The Aquarian Minyan Yeshiva
Shifting the Paradigm in Adult Jewish Learning one class at a Time
Classes occur on Zoom unless otherwise stated
Current Teachers
Rabbi Jonathan Seidel, Ph.D
Rosh HaYeshiva
Rabbi Jonathan Seidel attended Oberlin College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, was a Hayes Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University and finished his studies at U.C Berkeley where he earned a doctorate in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies (1996). He was ordained as a Rabbi by ALEPH, the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, and has taught Religion and Judaic Studies at UCs Davis, Santa Cruz and Berkeley, as well as Stanford, the University of Arizona, ASU, Portland State, Oregon State U. and the University of Oregon. Jonathan is the Aquarian Minyan’s Resource Rabbi and Rosh haYeshiva. Reach him at: rabbiseidel@gmail.com
Robert (Rob) Katz
Attorney
Robert (Rob) Katz spent most of his 30-year law career as a Senior Attorney at the California Supreme Court, dealing with many cases involving the relationship between state and federal law. He has been the principal attorney on a number of major environmental law, land use, employment, civil rights and consumer protection cases. Before becoming a lawyer, he was a newspaper reporter covering county government in Santa Cruz. He has a JD from Stanford Law School and an MA in Political Science from UC Santa Barbara.
Robert (Bob) Jaffe
Attorney
Robert (Bob) Jaffe has been a practicing attorney in California and the Federal courts since 1969. A graduate of Hastings School of Law by way of UC Berkeley, Bob’s career has ranged from defending Vietnam draft resisters in Federal Courts to bankruptcy law, civil litigation and personal injury. He was honored to be of counsel in Hedges V. Obama, a case challenging marital law for US citizens in 2012. Bob currently practices wills, trusts, and personal injury at his home office in the Bay Area.
Rabbi Sarah Leah Schley
Rabbi SaraLeya was ordained in 2005 by the ALEPH Rabbinic Program. Her rabbinic passions include plumbing the depth of Hebrew prayer, chanting Torah with interpretive translation, study of mystical texts, and officiating at rituals that mark life’s transitions, joys and difficulties. She is committed to practicing and teaching tikkun ha-nefesh, the self- reflective refinement of our soul-traits that helps us become shining vessels for the Divine spark that enlivens us.
Rabbi SaraLeya served Chochmat HaLev, Berkeley, CA, as rabbi from 2008-2014, and she is currently Rabbi Emerita and lifetime member there. She is associated with the Rabbinic Leadership Initiative of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
In recent years Rabbi Schley has been working as a ordained “Dayan” teaching Jewish law and developing responses to critical issues in modern Jewish life, including End-of-Life Halakha.
Mother of three adult children, she also had a fulfilling career as a Gynecologic and Obstetric physician from 1977 until retirement in 2014. She earned her B.S. in Psychology and M.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. She received a Master of Philosophy in Psychology from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a Master of Counseling from the University of Phoenix, Tucson campus. She is also certified in Interactive Guided Imagery™ and Soul Memory Discovery
You can learn more about Rabbi SaraLeya at her website: www.rabbisaraleya.com.
Ami Goodman
Physician
Ami has had a lifelong love of Jewish music, liturgy and language. He led the San Francisco-based monthly Kumzits for 10 years, and in recent years has been a student of Yiddish while singing and spreading Yiddish and Ladino music. He has served as a Ba’al Tfila and loves to explore and teach in-depth studies of the prayers. He has a BA from Rice University, a BHL from the University of Judaism, and an MD from Baylor College of Medicine. He is a retired pediatrician and neonatologist, and lives in San Francisco with his wife, poet and physician Abby Caplin. They have two grown children.
Baal Bracha Barry Barkan
Teacher and Mentor
Ba’al Bracha Barry Barkan has been the “Master of Blessings” to The Aquarian Minyan for the last 40 years, and co-founder of The Elders Guild, whose vision is a world in which powerful and conscious elders join together in common purpose to bring healing, joy and connection to our lives, our families, our communities and the world. Barry teaches a visionary Torah of Renewal which flows from the line of transmission from his rebbes and teachers, especially Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi of blessed memory.
Rabbi Diane Elliot
Educator
Rabbi Diane Elliot is a spiritual teacher, ritual leader, dancer and spiritual director who inspires her students to become clearer channels for Presence through awareness and movement practices, chant, and nuanced interpretations of Jewish sacred text. From 2007-2009, Diane served as the Aquarian Minyan’s spiritual leader and later as its teaching rabbi, and from 2011–2018 she directed the ALEPH Alliance for Jewish Renewal’s Embodying Spirit, En-spiriting Body program in embodied Judaism. She currently serves on the stewardship team of Taproot Gathering and is the author of three books of spiritual poetry. Find out more about Diane and her work here: www.whollypresent.org.
Past Teachers
Rabbi Dr. Orna Triguboff
Special Guest Educator
Rabbi Dr. Orna Triguboff has dedicated her life to promote spirituality and well-being. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia, specializing in Kabbalah. Her dissertation was about the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria of 16th-Century Tsfat, Galilee.
She has been a Hatha Yoga teacher for 20 years and received rabbinic ordination from the Aleph Alliance for Jewish Renewal in Philadelphia, USA. She is the founder and spiritual director of Neshama Life, an organization that promotes Kabbalah and yoga.
Tomer Persico
Special Guest Educator
Tomer Persico is known in Israel for his academic writings on Jewish meditation practices, from the mysticism of the early Merkavah School to Kabbalah to Hasidic mantras, up to the contemporary spirituality movement of today. He’s also written on how 21st-century religious expression – focused more on the inner experience of God – has affected Judaism. Persico is a prolific writer on the topic of the tension between nationalistic Jewishness and ethnocentric Jewishness.
Yiskah Rosenfeld
Educator
Yiskah Rosenfeld has taught workshops in Jewish mysticism, Torah study and creativity for over 25 years. She studied at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and an MA in jurisprudence and social policy from UC Berkeley. Her writings appear in publications such as Lilith Magazine, Bridges, Maggid, Kerem, Jewish Women: An Historical Encyclopedia, and Yentl's Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. Poetry prizes include the Reuben Rose Memorial Award and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, for which she later served as judge. Yiskah has served as Spiritual-Leader-in-Residence of the Aquarian Minyan and is currently the Jewish Educator at Congregation B'nai Israel in Vallejo.
Rabbi Fern Feldman
Special Guest Educator
Rabbi Fern Feldman is a teacher, spiritual director, and leader of prayer and ritual, whose interests include exploring the sacred dark in Jewish tradition, and non-dual approaches to gender in Kabbalah. She is the author of “Gender and Indeterminacy in Jewish Mystical Imagery”, in Unsettling Science and Religion: Contributions and Questions from Queer Studies, published by Lexington Books in 2018, and “To Dwell in the Thick Darkness: The Sacred Dark in Jewish Thought” in Contemporary Voices from Anima Mundi: A Reappraisal, from Peter Lang publishing in 2020. Her upcoming piece, “Gender Fluidity, the Cherubim, and the Divine Presence” will be published in the Transkeit collection, from Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Her websites are www.rabbifernfeldman.com and www.bodymindhealingjourney.com
Professor Naomi Seidman, Ph.D
Naomi Seidman is a Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies in Toronto, and a former Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies and the Koret Professor of Jewish Culture. Seidman’s most recent book is A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, a history of the Bais Yaakov movement and the creation of schools to provide a rigorous education in Jewish orthodoxy to girls.
Rabbi Tsvi Bar-David
Educator
R’Tsvi is honored to learn and teach Rebbetude with his holy brother and teacher Barry Barkan. In the last 6 years, R’Tsvi has focused on the path of the heart through ecstatic music in the fusional style of Sufi-meets-Chasid in the tent of the Beloved. Out of this path come both the Qirvah sacred ecstatic music ensemble and the Qirvah Multifaith Community. To balance heart and head, R’Tsvi also teaches cognitively, recently courses on the Piasetzner Rebbe, who developed an incredible deconstructive meditative practice. R’Tsvi also leads a Zoom-based Jewish meditation practice group. Email: tsvi.bardavid@gmail.com
Maggid Jonathan Furst
Educator
Maggid Jonathan Furst is the founder of Derech HaAretz – Way of the Earth Outdoor Yeshiva, offering advanced training in Jewish outdoor skills and spirituality. He is a nature-connection mentor, interfaith chant leader, Holocaust resistance educator, former part-time shepherd and a co-founder of JeWitch Collective. Jonathan is Education Director for the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation and also serves as spiritual facilitator for Keneset HaLev – Community of the Heart in San Francisco, where he has been teaching and leading services for more than 15 years. jonathan@derechhaaretz.org
Rabbi Charna Rosenholtz
Rabbi Charna Rosenholtz, MA, is an accomplished teacher specializing in psycho-spiritual growth and applications of spiritual wisdom. Ordained as a Hebrew wisdom teacher (Maggid) by Rabbi’s Zalman Schacter-Shalomi and Tirzah Firestone in 2007, she also holds a Master's degree in comparative religious studies from Naropa University in Boulder. A visionary, Charna believes in the role of Hebrew Scriptures as a living guide for becoming the best that we can be. Charna has specialized in teaching and leading Torah studies since 1998 and has presented on issues of spirituality to all age groups.
A healing arts practitioner since 1985, Charna has studied with medicine women, clergy, and master teachers of health and human potential. Charna weaves embodied practices, felt-sense awareness, and contemplative exercises into the learning experience. Her skill set in developing empowered learning environments creates successful circles of learning. Currently a Rabbinic student with Aleph Alliance for Jewish Renewal, her classes are taught in Boulder, Fort Collins, and Chicago, Illinois.
Daniel Matt
Special Guest Educator
Daniel Matt is a teacher of Jewish spirituality and one of the world’s leading authorities on Kabbalah and the Zohar. He has been featured in Time and Newsweek, and has appeared on National Public Radio and the History Channel. He has published over a dozen books, including The Essential Kabbalah (translated into seven languages), Zohar: Annotated and Explained, and God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony between Science and Spirituality (revised edition, 2016). Several years ago, Daniel completed an 18-year project of translating and annotating the Zohar. In 2016, Stanford University Press published his ninth volume of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, concluding the Zohar’s main commentary on the Torah. For this work, Daniel has been honored with a National Jewish Book Award and a Koret Jewish Book Award. The Koret award called his translation “a monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought.” For twenty years, Daniel served as professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Daniel lives in Berkeley with his wife, Hana.
Mark Levy has performed and taught in the San Francisco Bay area for 40 years at temples, synagogues, JCCs, Lehrhaus Judaica, Workmen's Circle, and other Jewish groups. He has appeared throughout the country, in Europe and Israel and is a singer and lecturer who specializes in older Judaic folk music in Yiddish, Hebrew and Ladino; Klezmer history and theory; and Jewish music history in general. He has performed for the Yeshiva University Sephardic Dept.'s Semana Sepharad in New York, and is a cantorial soloist in California. He recently released a fourth album of Jewish music entitled Bin Ikh Mir A Shnayderl: Yiddish Work Songs, in commemoration of the 100th birthday of Workmen's Circle, a fraternal order of Jewish workers.
Rabbi Itzchak Evan Shays (Marmorstein) is the gabbai of Beit haRav Kook in Jerusalem, and teaches the Torah of Rav Kook to a worldwide audience as well as “on site” during non-Covid times. A talented musician who has worked with jazz great Greg Wall, R’Itzchak is an old friend of the Minyan and brings his deep love of learning to everything he does.
Professor Deena Aranoff, Ph.D
Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU)
Professor Deena Aranoff is Faculty Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She teaches rabbinic literature, medieval patterns of Jewish thought, and the broader question of continuity and change in Jewish history. Her recent publications engage with the subject of childcare, maternity and the making of Jewish culture.
Keshira haLev Fife
Keshira haLev Fife is a Kohenet (Hebrew Priestess) and proud Jewish woman of color, who sprinkles sparkles, disrupts expectations, and offers blessings wherever she goes. In service to the Divine, to her bright and benevolent ancestors, and to those who are coming up after her, she serves as a community weaver, reclaiming ancient practices in ways that are resonant and relevant in the modern day. As Oreget Kehilah (Executive Director) of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, she delights in serving, supporting, up-leveling and weaving community, earning the unofficial title of “the Priestess who priestesses the priestesses.” She also pours love and intention into her work as founder and leader of Kesher Pittsburgh and more broadly as a davennatrix (shlichat tzibbur), life spiral ceremony officiant, ritual creatrix, liturgist, songstress, and public speaker.
Rabbi David Seidenberg is the creator of neohasid.org and author of
Kabbalah and ecology: God's Image in the More-Than-Human World. He has
smikhah from Reb Zalman and from JTS, and teaches music, nigunim,
dance, spirituality, Jewish thought and intellectual history, and is
also known for his liturgy and translations.
Taya Mâ Shere
Special Guest Educator
Taya Mâ Shere co-founded Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, teaches Jewish Ancestral Healing, and is on faculty are Starr King School for the Ministry. She is co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. Her albums of Hebrew Goddess chant rock has a devotional tribe worldwide. www.taya.ma
Lorelai Kude is the former Exec. Director of the Aquarian Minyan
and the Founding Mother of the Aquarian Minyan Yeshivah .
You don't have to be Jewish to love listening to the celestial overview for our times by Jewish Astrologer Lorelai Kude, MA (www.astrolojew.com).
A practicing professional astrologer since the 1980's, Lorelai Kude holds a BA in Journalism with a Minor in Religious Studies from San Francisco State University and a Masters Degree in Jewish Studies from Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, where she wrote her thesis "Yesh Mazal l'Yisrael: Astrology in Jewish Cultural History." Email lorelaikude@yahoo.com to connect about your interest in astrology.
Rabbi Cantor Sara Shendelman
Rabbi Cantor Sara Shendelman is one of the best-known Jewish Renewal rabbis in Berkeley, California. She received Cantorial Ordination from Rabbis Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Shlomo Carlebach, the only woman to do so. She received full rabbinal smicha (rabbinic ordination) from Rabbi Gershon Winkler. Rabbi Sara served as Cantor, Rabbi and Core Faculty for Chochmat HaLev, Wisdom of the Heart Center for Jewish Spirituality in Berkeley, and is the Founder and Director of the Jewish Arts and Culture School (JACTS), established in 1995.
Yehudis Fishman
Special Guest Scholar
Yehudis Fishman has been teaching Torah and Chassidic philosophy to people of all ages and backgrounds for over fifty years both on the East Coast and out west. For six years, she was the spiritual director of Congregation Aish Kodesh in Boulder, Colorado and continues to teach and counsel both children and adults in Boulder and Denver. Her qualities of erudition, relevance, sensitivity and humor endear her to a broad spectrum of multigenerational students. She is also the 2012 Boulder recipient of the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Award of Jewish Educator of the Year. In 2014 she became a Maggid as well, so now she is known as ‘M&M’= Morah Maggidah.
Eleanor Shapiro
Special Guest Scholar
Eleanor Shapiro, Ph.D. received her doctorate in 2018 from the Graduate Theological Union, with a dissertation that focused on Jewish culture festivals that take place in Polish small towns. Her field work research was supported in part by a Fulbright fellowship in 2013-14. Ellie’s interest in Poland began in 2003 when she first visited the country asa guest of the Polish Cultural Institute in her capacity as director of the Bay Area-based Jewish Music Festival. Currently an independent scholar, she has recently taught courses on Jewish music, Polish-Jewish relations and Israel/Palestine, where she worked as an educator and journalist from 1982-1990.
Rabbi T’mimah Audrey Ickovits, BSE,
Special Guest Educator
A visionary, scholar and teacher. She is the spiritual leader of Holistic Jew cultivating siddurim (prayer books)and leading ritual to provide meaningful mystical prayer weaving juicy English vernacular in with classical Hebrew. Wisdom from Torah and Kabbalah inform Liquid Kabbalah sacred movement.
Rabbi T’mimah’s books – Holistic Jew Shahareet Weekday Siddur and Seven Sacred Circles – are available on Lulu Press. Rabbi T’mimah teaches online regularly. For more information see www.HolisticJew.org.