Hi. I’m Rabbi Emily.
By day (and, well, by night too) I’m the spiritual leader of West End Synagogue, a Reconstructionist congregation on the upper west side of Manhattan. When I’m not serving my shul, you’ll usually find me at home in Brooklyn with my partner, our cat, and a cup of good coffee. I love to write (music and words), officiate ritual, engage in community activism, and lose myself on long urban strolls.
In addition to my pulpit, I’m lucky to have gotten to experience a number of programs, fellowships, and other opportunities since graduating from rabbinical school in 2018. Here’s some of what’s been happening over the last few years:
From 2018-2020, I was a Jewish Emergent Network Rabbinic Fellow, where I served as a full-time rabbi at Lab/Shul and engaged in robust professional development with clergy colleagues on the cutting edge of Jewish life all over the United States.
In 2021, I was honored as one of the NY Jewish Week’s “36 under 36” for my work connecting Jews on the margins.
From 2021-2023 I was a Rukin Rabbinic Fellow with 18Doors, where I got to learn with professionals dedicated to expanding Jewish community and connection for interfaith and intercultural families.
I get asked a lot why I became a rabbi, and while there are a lot of reasons, what it really comes down to is this:
I seek to create inclusive and expansive spaces for people to meet themselves, community and the sacred.
That sentence was born of a Leadership class at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where each student was required to write a mission statement for their life. No pressure, right?
But that’s really what my rabbinate is about. I don’t want anyone to feel alone. I want to help everyone I encounter to connect to something or someone that deepens their experience of existence. I want people to remember that they’re alive and that their lives are interwoven with the lives of those around them, however similar or different they might seem on the surface.
Forming those spaces can mean arranging chairs in tight concentric circles for a musical Shabbat service on a Friday night, gathering with interfaith clergy at a vigil for Reproductive Justice, sitting down for coffee with a congregant mourning a loved one, or teaching a group of teens that the God concept they’re skeptical of is probably also the God concept that I’m skeptical of and that maybe— just maybe— there’s room for connection to tradition anyway. I love crafting new liturgy and opening up conversations, wrestling with our text and celebrating its resiliency. I tend to lead with my heart, even when it scares me, and I hope to help in crafting a world where we can all rely on and trust in one another a little bit more.