Image: A human shadow against a wall of Jerusalem stone. This image appears with Rabbi Nafshi’s article in Lilith.
Every now and then I read something and all I can think is, “Darn, I wish I’d written that.”
My colleague Rabbi Robin Nafshi has published an exquisite essay on the Lilith blog, Losing God in Jerusalem.
I encourage you to click the link and read it. I’m not going to spoil it for you by saying more.
Image: People gather in the central courtyard of the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. Photo by deror_avi, CC BY-SA 3.0.
I just read something so exciting, with such great links, that I feel the need to share it RIGHT NOW.
Rabbi Nikki Greninger is attending her first Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) Convention in Jerusalem right now. She wrote an account of her experiences in the first day of the conference. I love her account because she holds up so many interesting aspects of Israeli life and especially of Reform Israeli life.
Did you know…
…That the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Tamir Nir, is in the final stages of study for the Reform rabbinate?
…That Hebrew Union College is a co-sponsor of a interreligious program teaching pastoral counseling specifically for addressing conflict-related trauma? Jewish, Muslim, and Christian clergy train together to support and heal those in their care who have suffered trauma from terror and related violence – the very concept takes my breath away.
…That there’s a new form of dance called Gaga which originated in Israel but is spreading around the world that is not about either the ball game nor Lady Gaga?
So here’s the link to Rabbi Greninger’s blog. She’s writing it primarily to rabbis in the United States who aren’t in Jerusalem for the conference, but I think there’s plenty in there to interest people of good will who want to learn more about Israel and the Middle East. She highlights aspects of the Israeli scene we simply don’t hear about. So much of our knowledge about Israel is shaped by crisis and conflict: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the women’s rights conflict, the struggle for religious pluralism in Israel — but life in Israel is not just about conflict.
Read. I think you will find some of those links as exciting as did I.
I spent yesterday afternoon in the stacks of the library at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. The official reason was that I’m assembling images for my Intro class.
As always, I went to the library with one project and found three projects begging for my time. Every book I pulled from the shelf had tantalizing neighbors. Every shelf I passed flirted with me. That library was the candy store when I was a student, and it remains one for me today.
I can lose an entire day bird-dogging after an idea. I get distracted by every interesting scent that comes my way, too. I’ll see an interesting book out of the corner of my eye and off I go on another side trip: Oooo, squirrel!
Image by Diane, some rights reserved
This blog post originally appeared on Tzeh U’Limad, the Blog of Continuing Jewish Learning published by Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion as part of its Continuing Alumni Education program. I follow that blog, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in “continuing Jewish learning!”
It’s June. I’m feeling the gratitude again.
Flash back to my first Gay Pride Month, in 1988: I had recently come out in a cloud of cluelessness, a single mom. There was a parade over the bay in San Francisco, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
1988 was a different world: AIDS was a mystery disease chewing through the gay male population, rumored in some quarters to be a Punishment from God. Same-sex intimacy was a felony in Georgia, with the blessing of the Supreme Court (Bowers v Hardwicke, 1986). After I came out to the principal at my kids’ Montessori School, I was told our family was unwelcome. An attorney told me it was a good thing my divorce had become final in California, because in my home state the courts would regard me ipso facto an unfit mother.
1988 galvanized me, and by the time the following June rolled around, I was volunteering for the National Center for Lesbian Rights where I had the privilege of meeting some of the people who’d been fighting on my behalf: Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, activists since 1955, and Donna Hitchens and Roberta Achtenberg, who founded NCLR in 1977. I met many other good people with names you won’t find in Wikipedia who had worked hard for many years. I learned what a deep debt I owed to those who had cut the rocky little path I was walking.
Flash forward to another June, in 2002: I emerged from the cheroot [shuttle] from Ben Gurion Airport and walked into the Jerusalem campus of HUC for the first time. One of the questions in my mind was, how was this going to go, really? How much of a problem was it going to be, well, me? Because that’s the thing: being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender is about identity. My orientation is an essential part of who I am that cannot be hidden or closeted or apologized for without twisting the truth.
I am happy to say that while I was at HUC-JIR (2002-08) I never felt that anyone on faculty or in the student body ever consciously slighted me on account of my orientation. I was proud to attend classes in the building that houses the Institute for Judaism, Sexual Orientation, & Gender Identity, first of its kind in the Jewish world. There is still plenty of work to do in the Reform Jewish world, but at least at school I felt welcome.
I owe my good experience to the pioneers who went before me: men and women who did the heavy lifting, who out of love for Torah and a sense of destiny persisted in pursuing this sacred work during the years when the Movement was not yet ready for us. Some of them suffered the pain of the closet. All persisted in the face of a particular interpretation of passages in Leviticus 18 and the slipperier “ick factor” that makes LGBTQ freedom work so challenging.
To those people, this June, I say todah rabbah, thank you very much. You are a blessing to us all. I know some of you, but by no means all of you. I hope that someday I’ll hear your stories. And just as this year we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of Sally Priesand’s ordination, I hope in some future year, we’ll be celebrating yours: you are my heroes.
