Spiritual Direction and Rabbinic Guidance for your Unfolding Soul

My spiritual journey, like everyone’s, is an endless, ongoing, and lifelong journey. Experiences and moments in my life have guided me to open this practice and guide others however I best can.

After growing up in the Five Towns of Long Island and studying in a yeshiva day school, I continued my Jewish education receiving a B.A. in Bible from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a B.A. in Religion from Columbia University. With a love of and dedication to learning, teaching, and experiencing Jewish texts, rituals, and life, I continued on to receive a Certificate of Jewish education at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. While living in Israel, I received rabbinic ordination from Yeshivat Pirchei Shoshanim and studied Safrut (scribal arts) under the tutelage of Rabbi David Gottesman. Following my time living in Israel, I worked as an experiential Jewish educator and classroom teacher designing and implementing courses and experiential school-wide programming at a Schechter school in New Jersey. After a short time owning and operating a kosher BBQ food truck, my family and I moved down to Miami and launched Base Miami (a community program using our home as a pluralistic rabbinic resource and central meeting place for Jewish learning and life). I am currently the Chief Programming and Engagement Officer at The Center for Jewish Life building a pluralistic community center merging the cultural, spiritual, and ritual components of Jewish communal life. It was through my rabbinic work as a pluralistic community rabbi that I was guided towards spiritual direction.

Over the past years of immersing myself in the work of spiritual guidance/direction/exploration, I have glimpsed into the depths of my own experiences and noticed the holy, miraculous, and wondrous permeating life and all that is. The work of spiritual direction provides a space, companionship, and reflection to explore and contemplate the deepest dimension of ourselves through the lens of the spirit/God/Infinite/etc.

While my background, training, techniques, and resources stem from the Jewish tradition, spiritual direction is about the exploration of ourselves outside the confines of any one religious framework. The Sfat Emet (Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter of Ger) explains that the “face to face”-panim b’panim- encounter that happened at Revelation at Sinai, was each individual being face to face with their own souls; experiencing divine revelation in their own unique way. We all experience the world, our lives, and our selves in the wholly unique ways that only we get to experience them. Spiritual direction is the holy listening and expression of those experiences through the lens of exploring a relationship with and to the Holy.