Are We Not All Holy? Our Legacy of Challenging Authority
Korah 5781 / Pride Shabbat 2021 / 12 June 2021
Are We Not All Holy? Our Legacy of Challenging Authority
D’var Torah by Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell
Shabbat Shalom.
When Abe asked me to speak this morning, I suggested that he invite a younger member of the LGBTQ community. After all, I am a vatika, a veteran. He assured me that my historical perspective would provide a context for our congregation’s future.[1]
So I humbly stand before as we celebrate what has become known as Gay Pride Month. As a long time member of the LGBTQ community. I’ve been blessed to see amazing changes over the 40 years since I entered rabbinical school in 1981. Every one of us in this ZOOM room and beyond knows now that there are millions of us who identify as LGBTQ: gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer and questioning. We are men and women, transfolks and non-binary. We live in every country in this world. We’re every ethnicity, every race, as diverse as human kind. In 2021, many of us are living “out,” open lives, no longer hiding ourselves, no longer fiercely protecting our privacy for fear of losing families, jobs, careers.
And in 2021, many of us are still isolated, living in the shadows, unable to be fully visible. For these folks, living in communities across the world, Pride parades keep us at home with fear of contagion—not from the pandemic, but a deeper additional fear— of contagion of identification that many LGBTQ folks have internalized all our lives, real fears that have been stoked by the anti gay and particularly the virulent and cruel transphobic regulations voted into laws across our country in the past months and years. Too many of us fear that by becoming visible as queer folk, we may be followed, persecuted, ambushed, murdered.
I have been blessed over the years to learn from others whose life stories have opened my eyes to experiences beyond my own. When I first embraced my own desire to spend my life with a woman, gay men and lesbians were just beginning to use the term queer to include not only each other, but also folks who identify as bisexual and transgender. Yet many of us were still seeing ourselves and one another through a binary lens, understanding ourselves as male or female.
One of the reasons I love our tradition is that I am continually discovering ways in which our rabbis were wiser than we are. Our Talmudic sages taught that there are six genders.[2] At different times throughout Jewish history, students and scholars have rediscovered this insight, and this has enhanced and deepened our appreciation of the range of human physiology, behaviors, and spiritual potential.
But then, like too many insights, we forget what we have learned, and return to a narrow view of the world, dividing up the world into male and female, failing to see how much and how many souls we we miss by such narrow thinking. We fail to see that all of us have many facets. We are all richer and more varied than we may initially seem!
Now, in this twenty-first century, our language has changed. When we used to speak about the LGBTQ+ community, we were focused on a range of sexual expressions, or on sexual identity. Today, we speak about gender identity. The term queer is now used for all of us who do not fit into what is now identified as “heteronormative.” Those of us who do not identify as male or female, those of us who were born with certain gender markers and now identify differently, those of us who are questioning, those of us who choose intimate partners of the same gender—we’re all queer. And we all have multiple narratives.
What does this mean for us as Jews, heirs to a tradition of sacred teaching, beloved and complex texts, the continuing challenge of creating and sustaining holy communities?
Let us turn to this week’s Torah portion, Korach. We are halfway through our wilderness travels, our journey through the book of Numbers. This week we read of deliberate challenges to authority. Moses’ cousin Korach, joined by Dotam and Abiram, challenge both God and Moses and Aaron, God’s chosen spokesperson and priest.
Korach brings together two hundred and fifty chieftains and says:
רב לכם! כי כל העדה כולם קדושים “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Holy One is in their midst. Why, then, do you raise yourselves above God’s holy congregation?” (Num 16:3)
Korach is not the first to challenge Moses’ authority. Moses’ own sister and brother, Miriam and Aaron ask:”Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Has God not spoken through us as well?” (Num 12:2)
We are clearly heirs of a tradition of challenging authority.[3] This story teaches that God is the ultimate authority.
We have spent 5000 years wrestling with this teaching. How do we discern God’s direction, God’s teaching, God’s word?
Chazal, the rabbis who penned Pirke Avot, attempt to answer this question in Chapter 5:17. They teach that controversies that are for the sake of Heaven will endure, but arguments and disagreements, challenges to community norms, will not endure: “which controversy was not for the sake of Heaven? Korach and his band”.[4]
The rabbis are saying, I think, that Korach’s challenge to the authority of Moses was an expression of ego, not true leadership. Moses, a humble servant, was chosen by God to lead. Korach, tradition teaches, deserved to be punished for mounting an insurrection against Moses— and God’s authority.
Yet Korach’s words, which we read every year, may be resonant for us: “For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Holy One is in their midst.”[5]
Often, the holy text challenges itself. Later in this same portion, God instructs Aaron and his sons to establish a priesthood “to do the work of the Tent of Meeting, a service of dedication. Any outsider who encroaches shall be put to death.” (Numbers 18:6-7) While this warning might be read as reference to Korach and his challenges to God’s establishment of an appointed hierarchy, Rabbi Professor Dalia Marx asks whether this reaffirmation of inviolable boundaries between individuals and groups needs to be read differently. She, and others, suggest that the multiple reiterations of our responsibilities to the stranger— because we were strangers in the land of Egypt— reflect a higher law, a more essential Jewish principle.[6]
Might we, then, consider this textual juxtaposition, a controversy “for the sake of heaven,” as the text critiques itself, and as we continue to wrestle with when, and how to single out those who seem to cross lines and challenge norms. When do we take a breath and see that “all the community are holy, all of them, and the Holy One is in their midst?”
For too many LGBTQ+ folks, it has been a significant challenge to see ourselves as holy. Raised in a heterosexist, gynephobic and homophobic culture, we have struggled mightily to see ourselves in God’s image. Some of us have been rejected by those closest to us. Some of us have never felt loved for who we are, as we are made.
Our morning prayers remind us that we holy and loved and that our souls are pure. Some of us have, thankfully, found our way into safe minyanim, both on Zoom and with others in real time and space. We have taken the words of the daily prayers into our hearts, and discovered that once we feel loved, we can love others. For some of us, this has been a journey not of days and months, but of years.
This morning we gather to reclaim the imperative of standing together—in the name of tradition, in the name of justice, in the name of love. Can we truly see ourselves—and one another—as holy?
When we learn to love ourselves, and to embrace our complex inheritance of Judaism, we can reach out to others, and work together on creating a more just and equitable society.
In the past year, we have learned much about what it means to stand together with others, particularly those who may initially seem to be different than ourselves. When we marched with members of our Black and Brown communities for Black Lives Matter, we discovered new strengths— and honored, perhaps for the first time, that our own community includes people of color. Jews were never only white Ashkenazi cis-gender heterosexual men. We’re now naming the richness of our community, and reaching beyond the Jewish community to proclaim that we are indeed all holy. We are learning that together we can and must name and dismantle white supremacy. We are learning that we must become actively ANTI-RACIST, educating ourselves and our children about the racism that is a poison underground spring snaking beneath the very ground on which too many of our lives and businesses and schools and even, tragically, our religious institutions have been built.
And just as we claim the work of Anti-Racism, we must continue to develop muscles and programs to dismantle all forms of homophobia, gynephobia and transphobia. We live in a world beyond binaries. We are discovering new ways of speaking with and about and to one another, asking for and respecting preferred pronouns. Jewish feminist theologians and thinkers challenged our use of language, both Hebrew and English, that assumes the community and God are male. LGBTQ+ scholars and activists challenge binary calls to the Torah and the arbitrary gender division of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. And the visionary leaders of Svara, “A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva,” challenge us to reclaim serious Jewish study as an essential path leading to the next chapters in our shared history. [7]
As we begin to open the physical doors of this synagogue, let us check in on the doors of our own hearts. Can we re-examine our long-held ideas about who “belongs” in our sacred community? Are we engaged in re-evaluating texts that we teach and lift up to see how our own blindness has kept us from seeing the pain these texts inflict on some, while granting power to others? Can we challenge ourselves to consider difference as opportunity, and approach otherness with curiousity and not fear? Can we love ourselves enough to open our hearts to others?
Throughout history, we Jews have challenged authority. Here in America, we have stood up for workers’ rights, for the rights of immigrants, for the rights of minorities. We Jews see others as holy, as created in God’s image.
That, I believe, is the message of Korach for us: to see the holiness of each individual, even as we discern false calls for insurrection as expressions of jealousy, greed, or warped, overweening egos.
Let us recommit to a Judaism that demands that we stand up to authority and speak for those whose voices have been dismissed, those who have been silenced, or bullied, discriminated against.
This, I believe, is a controversy “for the sake of Heaven.” God wants us to live, to thrive, and to serve, not to perish. God wants us, I believe, to learn to love ourselves and one another. And to march and dance in the streets with joy.
On this Shabbat Korach, we begin a new Hebrew month. Let us begin by reclaiming the words of Hillel, with a modern addition. You know well Hillel’s triparate question:
אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי. וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי.וְאִם לֹא עַכְשָׁיו, אֵימָתָי:
If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am only for my self, what am I?
And if not now, when?[8]
The poet Adrienne Rich, one of the most articulate, celebrated and essential voices of the twentieth century, a proud Jewish lesbian added:
If not with others, how?
That is our challenge, my friends. May we go forth in strength, in love, and in joy.
Footnotes
[1] This drash is dedicated to Rabbi Annie Lewis. Her courageous and unflagging commitment to and leadership towards the transformation of our broken world has been a great gift to BZBI and to the larger Philadelphia community. I join all the members of this community in praying for her and Yosef and Zohar and Shir Emet to be blessed with health and joy as they go forth to Gaithersburg.
[2] R. Nikki DeBlosi will speak on this topic through Rodeph Shalom, Philadelphia: “The 6 Sexes of the Talmud & The Blessings of Gender Today.” Wednesday, June 23 at 7:00 PM over Zoom. RSVP here.
[3] I continue to learn from my beloved colleague R. Richard Address. See: https://jewishsa- credaging.com/korach-numbers-161-1832-is-it-rebellion-to-ask-to-doubt-to-search/ I am also appreciative of R. Jane Rachel Litman’s insights: “Torah and Its Discontents,” in Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. ed. Gregg Drinkwater et al (New York: NYU Press, 2009,) pp.202-205.
[4] Pirke Avot 5:17.
[5] Is this why we read the story every year? Rachel Adelman, /When the Earth Opened her
Mouth,” https://hebrewcollege.edu/blog/when-the-earth-opened-her-mouth/.
[6] Rabbi Dr. Dalia Marx, derash to the Women’s Rabbinic Network Conference, 8 June 2021. See also David Ellenson, “Laws and Judgments as a ‘Bridge to a Better World,’” in Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, pp. 98-101.)
[7] https://svara.org
[8] Pirkei Avot 1:14
