Rabbi Steven Blane is the founder and Dean of the Jewish Spiritual Leaders Institute (JSLI), the first fully online rabbinical and cantorial school. He’s also a cantor, a singer-songwriter, and a longtime New York wedding officiant. JSLI exists because of a choice he made in 2009, and the story of that choice is the story of the school.
From Jersey City to the bimah
Steven grew up in a working-class family in Jersey City, New Jersey. He earned a degree in music education, worked as a singer, actor and producer, and performed on Broadway. In 1991 he took his first pulpit as cantor of Congregation Beth Israel in Biloxi, Mississippi. Over the next eighteen years he served Conservative and Reform congregations as a cantor, and in June 2001 he was ordained a rabbi. From 2006 to 2009 he was rabbi and spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Tikvah in New Milford, New Jersey.
The choice that started JSLI
Steven believed that interfaith couples who wanted a Jewish wedding deserved a rabbi who would say yes. In 2009 he resigned from the Cantors Assembly so he could officiate at interfaith weddings. That decision made clear to him how many Jews were being left outside: interfaith couples, unaffiliated Jews, and people who loved Jewish life but felt unwelcome in it.
He also met many people who felt called to serve those families as rabbis and cantors but couldn’t leave their jobs and homes for five years of seminary. So he built a school for them. Today JSLI is a community of more than 250 rabbis and cantors. In our most recent alumni survey, almost 90% of the graduates who responded are working professionally as spiritual leaders.
Sim Shalom and Jewish Universalism
Rabbi Blane also founded Sim Shalom, a free, interactive online synagogue with services open to everyone, and he leads the Jewish Universalism movement, which welcomes all people and honors every path to the Divine. JSLI is pluralistic and its graduates follow their own paths, but this spirit of radical welcome runs through everything the school does.
Music and life beyond JSLI
Music is still at the center of Steven’s life. He writes and performs his own songs on guitar, piano and ukulele, and for about fifteen years he has run Blane & DeRosa Productions, which produces audiobooks and children’s audio. He officiates weddings in Central Park and across New York. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Learn more
- Rabbi Blane’s officiant and rabbinic work: rabbi.net
- His music: stevenblane.com
- Study with him: Rabbinical School and Cantorial School