European Judaism

A tradition is a centuries-long conversation about the goods and concerns of the philosophical or religious systems in which these goods and concerns inhere. LGBTQ Jews are the latest newcomers to Judaism’s conversation. Entering an established conversation places stressful demands upon incomers and veteran participants alike but enlarges and enriches the discourse. LGBTQ participants bring new topics and categories concerning gender that challenge participants of longer standing. Bringing to the existing categories and topics of the tradition experiences of which it was unaware implicitly requires that those topics be reexamined in the light of new data and situations. All this revitalizes the conversation.

In the lecture she gave at the Day of Celebration to mark twenty-five years of ordaining LGBT rabbis by Leo Baeck College on 23 June 2014, Rabbi Dr Rachel Adler spoke persuasively and encouragingly of ‘newcomers’ to the ongoing Jewish ‘conversation’, ‘affecting the tradition’ by teaching the tradition ‘to re-understand its own stories’, and also by telling ‘stories that the tradition does not know at all’. For most of my rabbinate, I was engaged in the first kind of storytelling. More recently, I have been doing more of the second kind. In my response to Rachel Adler’s lecture, I trace my journey, both within the context of the developing women’s rabbinate and as a particular journey taken by a lesbian feminist queer rabbi determined that the voices, perspectives and lives of LGBTQ Jews are included within and transform Jewish life and teaching.

This article reflects on the interface between biblical studies and feminist science fiction as a tribute to Rabbi Sheila Shulman, who was interested in the theological questions that underlie much science fiction. The essay discusses briefly Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and Children of God followed by a longer analysis of Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy. The Native Tongue trilogy addresses questions of language and identity, the creation of a women’s language (Láadan), and the theory of linguistic relativity. The essay examines how these issues may be pertinent to the development of biblical based Jewish theology, with a particular focus on how questions of linguistic relativity might apply to the Hebrew language and, hence, Jewish theology.

Rabbi Sheila Shulman z’l was my teacher/mentor and friend. For years I spent many Friday afternoons in conversation with her. This article attempts to capture something of that time, and also something of the cadence and character of a conversation that I continue to have with her.

This article is a conversation between text and life. The particular integrity of lesbian and gay rabbinic leadership is shown to be rooted in the character of Job, in an architectural detail of the wilderness Tabernacle, and in the urgency and the aspiration of Rava, a sage of the Babylonian Talmud. This very quality of integrity and straightness is shown to be called out for, and towards, at this point in history, and is strongly exemplified in the lives of Rabbi Sheila Shulman and rabbinic student Andreas Hinz, z’l.

The article is a personal reflection, originally given as a sermon, on lessons learned from the experience of being a straight member of Beit Klal Yisrael. Beit Klal Yisrael is a largely, though not exclusively, LGBTQ Jewish community in West London, founded by Rabbi Sheila Shulman. The author found there no need to be part of a couple or a family, and no need to explain or apologize for her non-Jewish background. Community members understood that ties of affection, of choice and of shared lived experience were as significant as those of blood or socially recognized relationships.

Emmanuel Levinas’ teachings with regard to the other, the erotic and fecundity can speak powerfully to questions of Queer politics, morality and justice. Levinas’ insistence on the inalienability of human rights which supersede the bourgeois social contract, the interpersonal as the locus of goodness and his interest in the moral possibilities of the affectional and erotic offer stirring possibilities. So does his insistence that each person is a unique event in being, irreducible to genus (or gender). But what about Levinas’ formulations which appear to reinscribe heteronormative and patriarchal ideas about gender and family? Levinas scholars disagree about how to read these texts. This article provides a close reading of one of Levinas’ more provocative texts to derive a queer reading that honours the teacher.

In this deeply personal article, Mark Solomon explores the universal dichotomy between group solidarity and individual dissent by reflecting on two formative experiences of his own life. The first was his inspiring teenage encounter with Lubavitch Hasidism and his revulsion at its extreme, particularistic views about Jewish souls, which led to a loss of faith in Judaism and a four-year spiritual struggle over whether to convert to Christianity. Later, as an Orthodox rabbi, he had to deal with a growing awareness of being gay and the need to come out, once again leaving the solidarity of the traditional Jewish family structure for a dissenting way of life. Individual dissent can create a new sense of community and bring with it a solidarity among outsiders. The challenges of belonging and personal freedom are part of the perpetual rhythm of life and can be a source of growth and energy.

This article revisits the classic rabbinic midrash prohibiting marriages between women, found in Sifra or Torat Kohanim. The author proposes that the midrash be read as a construction of a parallel feminist science-fiction universe where lesbian marriages are commonplace and women are legal persons as well as active subjects. The complex interplay between the invisibility and visibility of lesbian sexual relations as well as the questioning of their existence and significance is examined in relation to their relative permissibility. Prohibition of lesbian marriages is linked to an acknowledgement of the substantive nature of sexual relations between women, while the denial of their existence is linked to permissive and dismissive positions. Maimonides’s ruling in his Mishneh Torah is analysed in view of his Talmudic influences, which are found to be competing with the radically divergent position found in Sifra, resulting in a position that both asserts and denies the significance of lesbian relationships.

This article discusses two academic events devoted to Holocaust studies in which participants became unconsciously involved in re-enacting the behaviour respectively of Holocaust perpetrators, and of victims turning aggressively on each other in a manner reminiscent of ghetto life. In one conference an out-group was created and silenced, while in another an individual became the object of projected guilt and was victimized. These projections were mediated by implied competition between film, sculpture and literature as the medium best suited to Holocaust memorialization. A description of each event is followed by analyses of the dynamics involved, with the support of psychoanalytic literature. Factors which led to the author’s twenty-year delay in publishing the article, which was drafted in 1995, are also examined psychologically.

Drawing on her poetry as well as her theology, this article explores Sheila Shulman’s multiple engagements with feminisms that have transformed patriarchal traditions within Judaism and opened new spaces to engage the integrity of differences. Thinking across boundaries and developing practices of ‘reading whole’, she showed ways of engaging traditional texts that call upon us to be honest and present to ourselves as we shape new forms of community. As a teacher she inspired many to read attentively and with love and to frame questions that mattered to the world.

The creative authors of the Midrashim treated the topic of ‘the persecuted’ or ‘the victim’ in a constellation of fascinating homilies on the lectionary portion for Passover. This short article will examine how the theme of persecution is elaborated in various midrashic texts, and point to similarities between rabbinic exegesis and Jewish Hellenistic and Christian Syriac discussions of the same theme.