Embodied Holiness: The Role of the Body in Leviticus

A hybrid event (in-person and virtual) by Rabbi David Kasher

ABOUT THE EVENT:

We sometimes speak of holiness as if it were entirely ethereal, having nothing to do with our physical selves. But Leviticus, the book of the Torah most focused on holiness, is also profoundly interested in the human body. Beginning with sacred dietary practices, and then moving to rituals that deal with health, sex, birth, and death, Leviticus offers a rich framework for understanding how the body can serve as a vessel for sacred living. This ancient holiness code invites us to integrate the physical and spiritual dimensions of life, challenging modern assumptions about the separation between body and spirit.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Rabbi David Kasher serves as the Director of Hadar West Coast. He grew up bouncing back and forth between Berkeley and Brooklyn, hippies and Hassidim – and has been trying to synthesize these two worlds ever since. After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1998, he studied for several years in yeshivot in Israel before heading off to rabbinical school at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. He was ordained there in 2007 and returned to Northern California, where he became the Senior Jewish Educator at Berkeley Hillel. He was part of the founding team at Kevah, a non-profit specializing in Adult Jewish Education, where he worked from 2012 to 2018, and developed the Kevah Teaching Fellowship. He has served on the faculty of Berkeley Law, the Wexner Heritage Program, Reboot, and the BINA Secular Yeshiva, and also taught courses at Pardes, SVARA, The Hartman Institute, AJR, and HUC. Rabbi Kasher is a teacher of nearly all forms of classical Jewish literature, but his greatest passion is Torah commentary, and he spent five years producing the weekly ParshaNut blog and podcast exploring the riches of the genre.

In 2018, he began work as an Associate Rabbi at IKAR, a non-denominational spiritual community in Los Angeles, where he teaches a weekly parashah class and has a new parashah podcast called Best Book Ever. He published an essay, ‘Eating Our Way from Justice to Holiness,’ in Kashrut and Jewish Food Ethics (Academic Studies Press, 2019), completed a translation of Avot d’Rabbi Natan for Sefaria, and is the author of ParshaNut: 54 Journeys into the World of Torah Commentary.