Who We Are 

A multi-instrumental musician, singer, and composer, Joey Weisenberg has taught and led prayer at Hadar for more than a decade. He is the founder of Hadar’s Rising Song Institute, which aims to cultivate the grassroots musical-spiritual creativity of the Jewish people. Joey works to educate and train communities around the world to unlock their musical-spiritual potential and make music a vibrant, joy-filled force in Jewish life, in part through his online master classes in Jewish song and prayer.

Joey is the author of Building Singing Communities, a practical guide to bringing people together in song, as well as The Torah of Music, a treasury of Jewish teachings and insights about the spiritual nature of music, from the Book of Genesis to the present day. The Torah of Music received the National Jewish Book Award in 2017. 

A devoted student and teacher of ancient and traditional Jewish melodies, Joey also composes new nigunim that have moved and inspired Jews around the world. His eighth album, L’eila, was released by the Rising Song Records in 2022.

An educator, practitioner, and facilitator of Jewish communal music, Rabbi Deborah Sacks Mintz serves the Hadar Institute as Director of Tefillah and Music, supporting those who seek to deepen, sharpen, and unlock their practice of empowered song and tefillah. Both within the beit midrash and out in the community, Deborah strives to interweave song and Torah as integrated tools in the process of unearthing the grassroots creative spirituality of the Jewish and global people.

As a performer and composer, Deborah deeply treasures the process of artistic partnership; through her work on the founding team of the Rising Song Institute, she has collaborated on over two dozen albums with a diverse array of voices in the Jewish soundscape, including two albums of her own of original spiritual music, The Narrow and the Expanse (2020) and Yetzira (2023).

Deborah received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary where she also earned her masters in women and gender studies, and holds degrees in music and religious anthropology from the University of Michigan.

Josh Fleet is the Communications and Operations Manager at Hadar's Rising Song Institute. Previously a (kosher) winemaker at Covenant Winery in Berkeley and an editor for religion at The Huffington Post, he compiled The Geulah Papyrus, a haggadah inspired by the band Phish, part of a larger project, Phish Talmud. He lives with his family in Atlanta.

Raised in a mixed Orthodox Ashkenazi and Mizrachi home, Yosef has taught and led prayer in communities of every Jewish movement. He has served as a ba’al tefillah for some of the most spiritually vibrant and creative prayer communities in the United States and Israel, including Romemu and B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan, the Kitchen in San Francisco, and Beit Tefila Yisraeli in Israel. For over a decade, as a consultant, Yosef has advised synagogues and prayer communities seeking to deepen the communal spiritual experience through musical prayer. 

Yosef’s original Jewish music is sung at synagogues, schools, and camps across the country. His first album of original music, Open My Heart, was released by the Rising Song Institute in winter 2019. As a sought-after vocalist, Yosef performs and records with a wide range of Jewish artists. He is a longtime featured vocalist in the Hadar Ensemble and a founding member of the Middle Eastern Jewish music ensemble the Epichorus. Along with trombonist Dan Blacksberg, Yosef was selected by the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts for its 2018–19 Jazz Residency.

Yosef received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2013, with a concentration in pastoral care and counseling, and was also awarded a Master of Sacred Music. He most recently served as Rabbi and Director of Sacred Music at Temple Beth Zion–Beth Israel in Philadelphia.