Author Archives: Penina

Ruach HaYam: Why We (Still) Need Queer Jewish Space

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This essay was first published on September 15, 2017 on the  Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Blog

Ruach HaYam: Why We (Still) Need Queer Jewish Space

A few years ago I started a group in Boston aimed at providing space for LGBTQ Jews to gather for learning and worship in a way that would enable us to bring our full selves to the table.  We named ourselves Ruach HaYam, Spirit of the Sea, after the sea surrounding us in Boston, and for the sea across which Miriam and Moses led the children of Israel.  Ours was not a unique idea at the time, but as we are completing our fifth year at Ruach HaYam, I find it becoming harder, and therefore more essential, to find spiritual community dedicated to queer Jews. Continue reading →

Vayikra: Why Is It Important To Be Called?

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Parashat Vayikra, the first portion of the book of Leviticus, is foreign to our modern ears, with its rules for animal sacrifice, detailed requirements for what to do with each type of animal for different offerings, and rules about eating the fat and the blood. How can we understand this ritual?  Nancy Jay [see sources at end of paper] points out that the way to understand ritual is not to try and find a meaning identical to the ritual actors, but to build a kind of bridge, “not to accurately decode their meaning, but to make what they do and say intelligible for us.”  One way to do this is to consider that the ritual of sacrifice as presented in Leviticus some 2500 year ago is a method of creating a holy routine – instructions about how to bring holiness into our lives through sacred norms.   As modern Jews, we don’t bring order through sacrifice, but we do bring order through our own ritual practices.

Although this seems like a satisfying meaning, there is a drawback. Continue reading →

Unrighteous Anger – Queen Vashti and the Erasure of Transgender Women

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This article was written by Mischa Haider and Penina Weinberg and was first published in Tikkun Daily Blog  on May 13th, 2016.

Image: Queen-Vashti-Refuses-to-Obey-the-Command-of-Ahasvuerus

The night after Purim the two of us sat feasting – a queer Hebrew bible scholar and a trans woman activist. The book of Esther was on our minds, as we read Esther every year on Purim, the festival when we celebrate the brave Jewish queen who saves her people from annihilation in Persia. Also on our minds was the “bathroom panic” gripping the nation over the perilous prospect of transgender women using women’s restrooms.

Continue reading →

Reading Torah through LGBTQ Eyes: A study of Joy Ladin’s work (April 19, 2018)

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Ruach HaYam Workshop at Congregation Eitz Chayim, 136 Magazine Street, Cambridge, MA – April 19, 2018. See end of post for logistics.

Join us for a discussion led by Penina Weinberg about Joy Ladin’s Tikkun Magazine article (fall, 2014): “Both Wilderness and Promised Land: How Torah Grows When Read Through LGBTQ Eyes.” (We will have copies at the study session). This is by way of preparing us for Joy’s book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, due out later in 2018 from Brandeis University Press. We hope to have an opportunity to learn with Joy at that time!

There is so much we can talk about from the article. In order to fully discuss it, and to see if we agree or disagree with Joy’s conclusions, we will look up and study many of the verses in Tanakh to which Joy refers.

There is considerable tension between queer creation and the establishment of sacred normativity. (PS, those of you who learned with Ezra Rose Greenfield , note the establishment of God’s **angelic** court.) Here is a taste of what Joy has written.

“The Torah’s God is disembodied, incomparable, and incomprehensible in human terms. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam developed theologies based on the God we encounter in the Torah, but by Iron Age standards, this God is utterly queer. Later Jewish traditions and texts normalize this queer God, imagining God as a king or emperor surrounded by an angelic court. But the God we encounter in the five books of Moses has no normalizing context, no divine hierarchy to define God’s kingship, no divine family for God to patriarchically dominate, no consort, and no body. As a result, despite the masculine pronouns and verb forms assigned by the text, God has no gender, masculine or otherwise, because God has no way to demonstrate or perform a gender. Gender is a system; even the simplest form of that system, the gender binary, requires at least two of a kind, and God, as Jews affirm in the Shema prayer, is One. And, as many of us know, being singular, living outside recognized human categories and relationships, makes one very queer indeed….. We are queer children of a queer God-and by ‘we,’ I mean the Jewish people. When queer Jews read Torah as our own, we help all Jews recognize and reclaim our heritage of radical queerness, rekindling the flame of desire that led our ancestors to abandon known norms and follow God through a wilderness unknown toward a future founded on the principle that being true to God requires being true to ourselves.”

Penina Weinberg is an independent Hebrew bible scholar whose study and teaching focus on the intersection of power, politics and gender in the Hebrew Bible. She has run workshops for Nehirim and Keshet and has been teaching Hebrew bible for 10 years. She has written in Tikkun and HBI blog, founded the group Ruach HaYam and is president emerita and webmaster at her synagogue. Penina is a mother and grandmother.

** Logistics**
Study starts promptly at 7:15 pm. We open the doors at 6:45 for schmoozing. Feel free to bring your own veggie snack for the early part. A parking consideration is in effect for the three blocks around EC during all regularly scheduled events. It is a good idea to put a note in the windshield that you are attending an event at EC.
Accessibility information: all gender/accessible bathrooms, entry ramp.

Ruach HaYam study sessions provide a queer Jewish look at text, but are welcoming to any learning or faith background, to all bodies, are friendly to beginners.

Shabbat ha-Lepre-cohen – Potluck Lunch and Learn: Jews in Ireland (March 17, 2018)

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Join Ruach HaYam on March 17, 2018, for a Saturday morning Shabbat service followed by potluck lunch and learn on the Jews of Ireland – in honor of St Patrick’s Day.   Arrive at 9:30am to schmooze and help set up. Service will begin at 10am.

For the potluck please bring veggie/dairy food and any experience you have regarding Irish Jews.

This lunch and learn will be led by our Ruach HaYam partner and service leader, Marvin Kabakoff.  Marvin graduated from Brandeis and received a Ph.D. in history from Washington University-St. Louis. He is recently retired as an archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, and is an adjunct in the Simmons Library School.

We worship without a mechitza, and with acoustic music only. We have our own siddur. Our services and study sessions are warm, meaningful, collaborative, lead to deepening of friendships, and are simply fabulous.

Trans(forming) Angels in Jewish Lore: Gender, Trauma, and More – February 15, 2018

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Ruach HaYam Workshop at Congregation Eitz Chayim, 136 Magazine Street, Cambridge, MA – February 15, 2018. See end of post for logistics.

Inspired by our reading of Julia Watts Belser and Ezekiel, and coming out of long studies on these matters, Ezra Rose Greenfield, Ruach HaYam member, darshan, and workshop leader, will teach about the multiplicity of different places that angels appear as supports/catalysts for transition. They will present some of the Hechalot literature (early Merkavah mysticism) as well as teachings by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. Rabbi Ruttenberg has explored a medieval ruling on the transition of Elijah from man to angel, and how this was used in an early modern trans rights case.

Ezra Rose Greenfield is an artist and educator (BFA ’09 RISD, M.Ed. ’12 Lesley University) living in the Boston area and teaching with community-based youth advocacy organizations. Their work explores themes of memory, mythology, personal symbolism and storytelling. Raised in Reform congregations in the midwest, Ezra is redefining and reconnecting to Judaism as an adult with a focus on integrating queer and trans identity with Jewish magic, mysticism and spirituality.

** Logistics**
Study starts promptly at 7:15 pm. We open the doors at 6:45 for schmoozing. Feel free to bring your own veggie snack for the early part. A parking consideration is in effect for the three blocks around EC during all regularly scheduled events. It is a good idea to put a note in the windshield that you are attending an event at EC.
Accessibility information: all gender/accessible bathrooms, entry ramp.

Ruach HaYam study sessions provide a queer Jewish look at text, but are welcoming to any learning or faith background, to all bodies, are friendly to beginners.

Breaking the Binary: King David and his Dualities – January 18, 2018

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Breaking the Binary: King David and his Dualities – January 18, 2018
6:45pm – 9:15pm @ Eitz Chayim

(See logistics at end)

In many ways, bisexuality is binary breaking; it defies the notion that people have to bat for one team. But the word can also carry binary notions of its own. Enter King David: poet, warrior, king, lover of both men and women. What binaries does he break? Which does he enforce? And why does it matter that the man involved is King David, hero of heroes?

We’re so excited to have one of our long time members, Sarah Pasternak lead this session. Sarah hails from a Jewishly diverse family that has been engaging her in Judaism and Jewish texts for the past quarter century. Sarah serves as leyner and gabbai for our Shabbat morning services.

Marc Chagall: David in Blu. Image of King David crowned, floating on his back over a city, harp on his lap. Colors all in blue, with a jeweled lap.

** Logistics**

Study starts promptly at 7:15 pm. We open the doors at 6:45 for schmoozing. Feel free to bring your own veggie snack for the early part. A parking consideration is in effect for the three blocks around EC during all regularly scheduled events. It is a good idea to put a note in the windshield that you are attending an event at EC.
Accessibility information: all gender/accessible bathrooms, entry ramp.

Ruach HaYam study sessions provide a queer Jewish look at text, but are welcoming to any learning or faith background, to all bodies, are friendly to beginners.

Disability and Divine Power: Reading Julia Watts Belser (December 21, 2017)

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Ruach HaYam Workshop at Congregation Eitz Chayim, 136 Magazine Street, Cambridge, MA  – December 21, 2017.  See end of post for logistics.

This study is led by Penina Weinberg.

Banner for event has a painting of an ecstatic person in red, possibly flaming, dress whirling in a blue wheel chair. Caption is
“Ezekiel’s vision split open my own imagination. Hearing those words chanted, I felt a jolt of recognition, an intimate familiarity. I thought: God has wheels!”
from “God on Wheels—Disability and Jewish Feminist Theology”
by Julia Watts Belser in Tikkun 2014
Illustration from the article: “Whirlwheel” by Olivia Wise. [end of caption]

Article can be found here via subscription or access through a library:  http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/god-on-wheels

Join us for an introduction by Penina Weinberg to the work of Julia Watts Belser on disability studies, and a relevant Talmud text study with Ruach HaYam member Ariel Cohen. Many of us wish for and hope for a world that will be accessible to all, and accepting of all. But there is much more. As Belser writes: “I fear that by conceptualizing disability primarily as an access problem to be solved, we fail to invite in the vibrant, transgressive potential of disability culture: of a ‘crip’ sensibility that celebrates disability as a way of life, a radically different way of moving through the world.” The notion of celebrating a vibrant and transrgessive culture will be familiar to queer Jews who wish to participate in celebration, not just tolerance.

Julia Watts Belser, whose work we will read, is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Theology Department at Georgetown University, with expertise in rabbinic literature and Jewish feminist ethics, with a focus on gender, sexuality, and disability studies. She is the author of Power, Ethics and Ecology in Jewish Late Antiquity: Rabbinic Responses to Drought and Disaster (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford UniversityBar Press, 2017).

Barb Ariel Cohen is the Chief Scientific Officer of Arex Life Sciences, a biotech startup enabling physicians to more successfully treat male infertility. Ariel has been studying for the past 20 years with her rebbe Rabbi Alan Ullman, including a small private study group which he took to Israel.

  • Ruach HaYam study sessions provide a queer Jewish look at text, but are open to any learning or faith background and friendly to beginners.
  • Study starts promptly at 7:15 pm. However we open the doors at 6:45 for schmoozing. Feel free to bring your own veggie snack for the early part.
  • A parking consideration is in effect for the three blocks around EC during all regularly scheduled events.  It’s a good idea to put a note in the windshield that you are attending an event at EC.
  • Accessibility information: all gender/accessible bathrooms, entry ramp.

Penina Weinberg is an independent Hebrew bible scholar whose study and teaching focus on the intersection of power, politics and gender in the Hebrew Bible. She has run workshops for Nehirim and Keshet and has been teaching Hebrew bible for 10 years. She has written in Tikkun, founded the group Ruach HaYam and is president emerita and webmaster at her synagogue. Penina is a mother and grandmother.

Ruach HaYam Shabbat Retreat November 18, 2017

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Ruach HaYam, in partnership with Congregation Am Tikva, invites you to our fifth annual full day Shabbat retreat for LGBTQ Jews and friends and family.

November 18, 2017, from 9:30am to 7:30pm at Congregation Eitz Chayim, 136 Magazine Street, Cambridge, MA 02139.

PRE-REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED
PLEASE REGISTER HERE

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Eitz Chayim is 15 minutes walk from Central Square.  There will be a parking consideration in effect so that you may park within a couple blocks of the synagogue.   Eitz Chayim has a ramp entry and accessible and all gender bathrooms.

Refresh your spirit and make new friends in this fabulous day of egalitarian davening, creative and thoughtful workshops,and delicious kosher food!

Ruach HaYam Ruach HaYam welcomes queer Jews, friends, allies, family, and interfaith connections to our events. We organize short and all day Shabbat events, as well as queer Jewish text studies in the Boston area through out the year.  We worship without a mechitza, with acoustic music only, and with our own siddur. Services are warm, meaningful, collaborative, lead to deepening of friendships, and are simply fabulous. Full day Shabbat retreats include scholarly and experiential workshops and plenty of time to schmooze. Although Ruach HaYam speaks with a queer Jewish voice, we welcome persons of all gender and faith identities. We are friendly to beginners.

Schedule for Retreat 
(see below for faculty and leader biographies)

Services
9:30 am to Noon.   Service Leader Marvin Kabakoff.  Song Leader Shana Aisenberg. Darshan Ezra Rose Greenfield.  Ruach HaYam Siddur assembled by Marvin Kabakoff and Penina Weinberg
Lunch
Noon to 1:30 pm
Workshops
1:45 to 3:00 – Sacha Mankins. Hagar in Yiddish Poetry. Sacha will present side-by-side Yiddish and English versions of three poetic interpretations of the story of Hagar, two of them by Itsik Manger and one by Rajzel Zhychlinsky, along with brief bios of the poets. We will then discuss the differences between the poems, their perspectives, how they reinterpret the story from Tanakh for the contexts in which they were written, and how they speak to us in the context in which we’re reading them.
3:15 to 3:45 – Time for a 7th inning stretch!  Walk or exercise!
4:00 to 5:15 – Marla Brettschneider. Jewish Feminism and Intersectionality.  Lots of people have heard the term intersectionality and aren’t sure what it means. Many folx think they have never heard it, but once they pay attention, they will realize they are hearing it often. What is intersectionality actually, how it is related to Judaism, to feminism, to queer studies? How does exposure to these ideas support and enhance our spiritual journeying?  Expect deep teaching and a lively discussion!
Closing
5:30 – Havdalah – Rabbi Yaakov ‘Trek’ Reef
Following Havdalah – Meal/Melave Malka
Retreat Director
Penina Weinberg is an independent biblical scholar and the founder of Ruach HaYam. Penina is President Emerita of Congregation Eitz Chayim in Cambridge, MA, where she is a frequent lay leader.  Her studying and teaching focus a queer lens on issues of gender, power, and identity in the Hebrew Bible. Penina teaches in Boston area synagogues, and has led many workshops for Nehirim and Keshet.  This is her fifth year as Ruach HaYam retreat director.
Partner Organization
Congregation Am Tikva, since 1976,Am Tikva Black2 has been providing a safe and welcoming space for GLBT Jews in the Boston area to pray together and to socialize. It created its own gender-neutral prayerbooks and customs for Friday evening services, the high holidays, and special events, such as the Erev Pride Liberation Seder. Am Tikva is a mixture of genders and sexualities who come from a variety of Jewish backgrounds. The services reflect that variety. Am Tikva offers two Friday evening services a month, one more contemporary and one more traditional, as well as High Holiday services and celebrations of other queer and Jewish holidays.
Faculty and Leaders
Shana Aisenberg  plays fiddle, mandolin, guitar
banjo, ukulele, dulcimer, piano, percussion; and diverse styles including Appalachian, Celtic, New England contradance, Eastern European Klezmer, blues, jazz and classical. Shana has performed nationally; has recorded numerous albums; has written music instruction books; taught at workshops and festivals nationwide, and teaches private students and group classes locally. She is the Music Director at Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Eastern Slopes (UUFES) in Tamworth NH.
Visit Shana online at shanasongs.com.
Marla Brettschneider is Professor of Political philosophy with a joint appointment in Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of New Hampshire. She is founder and past Coordinator of Queer Studies and long served as Coordinator of Women’s Studies. Marla has written widely on Jewish politics, queer and other diversity matters. Her book The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives (SUNY 2006) won an IPPY (Independent Book Publishers Award) in the GLBT category, and she is co-editor of the new LGBTQ Politics:A Critical Reader. She will present from her recent book Jewish Feminism and Intersectionality.
Ezra Rose Greenfield  is an artist and educator.
(BFA ’09 RISD, M.Ed. ’12 Lesley University) living in the Boston area and teaching with community-based youth advocacy organizations. Her work explores themes of memory, mythology, personal symbolism and storytelling. Raised in Reform congregations in the midwest, Ezra is redefining and reconnecting to Judaism as an adult with a focus on integrating queer and trans identity with Jewish magic, mysticism and spirituality.
Marvin Kabakoff graduated from BrandeisMarvin Kabakoff and received a Ph.D. in history from Washington University-St. Louis.  He is recently retired as an archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration at their regional facility in Waltham, and is an adjunct in the Simmons Library School.  Marvin attended a community Hebrew school and Hebrew High School in New Haven, and has been a long-time service leader at Am Tikva.
Sacha Mankins  is a part-time librarian-archivist, part-time history student, and part-time stepparent to a family of miniature goats (the symbolic companion animal of Yiddish culture). When not sorting through dusty synagogue archives, Sacha writes fantasy fiction for queer and trans teens. Raised in a secular Christian family, Sacha officially converted to Judaism in April 2017 after three years of study, and spent the summer of 2017 in Manhattan in the YIVO Institute’s Uriel Weinreich summer program in Yiddish language, literature and culture.
Rabbi Yaakov ‘Trek’ Reef walks in the world as a spiritual teacher and is a regionally recognized speaker, serving as a frequent guest in the pulpit at synagogues, churches, and meeting houses throughout the Northeast. He has also led workshops and classes for the Adamah Farm Fellowship, Star Island Natural History Conference, Elat Chayyim Center for Jewish Spirituality, Keshet Boston, Hillel House at Boston University, and Seaside Yoga Retreat Center in Oregon.  For three years Trek served as a retreat director and the program manager at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut. In 2016, he completed a pilgrimage along the storied Appalachian Trail, taking approximately five million steps over 2189.1 miles between Georgia and Maine to find a deeper connection to the awe-inspiring natural world.
 PRE-REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED
PLEASE REGISTER HERE

Gendered in the image of God: The first human (August 17, 2017)

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Ruach HaYam Workshop at Congregation Eitz Chayim, 136 Magazine Street, Cambridge, MA  – August 17, 2017.  See end of post for logistics.

This study is led by Penina Weinberg.

In speaking of the creation, the Kabbalists call the first human du-partzufin, a Greek term meaning two visages, ie two faces on one body, not two bodies. They describe the divine and human each as bi-sexual. They say that both genders are present in all humans and that this is the image of the divine.
What does that actually mean? How does non-binary fit into this idea?
We will read from Genesis and from the Kabbalists in an effort to see the biblical story of the creation in a new light, and to make greater sense of our own gender journeys.

  • Ruach HaYam study sessions provide a queer Jewish look at text, but are open to any learning or faith background and friendly to beginners.
  • Study starts promptly at 7:15 pm. However we open the doors at 6:45 for schmoozing. Feel free to bring your own veggie snack for the early part.
  • A parking consideration is in effect for the three blocks around EC during all regularly scheduled events.  It’s a good idea to put a note in the windshield that you are attending an event at EC.
  • Accessibility information: all gender/accessible bathrooms, entry ramp.

Penina Weinberg is an independent Hebrew bible scholar whose study and teaching focus on the intersection of power, politics and gender in the Hebrew Bible. She has run workshops for Nehirim and Keshet and has been teaching Hebrew bible for 10 years. She has written in Tikkun, founded the group Ruach HaYam and is president emerita and webmaster at her synagogue. Penina is a mother and grandmother.