Rabbi Jarah

Rabbi Jarah Greenfield has graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and is in residence at RTBI on alternate weekends and for all holy days. “The RTBI community is one that is interested in learning and in taking active roles in governance, leading prayer and reading Torah. I see my role not only as a religious functionary but also as a resource. I want to help people bring knowledge and creativity into conversation with ritual and tradition.”

Making the decision to become a rabbi was a ten-year process for Jarah, which began when she was a student at Sarah Lawrence College. In her first-year course on the Hebrew Bible, she was both intellectually enchanted and spiritually enraged by the content of the Torah and sought out the responses of contemporary feminist biblical scholars. Simultaneously, Jarah’s 5-year-old Hebrew School students were teaching her about the simplicity of faith and purity of joy as they responded to her lessons on Jewish holidays and customs. In combination, these and other experiences led Jarah to recognize that living out Judaism meant, for her, both teaching the complexity of the tradition as well as encouraging contemporary spiritual connections to it.

Prior to beginning her rabbinical path, Jarah was a visual artist who worked in a variety of media. “I am particularly excited to work with the b’nai mitzvah group. I want to use the arts as a vehicle to encourage them to explore Jewish values and issues of justice.” And Jarah is not hesitant about becoming embroiled in issues of justice. In the summer of 2005, she found herself in the middle of a hot-button debate on government-sanctioned torture, a controversy that pitted the Bush administration against members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.

Jarah was working as a summer rabbinic intern for the education and advocacy group Rabbis for Human Rights—North America. As part of the committee that established RHR-NA’s initial Jewish campaign, “Honor the Image of God: Stop Torture Now,” she traveled to Washington, DC, to meet with Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had spearheaded the effort in Congress to stop American torture of foreign detainees. The group offered support for the McCain amendment to the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act that forces all US agencies to comply with the Geneva Conventions against the use of torture. In December 2005, with both the House and the Senate in favor of the amendment, the White House agreed to McCain’s conditions.

Jarah says the meeting with McCain was an interesting lesson for her. “When you’re talking about something that’s a true human rights issue, you can cut across political boundaries in a way that touches the humanity of every individual, no matter what race, what gender, what political affiliation or what religion,” she says.

Her work with RHR-NA didn’t end there. She continues to be actively engaged in the organization’s campaign to ensure that the US implements the provisions of the McCain amendment. And in spring 2006 she helped the group coordinate its participation in the big Washington protest against the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. She also helped plan the first national conference for rabbis and rabbinical students on the subject of human rights, held in December 2006 in New York City.

Jarah, who grew up in Miami, FL, worked as the interim and assistant principal of B’nai Jeshurun Hebrew School in New York City and spent a year studying at the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education before entering rabbinical school.