As I prepare for Different from All Other Nights: NYU’s Annual Queer Seder at the Bronfman Center, lawyers on two sides of what has become a vitriolic and polarized debate over the legalization of marriages between persons of the same sex will argue their causes before the Supreme Court of the United States.
I confess that, when I think about gay marriage, I think selfishly. I think about my own partner of fifteen years: we have a ketubah (Jewish marriage contract), but no civil marriage. I think about our son: I was present at his birth, but his original birth certificate had only my partner’s name as parent. We spent time and (quite a bit of!) money obtaining what’s called a second-parent adoption so that I would be recognized as his legal parent in the eyes of the State (I am grateful, of course, for the opportunity to obtain those rights and responsibilities). When it comes to the legalization of gay marriage, I think selfishly.
It’s easy to stand up for marriage equality when you’re talking about your own family. Your partner. Your child.
Perhaps you already know where I’m going with this: Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and his celebrated (infamous?) reversal of opinion on gay marriage—from opposition to support—because he learned that his own son is gay. Many pundits and commentators—indeed many of my own friends (you know who you are…)—have acknowledged Senator Portman’s act as one of love. And rightly so. A father who loves his son stands up for him. But, what many of us also recognize are the limitations and dangers that the Senator’s actions imply: I care about the rights of my family—and no one else’s. As one online commenter quipped, “The best thing that could happen to such politicians is that they discover minority blood in their lineages, experience mental illnesses, realize their hired help are illegal immigrants, or have family who benefit from social programs.”
It’s kind of an Ahasueros move, if you think about it. You remember Ahaseuros—from the Scroll of Esther that we read just a few weeks ago on Purim. He’s the bumbling king who learns that his beautiful and obedient new wife Esther is actually one of them: a Jew! Knowing that the woman he loves is Jewish changes Ahaseuros’s mind about his own edict to annihilate the Jewish people. His love overrides his prejudices.
At our seder table this Tuesday night, a few students will share their coming out stories. We will celebrate their bravery, lament the discrimination they faced and continue to face, and give thanks for the family members (inherited and chosen) who support them with the unconditional love we all deserve from our families. I know I will find these stories moving and inspiring. And I know I will understand the crucial role that coming out has played and will continue to play in changing minds, in changing the culture.
But Purim cannot be the only model. It’s not a model for lasting change. It puts the burden on LGBTQI folks to be vulnerable and brave—as Esther was. But most insidiously of all, it assumes that we cannot support the rights of “Others” unless and until we can consider them our own. Must every single Ahasueros find his Esther?
Thankfully Jewish tradition gives us another model. Balancing the importance of honesty and bravery—the importance of coming out—that we learn from Queen Esther, the Jewish tradition gives us Passover. The holiday of as if:
בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ, כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרָיִם
B’chol dor va-dor chayav adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza mi-Mitzrayim.—“In every generation a person is obligated to see himself as if he had gone out from Egypt.”
כְּאִלּוּ K’ilu—as if.
In his weekly podcast, Dan Savage, sex and relationship advice columnist and creator of the “It Gets Better” Project, called Senator Portman’s argument a “failure of the moral imagination.”
We might expect the Passover haggadah to emphasize our personal, familial, historical experience with enslavement. And it does. We recall the Torah’s oft-repeated dictum: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). But our tradition knows that the direct experience of oppression cannot be the sole moral motivation to oppose the oppression we see—and sometimes inflict—in the world around us. Our seder invites us to imagine. To act as if.
In other words, it is precisely an act of imagination that our Passover seder asks of us. It does not ask us to recall our own bondage in Egypt so many ages ago. It obligates each of us to imagine that we had been enslaved in bitter bondage, and liberated by God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm. It invites us to imagine that awesome—terrible and overwhelming and miraculous—moment when the sea split, revealing dry land.
So this year, as the Supreme Court Justices ponder the arguments they will have heard on Monday and on Tuesday, let us imagine a world in which each Ahaseuros is indeed married to an Esther. Let us act as if our moral precepts demand ethical treatment of those Others around us. Let us act as if our fate were bound up in the fate of those around us—not just our own sons, our own daughters, our own children, but all those Others who cry out for freedom. For in every sense that matters, it is.
Showing posts with label Gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gender. Show all posts
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Separations
It wasn’t my first trip to the Western Wall, but it was my first time there in a huge crowd. I didn’t make it all the way to the actual stones; hundreds of women crowded together, praying silently. They brought their children with them, far past bedtime, to sit in chairs or simply on the ground in the plaza. They read from the book of Lamentations, swaying to the rhythm of their own reflections.
On the fast day of Tisha B’Av, Jews commemorate (and some very much mourn) the destruction of the Temple and other calamaties. In Israel, many travel to Jerusalem, to the Kotel, considered a remnant of the ancient Temple (though in reality a retaining wall, part of the entrance to the Temple area but not originally part of the Temple itself).
A group of HUC students walked down into the valley and up again to Mount Zion to observe and to participate. On our way, as we sang psalms about Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile, a faculty member pointed out a few interesting aspects of Israeli custom at the Kotel on Tisha B’Av. He called the holiday a combination of mourning and reuniting; people who haven’t seen each other in months run into one another at the Kotel and rejoice at the reunion, only to continue on to recite the heart-wrenching words of Lamentations. We would hear different melodies for chanting these verses, he told us, Jewish melodies from all over the world.
But, of course, I heard no melodies.
Large dividers cut the plaza in two. On one side, men. On the other, women and children.
It’s called a mechitza, and its function is to separate.
The word “mechitza” does not come from the Hebrew word for “division” but from the word “half.” But that night, as on all other nights and all other days since just a few decades ago when extremist notions took hold, the plaza was not split in half, not evenly. The smaller women’s side had been expanded for the holiday, but it was still overflowing with women, girls, strollers, infants, toddlers napping and crying and asking questions. On the men’s side, there was room to walk without tripping, an opportunity to make it to the Kotel without being separated from your friends, to approach this relic of Jewish history in a group.
And there was another important inequality: the melodies.
Certain Jewish traditions claim that women distract men from prayer, that our voices draw men down from thoughts of the spiritual to a baser level. So women do not pray aloud at the Kotel. No haunting melodies for Lamentations, no wailing nigunim (wordless tunes). On the men’s side, individuals chanting aloud and groups singing together—people praying in the Jewish way of praying: collectively.
I pushed my way back through the crowds to the section of the plaza farthest from the Wall itself and searched for my friends. They had forlorn faces, furrowed brows. Our male classmates were still down by the Kotel, perhaps observing, perhaps participating. We slowly made our way toward the mechitza to hear some of the melodies, faintly, and to simply look. Tears came, and words of anger.
I don’t know if I can explain that feeling of separation. For me, the injustice of this separation stems not (or not only) from the division of men from women but from the purported reasons. To argue that women distract men from prayer is to link women always, only, and irrevocably with the erotic and the sexual. Women tempt men, and so they cannot be seen or heard, lest they lead men away from the task of prayer. This way of thinking refuses to acknowledge women as full and complex human beings, reduces us to the instinctual. I cannot pray aloud at the wall because my voice would not be heard as one of prayer but as one of seduction.
I stood next to the mechitza and I thought about walls—to keep people in and to keep people out. And I thought back to just a few weeks before, Erev Shabbat, which we celebrated just around the corner from the Kotel, on the southern side of the Temple Mount. There, a group of men and women joined to pray old and modern words. As we concluded, we read aloud about Israel and its place in the world as “the dawning of hope for all who seek peace.”
Hope and peace, I read, and as I looked out from the spot that once represented an entrance to the Temple, a place to come near to what is holy, I saw a wall.
Curving like a snake from the horizon where the desert begins, cutting along the line of the valley and beneath the shadow of green hills, the Wall of Separation divides East from West, Muslim from Jewish. Does it mark, too, a line across which certain voices must not be heard?
I admit I have much to learn about Jersualem, about Israel, about separations and connections and divisions and communities. But I know, for now, how it felt to declare “the dawning of hope” with that imposing wall in plain sight. I know, too, how it felt to face the dark and silent night isolated from the community of the Jewish people, barred from voicing the words of tradition. Little hope, little peace.
But the small kehillah of my female classmates, huddled together at the back of the plaza, alternately teary-eyed and firey-eyed, reminds me that walls can be furnished with gates and windows and doors; they can be climbed with ladders and ropes; they can be relocated to encompass more territory; they can be torn down.
On the fast day of Tisha B’Av, Jews commemorate (and some very much mourn) the destruction of the Temple and other calamaties. In Israel, many travel to Jerusalem, to the Kotel, considered a remnant of the ancient Temple (though in reality a retaining wall, part of the entrance to the Temple area but not originally part of the Temple itself).
A group of HUC students walked down into the valley and up again to Mount Zion to observe and to participate. On our way, as we sang psalms about Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile, a faculty member pointed out a few interesting aspects of Israeli custom at the Kotel on Tisha B’Av. He called the holiday a combination of mourning and reuniting; people who haven’t seen each other in months run into one another at the Kotel and rejoice at the reunion, only to continue on to recite the heart-wrenching words of Lamentations. We would hear different melodies for chanting these verses, he told us, Jewish melodies from all over the world.
But, of course, I heard no melodies.
Large dividers cut the plaza in two. On one side, men. On the other, women and children.
It’s called a mechitza, and its function is to separate.
The word “mechitza” does not come from the Hebrew word for “division” but from the word “half.” But that night, as on all other nights and all other days since just a few decades ago when extremist notions took hold, the plaza was not split in half, not evenly. The smaller women’s side had been expanded for the holiday, but it was still overflowing with women, girls, strollers, infants, toddlers napping and crying and asking questions. On the men’s side, there was room to walk without tripping, an opportunity to make it to the Kotel without being separated from your friends, to approach this relic of Jewish history in a group.
And there was another important inequality: the melodies.
Certain Jewish traditions claim that women distract men from prayer, that our voices draw men down from thoughts of the spiritual to a baser level. So women do not pray aloud at the Kotel. No haunting melodies for Lamentations, no wailing nigunim (wordless tunes). On the men’s side, individuals chanting aloud and groups singing together—people praying in the Jewish way of praying: collectively.
I pushed my way back through the crowds to the section of the plaza farthest from the Wall itself and searched for my friends. They had forlorn faces, furrowed brows. Our male classmates were still down by the Kotel, perhaps observing, perhaps participating. We slowly made our way toward the mechitza to hear some of the melodies, faintly, and to simply look. Tears came, and words of anger.
I don’t know if I can explain that feeling of separation. For me, the injustice of this separation stems not (or not only) from the division of men from women but from the purported reasons. To argue that women distract men from prayer is to link women always, only, and irrevocably with the erotic and the sexual. Women tempt men, and so they cannot be seen or heard, lest they lead men away from the task of prayer. This way of thinking refuses to acknowledge women as full and complex human beings, reduces us to the instinctual. I cannot pray aloud at the wall because my voice would not be heard as one of prayer but as one of seduction.
I stood next to the mechitza and I thought about walls—to keep people in and to keep people out. And I thought back to just a few weeks before, Erev Shabbat, which we celebrated just around the corner from the Kotel, on the southern side of the Temple Mount. There, a group of men and women joined to pray old and modern words. As we concluded, we read aloud about Israel and its place in the world as “the dawning of hope for all who seek peace.”
Hope and peace, I read, and as I looked out from the spot that once represented an entrance to the Temple, a place to come near to what is holy, I saw a wall.
Curving like a snake from the horizon where the desert begins, cutting along the line of the valley and beneath the shadow of green hills, the Wall of Separation divides East from West, Muslim from Jewish. Does it mark, too, a line across which certain voices must not be heard?
I admit I have much to learn about Jersualem, about Israel, about separations and connections and divisions and communities. But I know, for now, how it felt to declare “the dawning of hope” with that imposing wall in plain sight. I know, too, how it felt to face the dark and silent night isolated from the community of the Jewish people, barred from voicing the words of tradition. Little hope, little peace.
But the small kehillah of my female classmates, huddled together at the back of the plaza, alternately teary-eyed and firey-eyed, reminds me that walls can be furnished with gates and windows and doors; they can be climbed with ladders and ropes; they can be relocated to encompass more territory; they can be torn down.
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