David Kasher serves as the Associate Rabbi at IKAR, a spiritual community in Los Angeles. Rabbi Kasher grew up bouncing back and forth between the Bay Area and Brooklyn, hippies and chasidim – and has been trying to synthesize these two worlds ever since. After graduating from Wesleyan University, he studied for several years in yeshivot in Israel before heading to rabbinical school at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, where he was ordained in 2007. He returned to Northern California and became the Senior Jewish Educator at Berkeley Hillel. While there, Rabbi Kasher joined the faculty at Berkeley Law as a lecturer and completed a doctoral degree in Comparative Law. He was part of the founding team at Kevah, an educational non-profit dedicated to expanding the place of Torah study in all sectors of the Jewish community. While there, he developed and ran the Kevah Teaching Fellowship, a teacher-training program for emerging Jewish Educators. He has served on the faculty of the Wexner Heritage Program, Reboot, and BINA, and also taught at Pardes, SVARA, Hartman, Dorot and various Limmuds. Rabbi Kasher is a teacher of nearly all forms of classical Jewish literature, but his greatest passion is Torah commentary, and for the last five years, he has produced the weekly ParshaNut blog and podcast (www.parshanut.com), exploring the weird and wonderful riches of the genre.