Welcome to Pride Shabbat at Ner Shalom.
People have sometimes asked me, “Why do we need a Pride Shabbat at Ner Shalom?” After all, with this rabbi, and this level of representation in the congregation, both the visible queers and the ones who inadvertently pass, isn’t every day Pride? The answer is: yes, it kind of is. Baruch Hashem! At least I hope it is. I hope that our synagogue keeps being and keeps becoming what we’d like to see all synagogues be – a place where we can all be truly integrated into a colorful and durable fabric.
So maybe because we don’t need a special day to bring up a queer topic or two, we haven’t held Pride Shabbat every year. We haven’t been motivated in that way. But we are living in a new era, where none of our liberties and none of freedom of expression can be taken for granted anymore.
So this year: Pride Shabbat, thank you very much. This is a night that celebrates queer voices and lives. And it is a night that is for all of us, whether you are queer or an ally or sitting in some newness to it all.
I’ll start by saying that I’m not a big fan of the term “pride”. This movement that many of us are a part of started out as the gay liberation movement. Liberation was the stated goal. We imagined what it would be like to be free. Then the word “pride” eventually crept in, elbowing “liberation” to the side. The arrival of the idea of pride was legit. Pride is an important step in self-liberation. Asking people who have been raised in shame to adopt pride as a stance is not un-radical.
But pride is liberation’s less threatening sibling. What’s more, pride is an individual project. For me it is a life-long project that I continue to struggle with. But it’s personal. I can’t exactly fight for your pride. You can only do that for yourself. But I can fight for your freedom. I can fight for your freedom whether you feel pride or not, and you can fight for mine. For allies who don’t identify as queer, “pride” leaves you out. But “freedom” brings you back in.
Because the struggle for freedom is something we all share. Queer freedom is everyone’s freedom. If queer people have the freedom to love who they want, to make a life together, to be who we are and express ours minds and our hearts in our most authentic and creative ways, then everyone has that freedom. Then we all have the freedom to choose our lives, whether the choice we make is outrageous or conventional. We have the freedom.
We need to fight for everyone’s freedom right now. Freedom is under attack, because freedom is the enemy of authoritarianism. Freedom is the best medicine for authoritarianism. Why do authoritarian governments crack down on gay rights or on queer organizing? Because doing so narrows the field of acceptable behavior and expressable thought. It gets people used to not expressing themselves. It results in a more docile, more controllable population. It is much harder to manipulate people who are used to thinking their own thoughts and speaking them freely. Suppressing queer lives and queer expression is a traditional means of control.
We should know. It’s part of our Jewish tradition also. Even though Torah includes some enticing tales of unconventional love and unconventional gender, the Book of Leviticus contains one of our tradition’s most famously severe prohibitions: “man shall not lie with man” – which carries a death penalty, in case you didn’t know. The Book of Deuteronomy contains a prohibition on what it understands as cross-dressing, which might in fact be a description of how trans people moved about in the biblical world. “Abomination”, both these provisions say.
So why the split-personality in Torah – enticing tales and horrible punishments? Our oldest tales – the ones of mythic patriarchs and matriarchs and especially gender-queer Joseph – those are our old indigenous stories. The laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy come later, already during our life as a nation-state, and those books carry with them specific political agendas. Leviticus is trying to constitute the priesthood as the sole governing body of the Israelite people. Deuteronomy attempts to shore up the political power of the later King Josiah. In both cases, the consolidation of power comes at the expense of the queer freedoms and queer lives that obviously had existed prior as part of the life of our people. Our queer ancestors and trancestors in antiquity were the easy targets of authoritarianism the way queers are today in Russia or Iran or, well, more and more here.
In the US, homosexuality is not criminalized anymore and same-sex marriage continues to be the law of the land, thanks to the struggles of previous decades. But right now, in many, many places in this country, books about queer families and queer romance are being banned from libraries and schools. Rainbow symbolism is being painted over. In more and more places, rainbow flags are being banned from flying in public spaces. Transgender people can no longer get a US passport in their chosen and lived gender. And in more and more jurisdictions, trans youth are unable to access gender-affirming medical care. Even in California where that right is protected, even in Sonoma County, threats to federal funding and fear of federal reprisal makes that care scarcer and harder to access.
Trans youth are especially good targets right now. The federal government and the states that go along with them capitalize on the traditional belief that young people can’t know their own minds and their own hearts. Trans and gender-expansive youth are easy targets because they can’t vote. And they are important to suppress because if their young peers in elementary and middle and high schools see that like the trans kids they can also think whatever they want and can’t be told what to be, it will be much harder to get that generation to fall in line. These are our kids. All of our kids.
So queer rights are everybody’s rights. Queer freedom is everybody’s freedom. Queer-identified people might be the ones at the edges holding the barricades and pushing the boundaries, but it creates a field of freedom that encompasses all of us. It is here, in this field of freedom and resistance that the distinction between queer and ally dissolves. In a time of authoritarianism, all struggle for freedom is queer. You don’t have to be L or G or B or T or any of the letters. We are in this together.
And so tonight, at Ner Shalom, in what might be better called Freedom Shabbat, we will celebrate queer love and longing. We will acknowledge queer pain. We will imagine ourselves forward into a time when we all are free to love and be. To live lives without fear – can you imagine? – without harm, and full of joy.
