Judaism never asked me to choose between identity and belonging

When I came out as a lesbian in 1991, my greatest guilt concerned ending my marriage and hurting my very good husband. I felt none of the guilt and shame that many queer people have about being sick, perverted, rejected by G-d or ostracized from a religious community. Even my family came around quickly. (I later found out that my grandparents played bridge with a lesbian couple for decades starting in the 1940s.)

Judaism had taught me how to live as a lesbian — and the people around me how to accept that. First, as a Jew, I already knew how to live as a minority. My parents taught through example how to decide whether to be open, quiet, or hidden in a hostile environment. My religion taught me to strive toward holiness with my whole being, and did not consider my body or my sexuality to be profane. My experience as a Jew taught me the erosive impact of the majority community assuming that everyone is just like them, how to guard my personal identity from it, and how to speak up for others who were marginalized. I learned that I got to define my Jewish identity, not the non-Jews who saw me as “Christian without Jesus,” or called Chanukah “the Jewish Christmas.” So many of my non-Jewish peers needed to choose between their religious affiliation and living authentically with non-straight identities.

In the community, a friend told me that she and her female partner were welcomed just like other mothers when they brought their children to religious school in the 1980s. I later found out that another friend had served as an openly gay rabbi in Altoona and Warsaw in the 1990s. I wondered if the acceptance was unique to Reform Judaism. Then another friend told me about coming out to his Orthodox rabbi: The rabbi held both of his hands and said, “I want you to keep coming to shul, and I will head the line of friends welcoming you here.”

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As I learned about LGBTQ+ history, I was proud and not too shocked by the outsized contributions of Jews: Alix Dobkin and Maxine Feldman in women’s music, Harvey Milk and Barney Frank in gay rights politics, Andrea Dworkin, Leslie Feinberg and Judith Butler in feminist writing … and of course there were so many more of us contributing to the larger world.

Bet Tikvah, founded in 1988, is Pittsburgh’s LGBTQ+ congregation, a vibrant community in which we are not a minority. It also became a welcoming community for other marginalized Jews in the early days, including interreligious and interracial couples. It was a place where queer Jews could gather and build community. I joined when I moved back to Pittsburgh in 2003.

I also prayed at Rodef Shalom Congregation without ever hiding, and at a synagogue in Morgantown, West Virginia, with a gay rabbi. But Bet Tikvah became my religious home.

As other congregations welcomed us more openly, Bet Tikvah’s membership has shifted toward Jews who are atypical in their gender identification, rather than their sexual orientation — at this moment in history especially, trans and non-binary people of all religions need safe havens.

Being a Jew also helped me to be open to an extremely rewarding relationship with a proudly Jewish transman. We talked about the troublesome passage in Leviticus: “You will not lie with a man as you would a woman.” This piece of Torah is one that many of us struggle with, of course. But there have been newer interpretations of it which do not condemn us. My partner also informed me that the Talmud includes discussion of how to integrate people with unusual genders into Jewish life — the Talmud!

Knowing so firmly who I was, not defining myself by how others saw me, I could maintain a lesbian sense of self while being with someone who no longer identified as a woman. And he, similarly, could be with a lesbian without feeling his masculinity
threatened.

When my beloved died last year, two questions arose: First, what would be written on his gravestone — he could not be listed as either the son or the daughter of his parents. The Jewish memorial company researched and found an answer. Second, would his body be prepared for burial as the man he identified as? Or as the woman he was born as? How wonderful it was to discover that the New Community Chevra Kadisha had a protocol for washing and caring for the bodies of trans and non-binary Jews. They were already prepared for us. Knowing that he would be respected, with a body that reflected both a masculine identity and a female history, made me prouder than ever to be a Jew. PJC

Beth Wallach is a psychologist living in Washington County.