During their time serving as a hospital chaplain, Noah Dor sat with a patient who miraculously survived a devastating car crash. The patient said that G-d must have saved him for a reason. He kept repeating, “Whatever it is, I’m all in.” This is Noah’s ideal spiritual posture, a willingness to meet the unknown with acceptance and compassion.
Noah’s grandmother, Susanna, taught them as a child that if anyone tried to pronounce the unpronounceable name of G-d, it would sound like breathing. This is a teaching they encountered again, praying alongside Arthur Waskow, z”l. Reb Arthur called G-d “Breath of Life,” conceptualizing divinity not as abstraction, but as aliveness.
הלא חי אני ומי הוא החיות שלי הלא הבורא יתברך
“Am I not alive?! And who is this aliveness that I am? Isn’t it the Blessed Creator?”
—Me’or Einayim, Yitro
As a transgender person, Noah chose their name with intention. נח means rest, a blessing and a protective balm against a culture that measures human worth by profit and productivity. Through cultivating their creative Shabbat practice, Noah understands rest as sacred, opening a path toward collective healing. Noah also continues to claim their birth name, אנה דור, understanding their transition as a journey from one perfection to another.
ויאמר לא יעקב יאמר עוד שמך כי אם־ישראל כי־שרית עם־אלהים ועם־אנשים ותוכל
The messenger blessed him, “Your name shall no longer be Yaakov, but Yisrael, G-d Wrestler, for you have wrestled holiness and humanity, and you keep holding on.” —Bereshit 32:29
Noah has a deep love of science fiction, narratives that stretch the imagination toward hope and possibility. Olam HaBa, the world to come, lives in that same imaginative space, not as fantasy, but as a future we are bringing into being. Living in a time of livestreamed death, including the ongoing devastation in Palestine, Noah is committed to witnessing and refusing numbness. For Noah, envisioning a future of freedom and safety for all is a core spiritual practice and a rabbinic responsibility.
“And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.”
— Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes
Noah carries deep gratitude for Reconstructionist affiliates Mishkan Shalom and Havurah Shalom, the communities where they were first called rabbi. They give thanks to their family whose unconditional love has sustained them to reach this moment; to their friends who hold them in their full humanity; to their teachers who have given them the invaluable gift of intimacy with leshon kodesh; and to their ancestors whose struggles made the abundant blessing of their life possible.
Whatever comes next, Noah is all in.
