Tag Archives: text study
Parashiyot Vayakhel and Pekudei: The Power of Embodied Love
Jews read sections of the Torah each week, and these sections, known as parshiyot, inspire endless examination year after year. Each week we will bring you regular essays examining these portions from a queer perspective, drawn from the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Torah Queeries online collection. This week, Rabbi Jill Hammer sees in the construction of the mishkan a model for a community where everyone, including and especially LGBT Jews, can contribute their own gifts.
Creative Common/David Burton
In the traditional Jewish community, queer people are often asked “What is your justification for being a queer Jew?” as if queer Jews are a controversial idea rather than a life form. This question may in part stem from an internalization of the model of Sinai, in which ideas are set forth or decried based on covenantal aims. Yet in the parshiyot of Vayakhel-Pekudei, we find a different model for what it means to be a sacred community, one radically different than the model we see at Sinai, and one that tends toward acknowledging people as bodies as well as ideas.
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Parashat Ki Tisa: Dancing at Sinai
Jews read sections of the Torah each week, and these sections, known as parshiyot, inspire endless examination year after year. Each week we will bring you regular essays examining these portions from a queer perspective, drawn from the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Torah Queeries online collection. This week, Rabbi Jacob Staub looks at the narrative of the Golden Calf in search of a welcoming tradition.
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I remember vividly the way, as a nine-year-old student at an Orthodox yeshiva in the Bronx, I was troubled when we first studied Parashat Ki Tisa. How could the Israelites have been so myopically impatient?! They had been witness to the plagues. They had been delivered out of Egyptian bondage. They had sung God’s praises on the shore of the Sea while watching their Egyptian pursuers drown. And now, asked to wait a mere forty days while Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, they couldn’t wait? And. . . they needed a golden calf to worship? Continue reading
Note: The opinions expressed here are the personal views of the author. All comments on MyJewishLearning are moderated. Any comment that is offensive or inappropriate will be removed. Privacy Policy
Parashat Terumah: The Gift of Safe Space
Jews read sections of the Torah each week, and these sections, known as parshiyot, inspire endless examination year after year. Each week we will bring you regular essays examining these portions from a queer perspective, drawn from the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Torah Queeries online collection. This week, Y. Gavriel A. Levi Ansara finds deep spiritual meaning in the instructions given to Moses for building the Tabernacle.
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Parashat Terumah opens with G-d speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai and commanding him in meticulous detail regarding the construction of the Mishkan, or “tabernacle,” the portable dwelling place of G-d’s presence that the Israelites could promptly assemble, dismantle, transport, and then reassemble during their sojourn in the desert.
G-d tells Moses: “Daber el Bnai Yisrael veyikchu li terumah me’et kol ish asher yidvenu libo tikchu et terumati./ Speak to the Children of Israel and have them bring Me an offering. Take My offering from everyone whose heart impels him to give.” (Exodus 25:2) Hashem continues by commanding Moses to acquire fifteen materials for the construction of the Mishkan — each item a gift or offering (terumah), and each to be brought by someone “whose heart impels him.” The offerings include gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple, and red-dyed wool; flax, goat hair, and animal skins; acacia wood, olive oil, spices, and gems. This lengthy description of the offerings necessary for the Mishkan emphasizes the multiplicity and diversity of color and material, a symbolic acknowledgment that sacred community cannot exist without embracing the unique experiences and identities of all Jews. Continue reading
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Bathroom Blessing Blues
Last Hanukkah my mother gave me a decorative wall hanging with the text of Asher Yatzar, also known as the bathroom blessing, the most hilarious benediction in the Jewish canon to any Hebrew school student. In a liturgical tradition with hundreds of formulas for giving gratitude to God at various special occasions, perhaps it should come as no surprise that traditional Judaism urges us to thank God each time we successfully emerge from the toilet. But tell that to a school age child. Or to my grown up self, trying not to giggle at my mother’s gift.
Photos: Bonnie Rosenbaum
My mother does not practice Judaism and does not read Hebrew. But every year for Hanukkah, in a heroic act of motherly love, she ships appropriately-themed gifts across the country for both myself and my Labrador. The dog got a stuffed dreidel. I got a ceramic placard with the words of Asher Yatzar. I’m not sure she knew what it was.
Like most Americans, I was raised with what I consider a completely normal level of neurotic shame surrounding bathroom functions. An integral part of my toilet training were the instructions to close the door behind me, pull up my pants when I’m done, and don’t talk about what I did afterwards, especially not at the dinner table.
And, like most gender-variant people, that primer of bathroom shame was coated with an extra layer of fear and confusion: Will I scare someone in the ladies’ room today? Will I be safe in the men’s room? Is sitting down to pee an affront to my already insecure masculinity? Continue reading
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Parashat Mishpatim: Revolution is the Easy Part
Jews read sections of the Torah each week, and these sections, known as parshiyot, inspire endless examination year after year. Each week we will bring you regular essays examining these portions from a queer perspective, drawn from the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Torah Queeries online collection. This week, Kerrick Lucker discusses how LGBT Jews can examine their own behavior, and learn to treat one another more justly.
Creative Common/yanni
It’s one thing to break down barriers of oppression. It’s quite another to build up a community of shared liberation. This is what Moses and the People of Israel are learning in this week’s Torah portion, parashat Mishpatim.
A shared sense of community sometimes arises naturally out of shared oppression, but when liberation happens – and we start to experience the brisk wind of real freedom – that sense of community often quickly dissolves. Freedom is hard work. Self-governance is hardest of all. People under the yoke of oppression seldom think about this in the face of all of freedom’s obvious benefits, but oddly enough, once you’re out in the desert and having to find your own food and make your own laws and mediate your own conflicts, there can be a strange yearning for the old days in mitzrayim, the narrow place. Continue reading
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Parashat Yitro: The First Commandment Revisited
Torah Queery: A Queer Take on the Weekly Torah Portion
Jews read sections of the Torah each week, and these sections, known as parshiyot, inspire endless examination year after year. Each week we will bring you regular essays examining these portions from a queer perspective, drawn from the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Torah Queeries online collection. This week, Rabbi Seth Goren revisits the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, and what Judaism demonstrates about families of choice.
Creative Common/dMad
The giving of the Ten Commandments is a vividly spectacular event. The combination of lightening, thunder, smoke, and blaring horns at Mount Sinai echo and flash across time, setting the perfect backdrop for the divine enunciation of Aseret HaDibrot (as they are called in rabbinic texts).
But Jewish tradition teaches that the First Commandment given in the Bible appears not in this week’s Parshat Yitro, but all the way back in Genesis 1:28. After their creation, the first human beings are commanded to “be fruitful and multiply.” Continue reading
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Parashat Bo: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are
Jews read sections of the Torah each week, and these sections, known as parshiyot, inspire endless examination year after year. Each week we will bring you regular essays examining these portions from a queer perspective, drawn from the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Torah Queeries online collection. This week, Amy Soule explains how coming out might be our very first, and perhaps greatest, mitzvah.
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Milk may have been designed as a secular movie but if you recall one of its (in)famous lines, you might also be reminded of God’s commandment to the Children of Israel before the final plague was visited on the Egyptians: “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Exodus 12:21-23 gives our ancestors their first collective mitzvah. They are asked to slaughter a sheep and smear its blood on the lintels of their home to ensure their homes will be protected when the Angel of Death appears.
Note: The opinions expressed here are the personal views of the author. All comments on MyJewishLearning are moderated. Any comment that is offensive or inappropriate will be removed. Privacy Policy
Parashat Vaera: Into Life
Jews read sections of the Torah each week, and these sections, known as parshiyot, inspire endless examination year after year. Each week we will bring you regular essays examining these portions from a queer perspective, drawn from the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Torah Queeries online collection. This week, Jay Michaelson looks to LGBT Jewish liberation as a demonstration of Judaism’s fundamental commitment to life.
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The exodus from Egypt has symbolized the movement from servitude to freedom for generations. Whether for African-American slaves or for our own gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender elders, the story resonates far beyond its Israelite particularity to any struggle for liberation.
There is another aspect to yetziat mitzraim (the Exodus from Egypt), though, beyond the move from bondage to freedom. After all, as many Jewish scholars have noted, freedom is the beginning of the Israelite quest, not the end of it. The parting of the Red Sea is a cinematic moment, but it is not the climactic one: the real point of the story comes at Mount Sinai. Egypt is the womb, and the Red Sea is the birth canal — but it is at Sinai where our people comes of age and begins its forty-year adolescence. (Only upon entering the land of Israel can it be said to have attained adulthood.) Continue reading
Note: The opinions expressed here are the personal views of the author. All comments on MyJewishLearning are moderated. Any comment that is offensive or inappropriate will be removed. Privacy Policy
Parashat Vayechi: Uncovering Joseph’s Bones
Jews read sections of the Torah each week, and these sections, known as parshiyot, inspire endless examination year after year. Each week we will bring you regular essays examining these portions from a queer perspective, drawn from the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Torah Queeries online collection. This week, Rabbi Jill Hammer takes comfort in the promise of eventual redemption in Joseph’s bones.
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Joseph is a popular biblical character to “queer” — because rabbinic midrash claims he curls his hair, paints his eyes, and is as beautiful as his mother, Rachel (Genesis Rabbah 24), and also because he is one of the rare biblical men known for not sleeping with a woman (the lovely wife of Potiphar, who attempts to seduce him). But it’s not the living Joseph I want to queer — it’s the dead Joseph. Joseph’s bones, to be exact.
At the end of Parashat Vayechi, the very end of Genesis, Joseph lies dying. He has moved his entire family to Egypt to save them from famine, and he has rescued the whole land from hunger. Though his father, Jacob, was buried in Canaan, Joseph will be buried in Egypt. He is, after all, an Egyptian vizier. However, Joseph commands his family to take his bones with them when they eventually leave Egypt and return to the land of Israel: “When God has remembered you, you shall raise up my bones from this place.” (Gen. 50:25) Continue reading
Note: The opinions expressed here are the personal views of the author. All comments on MyJewishLearning are moderated. Any comment that is offensive or inappropriate will be removed. Privacy Policy
Joseph: Liberation of a Soul
Jews read sections of the Torah each week, and these sections, known as parshiyot, inspire endless examination year after year. Each week we will bring you regular essays examining these portions from a queer perspective, drawn from the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Torah Queeries online collection. This week, Mijael Vera considers what the Torah’s careful documentation of Joseph’s unusual wardrobe might reveal.
Creative Common/Heather Quintal
In this week’s portion, we return once again to the story of Joseph – a story in which the connecting thread shows that whatever is normally deemed absurd comes to happen and in which literal and symbolic boundaries are repeatedly crossed. The servant (Joseph) becomes master, and the master (Pharoah) bows down to the servant. But it is in the psychological realm that boundary-crossing is most significant, for it is through a deep psychological analysis of Joseph that we come to truly understand him. Continue reading
Note: The opinions expressed here are the personal views of the author. All comments on MyJewishLearning are moderated. Any comment that is offensive or inappropriate will be removed. Privacy Policy
