How Rabbinic Pastors Serve Communities
ALEPH Rabbinic Pastors are ordained clergy who fill needed roles in our local, national and global Jewish and secular communities, such as healthcare chaplains, consultants on Jewish issues in health care, supervisors who train chaplains, and life cycle officiants.
Rabbinic Pastors’ roles are far reaching. We…
- Serve the pastoral needs of congregations and communities
- Officiate at life cycle events: (e.g., weddings, funerals, baby namings, shiva minyanim, and unveilings)
- Visit the sick and comfort the bereaved
- Reach out to and companion the disenfranchised and unaffiliated
- Offer pastoral counseling and spiritual guidance
- Lead weekday and Shabbat services
- Advise on issues of ethics and facilitate ethical discernment
- Perform research in the field of professional spiritual care
- Develop and lead innovative liturgies
- Design and facilitate creative rituals
- Serve people living with mental illness, hunger or poverty
- Promote deep ecumenism
Rabbinic Pastors are rigorously trained in the areas of:
- Clinical Pastoral Education
- Life Cycle Officiation
- Deep Ecumenism
- Jewish Literacy
- Jewish Bioethics
- Personal Spiritual & Emotional Development
- Pastoral Counseling
- Age-ing to Sage-ing
- Theology, Theodicy, and Jewish History
- Prayerbook and Torah Hebrew
- Kabbalah and Hasidut
- Rabbinic Pastors’ ordination is transmitted through the lineage of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi