Tomer Persico

Tomer Persico was born in 1974 in Haifa

Tomer Persico was born in Haifa in 1974 and grew up in a secular family in the Nave Sha'anan neighborhood. He attended Ironi Gimel school and was a member of the HaMahanot HaOlim youth movement.

He served in the army with a Nahal group and then traveled in Asia, spending time in Nepal and India. In India he encountered meditation, Buddhism and Eastern religions. After returning in 1997, he studied philosophy at the University of Haifa and grew closer to traditional Judaism.

He earned a master's degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004, with a thesis on Rabbi Kook and Meister Eckhart. In 2012 he completed a doctorate at Tel Aviv University on Jewish meditation. He later did postdoctoral research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

He taught at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa and lectured at Tel Aviv University on New Age culture. Since 2015 he has been a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and from 2018 to 2021 he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. At Reichman University he edited the Challenges of Democracy book series.

He writes opinion pieces for many outlets and runs the blog The God Loop. He conducts Jewish weddings outside the Chief Rabbinate. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Yael Yechieli, and their 2 sons.