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.