Our Stewardship Team
Rabbi Diane Elliot (Rabbinic Faculty)
lives in the Bay Area on land originally stewarded by the Ohlone Chocheyno people. Ordained through the Academy for Jewish Religion, California, she serves Jewish Renewal communities across the East Bay and nationally as a spiritual teacher, spiritual director, and ritual leader. Before studying for the rabbinate, Diane enjoyed a 25-year career as a concert modern dancer, choreographer, and movement teacher, and has trained in and taught Body-Mind Centering® for more than 30 years. She serves as a Project Director for the ALEPH Alliance for Jewish Renewal, is among the founding cohort of the Embodied Jewish Wisdom Teachers Network, and has authored three books of sacred poetry.
Rabbi Irwin Keller (Rabbinic Faculty)
has been the spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Shalom in Sonoma County, California since 2008, and received rabbinic ordination through ALEPH’s seminary in Jan 2021. His past work included LGBT and HIV advocacy, having authored Chicago's first LGBT rights law and directing an AIDS legal services organization in San Francisco. He was founder and, for 21 years, a writer and performer in The Kinsey Sicks, “America’s Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet,” appearing in 42 states and abroad. His poignant and humorous teachings about Torah, Israel, God, community, disillusionment, hope and finding inspiration on the fringe, can be found on his Itzik’s Well blog, at irwinkeller.com.
Shula Pesach (Program Director)
is a community ritualist, public astrologer, and trans theologian. Shula lives as a white settler on Nipmuc Land, and traces her ancestry from diasporic Ashkenazi Jewish peoples from the Danube and Dnieper watersheds. They are neurodivergent, working-class, chronically ill, and transfemme, with citizenship and education privilege. Shula serves movements for flourishing and collective liberation through her work with Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education and as the Program Director for Taproot. Shula is an apprentice of bird-language, the tarot, and stretching strudel dough. Shula also goes by Solace and Salomé.
Rachel Plattus (Steward)
is an edge dancer, web weaver, and tunnel builder. These days she’s most often showing up as an organizer and popular educator with Mapping Our Futures / Beautiful Solutions, PeoplesHub, Tzedek Lab, and other places trying to envision a radically restored future beyond colonization and capitalism from inside of forms that colonization and capitalism created. She dreams in silence, in wild places, at kitchen tables, and as a body in motion. She lives in the Quinobequin watershed (so-called Cambridge, MA).
Rabbi Eli Herb (Rabbinic Faculty)
is the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Sholom in Salem, Oregon. He was ordained as a maggid by Yitzhak Buxbaum z"l in 2010 and as rabbi by Hebrew College Rabbinical School in 2016. Prior to rabbinical school, he worked on interfaith climate justice, led wilderness river trips, and coordinated large-scale ecological restoration projects in SE Utah and SW Colorado.
Adam Horowitz (Steward)
is an artist, instigator, and co-founder of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture and Nuns & Nones. He lives on Tiwa territory, in Albuquerque, NM—and occasionally posts new writing and other offerings here.
