A Jewish-Quaker Dialogue about Jesus
Rebecca Mays and Marcia Prager Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Rabbi Marcia Prager is a Jewish renewal teacher, storyteller, ritual artist, and therapist. She is Director and Dean of Ordination Programs for ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, and rabbi for the P'nai Or Jewish Renewal communities of Philadelphia, PA, and Princeton, NJ. Her book, The Path of Blessing, explores the profound spiritual wisdom in the Jewish practice of blessing. She created the P'nai Or prayer books for Shabbat and other innovative approaches to prayer and liturgy. Her interfaith teaching includes courses on Jesus as a rabbi and approaches to a Jewish reading of the Gospels. She and her husband Hazzan Jack Kessler travel widely to teach in Jewish and interfaith settings.
Rebecca Mays was raised in a Southern Baptist family. After attending Earlham College, she became a convinced Quaker with a continuing deep devotion to Jesus. For twenty years she was the editor of Pendle Hill Publications. Following in the footsteps of Mary Morrison, Rebecca for years taught Pendle Hill classes on the synoptic gospels. She also served as Pendle Hill’s summer 2008 Quaker Studies teacher. Currently she is working toward a doctorate and teaching college classes in Interfaith Studies at Temple University. She edited Interfaith Dialogue at the Grass Roots, which contains a chapter concerning her interfaith work with Rabbi Marcia Prager.
