Drash - March 19 2010 at Congregation Sha'ar Zahav

Shabbat Shalom,

I have been thinking a lot about hiding lately, and what it means to come out of hiding, because it seems that our tradition and our calendar want us to think about that at this time of year. We are here in this period between Purim and Passover, two holidays that are rich with imagery of things hidden and things revealed. At Purim, we read the story of Esther, who is first in hiding and then reveals her true identity to those around her. And we celebrate the holiday with a revelry of masks and costumes, briefly hiding ourselves from each other, with the joy that comes from knowing that the masks are of our choosing and not forced upon us.

And then we come soon to Passover, where it is not one person, but literally the story of an entire nation that comes out of hiding, reawakening to their identity and to their relationship with God. In our Sha’ar Zahav Haggadah we read: “When we had almost forgotten ourselves, God remembered us, and we too began to remember.” The second half of the Passover Seder begins with Tzafun, which means “hidden”. At that moment of Tzafun, we eat the Afikomen, the matzo that had previously been hidden and then recovered, and we say that it is “a timeless symbol of our own thanksgiving and the promise of a future time when all hiding will end.” I am coming to believe that perhaps one definition of history is that history is what happens when people come out of hiding.

And this week, between these holidays, we read Parasha Vayikra, the first portion of the book of Leviticus. This parasha deals almost exclusively with describing how the rituals of sacrifice should be conducted in the temple. The word “sacrifice” comes from a Latin word meaning to make something holy. In Hebrew, we say “Korbanot”, meaning something brought near to the altar. And so, while we no longer perform these rituals, we have the opportunity this week to read the instructions for what our ancestors understood as some of the holiest moments of their lives. In the early part of Vayikra, we read the description of how the animal is to be laid out for the burnt offering and how the fire is to be prepared. And we find this instruction: It shall be slaughtered before God on the North side of the altar.

וְשָׁחַט אֹתוֹ עַל יֶרֶךְ הַמִּזְבֵּחַ, צָפֹנָה--לִפְנֵי יְהוָה

V’shachate oto al yerech hamizbayach, tzafonah lif’nei Adonai

Literally, it shall be slaughtered standing North before God. Why North?

Several interpretations have been offered, but the ones that intrigue me most relate to the fact that the word for North, Tzafonah, is from the same root as “Tzafun” which means hidden. And so it is suggested that before one can be holy, one must stand before God with all of oneself, the visible and the hidden, and make oneself known in a complete and whole way. The Sfat Emet, one of the leading Hassidic scholars of the 19th century, taught that what is important about the Korbanot, the sacrifice, was not the technical ritual, but bringing one’s inner self before God. When a person stands “North before God” he stands whole and complete, his outer self and his hidden self all visible before God. And so coming out of hiding creates not only history, but also holiness.

Recently Marc Lipschutz and I went to Israel with a goal of looking for ways to strengthen the ties between the LGBT communities there and in the U.S. We call this project building A Wider Bridge. During our trip, we had the opportunity to meet with just about every LGBT organization and leader in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Over and over again, I felt was meeting people who were working at this juncture of history and holiness. You know, sometimes people say “we should support Israel because it is a good place to be LGBT.” I think that statement misses the mark a bit. What we saw on this trip is that Israel is both a good and challenging place to be LGBT. But to the extent that it is a good place, it is because there are remarkable people working tirelessly to make it so. And I believe that we have a unique role and a unique stake in the outcome of that work. Let me begin with just a few brief highlights:

· We met the founder of a group called Rainbow Families. Last month in Tel Aviv they had a four day conference for LGBT families attended by more than 2000 people. They discussed issues like parenting, adoption, surrogacy. For the first time in Israel, large groups of children of LGBT parents got to meet and talk to each other.

· We met with the Leaders of Hoshen, a group that has trained more than 300 LGBT people to tell their stories, with teachers, to the military, social workers, high school students. As here, there is still widespread homophobia in Israel, especially in the schools.

· We met with the leaders of Israel Gay Youth, a group that works with thousands of teenagers and college age kids all over the country. Their ranks have grown exponentially since the shootings that killed two and wounded many others at the youth group meeting in Tel Aviv last August. And Noa and Avner, along with four of the teens in the group, will be here at Sha’ar Zahav for Pesach, joining us for our Congregational second night seder.

· We spent an evening meeting with the LGBT Chavurah of Kol Haneshema, Jerusalem’s wonderful Reform Congregation that many of us have visited. This Chavurah is one that a group of us at Sha’ar Zahav are now studying with on Facebook. Rabbi Levi and his wife Paula joined us for the meeting, and we talked about their plans to have their first Pride Shabbat service this July.

· We met with Hagai ElAd, the leader of ACRI, Israel’s largest human rights organization, and our last Saturday in Jerusalem we joined his group and thousands of other people at a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem to protest the ongoing and unfair evictions of Palestinians from their homes in that area.

Yet I think it is safe to say that nothing inspired us more, and perhaps surprised us more, than what we learned about the LGBT people and organizations that have developed from within Israel’s Orthodox community. Havruta is the men’s group. It started with 10 members just two and a half years ago as a part of Jerusalem Open House, and now has more than 300 members. Bat Kol is the orthodox lesbian group, now with more than 200 members. Shoval is a religious LGBT speakers’ bureau that also staffs a hotline one day a week at the gay center. And many of the calls they get come from within the Haredi community. The Havruta website now gets more than 10,000 hits per month. There is also a youth group and a prayer minyan. These numbers are now too large for the orthodox leaders to continue to claim that homosexuality does not exist in their communities, or that it is just a tiny number of “deviants.” The leaders and some of the members of these groups are “out” within their larger communities, but many others are not, or are in various stages of that process. Coming out as an orthodox LGBT Jew in Israel is not easy. But wherever they are in the coming out process, these are people who are saying: We will no longer hide from God. We will stand before God as our whole selves, including our gay selves. And they are writing history right now in Israel. Let me share a bit of this story with you.

On our next to last evening in Israel, we met with all the key founders and leaders of these groups. Ten of us sat in Avigail’s living room in Neve Tzedek, and talked for more than three hours. I’ll begin with the story of my friend Zehorit. Zehorit was a member of an orthodox congregation in Tel Aviv. She has a female partner, Limor, and two beautiful young children. Zehorit and Limor were married last summer, and she went to her rabbi and asked if she and her partner could sponsor the Kiddush at the shul one Shabat in honor of their marriage. The rabbi said no. “How about if we hold the Kiddush in the garden outside, and not in the shul itself?” Once again, the rabbi said no. Zehorit’s friends went ahead in any event, and held a Kiddush for her and her partner in the gardens of the shul. When the rabbi learned of this, he told Zehorit that she was no longer welcome as a member of the congregation.

The High Holidays were only a couple of months away. Zehorit called her friend Benny, who leads Havruta, the gay men’s orthodox group, and said. “Benny, the High holidays are coming, and I have no place to pray.” And Benny said, “well, we are resourceful, let’s create a place to pray.” And so they organized a minyan for Kol Nidre at the new Gay Center in Tel Aviv. They knew 30 to 40 people who were likely to come, and they began to spread the word in their communities. The night of Kol Nidre they optimistically set out chairs for 100. By the time the services began, there were more than 250 people packed in to the room. The following evening, more than 300 people came for Neilah, and the crowd spilled out into the park that surrounds the Gay Center.

Who came? The Orthodox, the ex-Orthodox, the Secular. Some people who had not been to a synagogue in many years. For religious LGBT Jews, this minyan is a new source of hope. And for the secular LGBT Jews, many who left Judaism early in their lives, many who are fearful of Judaism, this minyan has been a way back in. Literally and metaphorically, these young orthodox Jews are bringing Judaism back to the heart of the LGBT community in Tel Aviv.



But why is this happening now? My friend, Eyal Liebermann, one of the leaders of Shoval, the speakers bureau, wrote to me this week, and he said:

“The Minyan is the tip of the iceberg. The part of the community which is revealed. Yet iceberg tips do not exist in a void. They float because great forces support them, and push them to the surface.” I think he meant that all the work of these organizations, in creating support groups, counseling sessions, speaking engagements back in to the orthodox and Haredi communities, the hotline, all of this has provided the foundation for the most visible public manifestation of this effort, an LGBT prayer minyan in the heart of Tel Aviv at the gay center.

And for Purim, they sponsored a Megillah reading at the Gay Center, and Marc and I had the good fortune to be there. More than 270 people came that night, young, old, many from the orthodox community, and many secular folks, lots of little kids, fabulous costumes. Men and women alternated reading chapters of the Megillah, and the ruach in the room was amazing.

After the reading, a form was distributed. [Visual aids.] All in Hebrew, and I could tell that at the bottom there was a place for you to write your name. So I imagined it was similar to the forms we might use to capture the names and e-mails of visitors to Sha’ar Zahav. But I learned this was a bit different. It asks: What yeshiva did you go to? Who was the rabbi you studied with? Are you willing to make a phone call back to him? They told me that if an LGBT leader calls a rabbi and tries to begin a conversation about gay issues, most likely the conversation ends. But they have learned that they have more success when someone calls and says: I was your student three years ago. I want to tell you about who I am. So one phone call at a time, one conversation at a time, they are slowly making Israel a better place and safer place for all of us.

Let me return to the night we all met together at Avigail’s. With my proud Reform hat on, I asked Zehorit, “when you said ‘I have no place to pray,’ help me understand that? Surely there are Reform synagogues in Israel that would have gladly welcomed you in.” And she said, “Yes, but that is not who I am. For me, that would be like admitting defeat. For me, being orthodox is as much a part of my DNA as my sexuality. You can’t take it out of me.” And everyone around the room agreed with her. “We keep the mitzvoth”, they said. And yet to be with them, and to see how they grapple with issues of egalitarianism, mechitzahs, liturgy, is also to understand that they are both reclaiming orthodoxy and reinventing it. We did present the group with a copy of Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, a gift for which they were very grateful.

Thirty three years ago history and holiness were created here in San Francisco when a group of courageous people created Sha’ar Zahav, and said we are going to reclaim our heritage and stand before God as our whole true selves. A few weeks ago in Israel, I felt like I was standing at a similar intersection of history and holiness. We witnessed events that could not have taken place even a year ago. History is being written by a new generation of LGBT Jews, as committed to their religious traditions as we are to ours. And it is a story that is not well known. I believe that their story is intertwined with our story, that their struggle is part of our struggle, and that the entire Jewish community will be stronger because of the courage and determination that they are bringing to their cause.

I want to conclude with two last points:

First, as our conversation ended that night, Benny said to us, “we know that this is not just about us. We are going back to our rabbis and saying ‘we are the strangers that you must welcome back into our community. But we know that there are other strangers. Along with us, the women in our communities are also in some ways the stranger. Many want a chance to play a different role than the ones they have today. And they must be welcomed.’” And then he turned to me and said something I was not expecting. He said: “And we know that the last strangers that our communities need to welcome in are the Palestinians. They cannot continue to be strangers and outcasts here among us.” I went to Israel in part with the idea that there might be a unique role that LGBT Jews could play in the effort for peace. And while there is much to despair about in Israel right now, this evening gave me a renewed sense of hopefulness.

And lastly, these LGBT religious groups are now planning their first ever Pride Shabbat in June of this year, to coincide with Gay pride in Tel Aviv. Shabat Ga’avah. I asked them, with my Sha’ar Zahav smugness, if they are going to treat Pride Shabbat like a holiday, a chag, as we do, and say Hallel. They smiled and replied very gently to me: “This is our first one. We won’t be saying Hallel. But we will say the Shehechiyanu.”

I plan to be back in Israel in June to join in that Shehechiyanu. I hope some of you will join me. And I hope we say one here for them as well, recognizing the history and the holiness of that moment. May we give our love and strength and support to these Israeli brothers and sisters of ours, who are finding the courage to not hide who they are, and to stand before God as their true whole selves. And may each of us find our own path to stand North, before God. Ken y’hi ratzon
(With thanks to my study partners in Israel, especially Avigail Sperber and Eyal Liebermann, and to all my friends there who allowed me to tell their stories)