Category Archives: Musings

Why being queer in shul helps me to understand our institutional racism

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Our shul has recently embarked upon a course of community-building around anti-racism and diversity.   We have employed trained facilitators to guide our conversation.  From my perspective as a queer Jew, I offered up a comment in our first session about how the way in which I interact with the shul gives me some insight into how systemic racism may operate in our congregation, not necessarily overtly, but as an institutional problem. 

A member asked me how I could say that there was a lack of acceptance for me as a queer Jew, when the Rabbi readily agreed to my request for the use of gender neutral pronouns when calling an individual up to read from the Torah.  This terrific question calls for a measured answer.

The Rabbi agreeing to gender neutral pronouns is a validating and good feeling thing, an individual act of kindness and recognition.  As an individual, people treat me with respect and acceptance.  Yet it’s the institutional things that are difficult.

In our services we make an effort to mic all speakers, which is radical for a Conservative oriented shul, and very helpful to me as a person whose hearing is somewhat limited.  We strive to accommodate with ramp and large print prayer books.  There are a good number of caring folks heading up and participating in our committees and Board.  And yet, it is an institution with a history, with habits of thought, with practices, with policies that may not speak fully to some of the marginalized constituents, be they queer Jews, Jews of color, patrilineal Jews, disabled Jews, Jews by choice, interfaith partners. 

Speaking for myself personally, during an in-person prayer service, I can tune out the masculinist prayer book, Siddur Sim Shalom, the old Conservative siddur from 1985, because I carry with me one or two of my personal prayer books:  Siddur Lev Shalem is the new Conservative siddur that has gone a long way to providing gender inclusive and matriarch inclusive language.   Siddur Shahar Za’av is a siddur published by a queer synagogue.  I can and do make individual accommodations for myself by tuning out what the congregation is reciting, while listening to and participating in the music.

Yet, the masculinist prayer book on Sat mornings is the unquestioned and unapologized nexus of Saturday prayer, it is part of the institution of the shul.  It annoys me.  It sets my teeth on edge in places.  As a representation of the institution where I am a member, it excludes me and my lived experience.   It shows me that no matter how welcoming some individuals are,  as an institution we have work to do to celebrate and include LGBTQ Jews.

What holds me in the community is the promise of greater inclusion and celebration.  In our weekly Shabbat Torah study sessions, I often bring in the teaching of queer and/or disabled Jews.  When given a chance to read from the Torah, I have been able to bring in a feminist and/or queer and/or disabled perspective to the Torah portion.  Reactions from congregants and the Rabbi are positive and heartwarming.

From this experience, I can now question:  in what way is our shul, as an institution, perpetuating racism, in the same way that the siddur perpetuates an institutional masculinist/patriarchal view of the divine? In what way are we as an institution expecting marginalized persons to do all the heavy lifting?   We have individuals who are queer, of color, disabled, in interfaith families, and we often are able to provide welcome and accommodation.  But the culture overall is white, Ashkenazi, and heteronormative.  Having one or two or even three members from any group does not make a culture.

I am proud to say that our shul is grappling with these questions of inclusion and celebration, of understanding systemic racism and biases. We can only move forward by truth telling, by asking ourselves and each other hard questions, and by sitting with some discomfort in the process.

Harsh Passages in Life:What I Learned from the Yahrzeit of my Mother this Year

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When my mother died (May 29, 2014) I was present in the room, both in the hours before and the hour after.  She was 89 and had lived a long life, but this death was the result of accident, not old age, not illness.  My mom slipped and fell on the floor of the cafeteria in the nursing home where my father was living.  At that time his Alzheimer’s was profound, and in combination with Parkinson’s had brought him to a place in life where my mother’s daily ministrations probably did not leave her feeling that she was able to help him much.  My mother had sat with him day in and day out for hours at a time for several years.  Reading, talking, communicating.  On my twice yearly visits I sat with both of them too, but not as long.

I did not have an easy relationship with my mother ever.  There were many moments in our life together that could best be described as “harsh passages.”  I will explain that term shortly.  In the last four years of her life it was especially difficult because she was mostly distraught.   Not only was her husband slipping away, but we had lost son and brother in 2010 to a cancer which came on suddenly, although it gave us three months to accompany my brother as he prepared for death.  Shortly before my brother’s illness, I had finally made up my mind to work very hard to communicate with my mom, to invite us both to share the pains and disappointments and blames and recriminations between us and, I hoped, to forge a sweeter relationship. But with the tragedy of my brother’s premature death and my father’s illness, the best I could do was to hold my mother’s hand for her last four years.  I called her every week and listened.

When my mom fell in the nursing home, I was not there.  It took them several days to contact me.  By the time I heard from the hospital, they had already performed massive brain surgery, despite my mother’s strict wishes not to be resuscitated.  I flew from Boston to California immediately.  With the help of my parents’ extraordinary personal physician, we managed to convince the medical establishment that no, my mom would not like to wake up again in a vegetative or even bed-ridden state.   The brain surgeon, I may say, was livid, but that’s another story.  We moved her into palliative care, into a room with a beautiful view of an outside garden, and took no more extreme measures to keep her alive.  My mom did not wake up again and I accompanied her as she took her last breath.

At that final moment, a profound peace came over me.  I felt that my mother’s life had been very painful, particularly the last couple of years, and that she was now released.   I felt that I would have no further experience of the “harsh passages.”   Life, of course, is not so simple, but I am relating my feelings then.  I stayed with my mom in that room for an hour or so after she died.   As a Jew who came to Jewish practice late in life, I felt I should do something for my mom in that time.   I picked up the hospital-supplied Gideon Bible and read the psalms in English.  I knew that the traditional Jewish custom is to read Psalms in the interval between death and burial.  This was my way of honoring that tradition.  My mother was not Jewish, and probably would not have known the custom.  She was in fact an atheist, but only mentioned that to me once.   She had great respect for my dedication to Jewish learning.

In the years that intervened, of course many of my bitter feelings – of betrayal, misunderstanding, unhappiness etc – resurfaced, and warred with love and loss.  In the commemoration of my mom’s yahrzeit (anniversary of death) this year (2019, five years following death), I prepared to read from the Torah.  It was also my plan to speak about my mother on that Saturday morning.  I did not have a planned speech, but I wanted to speak in such a way as to open myself up for healing – not to talk about how difficult it was for me to think about my mom.   I made a particular point to go early enough for the recitation of psalms and prayers, because I understood them to be preparation for opening one’s heart to the Torah reading.

The Torah reading that morning was from Bechukotai (Leviticus 26:3 – 27:34).  Although I was to recite only four verses, I studied the entire portion.  There is a section where God lays out the harsh curses that will fall upon the Israelites if they do not follow God’s commandments.  In short form, God says   “… if you do not obey Me and do not observe all these commandments… I will wreak misery upon you”  (Lev 26:14-16).  These are harsh words.  This is a “harsh passage.”  Abraham Joshua Heschel devotes a section in God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism to “Harsh Passages.”  He writes, “We encounter… a serious problem in a number of passages which seem to be incompatible with our certainty of the compassion of God… We must… realize that the harsh passages in the Bible are only contained in describing actions which were taken at particular moments and stand in sharp contrast with the compassion, justice and wisdom of the laws that were legislated for all times.”   As we recited the Psalms that Shabbat morning, my thoughts went to the harsh passage.  The curses of Bechukotai are indeed “incompatible” with the God we praise in the Psalms.  Yet the recital of the Psalms prepares us to understand the harsh passages, the curses, as an action of “a particular moment,” not legislation “for all times.”

I was able to make the connection that morning in shul because I had learned of the teaching of Abraham Joshua Heschel from Rabbi Victor Reinstein, the rabbi of the synagogue where I was reading Torah.  There is much more that can be said about harsh passages in the Bible. But what came to me as a new thought was that we have “harsh passages” also in life.   As I wrote at the beginning, there were many moments in my life together with my mom which could aptly be called harsh passages.  They were nowhere near the level of the curses in Bechukotai.  Yet they function in a similar way. At the moment of my mom’s passing, as I read the Psalms, I felt the lifting of the harsh passages.  But harsh passages don’t go away.  Often in the past five years they have sat heavy upon me.  It came to me in the reciting of the Psalms at shul that the difficult encounters in life need not be seen as legislation for all times.  Rather, I could begin to understand that they were of a particular moment, and that I can dig deeper and uncover and cherish the underlying part of the relationship which is for all times.  This will not chase the harsh passages away.

Rabbi Reinstein teaches, “On the surface of Torah there is often violence and strife, as in life. Sometimes on the surface itself, shimmering as a crystal fount, and sometimes beneath the surface, there is a river of peace that runs through Torah into whose flow we enter by engaging and wrestling with what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the ‘harsh passages.’” (http://ssdsbostonblog.com/dvar-torah-rabbireinstein-vayeshev/ retrieved 6/2/19).  So too, I hope to find that river of peace with my mom, not by ignoring or hiding the harsh passages, but by engaging and wrestling with them in the secure knowledge that I can find again the peace that I knew in the moment of her passing when it seemed that all was resolved.

Escape to Canada: A Rabbinic Consideration

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Headline: Escape plan: How to Move to Canada if the Election Doesn’t Go Your Way

A Personal Response with the aid of Rabbinic Tradition

Talk about escaping to Canada if one’s preferred candidate does not win the election is plentiful.   It has been plentiful before, when George Bush was re-elected, after 9/11 and so on. No doubt escape hatches will be touted again and again. This calls to my mind rabbinic commentary on the story of Elimelech and his wife Naomi.   What follows is not a political statement, but a rumination on where the consequences of escape touch upon my personal life.

In the book of Ruth, in the space of the first 5 verses, we learn the following: There was a famine in Bethlehem, in the land of Israel; Elimelech and his wife Naomi leave Bethlehem with their two sons to sojourn in Moab; Elimelech dies; their two sons die without offspring; Naomi survives alone. This is clearly a tragedy.   The text tells us how tragic by this: “And the woman was left of her two children and of her husband” (Ruth 1:5). Naomi was so bereft that in losing her husband and her two children, she lost her identity, indeed her very name. She is left like a remnant.   “R. Hanina said: She was left as the remnants of the remnants [of the meal offering].” (Ruth Rabbah).   I mention this so that we don’t overlook the fact that the real tragedy of this moment is on the shoulders of Naomi, who is embittered and alone.

The rabbis interpret that the deaths were a punishment for Elimelech (and I would add Naomi and the children) for leaving the land of the famine. “Why then was Elimelech punished? Because he struck despair into the hearts of Israel… He was one of the notables of his place and one of the leaders of his generation. But when the famine came he said, ‘Now all Israel will come knocking on my door, each one with his basket [for food].’ He therefore arose and fled from them.” (Ruth Rabbah). Elimelech left behind those suffering from famine, rather than taking responsibility for the people of his country.

As I said, talk of escaping to Canada brings this story to my mind, but whether those who might flee this country (now or in the future) are unsafe in remaining, entitled to a better future, or should be frowned upon for leaving behind those less fortunate, is not for me to judge and is not the point of my re-telling.   The story leads me personally to my relationship to my Jewish community, to the shul wherein I daven and take on various leadership roles. Two years into my president emerita status and I feel very much like escaping, if not literally from the campus, internally from all responsibility. There are many things I don’t like about how the organization is run, how volunteers are recruited and nourished, and how visions are created (as in NOT). In fact I have been internally escaping for some time.

The response of the rabbis to Elimelech pulls me up short. Not because I am afraid of punishment as such. But I need to think very carefully about my responsibility to the people in my own small country, the land of my shul. These are folks who have nourished me, and whom I have nourished.   According to the teaching in Ruth Rabbah, one does not flee from those whom want might be able to help. Is this a moment to double down on my efforts to work with others to create a better community? Or is the a moment to go sojourn in Moab?   Not sure about this yet, but I do know I’m not moving to Canada any time soon.

The Untether Ring

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When my mom died 6 months ago, I started wearing one of her rings.  It’s a simple ring, flat and silver with some inlay of turquoise – might be Native American or Mexican origin.  Not a fancy ring, but very wearable and fit me well.  They handed me the ring in a plastic bag in the hospital after she died.  It had been on her hand when she fell at my dad’s nursing home, after which, despite major and expert brain surgery, she did not wake up again.  I have been wearing that ring every day since then, along with a few others which are my mainstay rings.  I am a ring person and have a lot of rings.  I wore this one both because I personally liked it, and because it connected me to my mom.

I had not found it easy to be connected to my mom in her lifetime, because pain, bitterness, disappointment seem to have been the chief things she communicated to me, and being the receiver of her sadness over the last few years in particular has been difficult and burdensome.   Nevertheless, when I sat quietly in the palliative care ward at the hospital, with the beautiful garden out the window, and heard my mom peacefully and without strain take her last breath, I felt that a lot of this negative emotion dropped away, and that both for her and for me there was a freeing up.   I grabbed the Gideon Bible and read to my mom for an hour from the psalms.   It is a Jewish custom for the psalms to be read over the deceased in the 24 hours prior to burial, so this was my best way to feel connected to my religion.   Not my mom’s – she was an atheist and raised Christian, but I continue to feel reading the psalms was just right.  I wore the ring from this place of connection.

This past week I made my second trip to the house in Monterey since my mom died, to look over her house, and then to take a week visiting friends a couple hours away.  After weekending in the house, and dealing with car title, home gardener, internet connections, house structure, and interviews with potential realtor and home move specialist, my first stop was Santa Cruz, to visit my old college roommate.   As I arrived, the sensation of my empty finger came to my consciousness, the finger where I knew I had put that ring in the morning.   My immediate reaction was shortness of breath, anxiety, and sense of loss.   This was the ring connecting me to my mom.   I started hunting for it.   I had not stopped the car since leaving Monterey, so I knew it had to be in the car or in the house, not on the road somewhere.   I hunted as many places as I could in the car, and thought about what might have happened to the ring.  I have not had this ring fall off ever, although it was not a super tight fit – none of my rings are.  So it must have caught on something I thought.   I hunted until giving up, and decided that the only logical place it could be was the disposal at the house.   The last thing I had done was reach into the soapy dish pan and wash my coffee cup, and then pour the water into the sink.  But I was pretty sure I had not run the disposal after that.  I would be returning to Monterey for my flight in a week and could look then.

After this discovery, the anxiety lingered.  There was no guarantee I would ever find the ring.    My stop in Santa Cruz was to walk some of my memories as a college student and resident, and to visit one friend.   I started my walk, enjoying the warm life-giving sun (after 0 degree weather in Boston), and started thinking about a friend of mine whose paper I was reading, and would visit the following day in Berkeley.  The topic was pastoral care, and the specific idea I pondered was inhabiting another as a witness.  It’s a deep and meaningful aspect of caregiving.  It put my mind into a place of calmness and of feeling inhabited and understood by my friend.  Quite suddenly I became untethered from the ring.  I pondered this for quite a while and celebrated it.  I untethered from the physical object for sure, but more than that, I felt a release from the heavy and painful tethering to my mom.  I had noticed this untethering to occur when I read the psalms, but now I saw that untethering is in stages.

The absence of the ring became a presence of untethering, a palpable sign of freedom.  I felt both my mom and I had taken another step towards loosening the bonds of disappointment and despair that had bound us for so long.   I walked along feeling the empty place on my finger as a release, not a loss.   I felt good and done and the ring left my mind as it had left my finger.

As it turns out, when I got to my Santa Cruz friend’s house a few hours later and opened my suitcase, there was the ring.   After all the work I had done to be at peace with losing it, I still felt a surge of happiness that the ring had come back.   I do really like it personally.   I hope it will now serve as a reminder of untethering.

Transitions Through Gray (and Desert)

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The last few months I walked at lunch down the bike path in Lexington, MA.   Many winter days were cold and windy, but the trees looked alive and full – snowy rather than leafy green.  Sunlight blazed off the white landscape.

A few days ago we had a mild early spring day, about 50.  Snow had been melting all week.   I noticed when I left my yard how muddy it looked, brown, worn out, and tired.  The fall leaves, which I allow to cover my plants to warm them under the snow in the winter, were now naked again, rotting, and drab.  During my walk I was amazed to realize that this point of transition from winter to spring, although warmish and evocative of spring, was disappointingly colorless.

The winter days were cold, but brilliant and invigorating.  The budding spring, when it’s warm and sunny, is simply marvelous.   But the in-between space…..  It was gray, and I had to work my mind hard to remember the jumping off point, and where I would land after crossing the desert.  Perhaps the grayness of the day fooled me, and made the past look better, as Egypt did to the children of Israel as they crossed the desert.   Perhaps I need to question my notion of beauty, and look for a way to appreciate the crossing itself.

Bible Study Meets Theoretical Physics

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Who knew that bible study had something in common with theoretical physics? I have been a student and teacher of Hebrew bible for over 10 years, but long ago was interested in the study of physics.  I come from a scientific family. My father is a physicist. My mother took her degree in math after the kids grew up. My daughter flourished as a math student, despite the discouragement of earlier teachers (5th grade teacher to my daughter: “You can’t do advanced math if you haven’t memorized the tables.” (!)) I was a star student in high school: advanced calculus, biology, chemistry and physics.

But as a UC Santa Cruz student in the late 60’s, I got caught up in social action, and the  romance and distraction of short-cuts to nirvana, and lost interest. When I wasn’t staring at the banana slugs, I studied poverty in South Carolina, grape boycott in San Jose, and Beowulf. In high school, Science had been for me masses of memorization – with definitive, invariable, Truth. I took pride in deriving formulae rather than memorizing them, and thought I was doing something important – but I didn’t question the fundamental reality of it all. If you could measure something, it was true. I associated physics with a certain intractable side of human nature, embodied in my father (ok, another story there).

For the past decade, in addition to doing close readings of Hebrew text, I have been studying bible commentaries by feminists, queer theorists, rabbinic sages, structuralists, narratologists, post-colonialists, true believers, atheists, archeologists, historians… I fully get it that in texts, there is no single Meaning, no immutable Truth. Who is reading? Who is writing? Who is the audience? What are my filters? What is the writer’s, reader’s, or commentator’s visible or hidden agenda? When was it written and when are we interpreting? But I didn’t reflect back to the world of science.

Recently, I came across the writings of Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Whammo: where and how you observe (and who you are) makes a difference in physics, too! The binary between observer and observed breaks down. The observer does not stand in a separate space, objectively recording the Truth. In order for light to be seen and measured, it has to land somewhere and there is an interaction. Detectors are “sites for making meaning.” (#1 p 166). Yes, I thought, just as text readers are a locus (not the only locus) for making meaning. Mind you, one ought not violate the integrity of the texts: it is one thing to find multivalent meanings; quite another to make them say whatever you damn please.

In my study of texts, and biblical commentary, I had learned to suspect the hidden current of Enlightenment thinking: things happen for a reason; life is Progress; old is bad, new is good; European elite white male thinking – absence of the female and other genders, and absence of non-elite, non-European humans.  But I had never applied this insight to Science.

Reading “Meeting the Universe Halfway” was an epiphany. What? Enlightenment thinking is not the only framework for science? There are feminist and queer (#2) viewpoints in physics? This came like a jolt of lightening, illuminating both ends at once, communicating from bible cloud to physics earth and from physics earth to bible cloud, two directions at once. (#2)

1 “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction”
2. “Nature’s Queer Performativity” (discussion of lightning pp 33-35)

Steve Alexander – the Inspiration

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In June 2012, I started a new job.   My boss had all the authority, and used it to my detriment.   Yet I needed the job, and direct confrontation would not have secured my place.  I considered quitting.  Steve Alexander, my dear friend, told me he was once in a similar situation and he determined that the boss would not make him quit.  How not to quit?   Sometimes living by our wits is a better way to survive than what we used to call (maybe still do), “telling truth to power.”   I started looking closely at how our ancestors lived by their wits.  I printed out Hebrew tests of both Ruth and David surviving and thriving in situations where they did not, at that moment, have the upper hand.   And the idea for my series  “Living by their Wits” was born.   Thank you, Steve.