Queer Uncertainty
Last week, I did something I almost always avoid: I hopped on a Zoom at 4pm on Friday. While Shabbat is now much later in Berlin – I had until almost eight o’clock – I’m categorically opposed to taking any meeting on a Friday afternoon. Even though I can make the logistics of shabbos prep work around meetings, it feels wrong and stressful. Why am I on a call when I should be sweeping or cooking or showering?
But for this Zoom, I would have cut it even closer to Shabbat: I had been asked to speak on a panel at Yale’s Jewish Women’s Conference. Not attending this conference in person is something I consider high on my list of “moved to Berlin” casualties – the lineup was full of my Jewish feminist heroes, some of whom are also my close teachers and friends. The panel I was on, with Laynie Soloman and Joy Ladin, was called “Building a Queer Jewish Practice: Visions of Queer Judaism(s).” I know, right!? I couldn’t possibly turn that down.
Something that crystallized for me during the panel was when my friend/teacher Lexi asked the panelists a question about how we can cope with feeling like we have to represent our own visions of queer Judaism when both of those terms – and what they mean in combination – are so highly contested and contextual. I heard in Lexi’s question (and, as I said then, this could be entirely me projecting!) a sense of responsibility, a calling to be, as it were, on shlichus to convince Jews about queerness or queers about Judaism or, as I think is true for many of the people in that room and many readers of this newsletter, that “queer Judaism” ought to mean xyz. (For example: should involve halacha, can reject framings of issur.)
In thinking about this, I realized that what I had before then been thinking about as a personal project was actually something I am politically committed to as well. (Is there a relationship between the personal and the political?? Someone should write or say something about that.) I’ve been working, ever since I got smicha and especially since I moved to Germany, on getting comfortable trying things and adjusting. As an anxious lover of certainty, doing things I am less than confident I will feel right about is very difficult. But I always feel better when I open up that uncertainty.
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