Rabbi Samuel Chiel Kallah

Join us for a special weekend with Scholar-in -Residence Rabbi Pamela Barmash, Ph.D
Chair, Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, Rabbinical Assembly

About Rabbi Pamela Barmash

Rabbi Pamela Barmash, Ph.D., has served on the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly since 2003 and has been its chair since 2022. She also serves as a dayyan (religious court judge) on the Joint Beit Din of the Conservative/Masorti Movement since 2008. She served as the rabbi at Temple Shaare Tefilah, Norwood, Massachusetts, for eight years. She taught at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem for many summers. She received her B.A. from Yale, rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from Harvard. Rabbi Barmash is professor of Hebrew Bible at Washington University in St. Louis and has served as director of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies there. She has been a fellow at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Rabbi Barmash was the editor of the scholarly journal Hebrew Studies. In her rabbinic writing, she wants to inspire more Jews to be mindful of God in the daily routines of life and live deliberately ethical lives, and she is the author of teshuvot (rabbinic papers) on contemporary issues in Judaism. In her academic scholarship, she addresses issues of law and justice and of history and memory. Among her academic books are Homicide in the Biblical World; Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations; The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law; The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal and Scribal Traditions; and In the Shadow of Empire: Israel and Judah in the Long Sixth Century BCE. She recently published Modern Responsa: An Anthology of Jewish Ethical and Ritual Decisions.

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