Radical Torah

“You’re moving where?” they asked. “What in the world would even let you consider moving to Salt Lake City? Don’t you know that Utah is a redder state than Texas? How can you possibly feel like you’ll ever belong in Utah?” My friends were more than a little incredulous when I told them three years ago that Keren and I were moving to Salt Lake City. What kind of crazy stunt would I be pulling, being a Conservative rabbi and a lesbian, taking a position as a congregational leader in a state where WE would be known as “gentiles.” We would become outsiders in more ways than one. This was not an obvious choice for my career. And yet, somehow, it all made sense.

After spending the first year after ordination more or less in the closet, I promised my life partner, Keren, that we would never hide our relationship again in order to find a position. As I embarked on my job search, I determined that at the point where a congregation expressed enough interest in me to invite me for a visit, I would inform them of my partnered status. Because the rules in the Conservative Movement are still rather ambiguous in relationship to GLBT clergy, I knew I was taking a big risk, but I couldn’t possibly do my best with a congregation if I felt I was hiding a major part of who I am. Fortunately, more than one synagogue was willing to seriously consider my candidacy.

I requested to see the congregational questionnaire for Kol Ami in Salt Lake City on a whim. I’m originally from Denver, and Keren is from Phoenix, so Salt Lake appealed to our Western roots. When I learned more about the congregation, however, it began looking like less of a joke. A nice-sized community with Jewish roots going back nearly to the beginning of the settlement, and a congregation created by the merger of the local Reform and Conservative shuls in 1972, whose roots go back to the 1890s.

My first contact with Kol Ami was a phone interview with an English professor who co-chaired the search committee. At the end of the interview she asked, “So, do you think you’d like to proceed forward with this process?”

I gulped, and steeled myself emotionally. “Yes,” I replied. “There’s something I need to tell you first. I came out to myself at the end of rabbinical school. I’m gay.”

“We know that,” she cheerily replied.

“And I have a partner.”

“We know that, too. Before we began interviewing rabbis, this topic came up in the search committee, since we’re interviewing Reform rabbis, too. There was a big discussion about our willingness to consider a gay or lesbian candidate until the oldest member of the committee, a gentleman in his 80s stood up and spoke passionately that since Jews have always been on the forefront of major civil rights issues, standing up for the oppressed, how could we do any differently in this case? After everyone applauded, that was the end of the discussion. So, are you interested in participating in a group interview?”

How could I say no? To make a long story short, the congregation and the Jewish community were both wonderful. They brought Keren and me to visit; they made sure we knew that there really is a diverse and vibrant GLBT population in Salt Lake. The Democratic mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson, actually filmed a recruiting video for the congregation, mentioning that Salt Lake had a Jewish mayor and Utah had a Jewish governor before New York City or New York State ever did.

We talked honestly about how my arrival would be perceived, both in the Jewish community and in the community at large. The one thing that convinced us that this would be the right place for us were those who said, “If you come here, you will be able to make a huge difference, you’ll be a big fish in a small pond. You’ll really count.”

For so many of us looking for satisfaction in our career choices, that’s a powerful incentive. We want to feel like who we are and what we do really counts. We can choose to endure inconvenience, hardship, and even discrimination to put ourselves in a position to make a difference.

In this week’s Torah portion, Pinhas, Moses and Elazar the High Priest are instructed to conduct a census of the Israelites: “Count the heads of all the community of Israelites from twenty years and up by their fathers’ houses, everyone who goes out in the army of Israel. (Numbers 26:2)” While ostensibly they are to count “all the community of Israelites,” the latter half of the verse qualifies this statement by limiting the count to all males over the age of twenty, those who are eligible to be drafted for military service.

Just like the first census of the Israelites at the beginning of the Book of Numbers, women, children, slaves, resident foreigners, etc. aren’t actually counted in the census. Painfully, when we deal with the texts of antiquity, we are often confronted with a past that was male-dominated, sexist and exclusivist, reflecting the outlook of people at a particular point in time. Fortunately for us, we Jews have always been interpretive readers of text, not fundamentalist literalists. What the text meant 2,500 years ago is not what it was construed to mean 1,000 years ago, or what it has to mean today.

When the signers of the Declaration of Independence affixed their signatures 230 years ago to a document which affirmed that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” what was self-evident to them was that all free, white, property-owning, adult males were endowed with certain unalienable rights, as those were the individuals who were privileged with the status of citizenship. However, even if it was only unconsciously, Jefferson laid the groundwork for the later women’s movements and civil right’s movements to claim for themselves the basic tenet of equality.

So, too, this basic value in the Torah, that all people count, needs to be expanded in our day beyond the narrow literalist reading of the verse. This is the consummate Jewish act. The 19th century Hassidic master, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, known by his mystically oriented Torah commentary, Sefat Emet, The Language of Truth, offers a wonderful insight into the need for the two census activities in B’midbar. The first census, he says, was needed for the process of giving of the Torah; the second was related to the settlement in the Land of Israel. “Just as each person has a unique and special portion of the Torah, so too, each person has a designated portion in the land…Every census in the Torah is for the purpose of standing each person on his/her ‘root’ (the place of grounding which enables someone to reach upward to achieve their human potential and purpose).”

For the Sefat Emet, the census of the Torah is not merely for the mundane purpose of assembling troops to conquer the land of Israel, it has a higher and more mystical purpose of directing each individual to his or her destiny. We can almost imagine his vision of such a numbering process: “You, Number 602,434, Rachel daughter of Golda, here is your unique piece of Torah that you are meant to share with the world. Here is your land, your place in your community. Now go out, live your true potential, help create that bridge between the upper and lower realms which will pave the way to tikkun olam, repair of our broken world.”

We know, by the way, that this unambiguously male-dominated view of the world is not the last word in a dynamic, ever-evolving Torah. Even in this week’s portion, we have a rather limited case of the five daughters of Tzelophehad who challenge the biblical law that only sons may inherit the property of their fathers. When their case is decided, they prevail, and are allowed to inherit their father’s property. They, too, are made to count among the citizens of Israel, so much so, that like the chieftains of the Israelite tribes, they, too, are enumerated by name.

We arrived in Utah to a flurry of press. Keren and I were to be recorded in the public record by name. Not only was being a new rabbi news in religiously preoccupied Utah, but also the distinction of being a woman clergy in a state where that’s not the norm, AND being a lesbian meant that I was fair game for all the media. I was on the cover of all the major newspapers in town, interviewed on radio programs, invited to meet the governor (at the time Utah’s first woman governor), the mayor, and the heads of the LDS (Mormon) church, and participated on countless panel discussions in churches, schools, and public venues.

Has the publicity helped or hurt? It’s an old marketing axiom that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and overwhelmingly, the publicity was positive. It has also created a wonderful open door for GLBT individuals seeking a connection or reconnection with their own religious and spiritual identities. Within the congregation, lesbian and gay couples have felt freer to publicly acknowledge their own status, and many raised in less accepting faith traditions have become Jewish because they know that they can be part of a religious community which will accept them in their entirety. One gentleman drove nearly 200 miles each way weekly for nine months in order to complete our conversion program. Overall, we have about two dozen openly gay and lesbian Jews and their partners as part of our growing synagogue community.

Allowing others to be counted, to help them reach their full potential, to help them find their unique piece of Torah, and the community in which they can become grounded and establish their own roots, is the greatest blessing of this position and this congregation. While every place comes with its own problems and challenges, we are managing to learn from experiences of estrangement to become more welcoming to individuals and families of all sorts, and are becoming a better community as a result.

Shabbat shalom.

Rabbi Tracee Rosen lives with her partner, Keren Goldberg, in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she is senior rabbi at Congregation Kol Ami, the largest synagogue in the state. She is a graduate of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in California. She was a banker for 13 years before beginning rabbinical studies.