Ask the Rabbi with Steve Weisman

TUESDAYS | AUG. 8 – SEPT. 26

Join Foundry and our friends from Temple Solel via Zoom on Tuesdays from August 8 through September 26 for our “Ask the Rabbi” series. Beginning at 7 p.m. on each of these Tuesdays, we will discuss the previous Sunday’s preaching texts with Rabbi Steve Weisman from Temple Solel. Register to join online here.

About Rabbi Steve Weisman

Rabbi Steve Weisman is no stranger to the Foundry community, having popped in a few times (always invited!) to on-line Bible study. Since August, 2000 he has been the Rabbi of Temple Solel in Bowie, MD. In that time, he has been a leader of the Clergy community of the Bowie area, and was an integral part of the founding of the Interfaith Coalition of Bowie - an organization created in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd to increase understanding across lines of difference, and to promote opportunities for local youth to learn and grow without restraint. He also helped organize significant community-wide fundraising concerts in support of victims of hurricanes in Haiti and the Japanese tsunami, for which he was recognized by the Bowie City Council, and was part of the organizing committee for the first Bowie celebration of the MLK Day weekend

Rabbi Steve (as he is affectionately known) brought to Solel a weekly text study that is soon to finish its second intense study cycle of the Pentateuch in its entirety, as well as its first cycle through the entirety of the Hebrew Bible. He was also a contributor to the recently published collection "Prophetic Voices," a major Reform movement effort to reinvigorate the role of readings from the Prophets as part of the Sabbath liturgy.

He recently retired after 50 years of involvement (starting as a camper in his youth) in Reform movement youth and summer camp programming, for which he was twice granted Life Membership by the North American Federation of Temple Youth, and is a member of the Union for Reform Judaism's 6 Points Sports Academy's Hall of Fame after playing a role in its founding, and serving on its faculty for its first ten summers.

These experiences and more have made him not only a respected teacher of traditional views of the Biblical text, but also a creative interpreter of its applications to modern life.

Rabbi Weisman was ordained from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in May, 1991, and received an Honorary Doctorate from the seminary in 2016. He has also served Jewish communities in Fredericksburg, VA and Fairfield County, CT, and has spent parts of the last three summers travelling throughout the South, seeing and learning first hand the often forgotten stories of religious and racial injustice, and working to understand the historic partnership, minus its mythology, between the Black and Jewish communities.