Category: Gender & Sexual Identity

I kept falling into this poetic form of idolatry

Ritual helps us pay attention. From the joy of a recovery to the grief of a funeral, ritual helps us inhabit the breadth of human experience.

Building queer family is an act of resistance.

It could have been me. I could have retreated to the safe space of a gay bar or club in order to dance with a man, to hold his hand, to kiss him in safety. One of my safe havens, a safe space for LGBT people like me, has come under attack. My lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender brothers and sisters have been killed. And it could have been me. 

When my friends Ella and Natasha were getting married, I wanted to offer them music for their wedding based on traditional biblical text. The challenge was that there was, of course, no explicit biblical narrative of a same-sex marriage. 

I believe that the heart of Pride has to do with love. In the midst of the book of Leviticus we find the three words: “v’ahavtah l’re’akha camokha”—You shall love your fellow as yourself.

This Sunday, at the Ethical Society in Philadelphia, Ritualwell goes offline to celebrate Jewish women writers with a special program called "Embodied Ritual, Embodied Writing." The very special woman who inspired the endowment of this program is a poet named Henny Wenkart. The Wenkart Writer-in-Residence program was established through Kolot: The Center for Jewish Women's and Gender Studies, at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.

We shared ideas for new rituals and prayers and worked together in hevrutah (with partners) to create new additions that honor, celebrate, and offer support for the experiences of transgender and genderqueer people.

We wanted a traditional Jewish wedding, but, as two women, we weren’t a traditional Jewish couple. 

Ritualwell maintains a large collection of rituals, prayers and blessings that addresses the concerns and life experiences of people in LGBTQ communities. As a progressive Jewish site, our goal is to present LGBTQ material as integral to contemporary Jewish life.