Rabbi Jason Weiner is teaching a 12th-grade Lahav Talmud class focusing on Shabbat this year, but he is no stranger to Shalhevet or to the Los Angeles. Jewish community. He taught a similar class here almost a decade ago, and serves as the Director of Spiritual Care and Hospital Rabbi at Cedars-Sinai, one of the city’s largest hospitals. He also teaches hands-on Jewish medical ethics to high school students throughout Los Angeles.
His Ph.D. in bioethics, combining Jewish law, philosophy and medicine, powers his oversight of Cedars chaplains and provides ethical and spiritual guidance to patients and families of all faiths.
“Supervising and working alongside chaplains from many faith traditions is a genuine privilege,” Rabbi Weiner wrote in an email to The Boiling Point. “It is deeply meaningful to collaborate with a diverse group of individuals who, despite their differences, are united by a shared commitment to compassion, service and making a tangible difference in the lives of others.”
Rabbi Weiner, who has worked at Cedars-Sinai for 18 years, said that helping families in moments of serious illness in the hospital helps chaplains “set aside politics and divisions.”
“What takes center stage instead is mutual respect, human dignity, and a common dedication to caring for those in their most vulnerable moments,” Rabbi Weiner wrote. “Jewish values of human dignity and tzelem Elokim [the concept that humans are formed in the image of God] are my guiding principles in the hospital.”
His new three-days-a-week schedule at Shalhevet is consistent and easier to balance with his other jobs, such as leading Knesset Israel, a synagogue on Robertson Boulevard, where he also serves as rabbi.
Rabbi Weiner’s teaching experiences, as well as his years of service in hospitals and synagogues, combine his academic background with his passion for Jewish thought and come from the same root value, he said: his dedication to Torah and helping others.
In an interview in October, Rabbi Weiner said that he loves breaking Talmud down to the level of “practical wisdom.”
One example, he said, is dealing with emergencies and health crises on Shabbat. Today’s advancements, increasingly including a “host of new technologies” such as A.I.-based therapies that may be “inserted into people’s bodies,” he said, and present additional challenges to religious observance.
“Although these things will become very complex on Shabbat, it is important to figure out how to navigate them properly because that is one-seventh of our lives,” Rabbi Weiner said.
Rabbi Weiner, who played college baseball at California State University, Monterey Bay, is a big L.A. Dodgers fan. But being outside of Los Angeles, and in a different time zone, during the 2025 World Series posed a challenge.
“I was in Jerusalem during Game 7 for my son’s bar mitzvah,” he said. “[We] woke up at 3 am to watch the game but had to watch it with the volume off and cheer silently since everyone else was sleeping in the same room.”
Cedars-Sinai is a Jewish hospital, which many people forget, Rabbi Weiner said.
“Our history reminds us of our purpose and our mission to the community, which is unique and different than most other hospitals,” he said. “This hospital was also built by the generosity of the local Jewish community and it is important to have integrity to maintain their dreams and vision from the time they made those contributions.”
