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livOne of my small communities asked me to run a Pride Shabbat. I thought it was because the town had a Pride event that weekend, but actually it was just vaguely near Pride (within a few weeks). I was quite excited to come up with a Pride service!
So I travelled to the community withjack and walked into the shul to find the whole place completely draped with rainbows. Proper Pride ones, from the original 6 stripe Pride rainbow to the modern Progress Pride flag, not just random bright coloured stuff. Though there was a fair amount of random vaguely spectrum-ish clothing among the congregation, including someone who had wrapped a rainbow scarf into her tichel (traditional Jewish headscarf). And including me, I wore my excellent rainbow mermaid dress that jack found for me, which drew many compliments (it has pockets).
I did a fairly standard Friday night service, drawing people's attention to the word גֵּאוּת in Psalm 93, which means pride and sounds a bit like the English word 'gay' so is sometimes used for talking about LGBTQ+ stuff in the positive sense. Though there was also a Lord Mayor and his consort visiting; his first time in a synagogue at all, and he commented favourably on the prayer book including transliteration which meant he was able to follow the service. And if his impression of Judaism is that we really, really like LGBTQ+ folk, so much the better.
Saturday morning we had a decent crowd, including quite a few young people and prospective converts. And OSOs' oldest joined us for the service; he lives not very far away and had expressed interest in coming to one of my services though he's not very religious and not at all Jewish. I kept the service fairly traditional, I didn't use a lot of Queer alternative versions of prayers or anything like that. Just talked about diversity and welcoming people into the community, and healthy / holy relationships.
Sermon. I found when I was composing this sermon that I had plenty to say and a fair bit of anger. I was just pouring out words – I usually write a rough outline, this time it came out almost as a pre-written speech. Then I tweaked it and put thought into hitting the right tone for people from all kinds of different perspectives. I didn't want to swallow my own intense feelings about the topic, but I also wanted to be professional and meaningful to the community, not just unload on them. I made a conscious decision not to do any apologetics, I didn't bother to explain why I think Judaism should be LGBTQ+ inclusive, I just took that as a given.
The Torah reading was Eikev, which is Moses' summary of the replacement version of the 10 Commandments. So I talked about how to respond to the breaking of the Covenant (when the Israelites committed the sin of worshipping a golden calf) - Moses has to carve the second set of stone tablets himself and carry them up the mountain so that God can rewrite the Commandments. So it's a joint effort between the community and God, it's not just something that's presented by God for us to accept. I mentioned the tradition that the fragments of the broken tablets were kept in the Ark with the replacement set. So the obvious connection is to the religious concept of repentance. We don't just forget the past and the harm caused, we have to put in effort to remake our damaged relationship with God, but also we can trust God to meet us halfway, to help us to rebuild. This is kind of the obvious sermon that everybody gives about Eikev, but I tried to make it personal and meaningful.
Having set that up, I mentioned the upcoming High Holy Days which are the season most heavily focused on sin and repentance. I reminded people that the liturgy specifically mentions praying alongside the most terrible category of sinners, not just people who have fallen short or broken some technical laws. The classical example is apostates who sold out other Jews to the Inquisition. The Jewish world as a whole should regard homophobia as just as bad as torture or idolatry; in order to repent of it, we'll have to put in serious work, and we'll have to keep the memory of how we broke our commitment to all humans made in God's image, but if we do, God will respond and help us to write a new covenant, will be our partner in creating a Judaism that is truly welcoming to all.
I think I got the balance right; it was the kind of sermon which gets complimented as powerful, and it was hopefully relevant to people wherever they are thinking about Judaism and LGBTQ+ concepts and people. To balance that, I did a fun study session (the community provided rainbow cupcakes), mostly based on R' Ruttenberg's delightful teaching on Genderqueering Joseph, with a bit of Boyarin's love story of the rabbi and the highwayman thrown in.
I have a lot of feelings about being here, now, in 2023, about to start studying to become a rabbi, being asked to run a Pride Shabbat. The people who suggested it and organized all the rainbow flags and cupcakes are I think mostly straight, while many members of the community are under the rainbow umbrella including gay men. I love that everybody made the effort, and they don't really care how I identify, it's a normal part of a (trainee) rabbi's job to organize liturgy and preaching and study for Pride. When I was a teenager we were still debating whether we were going to fully accept gay people, and much as Judaism is celebrated for encouraging debate and questioning, at times like that you almost long for a hierarchical religion where a leader could use their authority to deliver an edict that homophobia is forbidden. And perhaps ten years ago, the question of 'should we be homophobic or inclusive' was more or less resolved, but Pride stuff was still a niche thing and if a Pride event happened, it would have had to be the Queer section of the community who organized it. I remember turning up at one of my communities and being semi-jokingly asked how I felt being the only straight person present, because they assumed back then that a religious leader with a visible opposite sex partner must be straight.
So I travelled to the community with
jack and walked into the shul to find the whole place completely draped with rainbows. Proper Pride ones, from the original 6 stripe Pride rainbow to the modern Progress Pride flag, not just random bright coloured stuff. Though there was a fair amount of random vaguely spectrum-ish clothing among the congregation, including someone who had wrapped a rainbow scarf into her tichel (traditional Jewish headscarf). And including me, I wore my excellent rainbow mermaid dress that jack found for me, which drew many compliments (it has pockets).I did a fairly standard Friday night service, drawing people's attention to the word גֵּאוּת in Psalm 93, which means pride and sounds a bit like the English word 'gay' so is sometimes used for talking about LGBTQ+ stuff in the positive sense. Though there was also a Lord Mayor and his consort visiting; his first time in a synagogue at all, and he commented favourably on the prayer book including transliteration which meant he was able to follow the service. And if his impression of Judaism is that we really, really like LGBTQ+ folk, so much the better.
Saturday morning we had a decent crowd, including quite a few young people and prospective converts. And OSOs' oldest joined us for the service; he lives not very far away and had expressed interest in coming to one of my services though he's not very religious and not at all Jewish. I kept the service fairly traditional, I didn't use a lot of Queer alternative versions of prayers or anything like that. Just talked about diversity and welcoming people into the community, and healthy / holy relationships.
Sermon. I found when I was composing this sermon that I had plenty to say and a fair bit of anger. I was just pouring out words – I usually write a rough outline, this time it came out almost as a pre-written speech. Then I tweaked it and put thought into hitting the right tone for people from all kinds of different perspectives. I didn't want to swallow my own intense feelings about the topic, but I also wanted to be professional and meaningful to the community, not just unload on them. I made a conscious decision not to do any apologetics, I didn't bother to explain why I think Judaism should be LGBTQ+ inclusive, I just took that as a given.
The Torah reading was Eikev, which is Moses' summary of the replacement version of the 10 Commandments. So I talked about how to respond to the breaking of the Covenant (when the Israelites committed the sin of worshipping a golden calf) - Moses has to carve the second set of stone tablets himself and carry them up the mountain so that God can rewrite the Commandments. So it's a joint effort between the community and God, it's not just something that's presented by God for us to accept. I mentioned the tradition that the fragments of the broken tablets were kept in the Ark with the replacement set. So the obvious connection is to the religious concept of repentance. We don't just forget the past and the harm caused, we have to put in effort to remake our damaged relationship with God, but also we can trust God to meet us halfway, to help us to rebuild. This is kind of the obvious sermon that everybody gives about Eikev, but I tried to make it personal and meaningful.
Having set that up, I mentioned the upcoming High Holy Days which are the season most heavily focused on sin and repentance. I reminded people that the liturgy specifically mentions praying alongside the most terrible category of sinners, not just people who have fallen short or broken some technical laws. The classical example is apostates who sold out other Jews to the Inquisition. The Jewish world as a whole should regard homophobia as just as bad as torture or idolatry; in order to repent of it, we'll have to put in serious work, and we'll have to keep the memory of how we broke our commitment to all humans made in God's image, but if we do, God will respond and help us to write a new covenant, will be our partner in creating a Judaism that is truly welcoming to all.
I think I got the balance right; it was the kind of sermon which gets complimented as powerful, and it was hopefully relevant to people wherever they are thinking about Judaism and LGBTQ+ concepts and people. To balance that, I did a fun study session (the community provided rainbow cupcakes), mostly based on R' Ruttenberg's delightful teaching on Genderqueering Joseph, with a bit of Boyarin's love story of the rabbi and the highwayman thrown in.
I have a lot of feelings about being here, now, in 2023, about to start studying to become a rabbi, being asked to run a Pride Shabbat. The people who suggested it and organized all the rainbow flags and cupcakes are I think mostly straight, while many members of the community are under the rainbow umbrella including gay men. I love that everybody made the effort, and they don't really care how I identify, it's a normal part of a (trainee) rabbi's job to organize liturgy and preaching and study for Pride. When I was a teenager we were still debating whether we were going to fully accept gay people, and much as Judaism is celebrated for encouraging debate and questioning, at times like that you almost long for a hierarchical religion where a leader could use their authority to deliver an edict that homophobia is forbidden. And perhaps ten years ago, the question of 'should we be homophobic or inclusive' was more or less resolved, but Pride stuff was still a niche thing and if a Pride event happened, it would have had to be the Queer section of the community who organized it. I remember turning up at one of my communities and being semi-jokingly asked how I felt being the only straight person present, because they assumed back then that a religious leader with a visible opposite sex partner must be straight.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-08 10:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-09 08:53 am (UTC)Your final paragraph contains a lot that I could have written about Quakers.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-09 11:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-09 03:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-19 09:34 pm (UTC)