Dr. Avivah Zornberg is a Jerusalem-based educator, Torah scholar, and philosopher. Her weekly lectures on the current Torah portion have an impressive following - bringing together, among others, rabbinical students of all denominations, artists and professors. Her lectures, like her books, are a sophisticated mix of traditional Jewish exegesis, Hasidic texts, Western philosophy, poetry and other sources.

Born in London in 1944, Zornberg, who has lived in Jerusalem since 1969, was steeped in a world of rabbinic tradition and scholarship (her father was a dayan and av bet din [head of a rabbinic court] in Glasgow). Her quest in her second book, as she writes in the introduction, is "to find those who will hear with me a particular idiom of redemption," who will hear "within the particulars of rapture ... what cannot be expressed." Zornberg is less concerned with what the Bible means than with the dialectical process of experiencing existential dramas faced by the people we read about in the Bible.  

Watch a collection of short clips of her speaking at The J!Learn Channel here.  

Her first book, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire was published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1995, and won the National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction. Her other writings include The particulars of rapture: reflections on Exodus; The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, and prolific essays. She has appeared on the Bill Moyers PBS series Genesis: a Living Conversation, and lectures throughout Israel and the world. She'll be giving a retreat at NY's Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center from April 29 to May 2, 2010-find more info on this or any of Zornberg's speaking engagements at her website, http://www.avivahzornberg.com.