Our Clergy

Email Rabbi Gordon

Rabbi Leonard Gordon has been our spiritual leader since 2019. He served for sixteen years at the Germantown Jewish Centre, a Conservative synagogue in Philadelphia known for being "a community of communities." He was conferred the status of Rabbi Emeritus when he moved to Chestnut Hill, MA, serving as the senior rabbi at Congregation Mishkan Tefila until the congregation moved to Brookline. With rabbinic ordination and an MA from the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), he has a BA and M Phil from Columbia University, and an MA in Religious Studies from Brown University. In 2018, he earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in Interfaith Studies at the Andover Newton Theological School.

Rabbi Gordon has taught comparative religion and Humanities at Columbia University, Kenyon College, and the Ohio State University; and he has taught rabbinic literature, history, philosophy, and liturgy at the JTS, the Hebrew College Rabbinicial School, the Reconstructionist Rabbinicial College, and the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He is a popular teacher at Hebrew College's MEAH program. Among his publications, he was an editor of Mahzor Lev Shalem.

Rabbi Gordon serves on the boards of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the Internation Jewish Committee for Interfaith Consultations (IJCIC), and the Nation Council of Synagogues (NCS). At the JCPA, he co-chairs the newly created taskforce on Jewish-Muslim relations. He has traveled to Israel with delegations of Christian and Muslim leaders, under the auspices of Interfaith Partners for Peace (an organization he co-chairs), a project of the Jewish Federations of North America's Israel Action Network.

Rabbi Gordon is passionate about building communities of meaning and connecting people to one another, to the synagogue, and to Israel. When he was on the faculty at Kenyon College, he built the small Jewish community there and was the founding director of the Havurah of Greater Columbus.

His partner, Dr. Lori Lefkovitz, holds the Ruderman Chair in Jewish Studies at Northeastern University, where she is a Professor of English and directs the Humanities Center and Jewish Studies Program. They have two adult daughters. Ronya works for the Jewish Museum in New York and will be married to Mickey Roth this January. Samara recently moved to Boston, where she works for Hyperplane, a venture capital firm.    

Rabbi Gordon looks forward to getting to know the B’nai Tikvah family and encourages each of you to please be in touch to make a time to meet at the synagogue, in your home, or at a local coffee shop. 

Email Reb Josh

Reb Josh was born in the Boston area, but spent his childhood on a secular kibbutz in Israel. Discovering American progressive Judaism after college in the US, he has been involved in Jewish education and prayer-leading in one capacity or another since the mid-1990s. Josh has a Masters in performance from the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA, and loves to play 17th century English pop music with his band Seven Times Salt (you can find them on YouTube  and Spotify!). He is also a certified teacher of the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education®, developed by Israeli physicist and martial artist Moshe Feldenkrais, and serves on the faculty of the Longy School, where he uses the Feldenkrais Method to help musicians avoid injury and find their musical voice. He has spent the last decade and more developing a unique blend of his various pursuits, combining deep mind-body awareness with the musical, spiritual, and intellectual traditions of Judaism, to create an experience he calls “Embodied Judaism.” 

Josh lives in Arlington with his wife Beth, his son Noam (12), and Beth's daughter Josie (10) and nephew Aaron (20). He enjoys biking and baking with his son (ask him about his gluten free challah recipe) and making music with friends.

Josh is in his fifth and final year of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College, and is looking forward to being ordained this coming spring!