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The Grape Cluster and the Two Who Carry It: A D'var Torah for Pride

This is the D'var Torah I gave for Pride Shabbat 5781/2021, for Parashat Sh'lach L'cha (Numbers 13:1-15:41).

I love this parasha about the scouts, the m’raglim, and the fact that the Torah is so brutally honest about how hard it is to go forward even to a land of milk and honey, even when the alternatives are to stay in a desert or to return to Mitzrayim (Egypt). I love the duality of feeling like giants vs. feeling like grasshoppers -- and as I’ll tell you in a bit, thanks to Pride Shabbat I love the big cluster of grapes, so large it takes two people to carry it.

When I look forward on Pride Shabbat, toward a promised land, I personally have to start by looking back, to a day I think of as “The Lunch of the Three Jonathans.”

It was right after a final exam during college, and I remember this lunch partly because we ate at one of the dining halls I almost never went to. I can’t remember if I ran into two other Jonathans by accident or if I had plans with one and the other showed up too.  These two other Jonathans were distinct and important in my life at that time.

Any one of us could have become rabbis, and we briefly talked about it that day because I thought I might and I really thought they should too, both of them. Of the three, Jonathan #1 -- I’ll call him just Jonathan -- he really was the one most suited at the time to become a rabbi. He had the widest vision; he had the widest ranging intellect of the three of us; he had integrity and fearlessness about being an activist; he had been an active youth group person in high school. I brought up the rabbi thing and Jonathan laughed, a certain look on his face that was trademark for him -- a combination of a silly grin and a knowing, “no-way” laugh. If it’s possible to be simultaneously loving and telling someone how stupid they sound for the thirtieth time, it was that kind of laugh.

Jonathan #2 at the table was me, the only one called Jon to the exclusion of Jonathan. Jonathan #3 was a star yeshiva student, sometimes called Jonathan and sometimes Jon, and he’s a whole other story.

I knew Jonathan wasn’t going to rabbinical school but it was fun to poke him about it periodically and I didn’t mind the look and the laugh. I thought I knew at the time why Jonathan wasn’t going to be a rabbi, because we were good friends and had talked about it. But it turns out, I didn’t know at all.

I didn’t know until another lunch three or four years later, in a different cafeteria, this one at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I was in rabbinical school, and Jonathan was on a panel of three people brought in to talk about what it had been like to grow up Jewish and gay.

I knew Jonathan was gay, but that was the first time I heard him speak about what it was like to have been a gay Jewish teen, in a liberal Jewish community in Boston in the 1980s. People in his youth group thought of Jonathan as the ultimate insider, a leader, he said -- and Jonathan told his story of being unseen, of the closet as the price he had to pay to belong. Other people, straight kids, could be draped on someone of the opposite sex in a friendly way as they hung out, but for him this kind of regular youth group behavior was a constant reminder of what he couldn’t share, and the very cameraderie that was so essential for other teens was alienating to him, and told him that there was no room for him within Judaism. We didn’t use words like “heteronormative” so much back then in the early ‘90s, not even the gay and lesbian speakers on the panel that day. But that’s what Jonathan was talking about.

Listening to Jonathan I was crushed on so many levels. Ashamed of ourselves as a Jewish community. Ashamed of the myself for the things I thought were tough for me when I was in USY. After hearing him talk that day at JTS, I couldn’t believe that Jonathan had ever set foot in Hillel.  He had so much Jewish and Israeli in him that just walking away was never an option -- that too would have denied him so much of himself. Jonathan came to the Seminary and said he appreciated that we students were listening to their stories, even though we couldn’t ever fix Judaism for him enough that it wouldn’t be painful. At least maybe we could do better for kids in the future.

I was crushed and ashamed that I had known Jonathan by then for at least five years, intense years, and considered him a good friend -- and I never knew any of this. What kind of a friend had I really been. What must have I communicated, out loud or in unspoken assumptions, that he wouldn’t think of me as someone he could share any of this with when we were in college.

I hold up these two lunches next to each other in my mind, the lunch of the three Jonathans in college and the lunch listening to Jonathan at JTS, because the second lunch was the first turning point for me when it came to think about Judaism and LGBTQ+. It was Jonathan’s gift to me and hopefully his gift through me. That was the first time I got that it wasn’t enough to be unfazed when someone came out, to treat it as no big deal, an interesting and important thing about someone just like other interesting and important things. That was the moment I realized that the Torah about LGBTQ+ lives ought not be confined to two verses in Leviticus. It’s because of Jonathan that I eventually became convinced about marriage equality -- later when his partner Peter was dying and I saw what was already one of the most beautiful love stories I had known become even more beautiful and heartbreaking. It took me quite a while even so to arrive where I got to about gay marriage right around the time I arrived here in New Hampshire.

I cannot stand here as an ally, or tell you that I use he/him/his pronouns, without acknowledging Jonathan, and the impact of his friendship and pain and integrity on me. It would not be truthful to say I always knew what the promised land looked like, that from the start I was like Kalev (Caleb) in our parasha and knew how to be a giant and not a grasshopper.

Jonathan might be horrified that I am talking about him to you only through a series of stories about Mitzrayim and the midbar, Egypt and the wilderness, and not getting on to talking about visions of the promised land. (I should say that Jonathan is someone I’ve also learned from about other things, such as affordable housing and Israel-Palestine.)  I really want to embrace the terrific formulation that the Tzedek crew created about this Shabbat, which I stole for my note yesterday. We are celebrating LGBTQ+ Jewish lives and we are celebrating what queer Jews have brought to Judaism, to Torah itself.  So let’s talk about that enormous cluster of grapes, so unexpected, so big and juicy it takes two people to carry.

A cluster like maybe you’re not sure what it is, and I can say about myself that I’m only just beginning to get a view of what might be called queer Torah, just in the past two or three years. And I have to say, I’m excited and challenged. Here are a few things I’ve begun to see, on my own scouting of the land we’re heading to.

Liz brought to my attention the Queer Niggun Project -- melodies composed and traditional prayers interpreted by LGBTQ+ Jewish creators. Last night I was so taken by the “Carousel Niggun” for L’cha Dodi, one of the big Shabbat love songs -- this version mashes up very traditional, yeshivish Hebrew pronunciation with both old and new idioms for the metaphor of God and Israel as lovers, married partners.

Or take Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder and Rosh Yeshiva of Svara, which she calls a “traditionally radical yeshiva.” Her insight is that queer theory is actually the key to understanding the Talmud, because the Talmud was originally a project of marginal Jews who saw the world shaking before other Jews did, and these different-living, different-thinking sages were far more ready when the Temple was destroyed than any other Jews to pick up the pieces and make something strong and beautiful, which is the foundation of all of our Judaism today.

Rabbi Lappe says that a queer perspective is actually helpful and necessary for everyone, because the Talmudic rabbis were brilliant at tooling for a world exactly like that of the scouts in our parasha, who knew they would have to move into a new world about which so much was uncertain.  So at Svara you study in Aramaic, the rabbis’ own language, whether you’ve ever studied before or not, and sometimes their study events attract an aundience that is majority straight, because they find it’s the queer perspective that is illuminating. Once upon a time, this kind of thinking was the very definition of Conservative Judaism. I heard this same kind of perspective encoded musically in Itai Gal’s niggun from last night.

So this is my very new-for-me take on queer Torah. People like me, communities like ours, have tended to talk about LGBTQ+ Jews as people “we” quote-unquote need to “welcome”, to “include”, and to do that we have to let go of something we have had, some earlier definition or some certainty. But really, these queer teachers and creators are saying: What we have is this cluster of fruit, and we can carry it together. Yes, you could say it’s heavy, it’s unusual, I don’t know what to make of it. Or you could say it is nourishing and it’s sweet and it’s been missing. It’s been there rooted in the land the whole time, but until we went looking for it, hopefully together, you didn’t recognize it. You thought milk and honey was in the future, but the truth is the promised land is even richer.

When I think about us, this community in particular, I think about the two scouts holding that large dowel between them, carrying this new and large fruit. I can easily imagine that one of them, but only one, was Kalev, confident about the future and ready to live in it right away. The other was concerned or had questions, felt the weight of it more than the sweetness. But they carried it together. That’s a moment I treasure too in the parasha. That’s why we invited Mimi Lemay here. That moment is a hope for us, so that we don’t get stuck in the desert for 40 years. We don’t know exactly what the promised land is like when it comes to equality or what it means truly to celebrate LGBTQ+ Jewish lives all the time. What we can know, and what I do know, is like this in the Torah’s words: tova ha-aretz m’od m’od. The land of our Pride is a good land; it is very, very good.

Giants, Not Grasshoppers -- Toward the Landscapes Just Ahead of Us

This is my D'var Torah from last Shabbat, June 20, Parashat Shlach L'cha.

This week in the book of Numbers, there is a beautiful project that Moshe is getting impatient to launch. In a nutshell: it’s about becoming a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, in a land flowing with milk and honey. Moshe is impatient in a good way, and his instinct about the moment is that the people have been sitting still for too long. A lot of study groups working on the laws and the institutions, the beginnings of complaining because the people are in limbo in the desert... So Moshe decides it’s time to move closer to moving by sending out the scouts, the m’raglim. From the Hebrew regel, the leg – there’s going to be movement, shoe leather. Not everyone at first, but while the people are sitting still there is going to be activity by some. Sounds a bit like us now, yes?

So how did this step go?

The land flowing with milk and honey, eretz zavat chalav ud’vash, is now also a land that devours its inhabitants, eretz ochelet yoshveha. And the kingdom of priests and the holy nation? Now it’s we saw giants, and we looked to them like grasshoppers, and that is how we came to look even to ourselves.

And as a result, the people went nowhere. For a whole generation.

What happened, and what can we learn from for our own moment?

I summarized Moshe’s big project in two parts -- there’s the land and there’s the group itself. The most important thing we can learn from the m’raglim is not their report about the land but their report about themselves. Read carefully – the ten negative scouts said good and bad things about the future ahead. Bounteous, but also impossible. What they said about themselves though was very clear: We are grasshoppers, not giants.

I want us to look at this so we can learn how we can be giants and not grasshoppers, across the many landscapes we are looking at now and looking ahead to right away and over the next six months.

When Moshe set up the mission for the twelve m’raglim, he structured it for them around a set of questions, and most of them were good, clipboard kind of questions. Observe and report what’s out there – what’s the soil like, the trees, the fruit, the cities? But he threw in one question that wasn’t like that. Tell about about the land, hatova hi im ra-ah – is the land good or is it bad?

What kind of question is that? God had already given promises about a good land over and over. Opening up that question opened up the possibility of coming back and saying the land is bad. And that colored everything. The ten m’raglim had the opening to say the land was bad because they were really reporting on a different issue: Are we good or are we bad.

Calev and Yehoshua were able to say the land is good, because they could also say: We are good. Calev said: Yachol nuchal la. We are capable, we are up to this.

The others said: the land is good, the land is bad, see it both ways -- but we are definitely grasshoppers, looking at giants.

Why grasshoppers? Why not ants or locusts? There’s almost no traditional commentary on the metaphor.

I think last year I asked my daughter Sarinah about this, who is of course the bug expert in my household. Between her teaching and some other research, here are some things I’ve learned about grasshoppers:

1. Grasshoppers aren’t discriminating about what they eat. They’ll eat pretty much everything, whether it’s nutritious or not for them.
2. Grasshoppers use up what’s right there and they have no relationship to what’s right nearby in the field. They hop – they flit from one place to another. They’ll go any distance from where they are and then eat whatever happens to be there.
3. They are obviously at home in the grass – they exist where the roots are shallow, they don’t try to be near anything whose stature is much more than their own. In fact they have evolved to basically look like grass.
4. On its own a single grasshopper behaves fine, but in groups they devour, they destroy.

So why did the ten m’raglim compare themselves to grasshoppers? It wasn’t just about size and strength, small grasshoppers compared to giant humans.

They were saying about themselves, and they were saying about all of Am Yisrael:

1. Like grasshoppers, we can’t focus – we’ll try anything whether it’s useful for us or not. We hop from one thing to another, one focus or mission or cause to the next.
2. Like grasshoppers, we don’t lift our eyes up enough – we’re content to be in a field where everything is small like us, where nothing reaches to the heavens. In the psalms grass is compared to the wicked, who are widespread and fast growing but shallow, while the righteous are like a palm tree – tall, not so many, but deeply rooted. They were saying: We’re grassy, not palmy.
3. Like grasshoppers, we don’t sink roots. Our commitments are not deep, we don’t take the time to make them deep or to trust one another to be deeply rooted.
4. Like grasshoppers, we don’t trust ourselves as a group to be capable of great things – we think if we try to act collectively we will be destructive.

What the ten m’raglim were saying is that they didn’t see themselves or the people as wise enough or capable enough to try big things without destroying in the process.

Giants, they thought – that would be someone else. Those huge Canaanites who look they had fallen out of the heavens, godlike in strength and stature. Pharoah was a giant. Giants are Avraham and Sarah, in our past but not our present. You Moshe aren’t a giant, and neither is anyone else we know or could even imagine right now.

But Calev knew different. The Torah says he had ruach acheret, a different spirit. Rabbi Zohar Atkins says actually he had two spirits. One spirit understood what the ten grasshopper-scouts experienced, he got it entirely. And one spirit that said no, the giants are us. A kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

And I know different too. I know that we are giants, we Jews of this time and place. And if we are not giants, it’s just that we aren’t giants yet.

The justice issues of our day – we can be giants.

The grasshopper view is that we will lack focus, we will approach them shallowly like the roots of grass, and we will destroy our own community in the process. There were giants of justice in the past, not in our current generation. But we do not have to be those grasshoppers. We can focus, we can learn and act with depth, and we will in fact strengthen our own Jewish community in the process as we also strengthen America. I know this, because the people in our congregation who have already organized a prayer service and a resource list and a thoughtful committee and are grappling with how to talk within our Jewish community, they are acting like giants.

This pandemic, and how we will live through it by taking care of each other even though we don’t know if we have to do this for weeks or months still – we can be giants. The grasshopper view is that we lack focus. We do creative things for a bit and soon we’ll run out steam, or we will do it shallowly with e-mails only and just appear to be active. But we do not have to be those grasshoppers. We can focus, on making sure every person in our community gets a phone call with regularity, and we can act with depth as we discover what people need in concrete ways or in emotional support.

And I know this, because there are people who are stepping up to make calls even though they have other commitments and are tired, and there are mental health professionals who are making their wisdom available to me and our leadership, and there are people generous in all kinds of ways, and these people are acting like giants.

The future of Jewish community and the synagogue, here and across America – we can be giants. The grasshopper view is that we lack focus, we try to do one thing that might appeal superficially and then another, and we don’t take the time to really root ourselves in a mission that we repeat over and over. The grasshopper view is that communities will just eat up an ever-diminishing set of resources and burn out our own leaders.

But we do not have to be those grasshoppers. We can focus, because rabbis in the hundreds around the country have been organizing ourselves with focus on how not just to survive but how to innovate during the pandemic.  Talking to each other and creating new networks out of nothing. Look at us, you here this Shabbat morning, recreating community on the fly every single day and week. Wait till you meet Sarit, our newest team member, a thoughtful educator and a social entrepreneur - she is already starting to guide us and focus us. And in the months leading into and out of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I will show you how deep and how giant is Judaism as a response to this time we are in, and how many incredible teachers there are for you around this country.

We are not grasshoppers. If we are not yet giants, morally and spiritually, I am here to tell you we can be, if we decide to go into the new lands together. I’m going. The lands ahead of us, whether it’s the landscape of justice in America or the landscape of the pandemic or the landscape of synagogues – they are good lands. They are flowing with milk and honey. It’s no question whether they are good or bad – they are good. But if you don’t believe that yet, the lands are what they just are. Our job is to go into them now. Even when we have to do that while staying physically inside our homes. As Calev said: yachol nuchal lo – we are capable. Because, us -- we are a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

Shabbat Shalom.

Parashat Sh'lach L'cha: For the New Graduates

If I were delivering the opening D'var Torah at graduation or commencement, I might say it like this...

Distinguished New Graduates, Mazal Tov!

In this week's parasha, Sh'lach L'cha, Moshe sends a small group of people out to scout out the future.  For quite some time, the big group has been in an intense and very organized learning environment (basically Mount Sinai).  There have been many classes on specific topics -- some of them immediately practical, but a lot of them somewhat theoretical.  The group's time has been highly structured -- they are only allowed to move from one area to another when there is a signal (a cloud moving in front of the camp).

At the same time, the Israelites have all known that there is a future goal in mind.  The Promised Land, the land of milk and honey.  They have heard about it, and they hear from time to time that this is the purpose of all that they are learning.  But it's out there, somewhere else, in the future.

So finally, God instructs Moshe to send out twelve leaders to get a first look at the future.  He gives them a series of questions (Numbers 13:18-20):  See what kind of land it is.  Are the people who live in it strong or weak?  Few or many?  Is the land good or bad?...Is the soil rich in nutrients or poor?  Are there trees or not?  Get up your strength and bring back some of the fruit of the land.

Who are these questions for?  Surely God has already told Moshe the answers.  Surely Moshe knows that the place they are heading is a good place.

But still, the scouts have to go out and see for themselves.  They have to discover, to experience, to gather data and reflect on it.  It will only be in the future a good land, if the people are ready to go there and make a good life there.

For you, graduates, this moment is like that.  You've been in school for a long time, learning according to our grown-up plan for you.  If you're finishing high school, you can look back on 13-15 years of us telling you where to go and when with the ring of a bell, five days a week for most of the day.  We have been promising you that it's all for a good purpose.  That when you reach adulthood, you will thrive.  You'll be able to take all of this learning, and go straight into the Promised Land of your own future.

But as much as we promise and teach, we know that it's not enough to get you to the Promised Land.  You'll be the ones going to scout out the future, and to move into it slowly or quickly, with confidence or concern.  And as much as we know how good the next part of your life can be, we know we can't do it for you.  That's how it was for us too, after all.

What's going to happen next for you?  We can't promise that everything will be good right away, or that you'll even believe us that there's a Promised Land for you.  After all, when Moshe sent out the scouts, ten of them came back afraid.  People heard them and said that it would be better to go backward, to regress.  It's true that school and work are hard, that the economy is tough, that being independent and even just doing your own laundry can be hard.  You might make mistakes.  You might be fearful at times, like the ten scouts were.

But we hope you'll find enough moments when you feel like the other two, Yehoshua and Kalev.  They said:  It's true, the new land looks challenging, but God is with us and if you look deep down, you know it's a good land and we can make it.

So we congratulate you for all you have done so far to be prepared.  We can't wait to see what you do next, what contributions you will make in your lives to the goodness of our world.  You're absolutely ready!  To take the next step, and to scout out the future even if it will take some time to get there.  You don't have to get there all at once.   Along the way, know how many people are here to hear about what you find, to support you when you fear, and to celebrate what you do and who you become.

Mazal tov to all the graduates of 5772!

Parashat Sh'lach L'cha: Lose the Battle, Win the War?

Here is the question my rav, Yossi Gordon, posed about this week's reading, in which Moshe sends out scouts to do reconnaissance on the Land of Israel ahead of the upcoming entry.  How could Moshe ask, "Is the country in which they dwell [i.e. the Canaanites] good or bad?" (Numbers 13:19).

Surely Moshe of all people knows that God is sending them toward a good land, flowing with milk and honey.  So what's the meaning of this part of the spies' charge?

Two possibilities.  One is that Moshe already knows what the scouts will say.  He gives them the illusion of choice, so they'll feel that the answer he wants them to get is really theirs.  It would be like an exercise in decision-making, a big choice made in safe conditions to build self-confidence.

Only it turns out they didn't come back and say what a good land it was!  Or, to be precise, ten of the twelve came back with a negative assessment of the land.

So the other possibility is that Moshe gave them a chance to fail, to come back with the wrong answer.  Which they did.

You can argue with Moshe's (and God's) strategy here.  A lot of damage happened as a result of this mission -- a whole generation ended up lost.  God made the people wander for forty years, until the fearful generation passed and a new more courageous Israelite people came of age.  I don't want to minimize that.

But maybe Moshe and God looked at it differently.  Already, the people were restless, impatient, impetuous.  They were in no condition just to follow a command to enter the land.  Suppose they entered right away, and then had to face big choices.  What if it all went wrong and could never be made right?

So Moshe and God decide to take the measure of the people.  Are they ready to see that the land is good?  If they are, then the mission will be successful -- entering the land, living by the Torah.  And everything would be all that much better because the triumphs, military and community-building and moral, would really belong to the people.

If the scouts would fail, then at least the disaster to follow would take place in the safety of the desert, under God's more immediate protection.

That's how it happened.  It looks like the battle was lost.  But perhaps this was had to happen to win the war (much) later, to enter the land successfully at last.

So it is with forks in the road, or with questions of maturity.  The road isn't always smooth.  Sometimes with our children, our students, our teams and groups, we have to test and see if the time is right.  If the people are ready.  By giving a real choice, knowing that failure now will be an option.  The opposite of success now isn't necessarily failure forever.  Rather, it's a setback for now, even a long now.  A setback played out in a safe place, under the care and concern of someone Moshe-like.  Willing to hang in with difficulties and difficult people, willing to teach, for the long haul.