The Rabbi's Dress (Or Why I Wear a Skirt on the Bimah)

The author, in a favorite shabbos skirt.

Purim seems to be the time when suddenly Jews of all stripes are busy cross-dressing, men showing up in shul in tiaras and boas, tottering on their high heels. And women show up in a variety of costumes, but probably only make a splash themselves if they are in tiaras and boas, tottering on their high heels.

What makes the skirts on the guys work on Purim is that it is a transgression. In fact, Purim drag is such a commonly accepted transgression in the Jewish world that one wonders if it can actually count as transgression any more.

I also, from time to time, find myself in shul and even on the bimah in a skirt. Not often, but not never either.

Very few people in my own community are surprised by this, or at least give voice to their surprise. After all, they’ve opted to be part of the shul whose unordained rabbi moonlights as a performer in a 20-year-and-counting drag a cappella troupe called The Kinsey Sicks. And that turns out to be a draw in this outpost in Sonoma County, California. For Jews who have felt excluded from the tradition, joining up here is a vote for doing things differently. It is an opportunity to reconnect with tradition, but without feeling the pressure (or having the appearance) of buying in unquestioningly to elements of the tradition that have been troublesome.

Interestingly - well, at least to me - is the fact that my wearing of a shabbos skirt is not an outgrowth of my life as a drag performer. The shabbos skirt was an element of my personal practice before I ever set foot on stage as "Winnie," the awkward, marmish character whom I play (and love) on stage. Many people smarter than I have written about drag in theory and practice; what can I add? Except that my experience tells me that drag relies on its naughtiness, on its transgression, or even just on irony, to pack its punch. But my shabbos skirt? It has a reason; it has a history; it certainly communicates something about me and how I see the world. But it is not draping my body for a naughty or transgressive or comedic purpose. Wearing it is just as meaningful to me when I'm alone or with my family as it is when I'm at shul.

Because it is meaningful for me, period. In the way that wearing a tallit or kippah might be for others. It has become ritual garb; something that moves me into my shabbat consciousness. It represents a shabbat - a rest - from a world in which I'm always aware of the pressures of gender. On shabbat I like to feel, to imagine, the world as a kinder place. A friendly place even for the sissy boys.

My, that was a jump!

So let me back up. I should tell a little bit about how I came to be a shabbos skirt wearer. And then maybe what it means to bring that into shul with me, in a community where I serve a rabbinic function. And maybe ask the overall important question: is my shabbos skirt good for the Jews?

Becoming a Boy

When I was growing up, I had a remarkably keen awareness of gender codes in our culture, like a little gender-role prodigy. I never felt terribly boyish, and so the way that the world was poking and prodding me toward a set of male behaviors, affects and preferences always felt artificial to me. Boys had to act and dress and behave in specific ways, and mostly these ways made no sense to me. Aggression? Athleticism? Taunting girls? These values were alien and distasteful to me; my experience of them was something like what a Jew feels observing an activity that our people curtly dismiss with the term goyim naches.

And the goyim naches comparison is not ill-founded. Much of what constitutes masculinity in American Jewish culture involves activities and values absorbed from the mainstream, and tends to displace an earlier, softer, less aggressive vision of masculinity that has been prized in Judaism both in antiquity and in our Ashkenazic shtetl roots.

Maybe that's why I was also drawn so young to Judaism, and especially to the rabbi stories of both the Talmudic era and from Chasidism. These were heroes honored for brain not brawn. They weren't fast-shooting cowboys or men of steel or suave James Bonds. No matter how much they dominated the texts that they learned to the letter, they were submissive to God. (I am grateful to Jay Michaelson for this insight about Jewish male heroism.) They provided a model of manhood that was not all about asserting mastery over others, and that was very welcome to me as a non-mastery kind of kid.

Yes, gender convention was very visible to me. I knew very young that the punishment for non-compliance with the male set of behaviors was being teased (if you were lucky) or physical violence (if you weren’t). So I studied and mimicked how other boys walked, sat, crossed their legs, carried their books, etc., in the hopes that I would somehow fit in enough and that these efforts would keep me safe. (Spoiler alert: efforts unsuccessful.)

I didn't ever think that through practice, walking like other boys would become natural. I always understood it to be a pose. I always understood that my own walking, my own sitting, my own crossing of legs, would get me beaten up.

But I was lucky. While my parents also half-heartedly pushed me toward traditional male behaviors and interests, it clearly stemmed from their concern for my safety, not as clearly out of any belief that those behaviors were inherently right. Certainly they had traditional understandings of gender roles; they were post-War American suburbanites after all. But on the other hand, as Jews, they were accustomed to a softer masculinity. Men who kissed and who cried. So their pressure was always ambivalent.

In any event they loved me enthusiastically, despite my obviously being a sissy, and I felt and internalized that love. So deep down I felt that I was okay.  And I am aware that not all queer people of my era grew up feeling either okay or loved, and I am grateful to my parents beyond words.

But maleness was, for me, not a fact, but a project. Rules to learn, like a second language. If you speak it well enough, you might even pass as a native. But unlike when you learn your Mother Tongue, a second language makes you keenly aware of the arbitrariness of grammar. Your first language is just talking. You don't need to know what a verb is. But for your second language you do.

So I, nebech, studied the verb charts of masculinity. I never got terribly fluent; but I got good enough. And I hung out with other non-native speakers: brainy girls, nerdy boys (although, I’m ashamed to say, hanging with other sissies was too risky), Jewish boys who, like me, were studious and had un-rugged fathers. Even the Jewish jocks, though not my friends, would protect me from bullies.

So blessed (or cursed) with this awareness of the clunky, conventional nature of gender, life went on. I grew up. I came out, supposing that the gay world would be a less rigid place. And it largely was. It was hugely liberating. And still, the gay world had internalized the language and values of traditional gender. Conventionally masculine men were prized. Sissies were honored as sources of wit and commentary. But they were not sought out as boyfriends.

AIDS, Radical Faeries & Reclaiming the Sissy

Something shifted for me in 1987. It was October, and I was at the March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. I was a law student, serving as a legal observer for a mass civil disobedience at the Supreme Court. This was the 5th year of the AIDS epidemic. 20,000 Americans, almost all of them gay men, had died, quickly and horribly, leaving the gay community shocked, traumatized, decimated. The Names Project AIDS Quilt had been unrolled for the very first time the day before on the Capitol Mall, looking like a vast military graveyard. President Reagan had only that year for the first time mentioned AIDS publicly. He then announced an AIDS commission that included the likes of New York's Cardinal O'Connor, whose only qualification for the appointment was his public condemnation of homosexuality.

Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court had, the previous year, handed down a ruling in the now infamous case of Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), which upheld the the right of the states to criminalize gay sex. The ruling was a referendum on gay people’s right to full personhood and much of the country was shocked by it. In fact, 18 years later, when it was finally reversed in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), the Court apologized for the earlier ruling. In Justice Kennedy’s words: “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today."

So at the March in 1987, many hundreds of queer Americans and allies asserted their full personhood by participating in civil disobedience at the Supreme Court. The activists wanted the Court - and all of America - to see our pain and desperation and determination.

Protestors organized themselves into "affinity groups." Wave after wave would wash up onto the steps of the hall of justice, and wave after wave would be carted off in police wagons. I suddenly saw an affinity group made up of members of the Radical Faeries - a group founded by the visionary activist Harry Hay. Back in the 1950s Hay had founded the Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay rights organizations in the US. Mattachine was dedicated to equal rights for gay people in society. But over the intervening years, Hay’s philosophy had evolved. With Mattachine, Hay had fought for gay people’s right to be like everyone else. In founding the Radical Faeries, his objective was to nurture gay people’s right and ability not to be like everyone else. In today’s language, you might say his goal was to locate and honor the productive difference that gay people represented. Instead of trying to assimilate into an oppressive culture, gay men, in his view, had a different experience of the world, from which perspective they could live and teach and perhaps change the culture in the process.

Harry Hay

I don’t recall if I had heard of the Radical Faeries before that day, I think I had, but I had certainly never seen them in person. And there they were marching up the steps of the courthouse. All these men who had never felt quite in the mold, who - like me - felt like frauds in suits and ties, were there to do civil disobedience, wearing t-shirts and army boots and camouflage pants and skirts over them. I had never seen such a thing. This marvelous mix of masculine and feminine elements, expressing so clearly how they saw themselves in the world. They undid the assumption that skirts were just for women, or for men imitating women. Instead, they seemed to say, everyone had a right to express on the surface the feminine and masculine of their nature. Or maybe they were saying that the concepts of “feminine” and “masculine” were altogether too narrow to capture the complexity of human experience, or at least of theirs.

I looked at these beautiful men in their skirts and boots and beards and glitter, these brave and rugged sissies, doing what was clearly, palpably, holy work, as they locked arms and were dragged off for arrest. I looked at them and a world opened up for me. They were not just speaking but wearing my own experience; they were making space for my personhood in a world where no space was given. Skirts were suddenly liberation.

In the Habit of Ritual Garb

I confess that I have always loved ritual garb, in the same way that I love sacred space. I love the simple magic that can wrench a place or a moment out of the ordinary flow and heighten or deepen it. There is a Talmudic meme addressing how something out-of-the-ordinary in the physical world can affect you in a spiritual way. It goes: im tashiv mishabbat raglecha. The idea of this principle is that whatever you set aside for Shabbat will eventually become a strong, almost Pavlovian entry point for you into a Shabbat consciousness.

As a kid in Jewish summer camp, on Erev Shabbat, we would replace our shorts and t-shirts with long pants and white, buttoned shirts. This was Shabbat's dress code, and it made us (or me) feel different, elevated. I still have a preference for a white, buttoned shirt for Shabbat (even with a skirt!), dating undoubtedly from those Wisconsin summers.

It is common among religious traditions for ritual garb to differ not only from everyday clothing but even from typical formal clothing. More fabric, more flow, unsuited to the wear and tear of daily life. Sufism offers the beautiful spinning skirts of the dervishes. Traditional Judaism offers the kittel that is worn by men on Yom Kippur and Pesach, and even the large tallit, the great flowing and fringed shawl that creates a nearly angelic silhouette. These are examples of garments designed and intended to take one out of the mundane and into a ritual awareness

After moving to San Francisco, I began to find myself on the fringes of Radical Faerie community. The Jewish Renewal chavurah I joined, called Queer Minyan, was influenced by the  Faeries, as well as other feminist and pagan groups. Queer Minyan included a number of men, myself included, who began to wear skirts for Shabbat and Yontiff ritual. Im tashiv mishabbat raglecha. This personal custom became habit, and when I most wanted to be myself, to honor who I was inside, with a ritual intention, the skirt could bring me there in an instant. In a skirt I’d feel Jewish, I’d feel beautiful, I’d feel a little freer from the constant hum of gender rules that form so much of the world’s background noise.

And so I would wear a skirt at Queer Minyan. Or at home for Shabbat evening. Or on High Holy Days at Berkeley’s Aquarian Minyan. I wore a shabbos skirt for an intimate Jewish Renewal Shabbaton with movement founder Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. I was nervous about it, but he loved the skirt and thanked me for bringing gender fluidity into the shared ritual space of the weekend. When I sit to meditate (which I should do more, I know, I know), it is often in a skirt. And in 2008, after being a couple for 15 years, Oren and I stood at last together under a chupah, both of us in skirts.

Our wedding; our chupah; our skirts.

Invisibility on the Bimah

I've only worn the skirt on the bimah in my Northern California community a few times. I tend to hesitate, because I don't want the lovely shift of consciousness I feel in the skirt to be jeopardized or drowned out by my anxiety about what other people will think.

I worry about it because the skirt's being meaningful for me doesn’t mean it is without impact on others. Especially in religious environments, those in leadership are “symbolic exemplars.” In addition to what they intentionally bring to the experience, rabbis are also the repositories of congregants' expectations. Their personal choices are inevitably seen as symbolic. It is very hard ever to be on the bimah without a self-consciousness or anxiety about what people are seeing in you, and whether it is the you that you intend people to see.

When I'm in front of that room, I want people to have an experience. I want them to feel connection with tradition and each other, a bunch of belonging, a lot of uplift and maybe some transformation. So how do I negotiate being present enough to cook this up and also make sure I, as a visible presence in the room, don't get in the way.

Rabbis are typically taught in rabbinical school to try to make themselves invisible on the bimah so that they do not distract the congregation from its spiritual process. But for some people invisibility is easier said than done. And for some people invisibility can have a painful edge.

Invisibility hasn't always been the custom for religious leaders in Judaism. In antiquity the priestly caste would wear special garb described in Torah – robes, a choshen, or jeweled breastplate; I seem to remember of headdress of some sort. This would set the priests apart from the people. After the destruction of the Temple, the practicing priesthood disappeared. Cantors, or chazzanim, became the day-to-day ritual leaders. They were not of a divinely chosen hereditary clan but were sh’lichey tzibur, emissaries of the community. That is, they were of the people. Rabbis also were teachers before we came to see them as ritual leaders; their origins are also from among the people. And so rabbis and cantors would typically dress like the congregation because they were the congregation.

With the rise of Classical Reform Judaism in the late 18th Century, rabbis came to wear robes in the modern style -- that is, in the style of Protestant ministers. And so would the cantor and the choir. These robes would likely be more ample and pleated than the traditional kittel. They would achieve uniformity among the clergy, but press a sharp distinction between clergy and laity.

So “invisibility” really would mean different things depending on the context. In a community where the rabbi dresses in robes, it would mean, “wear robes.” In a community where the rabbi dresses like the laity, it might mean something like “dress conventionally.”

This kind of invisibility is, though, not as obvious as it looks. I canvassed some rabbi friends (in a statistically irrelevant kind of way) about their experience of how to dress on the bimah. While the men I asked told me they dress invisibly by wearing jackets and ties, the women rabbis did not seem to have the luxury of invisibility no matter what they wore. Almost every single female rabbi I asked had a story to share about her appearance being publicly or privately criticized or commented on. They'd been told by congregants or board committees or sisterhood groups that they should wear more jewelry, less jewelry, more makeup, less makeup, some nail polish please, higher hems, lower hems, higher heels, lower heels, skirts not pants, nothing too flashy, nothing too butch, no color orange, no cleavage, and even that they should consider electrolysis. The men had virtually no parallel experience.

This suggests to me that invisibility is a perk that comes with being part of the dominant class. It is pretty much impossible for a Black person to achieve invisibility in white-dominated environment; it is impossible for women to achieve invisibility in male-dominated environment. (In these cases I don't mean "invisibility" in the sense of "being ignored" but in the sense of "blending in.") And Judaism – and the bimah in particular – continue to be marked as male space even as we strive for it not to be. Despite our protestations of egalitarianism, the bimah reflects a sexist double standard around clothing and appearance.

Must Men and Women Dress Differently?

Okay, maybe it's time for a quick tangent. A pet peeve of mine. Although reflecting, obviously, a big social inequity that's relevant here. The double standard in how men and women are required to dress bugs me, and our being so used to it that we don't notice it, bugs me even more.

This is an issue I’ve taken up before in a drash about Torah's prohibition on cross-dressing. And I could talk forever about how women in the modern world are dismissed for dressing too girly and disdained for dressing too butch and are constantly negotiating appearance in a way that men never have to.

But I'll skip the discussion and go right to an illustration. This is a picture I snapped in Washington, DC last year:

This bus advertisement promotes the meteorology team for a local TV station. Four meteorologists appear. Presumably all have similar meteorological education and meteorological expertise. Three are dressed identically. But look at poor Veronica Johnson who, because she's a woman, has to reveal more than twice as much skin as her colleagues do. And wear jewels and lipstick and false eyelashes and long, very styled hair – all in order to be successful in their shared profession. Maybe she likes dressing that way! But I think we all know, that if it were her preference to just dress like a meteorologist, and not like a weather girl, she wouldn’t be in this photo and on this team. Her professional success relies on her willingness to abide by the tremendous disparity in how men and women are expected to look.

The point is that clothes and personal appearance are one of the places where our culture remains most invested in keeping a clear divide between men and women, a line that in general causes men no big inconvenience, but costs women time and money and lifelong anxiety about their appearance.

And so me in a skirt, crossing that divide, is inevitably going to bring up some deep reactions from people, especially (but not exclusively) when I'm on the bimah. And that is why usually I don't do it. Because I want people thinking about the Shema or the Shechinah and not about my skirt.

Rabbi as Teacher, and the Problem of Discomfort

So I usually decline to wear a skirt to shul. But on the other hand, don't I have something here to teach with my skirt? Some Torah of my own? Most rabbis teach with their words. But many go beyond their words and teach with their actions too. Heschel famously marching next to Martin Luther King, saying that his feet were praying. This is very important Torah, expressed not just through the black flame of the words but through the white flame of example.

So at what point do I judge that what I have to offer through my actions is worth violating the elusive principle of invisibility on the bimah? (A principle which, thanks to not having gone to rabbinical school, doesn't really bind me.)

Invisibility is not neutral. What makes my male rabbi friends look invisible makes me feel conspicuous. In a suit, I feel like I'm in someone else's clothes. I wobble from foot to foot like an awkward kid. I may be leading a prayer, but some part of my mind is wondering if my pant cuff is caught on the tongue of my shoe. So what looks like invisibility is not without cost or consequence.

On the other hand I know I can't be invisible in my skirt either. Still, when I wear it, I feel more like myself. Which holds within it the possibility of being a better, more authentic leader.

So I'm doomed. But that is also the nature of being an instrument of change. It means sometimes being conspicuous. It means living in the discomfort. And living with causing discomfort. Anyone who's been part of a social change movement knows this. Anyone who's ever come out of the closet knows this. That causing discomfort is sometimes the only thing you can do with integrity.

And what is discomfort anyway? I think it's for the most part a reaction to the new. An anticipation of change. Our goal as thinking, evolving people is not to never feel uncomfortable, but rather to change through our discomfort.

One of the colleagues I’d surveyed about clothing was Rabbi Shefa Gold, ordained in both the Reconstructionist and Renewal movements, and a pioneer in using new modalities to bring Jews into a deeper connection with spirit. In response to my inquiry, she related this personal experience:

There is a tendency to take whatever we are used to, and make it right. I remember when I used to be at Elat Chayyim [an East Coast Jewish retreat center], there was a wonderful guy that worked there. He liked to wear skirts, and at first it did make me feel uncomfortable . . . because I just wasn't used to it. After a while I did get used to it . . and I enjoyed being in a community that embraced different styles of expression. So why was I uncomfortable? My guess is that I was conditioned by gender rules of what's right, and I had never confronted that conditioning, which soon dissolved in the light of Reality.

I've also learned not to presume that people will necessarily be uncomfortable just because I'm doing something new or different or challenging to a certain kind of status quo. The most recent time I wore a skirt to shul, the oldest member of our congregation, an 85-year old lesbian activist, bounded up to me and took me by both my hands to tell me how snazzy I looked. My skirt, in all its unorthodoxy, had created more room for her and who she is. And the comfort of those who have felt excluded in the Jewish world is of huge importance. So it's important for me to remember that I'm not alone. And that when I do something that is out of the box, there are others who feel more embraced than they had before. And that has got to be good for the Jews.

Tradition! Tradition!

One of the things that I love about Judaism and that I think is frequently misunderstood, is its dynamic nature. Judaism changes all the time. Through a variety of mechanisms. Sometimes the change is gradual and incremental. Sometimes it happens all at once. For instance the inclusion of women in synagogue ritual, including through Bat Mitzvah. This sea change waited for its time, it waited till it could not be contained, it waited until there was the right leadership and the right milieu, and then it exploded into existence.

On March 18, 1922, everything changed for women in Judaism, thanks to the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Mordecai Kaplan, and his daughter, Judith Kaplan, who that day not long ago by Jewish standards celebrated the first Bat Mitzvah.

The reason I like to think about this change is that it came from a great shared impulse for justice. It might be even described as a Jewish impulse for justice. Unlike, say, a rule about kashrut, it did not come from a rabbinic process of pilpul - of debate and slow consideration. Undoubtedly the progressive movements had been having debate on this topic - we'll let the historians fill us in on those details. But at some point doing became more important than debating. Kaplan faced the prospect of excommunication for having called his daughter to the Torah. But it was too late. Women's equality in American Judaism could not be rolled back.

So here's the question: was sex equality an incursion of non-Jewish ideology into Judaism? Arguably it was. But Judaism has always grown and changed as a result of exposure to new values and understandings.

Rabbi Benay Lappe writes about the powerful concept of svara – the strong moral instinct that permits or even requires us, according to Talmud, to nullify words of Torah if they result in an injustice.

The inclusion of women despite threats of excommunication and cries of heresy comes from a deep place of svara. And maybe my own particular svara, my own deep impulse for justice, has to do with questioning the orthodoxy of gender codes. I have a Torah that is about gender, and I have a lifelong desire to create the Judaism that I want to be part of.

The Torah of the Skirt

I guess when it boils down to it, my Torah, my teaching, is this: that unless men can wear skirts -- not for a laugh, not to make a clever social commentary, not to work the Esther look on Purim, but stam, just because -- then we're not serious when we say women are equal. As long as a man is diminished by wearing an article of women's clothing, then we have to own that we as a culture continue to hold women in lesser esteem.

My brilliant friend Emily Doskow said to me more than 20 years ago that we won't have true gender equality until we start dressing our little boys in skirts. At the time I understood the point but the idea still felt outlandish to me, as it might feel to you right now. But finding it outlandish is in fact proof of the problem. Why is it outlandish? It is only outlandish to put a boy in a skirt if it is an insult to the boy to be mistaken for a girl. It is only outlandish if being thought a girl is a serious problem. That being incorrectly thought a girl is wrong, or harmful, or confusing, or any one of a number of well-meaning but probably just-not-true adjectives you could put in that spot.

We might say we protect our little boys from skirts to keep them out of harm's way; to protect them from bullies and detractors (most of whom are probably adults). But they are only in harm's way because we believe, or we go along with the idea that gender is a line not to be crossed. And that it somehow lessens a boy's capital to be too closely associated with common signifiers of femaleness.

So maybe this is a piece of my Torah too. A reminder that we are all equal. That men and women are not opposites. That our species holds endless variation. That we should question our investments in a sharp distinction between male and female - in our laws, our entertainments, our rituals and even our metaphors (including our beloved Kabbalistic symbolism, which is fueled by the supposed yinny-yanginess of male and female).

In any event, I am not at this moment proposing that we put skirts on our boys (although it's worth considering). And I confess I am in awe of the growing numbers of little boys who insist on skirts and the growing ranks of parents who support them in their choice. But that's not what I'm proposing.

I don't need to wear a skirt to shul every week. But I want to be able to. I want to be able to express who I am, wear what makes me feel comfortable and beautiful and soulful and Jewish. I want to wear what makes me feel solid in my very unsolid gender. And I want everyone else to feel that same freedom to express who they are even when they're in the confines of synagogue or other Jewish space.

Discomfort as an Invitation to Change

So where does this leave me? I can wear a skirt, and other men can too, and people can continue to try to work through the pitfalls of gender duality using whatever creative means are at hand.

But what about other people's discomfort? Well, where there is discomfort, there is also an invitation for change, for liberation, for an opening up.

To know for certain that working through discomfort can open a door to wonderful things, I have only to look at my mother, Marilyn Keller, z"l, who was the greatest example of this quality I have ever known. Life threw her a variety of uncomfortable curves. She had two queer children. One became a performer in drag. She came into proximity with many gay people and many transgendered people too. And she came to be a grandmother in a very alternative family structure.

In each instance, there was initial discomfort. And she would push through it, armed only with love. She would in short order dispatch her discomfort as an unuseful thing. Her old ideas held no nostalgia for her. Instead she would become proud - of what she'd learned, who she'd become, who we'd become. She went from discomfort right to pride, without pausing at "tolerance," which her honest heart quickly told her was just discomfort with a smile.

This is how my mother grew and how we all grow. It's how we change for the better. As individuals, as communities, as Jews, as a species that longs so very much to be bigger than its biology. It is how we become holy.

Purim Time is Here

So here it is Purim again. A time for masquerading and for unmasking. I've done a little unmasking right here. And for all you Jewish guys trying out the Esther look this year, I have a suggestion. When you're done working your costume for laughs, stay in it a while longer. Quietly. Without an agenda. See how it feels. See what you learn about the world, and the pressures on women. See what you unmask about yourself and who you are inside. If you're going to transgress this Purim, don't just do it with clothes. Transgress your own beliefs, your own presumptions, your own comfort zone.

That willingness to look, to listen, not to be so certain of what we know, is how we make a world that's richer, deeper and safer for every one of us.

And to my mind, anything that enriches our spirits and our love for and appreciation of this tremendous and complex creation in which we live is, ultimately -- no, immediately! -- good for the Jews.

So I'll keep wearing my skirt. Maybe not so much on Purim. But on shabbos, for sure. For me, there's nothing better.

______________________________

I had so many wonderful conversations whose insights and flavor I tried to capture, but undoubtedly failed. I am grateful to Rabbi Marla Subeck Spanjer, Rabbi Rachel Timoner, Rabbi Eli Cohen, Rabbi Chaya Gusfield, Rabbi Shefa Gold, Rabbi Ted Feldman, Rabbi Bonnie Sharfman, Rabbi Eitan Weiner-Kaplow, Rabbi Deb Kolodny, my chevruta partner Eli Herb, Atzilah Solot, Anne Tamar-Mattis, Shari Brenner, Alan Ziff and Shira Hadditt. I am thankful to have you all in my life.

Yom Kippur 5774: Three Longings

For Congregation Ner Shalom

The Chasidim who, like me, love to toy with words, re-sorting letters to see what new can be found, have an interesting teaching about this day, Yom Kippur, which is called in Hebrew, Yom Hakippurim. They mess with the vowels just a little and point out that the name of this holy day could be read as yom k'purim. A day like Purim.

Of course on the surface, that seems ridiculous. These holidays are nothing like each other. On Purim we celebrate with indulgence. It is an ecstatic and intemperate holiday of costumes and merriment. So very unlike this solemn day of fasting and introspection. And yet the Chasidic masters are insistent that we notice that these two moments are linked. To my mind, the strongest bond between Purim and Yom Kippur has to do with hiding and revealing. Each holiday involves an unmasking of sorts.

At Purim we wear disguises, in deference to Queen Esther herself who, disguised as a gentile queen, is forced by circumstance to muster her inner resources and lower the mask, own up to who she is, and take responsibility for her fate and that of her people.

And here we are on this Yom K'purim, this Purim-like day, struggling to muster our inner resources and lower our own masks, to reveal to ourselves, and each other, and the Universe, and God perhaps, who we really are. What's in our hearts. What we're made of. And what we long for.

This does in fact take some unmasking. Because so many of our longings are invisible even to us, even though they inform so much of our lives. Our longings sit below the surface, like rules of grammar that indiscernibly conjugate our verbs and line up our words before issuing them from our mouths. The grammar of longing informs our values and arranges our choices. Our longing is the deep structure of our lives. And much of that longing plays its part without our even noticing it.

But tonight I'd like us to notice. I'd like us to take up three longings that I think we as a community struggle with and that we, as individuals, have often sent into exile as being, somehow, wrong or undesirable. Three longings which, I believe, deserve our attention and some honor and maybe even some forgiveness. These three longings I will refer to, for short, as House, Home and Whom.

HOUSE

We'll start with House, by which I mean the House of Israel. Being a Jew. The longing to be a Jew, to be a good Jew. 

Now I know that I was the one standing here two years ago reclaiming and praising the Bad Jew. But my point then is still my point now even though this time I'm using "good Jew" language around it. The idea is this: that wanting to be a good Jew is not something to be ashamed of. It can inform what you do in this world. It does not have to mean coming to shul every week, although you are certainly invited to do so (and you already have a name tag). It doesn't mean being orthodox or looking that way, although tzitzis on radical Jews and tefillin on women is always a bit of a subversive turn-on.

But what I'm suggesting is this. We all openly aspire to be good people; but maybe that's not quite enough. Wanting to be a good person is easy; it's a popular want. But owning the Jewish part of that is harder. The Jewish part that says "repair the world" or "feed the hungry" or "stop gossiping" or "have compassion" or "learn learn learn." That is what we've abandoned, the understanding that those ideas, clearly of universal application, originate - for us at least - in our own Yiddishkeit, in our own Jewyness.

Yes, those values drive us in beautifully universal ways. But it is always of note to me that the leaders of every modern Utopian movement, the visioners of anything designed to make the world better -- whether it's environmentalists or communists or feminists or unionists or Esperantists or even, I would suggest, early Hollywood folks dreaming up a world better than the one we live in -- every social exercise intended to make a better world has been seeded and populated by Jews. And then, almost simultaneously, the Jewishness has gotten erased right out of it. Erased, in large part, by Jews. As if being associated with Jewishness delegitimizes. That is what centuries of Anti-Semitism has done to us. We are driven to accomplish and to better and to be ashamed of where that spark came from.

So I ask, like I did two years ago when talking about Bad Jews, that we bring the Jew back into our jewbilation and rejewvenation and jewrisprudence and all the jewcy things we do. That we let our longing to be good Jews guide us in the world and we call it what it is. That we go ahead and fight for peace. For justice. For the Earth. That we strive and struggle and heal and learn at every turn. Not just because this is what humans should do, but because this is what being a Jew requires of us. That we let our beautiful universal values and accomplishments retain something of our fine specificity, of the flavor and temperature of the Jewish tables we grew up at. 

HOME

The second longing that I suspect many of us have abandoned is the longing for Home. And by Home I mean homeland, I mean Israel. This is a tricky subject, as you know by how you are tensing up right now.

But this land is the long longing of our people. Since the Babylonian conquest 2600 years ago, the sense of being in exile, displaced, deported, has been part of our psychological makeup and our spiritual essence and our cultural production. We sing Psalms about  our longing. Im eshkachech Yerushalayim, tishkach yemini. "If I forget thee Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning." Centuries of poets have poured out their yearning. Libi b'mizrach va'anochi b'sof ma'arav; eych et'amah et asher ochal. "My heart is in the East and I in the uttermost West; how shall I find savor in food?" We conclude every year's seder saying, l'shanah haba'ah birushalayim. "Next year in Jerusalem." And then we hurry to explain, to apologize, that by Jerusalem we mean something metaphysical.

But Jerusalem is a place. Physical. In a physical country that we are for better or for worse deeply connected to. Now those of us of a certain age grew up at a time when the dream of Zionism -- of a present-day, non-Messianic, non-mystical return to the land -- when the dream of Zionism was still unmarred; when Zionism embodied huge and important values - the safety of our people, the end of exile, a halt to our long persecution, a brighter future than we'd had since the Golden Age of Spain, and our first crack at Jewish autonomy in millenia. Those of us of a certain age grew up with a powerful, deep, incessant longing for Israel, for Modern Israel, not the mythical place. An Israel of blooming deserts and Nobel Prizes and medical advances and folk dances. We longed to go, to live, to visit, to breathe it in. To see a new era and to be its emissaries.

But the problem now, of course, is that 65 years of history have intervened. Real life, on-the-ground, difficult history. Because we planted our dream in a land that was and wasn't ours. And our hope, over time, has given rise, and given way, to such suffering and such bitterness. We have learned things that were hidden from us as youngsters. We have learned about things done that should not have been done. The present-day leaders of the State have, in the name of survival, abandoned our great vision of a land of harmony and renewal. Those Jews who remain the staunchest supporters of the State of Israel have been forced to abandon the dream of peaceful co-existence and religious pluralism. Forced to go along with ghetto walls enclosing our supposed enemies; and forced to turn a blind eye to the Orthodox male stranglehold on religious life in Israel, including who is and is not allowed to pray at our holiest sites or to be called a Jew anywhere in the land still, tenaciously, called holy. So much longing abandoned in order not to abandon the State.

Meanwhile those of us who see ourselves on the Left, who articulate our criticisms of Israeli policy, we who are quick to see Israel's flaws, have also lost touch with something, and that is our deep love and longing for this place. A longing and a love that are still in our bones. A love that we have sent into exile out of disappointment or sadness or shame, but which, if reclaimed, would give us greater, not less, legitimacy when we say, "No, no, Israel. Not that way, this way."

What Jews on both sides of the debate have given up, it seems to me, is a longing for an Israel that is as great and holy and just as we can imagine it. And it is up to us to bring that longing back and let it inform our words and actions. We owe it to our people's past and to our people's future. 

WHOM?

The third and last longing I'd like to call in tonight is what I will call Whom. And what I mean by that is the longing for whom? For God.

Because I think this longing is in us, in each of us. Not belief, not faith, but longing. It is deeply rooted in our human experience. It is a longing that grows out of the disconnectedness of our psyches and the fenced in nature of our bodies. Our spirits, or the parts of ourselves we identify as spirit, tell us that we are capable of full and deep and complete connectedness. Perhaps it's a sense memory of the womb. Or else it's just imagination. But we long for a connectedness greater, deeper, more intimate and perfect than anything a lover or parent or friend could give us. We long for God to take that place. God, as confidante, as personal coach, as yedid nefesh -- the companion of the soul, always always present with us. I'm not certain any of us ever longs for a Creator God, or an angry God or a law-giving or justice-doling God. But this personal, immanent presence, this Shechinah, is something we yearn for, even while we might rationally deny any such emotion.

Or perhaps our longing isn't for that intimate embrace but for transcendence. To be able to experience something beyond the walls of our human existence. Beyond the limitations of our bodies and intellects. We do seek out such moments of transcendence in our lives, mystical moments, by walking in the woods or on the beach or hearing Beethoven performed or seeing some powerful piece of theatre. Or by dropping acid or marching in a protest or sometimes even by going to shul. We feel that transcendence in a flash; or sometimes it is like a deep glow inside, what Rabbi Art Green might call the n'kudat p'nimiyut, the internality of the God experience. Not a reaching out or up to touch the Divine, but a reaching and recognizing deep within.

Or maybe it's not connection or transcendence but life itself that we long for, the denial of which our finite physical bodies cannot comprehend or accept. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, said, "God may not in any way resemble or correspond to the idea we form of him [sic], but he is present in the very will-to-live, the reality of which we experience in every fiber of our being."

I think it is fair to give in to this longing, even without having any certainty about believing. I think it is fair to long, even while living in the not-knowing. More than fair. Because it is a fire burning within us. And it can inspire us to new paths, great actions, deep love, readier compassion. It can cause us to return on Yom Kippur to who we want to be, and how we want to be accountable.

But how do we notice and consciously stay in touch with that longing? We can't count on transcendent moments. Rebbe Elimelech of Lizensk characterized that flash of transcendence, of opening up, of revelation as God's free sample. Like the Sample Shack at Trader Joe. You get one piece of deliciousness for free. And after that you have to pay for it. Rebbe Elimelech instructs that our payment, our slow recapturing of the goodies, comes through practice: prayer and mitzvot and, above all, d'vekut.

What is d'vekut? There is no appealing English word for it. It means something like "clinging" or "attaching," both words carrying rather unattractive connotations of the relationships we had in our twenties. But d'vekut suggests attaching oneself to the idea or possibility of God in all things. Not just when in prayer or meditation or study or moments of ecstacy. But in the day to day. Holding a mindfulness of the godliness, the divine, the qi that runs through all things, even things we barely notice or consider insignificant. Expanding our consciousness until we can perceive the divine in the glorious and in the painful and in the mundane.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav described d'vekut as imagining oneself in the presence of the Shechinah. For Rebbe Nachman, this practice was a way to accustom oneself to being in the World to Come. And Rebbe Meshullam Feibush of Zabrizha said that the way to always notice the divine in the world is simply always to be aware of one's longing for God.

The truth is that we don't know. When I have moments of feeling God's presence, I can't tell you if I'm perceiving or projecting. I can't tell you if I'm looking outward or inward or if that makes a difference. I sometimes wish I had the certainty that some believers express, although I suspect that none of us is truly without doubt. If God is there, then God makes it difficult. Playing hide and seek with us all the time. And getting characterized by religion so severely and narrowly that it is almost always easier to say "no" to the idea than to say "yes."

But still, I'm okay with not knowing. I'm okay with spelling God with a question mark in the middle. I'm okay with God creating the universe, or God being a synonym for the universe. I'm okay with God being nothing like we've ever conceived and this cosmos being really good glamour-drag. I'm even okay with God being the ayin, the great emptiness. I don't know. And in this not-knowing, I will stay attuned to my longing; I will continue to look for God in the hidden places and let that affect how I see you and me and the dog and the tree and the rock and the sky and the microbe. And the joy and the loss.

As Medieval poet Yehudah HaLevi wrote, Yah ana emtza'acha, m'komcha na'alah v'ne'elam. Adonai, where shall I find Thee? Hid is Thy lofty place. V'ana lo emtz'acha, k'vodcha malei olam. And where shall I not find Thee? Whose glory fills all space.

Our universe, our reality, is like the Book of Esther; it is a place where God is never mentioned by name, and can only be found by inference. It is a place where God, if there is a God, is masked.

But this is Yom K'Purim. It is a day is like Purim. Where masks are lowered and the hidden is revealed. So on this Purim-like day, let us recommit to the longings that we've kept masked. Longings for House, Home and Whom. Let us strive, openly, to be better Jews as well as better people. Let us feel, without shame, our love for the land and let that guide us toward fashioning a fairer, kinder Israel that is truly a light to the nations. And let us revel in our longing for God, living it everywhere, locating it in our hearts and in the world, so that, whether God's mask ever gets lowered or not, we at least may be drawn to give our best to this creation and to each other and to our selves.

And let us say, Amen.


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I wish a shanah tovah, a happy, healthy year to all my loved ones.
I am grateful to my study partner, Reb Eli Herb, for some lovely insights that made their way into this drash.