Mendocino Coast Jewish Community

Earlier this summer I participated with a group of rabbi-activists in a training by a leader from a group called Jews of All Hues. The leader, who had dark skin and African-American-looking features and wore a kippah, asked us to write down places in our work lives where we have power. I found that hard: geez, I’m a little local rabbi. I guess I get to choose which melody we’ll use for prayers. Sometimes I decide what day we’ll meet for this or that project. I get to write a Megillah column every month. I don’t think of myself as wielding a lot of power. Once we had made our lists, our trainer led us in a very simple, and confounding, thought experiment. “Consider giving up those powers,” he said. As some of us began to sputter in protest, he said, smiling, “You’ll do okay. You’ll find another job.”

At LMPS!, in gentler but no less insistent tones, I was also being asked to cede my space at the center to people who have less access to leadership in the Jewish world. I admit, I found it hard. I felt—pure projection, I know, since no one said it to me—that I wasn’t worth talking to, wasn’t worth getting to know. I was just another cis-gender Ashkenazi Jew, part of the ruling class of the Jewish world that should get out of the way.

I felt lonely and invisible. It made me think about the Afrikaaners I interviewed in South Africa, who felt so marginalized and displaced after the end of apartheid even though they still controlled so much. It made me think about white Americans in our current political environment, many of whom voice something like the same loneliness and invisibility, even though they control so much. It’s not easy or comfortable to be told to step aside.

But it also made me think, much more joyfully, about the space I was in at LMPS! and had been in at Svara and other exciting, thriving Jewish spaces: I was part of a brilliant array of appearances and dress and songways and languages and cultures and perspectives, where there was so much new to learn and taste and enjoy, where I saw people stand up and weep because they had never before stood up in a Jewish space to share something they loved, where I saw 249 other people learn and catch on to the warbles in a melody from a shul in Calcutta or spontaneously complete a chant called Goddus, as in “God-us” while the young queer person who had just composed it shined with joy at the roar of our voices.

When I was a rabbinical student a thousand years ago, I was asked—like every one of my female classmates was asked, over and over--to teach a class on women in Judaism at some local synagogue. My gig happened to be at a Conservative shul in Orange County. Men would come to the class and challenge everything I said: “Doesn’t it say in the Talmud that...?!?” My knowledge was indeed a baby-finger deep, and I felt humiliated and furious. The last day of the class I brought my tallit and invited the women in the group to take turns putting it on. I took a Torah scroll out of the ark and offered it to the women to hold. Tears streamed down their faces as they touched the sefer Torah for the first time. One of those guys who had challenged me so much, now watching his wife wearing a tallit for the first time, holding the scroll she had never before been allowed to touch, was shaking his head in amazement and saying over and over, “I had no idea!”

There is radiant new Jewish life birthing in spaces like Let My People Sing! and Svara and The New Synagogue Project in Washington DC and Hinenu the Baltimore Justice Shtiebel and Kol Tzedek in Philadelphia, and many other places where people whose voices haven’t been heard much before are now being centered and celebrated. I look forward to more opportunities to step into those spaces, to step aside while in those spaces, and to bring their voices back here to our community.