By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Rabbi Yael Karrie, at center, leads a Jan. 14, 2026 Temple Scholars class at The Temple (photo by Andrew Adler)
Yael Karrie is a rabbi, and since the word “rabbi” can be said to mean “teacher,” it wasn’t surprising to find this visitor from Israel in full-on teaching mode during her three-day visit to Louisville earlier this month.
Whether speaking to staff at the Jewish Federation and the Trager Family JCC, or to a class of adult Torah Study students at The Temple, Karrie clearly reveled in her role as discussion leader. As a Rabbi for the Matte Asher community in Northern Israel, she was travelled to Louisville under the auspices of Partnership2Gether Western Galilee.
Karrie is among the few Israeli rabbis that belong to the Reform Movement, which makes her, by definition and sensibility, an egalitarian. More specifically, she is an egalitarian with a profound sense of soul and soulfulness.
Witness how, during her presentation to staff, she invoked the words of the celebrated Israeli poet and songwriter Lea Goldberg:
“From this comes my deep conviction that the poet is the one who, in Days of War must never forget the true value of life. It is not merely permitted for the poet to write a love poem in times of war. It is necessary, because even in wartime, the value of love outweighs the value of killing.”
Karrie spoke about the resonance of prayer, how “we ask God to open up our lips so we can say God’s glory.” She told how Goldberg wrote the above in 1939, a time of despair for Jews in some ways analogous to October 7, 2023. Those words, Karrie said, “were the light for me in these challenging times,” defined largely “by fear and grief.”
Goldberg, Karrie says, declares that “in time of war, if we focus only on death, destruction and fear, we won’t be able to remember what it means to be a human being once it’s over. We’ll be destroyed.”
Karrie recalled how “I had the hostages in my heart all the time. I lost three Bat Mitzvah girls and one Bar Mitzvah boy.”
She channeled her grief into her parallel career as a photographer. The Trager Family JCC is exhibiting her characteristic images of pomegranates – some ripe and whole; others blasted open – metaphors for lives, homes and hopes torn apart and then, miraculously, reconstituted.
“I’m studying phototherapy,” she explained, “because this really has helped me focus on beauty.”
Karrie finds “the image of God in things I see around me,” she said during her talk as her photographs flashed across a video screen. “Every picture here is symbolic for me.”
Often, her challenge comes down to, “How do you make sense of something that is broken,” when “you feel that your roots are coming out, and you need to find new ground for your roots?” Or to put it more directly: “How do you create something completely new from this mess?”
Karrie remembered one day while she was driving out of her home in Kibbutz Rosh KaNikra when – after almost giving into a moment of deep despair – “I stopped my car and saw this plantation of almond trees, a reflection on the water and pebbles under water. And I said, ‘Wow, this is kind of what I feel at this moment.’ It helped me ground myself. It helped me breathe again. It helped me see again.”
She related how she and her fellow rabbis were taught how to cope with PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
They were advised, Karrie said, “to ask people to name five things they can see, four things they can smell, three things they can touch, and two things they can hear. It’s for you to (get) back into your body, because the body remembers more than our soul, and our mind sometimes remembers how it feels to be quiet – how it feels to be present, how feels to be grounded.”
Karrie’s time at the Trager Family JCC included an AgeWell photography workshop, With Kind Eyes; a sound bath Women’s Philanthropy meditative session and a meeting with potential Momentum participants.
There were also a pair of morning Temple Scholars adult study classes at The Temple, where Karrie devoted one session to a what amounted to an extension of her earlier staff talk. Where her first presentation ended with an invocation of quietude, here she framed balance in terms of another challenge: “how we can get to inner peace.”
“We know that we try our hardest to work on ourselves,” she said, sitting in The Temple’s library in the company of about a dozen listeners, “and then, it projects to people around us. In this lesson, what we’re going to do is dive into the darkness.”
From here the metaphor grew stronger and stronger. “The night is very, very strong,” she said. “What we aim to do is balance. We need to balance all the time. We need to balance the female side and the male side.”
The pivot point of her lesson was the Kabbalah – a tradition that aims to uncover the hidden, mysterious import of the Torah.
“I had a professor of Kabbalah at university who said that Kabbalah was formed as a reaction to Maimonides, a reaction to philosophy that said God created the world and then stepped outside. He said people were not able to accept this theory, because how can we live in a place that God is not part of?”
The Kabbalistic approach, Karrie explained, holds that “not only is God here in the world, but everything we do affects God – and vice versa…so with your permission, we’re going to start from the darkness to the light.”
A series of short readings followed: comparing, for instance, the darkness of night to the darkness of a cave. Freud and Jung were invoked, as the Book of Psalms. “How do we imagine nothingness, and why?” Karrie asked, speaking of “void” and “chaos.”
“I’m willing to embrace the unknown in the darkness,” she said. Quoting Job 26:7: “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.”
“This is, I think, one of the most beautiful sentences in the Bible,” Karrie said. “People come to me and say, ‘Rabbi, I don’t believe in God, but I’m angry.’ When we say to them, ‘He hangs the earth about nothingness,’ we understand that this nothingness is something – because as Psalms tells us, this is where our help will come.”