Rabbi Rachel Barenblat (a/k/a the Velveteen Rabbi) serves Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is author of six volumes of poetry, among them 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia, 2011) and Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda, 2018). A founding builder at Bayit: Building Jewish, she resides in western Massachusetts. She has blogged as the Velveteen Rabbi since 2003.