Words of the Spirit -
Pride, Visibility, Family and Remembrance / Zihronot
Ottawa celebrated Pride last week. It’s never too late to share moments of pride. And as we are now in the month of Elul, I offer this reminiscence as a form of preparation for the new year.
There are three core themes on Rosh Hashanah: along with the shofarot – shofar calls to action, and malkhuyot – recognizing the force/s that govern our lives, we hold up zihronot – remembrance, which we also address on Yom Kippur. Here is a memory:
Late in the summer of 1985, as an opera singer-in-training, I moved from Montreal to Toronto.
I already had a gaggle of queer friends there, among them members of the Body Politic collective, including the late, great activist Chris Bearchell, as well as Ed Jackson, who by then was working with ACT, the AIDS Committee of Toronto.
In 1983, fairly early in terms of the AIDS epidemic’s impact in Canada, I lost my best friend from high school days, Laszlo Kertesz. Within two years of our graduation, he was living in New York City, a sweet, baby-faced aspiring screenwriter. On my visits we would go to movies at the Thalia, and I would stay in his railroad apartment in the East Village with the bathtub in the kitchen. He would regale me with descriptions of the activities at the bars he would frequent, and he was my first friend to tell me I was a lesbian before I came out.
Laszlo was diagnosed in May and was dead by November. My grief was, at first, immobilizing, yet once the grip of the horror of the loss shook loose, I was able to formulate a pledge – to find a way to work on AIDS awareness and education in his honour.
Toronto, the city where he was buried, became the first place I was able to do just that. In addition to joining up with Ed’s education and resource programs at ACT, I made forays into the Toronto Jewish Community, and quickly yet unsurprisingly discovered a deep resistance to addressing the issue Jewishly. By then, this was changing in certain American cities, and I was fortunate to be able to adapt some resources from Jewish Family Services in San Francisco, even after hearing from the head of a similar agency in Toronto that this was “not a Jewish issue.” I added Jewish resources to the AIDS Education library at ACT, and along with offering trainings at workplaces and organizations, I visited small group gatherings in the Jewish community, mostly organized by women’s groups.
Eventually, a large Reform Temple became the locus for AIDS activism in the Toronto Jewish community. In 1989 I moved to Philadelphia to start rabbinical school, where the local Jewish Family Services was receptive and eager to create a Jewish community AIDS Task Force. Among other things, we mobilized a large Jewish presence for an annual fundraising AIDS walk-a-thon, where, by the 1995 edition, a young queerspawn toddler marched along in her stroller with her almost-rabbi Ima. By then, my eldest was a veteran of the Stonewall 25th anniversary parade in 1994. They now live in Brooklyn with their spouse, having met two years ago at Defund the Police protests outside New York City Hall, where they married this summer.
For me, Pride is very much a family matter, and very much a religious matter. I’ve participated in as many panels, educational forums, on- and off-campus presentations, and classroom visits as I can as a rabbi, as clergy, as a visible queer religious leader. It’s been deeply moving, and very personal as well, to receive messages from young trans and queer folk from the congregation, from my neighbourhood, and from my kids’ schools back in the U.S. who have written with great feeling about what it meant for them to have a person visible in their lives who was out, who was a parent, who was proudly Jewish and progressive.
Naming who we are, coming out, being seen, and doing so when and where it may not be possible for others to do so safely, so that they know they are known – and also for those who live on in our memories – this is Pride.
The call to visibility resonates. To be a proud, open Jew in our day shares some of the challenges of queer pride and identity. There are places on the planet where a Jew, and queer person are at risk, simply for being. All of our selves, and those of our communities’ children, need to be safe, need to be seen, need to celebrate all of who they are.
When we call in our community for prayer, we set this intention, written by the poet Marcia Falk and set to music by Faith Rogow:
As we bless the source of life, so we are blessed. And the blessing gives up strength and makes our vision clear. And the blessing gives us peace, and the courage to dare.
The blessing of community gives us the strength to dare. When we sing it, we loop back to the beginning on the word dare. The beginning of the year loops us back in to reclaim the sacred opportunity to remember, and each Pride season reminds us to continue to claim our visibility.
Rabbi Liz
