In all my years at Ner Shalom, we've never really done a do for Pride, maybe in part because we usually are not together for Shabbat on the last Friday of June, the Friday closest to the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots of 1969. And maybe we haven't done a do because our community has been such a home to LGBTQI people over these last years, that our experience and sensibilities have found their way into all of the corners of this synagogue, and doing a do has almost seemed redundant.
But this year, here we are together on Zoom every week. And here it's that week. The timing is right. And also the timing is terrible. Because we are in a resurging pandemic that demands constant attention. And we are in a renewed struggle for racial justice that demands our action and our full hearts. Who has time for anything else?
And yet two weeks ago the Supreme Court announced that workplaces couldn't discriminate against LGBTQI people. You might have felt surprised that this was so late in coming; in Chicago we passed such a law in 1989, a process I was part of, involving some of the ugliest politics I've ever seen. That it took three more decades for this to be the law of the land is, probably – and rightfully – shocking. But that fact it happened so decisively, and penned by an appointee of this president, that is reason for celebration. And there is more reason: today is the 5-year anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which extended marriage equality to same-sex couples across the country.
We must become adept at holding successes at the same time that we hold struggle. We must take pleasure in and feel gratitude for achievements, break-throughs, awakenings. We have to let the wins nourish us; that is how we can keep on the journey.
So this year we are doing a do, we do the do the you do so well. And we are celebrating Pride. With musical, liturgical and poetic contributions from Ner Shalomers.
And I also happen to be prepared. Over the last years I've had the chance to speak at Pride Shabbat events in Vancouver, Santa Cruz and even distant Santa Rosa. And so I'd like take more time than usual at the beginning of his service to present a version of what I presented in those places – a little piece of celebration I call "Gifts of the Queers." This is a chance to recognize the role that LGBTQI people have played in our culture, including our Jewish culture, that we don't so often identify and name. So I will skip right over the obvious – words and film and music. Skipping fashion will save us a half hour right there. Instead, subtler gifts of the queers for which I am grateful for in my life, and I suspect you are too, or will be once they're pointed out.
A side note: If at any point you're overcome with gratitude and need to shout out, "Thank you, Queers," please feel free to do so in the privacy of your home. Or you can put in the chat. Because no one ever can be thanked enough. And any of the queer people in the room should feel free to say "you're welcome" on all of our behalf.
So we will do this countdown style, beginning with:
Gift #7. Love.
Queer people did not invent love. But LGBTQI people have much to say about it. We know what it is like to risk everything for it. We know what it is like to negotiate love without the crutch of gender roles to fall back on. Most of us, at least the ones in this room, know what it was like to love without benefit of marriage or social recognition. To love despite disapproval. We know what it is like to love lavishly, fiercely, sequentially or simultaneously, without the advantage or constraints of convention. We know love to be of greater importance than a whole mess of shoulds.
What the world needs now is love – sweet love. It's not the only thing but it is a thing that there's just too little of. Now is the time for us all to see and activate the reckless power of love. Activate it, unleash love, love that breeds courage. See it in our activism. When we fight for the holiness and safety of black lives, that is love. So bring the love. Unleash the love.
Gift #6. Marriage.
It was predicted by some that by allowing gay people to marry, we queer people would, singlehandedly, destroy the institution of marriage. For some of us, that was what made it worth going for.
I am instead amused to announce that we, the queer people of America, have made marriage great again.
Before the marriage equality movement, marriage was in a slump. The role models were not good. Britney Spears, drunk in a Vegas wedding chapel. And with a 50% divorce rate, marriage's stock had plummeted.
But we, in our same-sex marriage quest, with our photogenic octogenarians waiting in line in San Francisco for wedding licenses; with our public testimony and our court battles, we made marriage desirable, valuable. America saw that marriage was worth fighting for. I don't think we notice this quite enough.
Same-sex marriage is also a gift to Judaism and I'll tell you how.
Traditional Jewish marriage is based on a model of acquisition. A man acquires a woman or acquires her exclusivity. The ring and the harei at mekudeshet language – "behold you are dedicated to me" – in a wedding ceremony are holdovers of that. Traditional divorce requires him to release her; she has no authority to release him.
Progressive Jews have tried to undo this, to rethink it, to announce that this language is metaphorical without asking why, if it's only metaphorical, we still do it at all. We have tried reciprocity – having the bride say to the groom the same language the groom just said to the bride. And in the progressive Jewish world that largely works. But the Orthodox would look at the same ceremony and consider the groom's traditional words to be binding and the bride's words to be noise. This is a problem for egalitarian straight couples, who can land in a horribly unegalitarian place if somehow they brush up against the world of Orthodoxy, in Israel or the Diaspora. And we, on the progressive edge, manage it by not looking too closely. We modify traditional Jewish wedding language and keep our fingers crossed.
But then here we queers waltz into the chupah with all our blatant undeniable same-sexedness, and Jewish law is puzzled into silence, unable to discern who is acquiring whom. Obviously the Orthodox world would not recognize our marriages to begin with. But the progressive Jewish world now at last has to get serious about getting creative. And when we develop something that works for same-sex couples and resonates in the world of Jewish law and that we all find beautiful and binding, it will work for everyone. It will be a gift for everyone.
Okay, after love and marriage, the next gift might logically be:
Gift #5. Family.
Here's what we have to offer Judaism and the world about family. Queers have learned how to create family in unexpected and organic ways. Many of us formed families of friends. Having children, for us, requires special thought and planning and technology. And we sometimes bring these children into creative family arrangements – with multiple adults – exes, friends, an army of aunties – all playing a role in raising children who will, by the way, never have cause to doubt how wanted they were.
Queer families know the difference between biology and kinship, and that is something we can bring to the Jewish world. We are family because of how we live, who we are, not how we were conceived.
And as we Jews continue our never-ending conversation about who is a Jew, maybe we queers can be a gentle vote for a post-biological era, where a child's home and relationships and practices and desires are as or more important in determining their Jewishness than inquiring whose egg and whose sperm were involved, which, by the way, is never an okay thing to ask about. Trust me. I could tell you stories.
In teaching an expanded notion of family, we don't have to look outside of Judaism's own stories. Consider Ruth and Naomi who, by vow and by practice, created family with each other. So much so that when Ruth, at the end of the story at last has a baby, the neighbor women say, "a child is born to Naomi." This is a story of kinship that is voluntary, kinship that is recognized by community, kinship that is decoupled from gender and genetics. And while we're mentioning gender...
Gift #4. Freedom from Gender.
Queer people, probably without exception, have had to negotiate gender in their lives. All queer people have had to question how binding the rules and requirements of gender would be on them. Some queer people live in a gender they were not raised in. Some queer people are pioneering what it is like to live in a different gender altogether or no particular gender at all. Queer people have been and still are punished for transgressions against gender – as we see in the murder rates of transgender people, particularly transgender people of color. But we keep coming back – responding bravely, playfully, cautiously, heroically.
We have taught and we have modeled that gender doesn't have to be this way, so obligatory, so limiting, so insistent. And that, I hope, can be freeing for everyone.
And here's a Jewish angle: if we see gender as dynamic and flexible, and we see all humans as tzelem Elohim, the image of the Divine, then how much more dynamic and fluid and flexible does our understanding of God become? How freeing not to be stuck in the gendered God-rut, using he-language so much, and then Shechina language sometimes as an antidote. Imagine seeing our rich and varied experience of gender as the reflection of God in this world. I can practically hear our collective sigh of sweet relief, like our mothers used to make taking off a girdle that was on for too many hours. Gender. Let us unhook it, let our ribs re-expand, so we can at last take a deep, unfettered breath.
Gift #3. Outsider Outlook.
Sometimes when you stand in the center, you don't know which way to look. But the perspective of the outsider can bring great clarity. From outside a system, you sometimes see what the mechanics of the system are, the assumptions built in, and you can articulate that.
This is a not just a queer phenomenon, but a Jewish one too. Jewish humor is all about observing cultural assumptions and revealing them as arbitrary. A favorite Jewish joke that I heard from Gale Kissin goes like this: Malkah and Sonja are talking over the fence. Malka says, "Sonja, did you hear? We're not in Russia anymore. Now we're in Poland!" Sonja responds, "Thank God. I couldn't stand another Russian winter."
For the non-Jewish world, national boundaries were natural and essential. To Jewish eyes they were arbitrary to the point of comedic. This is the role of the margin: to point to the center and question it. A delicious quality shared by Jews and Queers.
Gift #2. Political Correctness.
This one is, admittedly, a tangent. Not specifically Jewish and not specifcally queer. But it is something that I think needs rehabilitation, and I never get the chance to say that.
Queers did not invent the phrase "politically correct" – although it was in queer feminist circles that I first learned it in the 1980s. It was an ironic borrowing from Stalinist circles where "politically correct" meant following the party line. It was ironic because we on the Left really had no power.
But underneath the irony was our evolving relationship to social change. New voices of disempowered people's experience were bringing new understandings to our politics and creating a demand for new kinds of action and new kinds of inclusion. We were expected to – and wanted to – take these to heart and employ them in our lives. We joked about this being political correctness; we wanted to do these things, even if it was uncomfortable, and perhaps it was not fair to invent the political correctness barb, because it reflected our privilege, and because it got stolen from us, and it has done damage.
Now it is the Right's favorite critique of the compassion of the Left. Advocating for Muslims or transgender people or standing up for the lives of people of color – these acts get called – and dismissed – as politically correct.
So I say is time to reclaim this moral turf. When accused of being PC, it is time to say yes, I am PC: Persistently caring. Proudly compassionate. I am a channel of Pure Chesed.
And finally:
Gift #1. Joy.
Sitting in this dire moment of the world throws me back to the direst times of the AIDS epidemic. We were angry and outraged and still, gay pride festivals were grand celebrations. Celebration remained a requirement. Even our activism was done creatively, glamorously, extravagantly, often playfully.
There is an important learning here moving forward. About bringing joy to our resistance. If we are looking to build a future worth celebrating, there's no reason we can't get into the celebration habit right now. Let us experience joy not as an escape from our work in this challenging world, God forbid, but as a Vorspeis, a sampler, in the way that Shabbat is a taste of the World to Come.
So let us imagine the world we want to inhabit and feel the joy of it, the promise of it. And let us bring that feeling right into our celebration of Shabbat and our celebration of Pride and the week beyond and our activism beyond that. A little glitter never hurts.
So that's it. Tonight's manifesto. May we continue to give our gifts – as queers, as allies, as Jews. May we share our light, our endurance, our joy, our love, our learning, our humor. May we have pride, not just one day, but every day. May we not just have pride, but be a pride, of lions, fierce and beautiful, protecting our young, the next generation that will surely follow, inhabiting a landscape of tomorrow.
Now go celebrate your gifts. Shabbat shalom.