D’var Torah

by Shoshana Jedwab

Adapted from a d’var torah given at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City during Pride Month in June.

I want to begin by telling you about an experience I had at the recent Nehirim retreat.  Nehirim is an independent national organization that creates spiritual and cultural community for Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgendered Jews.  They run an annual spring retreat for queer Jews of all backgrounds and denominations.

During the opening icebreaker, I was asked to write down on a large piece of paper a verb to describe where I am currently at Jewishly.  I stole a verb common in GLBT circles and shared that I am transitioning. I am transitioning from modern orthodox Jew to Medicine Woman.

Coming out as a Medicine Woman was my dramatic way of saying I am becoming more of an earth-based Jew. Becoming an earth-based Jew means more than refusing plastic bags at Fairway, or eating local organic food.  It means looking at plants and animals as part of my living community.   It means looking at myself as part of a physical and spiritual ecosystem that includes all life.  Becoming an earth-based Jew means I am interested in things in the Torah and in the Talmud that I had once written off as irrelevant. It also means I am now open to believing in things I had once thought were not true.   The Torah contains much that is hard to believe. In one parsha alone, Parshat Hukkat, which we read a few weeks ago, we are told that a potion made of Red Cow juice can beat back the gloom of death. That if you are thirsty you can ask a stone for water. And that Moses will never enter the Promised Land because he hit a rock.  But then from my previous life as a modern orthodox Jew, my current queer lifestyle would be hard to believe and a challenge to tolerate.   Like much of the Torah, my journey to where I live now was an earthly journey of body and spirit, of flesh and impulse, imagination, humor, healing, community, celebration, advocacy, and love.   In fact, my journey bears more resemblance to the earthy wisdom of Parashat Hukkat than might be apparent at first.

Parshat Hukkat is about trusting the physical and non-rational.  The law of the Red Heifer in Hukkat is in fact cited in Rabbinic tradition as the prime example of a chok, or biblical law for which there is no apparent logic, and is therefore of absolute Divine origin.  We also read in Bamidbar Rabbah that Rabban Yochanan tells his disciples that we have neither the ability nor the need to uncover the mystery behind this ritual.

But I know something about physical mystery from my journey as a musician. It was here at BJ drumming one Simchas Torah that I realized I am powerfully connected to God through this physical event called rhythm that happens on the inside of me- the event of rhythm that is an ecstatic electrical charge that I dance and that dances me. This is a most intimate religious experience and I realized it is this that drew me to coming out as queer among other things. I have simply been learning over the past seven years to follow the earthly mystery. I run a drum circle based on the same faith- trust in the earthly energy.

I have become an earth-based, queer, percussionist, Jewish educator and emerging Medicine Woman. I now seek the tools and the support to get grounded in flesh and earth and limited natural resources.  I want to connect to my real body and my real spirit.  I want to live with what is inside the box and not pressure this box of life to be something it isn’t. The most radical aspect of my spiritual transition is that I am beginning to view nature as a divine consciousness. I think people and nature participate in a rich open, vulnerable, interdependent shared system of energy or Chiut- life force.  As the Hasidic master and mystic Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught:  “For every blade of grass there is a song which it speaks, and from the song of the grasses is made the niggun of the shepherd.”

I think the whole human community must come out into its place within nature and not above it.  This means acknowledging the truth about ourselves.  Coming out into my own queer sexual mystery has taught me how specific every person is, how rich and varied nature is, and how we complete each other and play valuable roles in an incredibly complex universe.  Spirituality is less about transcending the body than about fully living in it. All of life is a drum circle and we are the vibrating skins.

This new way of thinking is a very big paradigm shift for me. I was raised to be a good Maimonidean and Newtonian misnaged- an old school rationalist from the 1970’s. If you are a modern yeshiva day school graduate you are not supposed to drink potions containing red cows and the four elements, nor are you supposed to speak to rocks in order to reveal their underground rivers. Miriam, Moshe and Aaron are supposed to do those things on the Biblical page.  We are not.  At the very least we are supposed to think of our ancestors as primitive or blessed with a totally different relationship to God and nature.

I am blessed to be in love with and married to one of the great earth-based rabbis of our time- my partner and spouse Rabbi Jill Hammer, author of The Jewish Book of Days. Jill’s writings and experiential teachings have helped me and others relook at how Judaism is fully rooted in the soil, flora and fauna and in the rhythms of the seasons of the Northern Hemisphere.   But Jill tells me I always thought in earthy ways about the Torah; I just could never admit it.
But living in nature has a downside. Nature is also terrible. Nature traumatizes us, challenges us, and gives us losses that break our hearts and finally destroys our bodies. As Rabbi Mike Commins writes in A Wild Faith,   In the backcountry, beauty is commanding and pervasive. But so is danger and risk. One cannot see wildflowers or moose calves without passing rotting tree trunks, the remains of fire, or unburied bones. The grandeur and fragility of our world, the immediacy of life and death, are all around.

Nature throws a lot of gevurah at us- a lot of severe limitation. But we also gain healing, trust and survival from animals, colors, plants, rocks, human community and leaders who help us integrate the whole so we can stay in the game even when nature’s extremes threaten us.  If you can’t accept that gevurah is part of the world, you can’t live in the world.  But you also must not believe that there is only gevurah in the world.  The only way we can deal with gevurah- with the severe limits of nature– is not by denying it and not by utterly rejecting it but by putting it in the context of the greater whole.
And that’s what queer people are asking for- that you see us as a part of the divine cabaret. That we be seen as faithful partners and fellow healers of humankind. That we are another kind of divine consciousness, another ingenious ingredient and color in God’s world. With your help queer people may receive the dignity and benefits that nonqueer people are entitled to. Thank you for what you have done this day for those of us here who occupy a vulnerable minority status. You have taken the ancient container of the holy Shabbat and made it a vessel to celebrate GLBT people during zman simchateinu- Pride month.  You are helping us to hold the gevurah in our own lives.  You are helping us to re-integrate into the whole.  You see, you are also Medicine men and women!

Life for the planet and for gays and lesbians bisexuals and transgendered people will improve when we again as a civilization think of ourselves as thoroughly part of nature. An earth-based consciousness will enable a humility and awe, a vulnerability and trust in the whole that will enhance all our efforts at creating Tikkun Olam and social justice . I believe this because I have faith that generosity and goodness are as much a part of us as envy and aggression.

We need leaders today who can integrate the death of things with how alive and blessed life is not leaders who constantly create the death of things through war and by telling us there is only one kind of sexuality.  By the way a colleague of mine told me that the JTS library contains books from old Jewish Europe listing potions Jews obtained for casting spells on people of the opposite gender to fall in love with them, and spells for people of the same gender to fall in love with them.  Even our history has been repressed by a monolithic way of thinking.

It is hard for queers and their supporters to talk to the rock of traditional Jewish sentiment and homophobia but as we see from events this year rocks will crack and water will flow.  Because ultimately, we are here to heal each other, to see the water beneath the dry stones when another person temporarily cannot.

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