Reposting this from last year in honor of this week’s Torah portion, Ekev …
So Here’s the Backstory.
My husband and I are now devoted groupies of an organization called Nehirim, from a Hebrew word for “lights.” Founded by author and activist Jay Michaelson, Nehirim hosts retreats, trips, conferences, you name it — all with the goal of building community among LGBT Jews, partners, and allies and helping them take that spark back home.
Retreats that coincide with Shabbat include full services — some traditional, mostly Renewal-style, but always complete with Torah readings. When the organizers of this year’s Men’s Summer Camp reached out for volunteers to read from the scroll, I raised my hand, and before I knew it, I was practicing an hour or two a day every day for about three weeks. Two aliyot, portions of about half a dozen verses each, from the triennial cycle.
Did I Mention the Bar Mitzvah Thing?
I only volunteered because Brian and I have been studying for the past few months with one of our community’s wonderful rabbis, in preparation for what might be, for all we know, the world’s first joint adult bar mitzvah ceremony for two married, gay converts.
Bar mitzvah (or the female version, bat mitzvah) is an Aramaic phrase meaning “son of commandment.” Since the early middle ages, and for girls since the late 20th century, it’s been a rite of passage whereby children become adults under Jewish law, fully entrusted with the tradition and its joys and obligations. In more recent decades, “a bar/bat mitzvah” has become a community celebration, too, with big parties and social justice projects, and it’s also become a common step for adults who didn’t go through the process at age thirteen, either by choice or circumstance or because they converted.
So that’s where Brian and I are, having decided to take our commitment to Jewish living up a notch or two, in April of 2012, when each of us will read from a Torah scroll.
And That Is No Small Feat.
A Torah scroll is a copy of the entire Five Books of Moses, a roll of stitched-together parchment pages, every letter reproduced by hand from an unbroken chain of manuscripts going back to at least the early Middle Ages.
Each scroll is a dramatic work in its own right, with critical moments in the text reflected in spacing and lettering. When the Sea of Reeds parts on the way out of Egypt, the text pulls apart into two jagged, parallel lines. When the Ten Commandments are given, each is set apart from the rest of the text in a way that’s impossible to overlook.
The text itself is right out of ancient Semitic literary culture, which means its primary function is to aid the memory of readers who are presumed to know every word by heart. The alphabet is made up only of consonants, with some letters doubling as vowels under conditions that take a while to explain.
To give you an idea, here’s how a Torah scroll would render Hamlet’s famous soliloquy:
To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of struggles, and, by opposing, end them.
TW B’ ‘R NT TW B’ THT ‘S THQWSTYN WHTHR T’S NWBLR ‘N THMND TW SFR THSLYNGS ND ‘RWS ‘F ‘WTRGYS FWRTN ‘R TW TK ‘RMS ‘GNST ‘SY ‘F STRGLS ‘ND BY ‘PSYNG ‘ND THM
Did I mention there’s no real punctuation, either? What’s more, every line of text is meant to be chanted according to a prescribed set of melodies, which must also be memorized.
So Here’s What I Was Looking At.
The Torah portion from the week of the Nehirim retreat is called ‘Ekev, from Deuteronomy chapters 7 through 11. This is what the first bit of ‘Ekev looks like in a Torah scroll (via Navigating the Bible):
And this is what the text looks like when overlaid with all the information you really need to chant it. If you have a RealAudio plugin, you can hear roughly what it comes out sounding like.
Except for some of the dots in the middle of the letters, every little doohickey is either a vowel sound or a melodic sequence to be memorized.
Difficult But Doable
Just ask any of the millions of bar/bat mitzvah kids who met the challenge and went back to eighth grade homeroom all the stronger and more affirmed for it. After several lessons with our rabbi, I felt I had enough preparation to manage a moderately sized reading, using the notation and audio files at bible.ort.org.
And so began one of the most remarkable encounters in my short life as a Jew. Every day for about three weeks, I listened and repeated, quizzed and corrected myself, adding phrase by phrase, verse by verse to the parts I could recite from memory.
Without much in the way of conscious thought, I started to feel the emotional shapes of the melodic inventory — tenderness, alarm, solemn awe, comfort, and more, all packed into little scales almost anyone can sing.
And bit by bit, the text itself opened up to me in a way that’s hard to put into words.
I’m no literary noob, you see. I got enough graduate coursework under my belt to critically engage with any text, day or night, with one hand tied behind my back. I’ve spliced and diced Torah plenty, applying literary-critical approaches, queer hermeneutics, structural and cross-cultural analysis galore.
This was different. I think the realization came to me when I was working on the text one day over my lunch hour. There I was, sitting in a little room, reading and repeating, over and over again, letting the text and its melodies, its consonants and its vowels and subtle structures wash over me like sheets of rain.
The lines stopped being a thing under my microscope, an item on my to-do list, a test of my cognitive abilities. Somewhere along the line, ‘Ekev became my companion.
That meant I could start taking the text at something deeper than face value. ‘Ekev is a fraught little package of Divine reward and punishment and a seeming endorsement of the ethnic cleansing of Canaan. I think I’ve read some settlers in the the West Bank use it, along with other portions, to justify displacing and assaulting the Arabs who live there. There it is, in black and white:
v’achalta et kol ha-amim asher Adonai eloheicha notein lach lo’ tachos eincha ‘aleihem v’lo’ ta’avod et eloheihem.
And when you have consumed all the peoples that HaShem your G-d has given to you, show them no mercy and do not worship their gods.
But with all the lines and their melodies in my head, I couldn’t just magnify one part of the text, as I had plenty in the past, and say, “this is its unforgivable flaw, this goes too far, this is too much.” That would be cutting my best friend out of my life because she disappointed me or lied to me once. That would utterly negate her beauty, her compassion, her love for me.
And her wisdom. You’re going up against immense odds, she’s telling me, with nothing but a strange and invisible G-d on your side, One Who values action more than objects, justice more than jewels. You won’t be able to hold onto your values if you try to accommodate the people waiting for you by, say, agreeing on an acceptable level of ritual prostitution, human sacrifice, idol worship, and oppression of the poor. Whatever happens, don’t ever become like them.
ki t’omar bil’vav’cha rabim ha-goyim ha-eileh mimeni eichah ‘uchal l’horisham
You might say in your heart, these nations are greater than I am. How will I be able to drive them out?
You’re not going to make it if you accept the geopolitical realities at face value. You’re not going to make it if your vision is fixed on the world as it is, not as it could be.
lo’ ta’arotz mipneihem ki Adonai eloheicha b’qirbecha el gadol v’nora’
Do not cringe before them, for Adonai your G-d is with you, a great and awesome G-d.
The values you are taking with you are more powerful than any of the armies you will face, but only if you believe in them and remember where they came from and never stop fighting for them.
The day before I was called up to read, I was alone, swinging in a hammock on a beautiful country day, having practiced the reading a dozen or more times, and it hit me. This text is radiant with love. And my tears fell.
Showtime
I rehearsed a few times with generous rabbi friends, including in front of the actual scroll at our Nehirim retreat, one with tiny little letters and variations on some shapes I hadn’t seen before.
At first, I approached the reading the way I do a lot of things — softly and with meek self-effacement. I felt so much tenderness in the words and the melodies that I hadn’t really thought about the broader context.
One of my rabbi friends, David Dunn Bauer, reminded me that this is Moses’s dying speech to his people near the end of their long journey. He’s heaping upon them his admonishment and warnings, love and awe and frustration and his desperate hope that, in spite of all the failures and setbacks of the last forty years, it will all be enough.
So it was kinda written to be belted out, not softly murmured. Project. Butch it up a little why don’t you. Put some masculine oomph into it and let it be beautiful just that way.
So on a Friday afternoon while the rest of the gang was off tubing or mud bathing or something, I took a hiking trail into the woods and chanted at the top of my lungs, over and over, until I started going hoarse. At one point I saw a large doe on the trail ahead of me, scrutinizing me. I smiled and wished her a good Shabbos, and then I started belting out my lines again. She turned and trundled off into the woods.
Come Saturday morning, a group of about thirty men sat davenning together, singing and bowing and speaking our ancient words. When the Torah scroll was lifted up and carried around like a newborn baby, I was connected to all the other times I’d encountered a scroll.
One time in particular I’ve never told anyone about. I was at an evening study session at our synagogue, and one of our scrolls was on the table from a previous session. I volunteered to return it to its arc, the stone cabinet that holds all our community’s scrolls.
This one in particular was very special — it was found, along with hundreds of others, in Prague after the Second World War. The Nazis had stolen it from a small Bohemian community just before deporting or murdering every Jew they found there. Along with the other scrolls, it was intended for a museum to commemorate the total destruction of Jewish civilization. After the war, the scrolls were restored and adopted out to Jewish communities all over the world, including ours.
The sanctuary was empty as I carried our scroll, our survivor, to the arc, cradling it like a baby. My steps slowed and I started to cry as I remembered the last time I had held it, on the day of my conversion, in front of a whole community that had come to welcome me as a brother.
I had stood there that day only because Torah, with all its seams and scars and beauty, had opened my heart wider than I ever thought possible.
“I love you so much,” I said as I kissed it gently and laid it to rest in the arc.
I had to contain those same tears that morning at Nehirim as I approached a sister scroll. After all, I couldn’t very well chant if I was crying and sniffling.
I watched and prayed as the blessings were recited and then I pointed at the spot where the reading was about to begin. Men who had come up for special blessings touched the corners to their prayer shawls to the scroll and kissed them, and then it was time.
Breathe In. Breathe Out.
All the men there, we’d all been through so much.
So much doubt and rejection, so many years lost trying to be what we weren’t, so much struggle just to find safe places to love and live and pray.
“V’haya-a-a-a-a ‘e-KEV tishme’u-u-u-un,” I sang. It’s up to you to guard this relationship with G-d, these transcendent values that have brought you so far.
My legs were shaking, and my voice was quivering, but I kept on, my whole body moving in tune with the melody.
“Ve-sha-ma-a-a-a-ar AdoNAI elo-HEI-cha le-cha-a-a-ah et ha-BRIT ve-et-ha-CHESED …” G-d will protect you, G-d’s covenant and lovingkindness will go with you. I missed a trope and started out on the wrong note for the next one, but I just kept going.
“Va-ahe-e-ev’cha u-ve-ra-che-cha v’hirb-ECHA …” G-d will love you and bless you and multiply you.
Such deep longing for our happiness and well-being. I tried to keep all the men in the room in my heart as I put everything I had into each word.
“V’chol mad-ve-e-e-e-ei mitzRAYIM ha-ra’IM…” all the terrible afflictions of Egypt. Your freedom and liberation came at such a heavy price. What will you do to honor and remember that?
“V’lo-o-O ta-a-VOD et-elo-o-o-hei-he-e-m, ki MOKESH HU LA-A-A-ACH.” No matter how far you come, you must not fall into worshiping power and control the way your oppressors do. You are love. You are justice. Don’t forget that.
The first aliyah was done. I stepped back. Another group was called to the Torah. More blessings, more love and inclusion.
Second aliyah. “Ki-i-i to-MAR bi-l’VA-a-a-ve-CHA-a-a ra-BI-i-i-im ha-goyim ha-EIL-eh mimeni…” You’re going to doubt yourself. You’re going to see yourself as your oppressors see you, as small and weak and divided. It’s okay.
“Lo-o-o ti-RAH-A-AH mei-hem! Za-CHOR TIZ-KO-o-o-or eh-eh-et asher a-SAH Adonai elo-HEI-chem le-pha-ROH u-le-chol mitz-RA-yim…” Don’t be afraid. The G-d of history, the G-d of all creation is on your side. Carry that knowledge and let it make you strong.
“Ken ya-ah-SEH-eh-eh-eh-eh Adonai elo-HEI-CHA le-chol-ha-a-MI-i-i-im asher atah yar-EH-EH-EH mi-pnei-HEH-em.” The people who oppress you, the people who put power and fear ahead of love, they will know what it means to be powerless, to lose the control they thought they had over you.
“Ki Ado-NA-a-ai elo-HEI-CHA be-kir-BECHA. EL GADOH-O-L VE-NOH-O-O-O-RA-A.” Don’t be afraid. G-d is with you. G-d’s great love and justice and passion will win out in the end. Nothing on earth is more powerful.
I looked up. There was so much love in that room. Such a perfect, radiant moment with this strange document at the center of it, this one improbable survivor.
I got it. I really got it. Torah is beautiful in ways that nothing else on earth can be beautiful. And in that one crystalline moment, I saw it. Just like Torah, the men in that room could not have been more beautiful, more perfect than with their joys and scars and wrinkles.
Since it was my first time ever reading during a Torah service, we sang and danced around the scroll and said shehecheyanu, the blessing of gratitude for perfect moments.
Lots of praise and affirmation afterwards. Lots of gratitude for the love and passion that came out of me.
But the love and passion came right out of that scroll. All I did was put in the hard work to channel it to the men then and there in that space, which was a joy any way you slice it.





In the story, ten of the spies come back consumed by fear. The land is as rich and beautiful as G-d promised, they say, but it is occupied by powerful, well-defended enemies, they say, even giants, and it would be crazy to move there.






Let My People Marry! Parashat Va’eira
Reviving this oldie but goodie from 2010 as we pass from Va’eira into Bo’ …
The Basics of Va’eira
Va’eira is the second act in the violent disruption of history and memory that is the Exodus story, the struggle between the ancient Israelites and their Egyptian enslavers, formerly their gracious hosts, under a monarch “who did not know Joseph,” (1:8) the Israelites’ savior centuries prior and favored son of their patriarch, Jacob.
This portion begins the tortured bargaining between the Pharaoh and Moses for the Israelites’ liberation, with G-d calling the shots and raining down plague after plague on the Egyptians.
The story is an archetype of absolutism in crisis. Pharaoh is the tyrant who knows the game has changed, totally and irrevocably, but won’t let go. He holds out longer than any sane person would. He tries to find the smallest quantum of dignity he can give out just to get rid of the smelly frogs. Then the boils, then the lice, and so on.
This Isn’t Just Any Bible Story
The Exodus story is the only one we are encouraged — even commanded — to tell every year at the Passover table, where we’ll be just over two lunar months from now. But we don’t just read it out loud. We re-live it. We tell each other, usually in Aramaic, “Today, we are slaves. Next year, we will be free.”
This is happening to us now. This is today’s news.
This year, Va’eira comes at a delicate moment. This year, I can only read the story through the prism I live inside every day — that of a married gay American.
As I write this, Paul Katami, one of the plaintiffs in the gutsy federal lawsuit against Proposition 8 in California, is choking back tears on the stand. He is begging to be allowed to marry the love of his life. He is asking how their commitment could be lumped together with pedophilia as a ‘threat to children.’
Last year, we encountered Va’eira with the joyous noise of President Obama’s election and inauguration still ringing in our ears. My husband and I had worked our tails off for the Obama field office in our south St. Louis neighborhood, and after so many losses four years prior — Dean, Kerry, the fight against Missouri’s marriage amendment — it felt so good to be on the winning side.
Every hour and dollar we put into the Obama campaign we also put into the fight to save marriage equality in California from Proposition 8. We hosted a fundraiser in our home, phone-banked over the Internet, you name it. After we left the election night celebration just before midnight, we turned on the computer at home, and the results coming in from California hit us in the gut.
There we were again — how many times now? We’ve lost count — having the central relationship of our lives put to the whim of voters, legislators, judges — people who didn’t know us.
It was crushing.
So much had been riding on California, and when the vote was finally called, it was the death of hope.
It was the death of hope that someday soon, we could take care of each other without our own government working against us.
It was also a sentence. You’re going to spend years, the voters told us, maybe decades more in your legal no-man’s land, begging your neighbors to recognize you. Now go back into your little box and be grateful for it, faggots.
Thank G-d We Have the Exodus Story
We Jews read our exodus from Egypt as a piercing beacon for social justice. Without it, we might just lose the will to fight against seemingly impossible odds.
We have been exactly where Moses and Aaron stood in last week’s parashah, just as they first approached Pharaoh with the words, “So said YHWH, God of Israel, ‘Send out My People.” (5:1)
How Pharaoh must have shimmered with raw political power. He must have looked like a god compared to the shabby, sandal-wearing sheep herders in his presence. He had no idea who or what this so-called god of theirs was. Why should he? Why should he budge even one bit?
It isn’t until we get into Va’eira that Pharaoh starts to understand the power working through Moses and Aaron. The bit with the snakes (7:10-12) is nice enough, but right away, YHWH exponentially raises the stakes by turning every drop of water in the land to blood (7:19).
Then YHWH covers the land in frogs, which the magicians can match well enough, but it’s at this point that Pharaoh first acknowledges he is in a different game than he might have thought at first: “Entreat YHWH to remove the frogs from me and my people, and I will let out the people so that they may sacrifice to YHWH.” (8:4)
Once the frogs are gone, of course, Pharaoh again refuses to let the people go.
Fine. We all knew his heart wasn’t in the bargain. We all knew this was going to escalate. But the lice, the beasts, the death of the livestock? We’re not even halfway through the plagues yet, and already, the people of Egypt are writhing in agony, reduced to poverty in the blink of an eye.
We’re long past the point where Pharaoh’s magicians tell him they’re outmatched, that Moses and Aaron’s god is real and too powerful to mess with. Still Pharaoh bargains. After the beasts, he agrees to let the people go out, but not far (8:24). Then he changes his mind again. And again.
From the text, we know that the plot is rigged. G-d knows that Pharaoh isn’t going to do the right thing, and even if he decided to, G-d has rigged the whole story to end in ever greater atrocities (6:3-4). But we’re not there yet. We’re still in a story about human beings with free will, and we can’t stop hoping that Pharaoh — in the face of overwhelming proof that there will be no return to the way things were — will do the right thing.
But he doesn’t. And it drives us mad.
Why can’t he just let them go? Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t he care about his people? Is he so blind to what this YHWH is capable of that he would stick to his defiance? And out of what? Pride? Stubbornness? His own sense of misguided godhood?
The Outstretched Hand of Truth. Slow Motion.
Since gay couples in North America (like us) started getting married in 2003, it’s been obvious to anyone with a brain that none of the dire predictions made by equality’s enemies have come true. Nor will they. There is no bestiality, no group marriage, and by every measure, children — all children — are better off in jurisdictions with legal equality for gay couples.
Unless you’re married to your own anti-gay bias, equality is a simply a win-win.
People who are against equality for LGBT couples have run out of ‘facts’ to hide behind. Bias is all they have left — clothed, at its very best, in some religious-looking garment.
That was made as clear as day in the debates leading up the defeat of marriage equality bills in New York in December and New Jersey earlier this month. In the New York Senate, the only opponent of equality who stood up to defend his views was a Pentecostal minister. Everyone else was silent.
In America, naked expression of social bias isn’t generally cool. You’d have to be a royal putz to get up in front of live cameras and tell everyone that gay people are less worthy than their neighbors, even if they are good for upping real estate values.
And behind it all, the demographic clock keeps ticking. The marriage issue has lost its power (if it ever had any) as a Republican get-out-the-vote instrument. Every day, tens of thousands of older voters pass from this life and are replaced by teens and twenty-somethings for whom out, committed gay couples are an unremarkable part of the world as it is.
So What Is Va’eira Trying to Teach Us?
We don’t have Pharaoh today. We have millions of lesser pharaohs instead.
Perfectly nice people most of the time, and may G-d bless them always. But a twisted reading of democracy has empowered them to vote their neighbors’ rights into or out of existence.
I think Va’eira is trying to teach us that when it comes to the dignity of our families, we can’t bargain with people who don’t know us, who don’t recognize the fullness of our humanity.
I think Va’eira is trying to teach us we can’t bargain with people who are consumed with holding on to a dying image of their privileged place in the order of things.
I think Va’eira is trying to teach us that when it comes to justice for something so important, our civil actions must be big, swift, unmistakable, and game-changing. Like the Olson-Boies lawsuit underway at this very moment.
I think Va’eira is trying to teach us that if we send mixed signals or accept compromise, all we do is prolong the pain of the status quo. Fighting for marriage is gutsy, risky, and not everyone thinks it’s the best idea.
But if we ask for anything less than our rights as equals, should the pharaohs deal with us as equals?
Why Does It Have to Be Like This?
Why does there have to be so much suffering in Va’eira? Why couldn’t G-d just beam the Israelites out of Egypt? Or prevent them from falling into slavery in the first place? Why couldn’t G-d just turn Pharaoh into a mensch? Or put him and his army into a trance while the Israelites made a hasty exit?
Or why, in a society built on the simple truth of equal justice under law, do we have to fight to be treated as equals?
The answer of course is that our story had to be what it is for us to be who we are.
We have to learn every year that in a world of free will, equality and dignity can come at a staggering price, one we have to be ready to pay. Or exact from our oppressors.
We have to live through powerlessness, facing betrayal and denial at the hands of our neighbors over and over again to be — when we finally come out on the other side — better, more compassionate people.
Look no further than the many thousands of American children being raised by gay and lesbian couples. They turn out perfectly fine and just like everyone else’s kids but for one thing: a more developed sense of empathy for the outcast.
Torah teaches that we were created with a divine sense of justice within us. It is universal and indestructable, but it needs be lived out and experienced with our whole bodies and all their senses. Daily, if at all possible.
But imagine this. Imagine we could convince G-d to intervene in a big way, to erase the past and bring about total and instant equality for LGBT people throughout the land.
No more crippling memories of being shut out and shut down. No more separate tax returns, no more sobbing outside closed emergency room doors. No more children torn from loving parents, no more careers ended out of bias. Acceptance. Inclusion. Bliss.
But suppose that in exchange, we had to give up the sharpened sense of compassion that only our pain could have given us. Instead of who we are in this world, we would be some breezy, happy-go-lucky tribe with with not a care in the world, free to immerse ourselves in our relatively prosperous lives.
Would we want that?
Would we want that as Jews, as people committed to a G-d of justice?
If we were those people, would we be the right ones to bring about a better world for all the rest of its outcasts?
While We Meditate the Long View…
In the midst of Va’eira, all that is happening is that G-d is raising the stakes. G-d is making the status quo unbearably painful.
Right now, we are nothing but a frightened, downtrodden mass of flawed, deeply self-doubting people about to take the first steps towards freedom. There’s nothing pretty about it, and we have no idea what’s coming next.
But maybe G-d does, and maybe that will be enough.
Cross-posted, with thanks to ramara, from StreetProphets