Hannah Dresner
Hannah Dresner believes it is her calling to work toward a revitalized Judaism integrating experiences of head, heart and physical being into Jewish practice so that our religious lives truly address the breadth of our human needs. She currently serves as full time spiritual leader of Or Shalom, a Jewish Renewal synagogue in Vancouver, BC. She is in the last cohort to have received rabbinic smicha from Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi through the ALEPH Alliance for Jewish Renewal, where she was also ordained as a spiritual director. Rabbi Hannah entered the rabbinate with an MFA from the University of Chicago and an exhibition, curatorial, and teaching record in visual arts. She is a Rabbis Without Borders fellow as well as a fellow in the second cohort of CLI, CLAL’s Clergy Leadership Incubator.
Articles by Hannah Dresner
Catching Our Breath
This Shabbat we celebrate the New Moon of Shevat, the beginning of the Hebrew month in which the world begins ...
It’s Not A Supernatural Miracle
Eternal light in the ancient Temple symbolized an uninterrupted connection between God and the people. When the Romans desecrated the ...
Be All That You Can Be
In 1996, I fell in love with Marsha Falk’s feminist revision of the blessing I’d been giving my daughters every ...
Humble Audacity
Commentary on Parshat Noah, Genesis 6:9-11:32After the great flood, all of humanity shared a single language and lived together in ...
Make a Window in the Word
My favorite Hasidic teaching is a teaching about prayer couched in a homily on Noah’s Ark. God tells Noah to make ...
Arrived: First of Our Long Awaited Refugee Families!
Or Shalom, Vancouver’s East-Side Shul, the synagogue I serve as spiritual leader, is a community of 200 households that has ...
Hate Talk, the Nesting Ground for Orlando
This past Monday, exhausted from the stress of the Orlando tragedy and its reverberations of grief, my husband and I ...
Like God, I Am Prismatic
Although it might be awkward to articulate the breadth and depth of human qualities we aspire to, it is not ...
The Passover Egg: Symbol of a Weeping Earth
Coming out of Egypt, the Children of Israel crossed the Sea of Reeds (also known as the Red Sea) walking ...
IF We Build This World In Love
This week’s Torah portion, Tzav, ends with a ceremony consecrating the first Israelite priests, Aaron and his sons. The blood ...