RABBI'S CORNER

Same-Sex Marriages and Queer Shabbat

A Queer Shabbat parallel to Amsterdam's yearly Gay Pride hasn't only become a regular minhag for Beith Ha'Chidush, but it directly leads to the question of Jewish identity. BHC represents a community which doesn?t distinguish between sexual orientations. Homosexuals and heterosexuals have equal rights. Recently I had the privilege of officiating at the first Jewish same sex-marriage in the Netherlands. Two men - an Israeli and a South African - sanctified each other under the Chuppah. I am very proud to have had a share in this holy event.
Many guests from Israel and South Africa came to the wedding, including not only a number of gay friends of the couple, but also the families of both partners. Parents, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins had tears in their eyes when the rings were exchanged, the Ketubah was read aloud and the glass was broken. In the conversations afterwards, everybody regretted that Jewish same sex-marriages are still impossible in their countries. Both families of the two men have gone through quite some crises of partnership and divorce. But the relationship of their gay sons turned out to be the steady rock in the family web ? the longest enduring relationship of all, still sparkling from being in love.

Without the secular laws of the Netherlands and various other western countries, Jewish tradition would never have come so far. So far? Some Jews consider it the end of Jewish religion and morality. As for myself, together with other liberal rabbis, I see is as a proof that without the blessings of secular influences, religion would turn into a rigid tradition. However, I also see that a secular system with no religious-ethical grounding would lead to emptiness and lack of meaning. For Jewish weddings are not about 'rights' which the partners receive by getting married, but rather about a sacred bond of 'chosen obligations'. After all, they establish a 'Jewish home'.

What do we mean by 'holy'? What is kadosh? These are questions we have often talked about at BHC. Holiness starts with the sense of transcendence: when a human being grasps that he is more than just himself within the narrow limits of moral autonomy, when he rises above and beyond himself and gets aware of the sphere in which the purpose becomes perceptible: a purpose that God has laid into each person but that naturally reaches into others' lives. Therefore the conscience for community and community values - i.e. responsibility, being a responsibility for the whole - is inherently connected with holiness. Kol Yisrael arevim ze laze - 'All the people of Israel are responsible for each other.' Responsibility for each other is the deepest fundament for Jewish identity. But at the same time responsibility is a most important criterion for Jewish renewal.

Of course I am happy to bless gay and lesbian couples when they increase the holiness of the people of Israel. And of course I get sore feelings when couples wish a Chuppah for other reasons. But such people have never showed up at BHC. The mutual responsibilities listed in the Ketubah would be too meaningful for them.

By the way, now that an Israeli-South African couple has had the first same-sex Chuppah in the Netherlands, it is really time that Dutch Jewish gays and lesbians come out of the closet! My rabbinic assistant, Clary Rooda, will hold a Shiur at the Queer Shabbat about Ketubot for same-sex couples. Dutch Jewish gays and lesbians can get informed on how it could work.

Dare to sanctify each other - dare to do your Kiddushin!

Have a wonderful summer,
Shalom uVracha!
Rabbi Elisa, July 2008

Rabbi's corner Febuary 2008

Our own language

BHC's new sidur, Sidur ha'Chidush, was sold out within a few days. This shows that people are longing for new approaches to Jewish liturgy: not a submission to a fixed ritual in Hebrew, 'because it has always been practiced this way', but rather an explanation by various points of view. Spiritual and religious approaches are for us of equal value as cultural or philosophical ones. But most important: the individual experience is our starting point. Following this path, we form a community in which everybody contributes to our community by being truly him or herself.

However, this demands a lot of knowledge. It is not accidental that BHC is a community hungry for learning. Renewal means in the first place a deepening of conscience and knowledge in order to be able to make choices. Choices for yourself, concerning your own person, but also where you stand in the Jewish tradition, and as a consequence, where the Jewish tradition should stand in today?s world as a whole. In this context it is very important that we find our own language, i.e. a language that is not determined by Christian interpretations of words like 'belief', 'revelation' or 'holy.' We want to make our own adequate translation of these words.

Judaism never understood itself in the first place as a 'belief in a God who supplies for grace and forgiveness', but as a spiritual attitude towards the world and its creatures. Therefore, Judaism has always had a secular strain directed towards worldly affairs. A beautiful example of the secular option even within the liturgy are the three brachot, the blessings around the Sh'ma (the affirmation of the oneness of God). These three brachot form a kernel of the service. They constitute in fact a philosophic pattern of conscience
- for the universe (creation),
- for justice and ethics (revelation of Torah and being chosen by love),
- for freedom (redemption from slavery and other obstacles for human development).

This pattern has truly determined European civilization as a whole. Our Sidur acknowledges the Jewish contribution to western thought among others by short introductions into the system of Spinoza, or by quotations of Einstein and Immanuel Kant, in which the pattern of the three brachot clearly shines through.

In 2008, BHC will again dedicate time and special moments to the fact that Judaism should not be understood as a faith alone. For the fall we have planned a series of 'secular Mincha?s' ? a new form of service for a debate between religious and secular Jews. Meanwhile; the shiurim (lessons) about how to use the new BHC Sidur and about the contents of Jewish renewal in the Netherlands will continue. Besides, Jewish education for the next generation, facilitated by the project Ledor wador, plays a growing role in BHC. By asking ourselves, what do we want to teach our children, we teach ourselves the fundaments on which we can make choices.

Shalom uVracha,
Rabbi Elisa

Rabbi's corner July 2007

Renewal is a Shift of Emphasis

Jewish tradition has always succeeded in renewing itself over the centuries. This renewal has always been prompted by urgent topical questions about changing circumstances of life. But when you look more closely at the history of renewal within the Jewish tradition, you see that it has never involved incorporating something completely different. It is always a change of emphasis. While the Torah, for instance, was about the shared values in the land of Israel, later on the Talmud discussed the shared values among Jewish societies in the diaspora.

In our time too, renewal is mainly a shift of emphasis. Even so, such shifts may be perceived as very threatening. I noticed this not so long ago during a debate about present-day Jewish identity. Ido Abram recalled the ‘five-slice pie chart’ he had devised, consisting of the five elements that served at the time of his research in the early 1990s to determine Jewish identity in the Netherlands:
1) Jewish culture (in the widest sense, in which religion is one of the many pieces of the mosaic), 2) Israel, 3) Shoah and antisemitism, 4) one’s own personal history, and 5) the influence of Dutch culture and one’s surroundings.

I responded that in some circles, such as Beit Ha’Chidush, the accents of Jewish identity have shifted since then:

1) Instead of the loose definition of ‘Jewish culture’, BHC emphasises the Jewish religion again (albeit with different spiritual and intellectual accents than in the past);
2) Instead of focusing mainly on ‘Israel’, our gaze is now fixed more on Europe, starting with Jewish life in the Netherlands and bound up with the attempt to define a European Jewish identity;
3) Instead of concerning ourselves with ‘Shoah and antisemitism’ there is now a greater interest in the positive content of Jewish tradition and intellectual history in relation to modern Western society. As a result of these three shifts of emphasis, we also tend to place a different construction on 4) our ‘personal history’ and 5) the ‘influence of Dutch culture’, or of ‘non-Jewish culture and our surroundings’.

These remarks provoked unexpectedly vehement responses from other participants. The Israeli professor Athalya Brenner demanded indignantly: ‘Am I as a secular Israeli still a Jew?’ In other words, she wanted to know whether there was still any place for secular Jews within these new emphases. And Rabbi Tzvi Marx accused me of presenting an ‘imperial vision’ – a vision oriented towards Europe, and thus supposedly against Israel.

Leaving aside the fact that there is probably no other Jewish community in the Netherlands that concerns itself as intensively as BHC with the question of how secular and religious Jews can engage one another in a new dialogue – and the fact that there is probably nowhere else where the complex reality of the Jewish relationship with Israel receives as much attention as within BHC – I was still taken aback by the ferocity of these reactions. Evidently the shifts of emphasis I had mentioned had touched on taboos; it seems that a fixed Jewish identity has been defined, that many have appropriated as their own.

This in itself is reason enough to think about new initiatives that can lead to a true Jewish identity that can be experienced in every detail. What a great thing it is that Beit Ha’Chidush provides a forum for such explorations – and will hopefully expand this role further in the future.

Shalom uVracha!
Rabbi Elisa, July 2007