Welcome to irwinkeller.com and Itzik's Well!

About me: I am a rabbi, teacher, writer, music-maker and performer. I have served as spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Shalom in Sonoma County, California since 2008, and received my rabbinic ordination through the ALEPH ordination program in 2021. I am a co-founder and steward of the Taproot Gathering – a deep dive into mystical learning and spiritual practice for activists, artists and community ritualists.

If you check out my blog, Itzik's Well, you'll see what I am driven to think and write about: life, loss, family, hope, change, Torah, gender, sexuality and the usefulness of an outsider's perspective. I like to invite active imagining and re-imagining of the core stories of our tradition. I like to find the humor in the serious, and to locate the serious in the humor. And I believe that all of us who have felt like we didn't fit in have important lessons to teach Judaism and the world, and that the world, and Judaism, will grow and change with us.

What else? I have a past. I was once a lawyer and advocate (including being the primary author of Chicago's first gay rights law). I had the distinct honor to turn my activism into song and play through being a marginally famous singing drag queen for 21 years with America's Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet, the Kinsey Sicks, dubbed by NPR "the Royal Shakespeare Company of drag performance."

Reb Irwin’s TedX Sonoma Talk – A Spectacle of Love – November, 2017

A teaching on the Book of Ruth as a ritual source for same-sex marriage.

A reading of current work by Mesa Refuge alumni, looking at race and justice.

A consideration of fasting ritual in response to tragedy or public peril.

In conversation with Commonweal founder Michael Lerner about God, Torah, hope.

A musical/drashic improvisation on Mi Chamocha, with Ner Shalom musicians.

Smicha2021.jpg

If you want to know more about my life and wild mix of careers, you could check out one of these articles: 

The Sacred and the Profane (Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

Kinsey Sicks' Drag Queen Turned Rabbi Passes On the Crown (San Francisco Chronicle)

Oath of Disloyalty (a poem-manifesto sung in haftarah trope)

Thanks for visiting the site. Wander around. I look forward to being in touch.