Rabbi Rachel Rosenbluth: Reimagining Jewish Ritual, Kehilla, and Communal Covenant in Modern Life

Rabbi Rachel Rosenbluth is the founder of Bluth’s Ritual Studio, a Toronto-based practice that works globally, and is devoted to reimagining Jewish ritual for modern life. Ordained by Beit Midrash Har El, an Orthodox yeshiva that ordains women, she works largely in a Conservative-inflected mode as a rabbi, educator, wedding officiant, and artist. Her work blends pastoral care, theology, and aesthetic craft, including Hebrew calligraphy and ceremony design. She is developing a stunning coffee-table book to help people build community around the rituals that matter most. She collaborates with couples and communities to make belonging resilient.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Rabbi Rachel Rosenbluth, founder of Bluth’s Ritual Studio, about Jewish community as purpose-driven peoplehood rather than a mere feeling of inclusion. Rabbi Rachel Rosenbluth distinguishes kehilla (an assembled community of obligation) and edah (a witnessing group shaped by shared experience) from modern “belonging” language. She explains how Jewish weddings become communal covenants through witnesses, ketubah, minyan, and collective joy. She outlines Jewish frameworks for conflict—tochacha, teshuvah, machloket l’shem shamayim, and arevut—and argues that beauty, ritual craft, and accessible practice build resilient belonging across difference.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In Jewish thought, what distinguishes kehilla/edah from social belonging?

Rabbi Rachel Rosenbluth: In Jewish thought, kehilla and edah describe forms of collective life that are not primarily organized around feelings of inclusion, rather around shared purpose, memory, and responsibility. A kehilla is a gathered community - from the root hakhel, to assemble - a people called together for something - often practice, covenant, or collective obligation. Edah, from the root ed (witness), is a group formed through shared experience: people who have seen something together and carry that forward in their collective identity.

Social belonging, by contrast, describes an individual’s subjective sense of inclusion, acceptance, or connection. Belonging is measured by how welcome one feels; whether one is seen or affirmed; and whether one can remain comfortably inside a group.

The former (Kehilla/Edah) is about a covenantal peoplehood, or a values based community; the later (social belonging) is a more individual experience of felt inclusion.

Kehilla and Edah are not primarily concerned with whether individuals feel included; they are concerned with what a people is gathered to do and sustain together. Belonging may emerge from that shared life, but it is not the organizing principle. By contrast, social belonging is a language of affect and inclusion - a measure of how welcome or accepted one feels. As Priya Parker notes, contemporary communities often mistake inclusion for meaning, offering belonging without purpose. Jewish communal life, by contrast, assumes that meaning comes first - and belonging follows.

Jacobsen: When you officiate a wedding, what converts a private moment into a communal covenant?

Rosenbluth: The Jewish wedding is in fact a very communal experience! It is not something that is just happening between two people, rather the intimacy is broader and the community plays a crucial role in the ceremony. When I work with couples or train officiants, I like to remind people that a Jewish wedding doesn’t technically need a Rabbi - rather it needs witnesses, people that are representing the community, who are showing up to make the marriage official, to bring community support and participation to the process. Even the wedding contract, The Ketubah, is not a private contract between the couple - rather, it’s a contract signed by the witnesses - on behalf of the community. It is the community saying: we witness your love, we support you on your journey together, we are here to hold you accountable and to widen your circles. It is a covenant within community, it brings together communities, and it is between the couple and the community.

During the ceremony, the guests play an important role. Their role is to bring joy to the couple “Lesameach Chatan v’kalah”. When we give the seven blessings at a wedding, we do so in the presence of the minyan - a quorum of ten. The celebration after the ceremony - the festive meal, seudat mitzvah - is part of the wedding rituals as well. All of these things are inherently communal and collective. It’s not supposed to be private, or a pure performance, it is a participation of a community.

Perhaps that’s the symbolism of the chuppa - like an open air tent of meeting, a gathering place. It holds two people in their union, yet it invites the wider community to witness and to hold. In a way it is also a nexus point that connects with the ancestors of the past and marks a moment that will bring forth new futures, a new family. A private moment that is widened on many scales.

Jacobsen: What is belonging in practice, e.g., who gets welcomed, who sets norms?

Rosenbluth: Belonging, in practice, is shaped by shared purpose. It involves safety, accountability, engagement, and accessibility, and it is something cultivated over time rather than assumed.

Cultures of belonging develop and evolve in many ways. Jewish law, practice, and tradition often influence these cultures of belonging - sometimes prescriptively, by defining norms and expectations, and sometimes descriptively, by reflecting the lived reality of a community. Some norms are inherited from elders or previous generations; others are shaped or articulated by leadership. Always, they are influenced by the purpose of the group and by the people who comprise it. Ritual, repetition, and shared practice play a significant role in establishing and reinforcing these norms. They may be inherited, adapted, or reinvented. I find that norms are most durable when they make sense, invite input from the group, and are framed positively - allowing them to stick, grow, and adapt alongside the community itself.

As for who gets welcomed, that depends on how a community understands and defines its boundaries.

Jacobsen: Communities inevitably face conflict. What Jewish frameworks guide accountability and repair?

Rosenbluth: In Jewish tradition, conflict isn’t understood as a breakdown of community -

It’s an inevitable part of being in a long term and diverse community. The question is how to address harm when it occurs. There are several core frameworks that guide this. One is tochacha, constructive rebuke: addressing harm directly and, when possible, privately, with the goal of repair rather than shaming. Accountability is meant to remain relational, not performative. This brings us to the most well known principle which is Teshuvah - a concrete process that places responsibility on the person who caused harm - naming what happened, taking responsibility, making amends where possible, and actually changing behavior over time. An apology alone isn’t the endpoint; change is. Rambam writes extensively about this, particularly in ways that surface during the High Holidays. Part of this is that forgiveness is never forced. Repair must come before reconciliation, and the person who was harmed is not obligated to forgive in order to restore comfort.

Judaism also makes space for disagreement itself. The idea of machloket l’shem shamayim—argument for the sake of heaven—holds that people can disagree deeply and still belong to the same community. Unity doesn’t require sameness, and conflict isn’t a threat when it’s held with care and integrity. There are organizations today that try to promote this given how highly divisive politics have become in Jewish community today.

Importantly, accountability isn’t only individual; it’s collective. The principle of arevut, mutual responsibility, understands harm as something that affects the whole group. That’s why repair shows up not only in personal conversations, but in communal rituals like Yom Kippur—an annual reset that reminds us we are always practicing how to do better together. Personally, I also look to frameworks of transformative justice to guide moments that require genuine harm reduction and repair. I know many rabbinical schools and Jewish institutions that are doing the same, drawing on these frameworks alongside traditional sources to respond to harm with greater care, responsibility, and depth.

Jacobsen: How do you build community across difference?

Rosenbluth: For me, it begins with empowering ritual in the home - bringing shared traditions and purpose into people’s personal lives in ways that feel alive and accessible. When people have shared practice, they can build community even across real differences in background, identity, politics, and belief.

Rather than outsourcing identity to political ideologies or institutions, this approach affirms that Torah and Jewish tradition belong to everyone. It’s not just for the most literate, the most observant. Too many people today call themselves “bad Jews,” almost as if it were its own denomination. I’m interested in offering an alternative - creating an empowered, accessible and inspired relationship for everyone in the community.

My work is about giving people tools, language, and inspiration to form a living, breathing relationship with tradition - one that feels positive, meaningful, and rooted. From there, a sense of belonging can emerge that stretches across difference: across place, time, opinions, and lived experience, without requiring sameness.

Jacobsen: How do rabbis work with those who have been, or feel as if they’ve been, lonely, shamed, and excluded inside Jewish spaces?

Rosenbluth: At their best, rabbis help people find places where they can belong. They can also empower individuals to ask for accountability and to seek repair when harm has occurred. Through processes of trust-building, responsibility, and repair, people may be able to re-enter spaces where they once felt unwelcome - or find new spaces that feel more aligned.

Today, many rabbis also bring a therapeutic sensibility to this work, helping people process experiences of pain, shame, and trauma. That support can be essential in restoring a sense of dignity, safety, and connection - whether within existing communities or beyond them.

Jacobsen: What does digital Judaism provide?

Rosenbluth: Digital Judaism provides access and it provides creativity.

It gives people who live far from Jewish community the ability to participate, and people who live far from centers of learning the ability to learn. It also gives those who have been shaped within one expression of Judaism access to other voices, practices, and ways of being Jewish. Digital Judaism can support certain forms of community. At the same time, I believe that genuine community ultimately requires gathering in person - being physically together, and allowing experience to become collectively shared rather than remaining purely individual. In addition to the book of Jewish ritual that I am working on, I hope to develop an app that will provide people a “Jewish ritual guidance at your finger tips” experience to make ritual experience accessible and inspired.

Jacobsen: Your work blends art and ritual. How can beauty function as a technology of communal attachment?

Rosenbluth: Abarbanel writes that beauty is that which moves the soul toward love. Beauty opens. It expands. It brings people into creativity, connection, motivation, and a sense of expanse.

Beauty allows people to enter a state of wonder and openness - toward intimacy, toward deeper relationships, toward learning something new. In communal life, that openness matters. It shapes how people show up, how safe they feel, and how willing they are to engage rather than remain purely analytical.

Another way to understand beauty in ritual is through lived experience. Studying for rabbinic ordination in yeshiva was an intensely intellectual and rigorous experience. It demanded precision, discipline, and deep engagement with text. At the same time, it did not feel embodied, or spiritually inspiring beyond the mind. Shortly after completing my Yeshiva studies, I spent a few months studying yoga philosophy in an ashram in South India. That offered a different kind of learning experience. Embodied, in open-air spaces, with sunlight, humidity, and the presence of the natural world. Beauty and environment were part of how learning happened, shaping how meaning was absorbed and lived. It really offered something that had been missing for me.

Art and ritual function similarly in communal settings. When beauty and design are present, ritual moves beyond cognition into experience. Music, visual form, space, and setting influence how people relate - to the practice, to one another, and to themselves. Beauty helps inspire connection.

This is something the mystics (Kabbalists) understood well. While the rabbis emphasized the study hall, the mystics emphasized direct experience - by streams, under trees, and in open fields. Judaism already holds immense beauty, shaped across lands and generations. When people can actually see and feel that beauty, it brings them toward one another - toward connection and community. As a scribe, a ritualist and a Ketubah artist, I aspire to make the age-old and timeless beauty embedded within Judaism, Jewish ritual, and communal life, more accessible.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rachel.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a blogger on Vocal with over 120 posts on the platform. He is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978–1–0692343) and the Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369–6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018–7399; Online: ISSN 2163–3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, The Washington Outsider, The Rabble, and The Washington Outsider, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media associations/organizations.