Divrei Torah Given In Honor of Pride 2025, By LGBTQ+ Members at CBI

D’var Torah by Jan Netter

My name is Jan Nettler. Shabbat shalom.

You may have noticed that I’m wearing all white. We do that on Yom Kippur, and I will be talking about Yom Kippur. Yes I know it’s a little early for that. Or, depending on how you look at the calendar, it’s a little late.

I grew up as a boy, but as you can see, I am a woman. I’m a lot older than the others who will be speaking today. I lived in a time when it was extremely difficult to come out as trans. All of the images I saw of people like me were either hated or laughed at. I did not want to be hated, and I did not want to be laughed at.

Occasionally people have commented that making my transition must have been so hard. I had spent so much of my life in pain hiding who I was. Ultimately it is much easier to live as I am than hiding who I am. But not everything was easy. Among other things, my sister rejected me and refused to allow me around her children. I wasn’t even invited to her son’s Bar Mitzvah.

While I grew up Jewish and had a Bar Mitzvah, being Jewish was not a part of my life. I lived far from my Jewish family. I didn’t go to a synagogue nor celebrate holidays for about 50 years. I knew I was Jewish, but I didn’t think about it very much. All of that changed 6 years ago when I became a born again Jew, but that’s another story.

For the past 33 years I have been active at the Unitarian Society. I have given several sermons there. When we study Torah here, we often bring in writings from several sources. For a sermon, we do the same. The main topic for one of my sermons was forgiveness. I was reading a 2 page meditation written by my former minister that spoke about during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are called to make peace with those we hurt or wronged or injured. She writes that it is not about smoothing things over or compromises, but the goal is truth, about taking ownership, about wholeness and holiness. About restoration.

But then she asks us to imagine what you will do when someone knocks on your door or when your phone rings or you get a letter. Someone is reaching out to you to ask for forgiveness. How will you react? It can be awkward. How will you participate in the restoration. It should not be so easy as just saying it’s ok, when maybe it isn’t ok. It is not about comfort, it is about truth. She asks us to imagine healing from within.

As I was reading and rereading this mediation., being totally absorbed in its messages, the phone rang!! My sister was calling. I had no idea that it was Yom Kippur that evening. My sister was calling to apologize for the way she treated me. I’ll never forget this one short sentence she said.

She said “I could have done better.” I could have done better.

What an unexpected and holy moment that was for me. Restoration.

Rabbi Reuban Zellerman points out that twilight is neither day nor night, but in-between. He calls people like me the twilight people. He offers this payer:

“Blessed are You, God of all, who brings on the twilight.” Amen

Pride Vort by Elias Molitors Bergman

The very first verses of today’s parsha are about ritual impurity and birth- how long the person who gave birth is tamei afterwards is determined by the sex of the infant; 7 days for a male and 14 days for a female. One might assume from this that the Torah holds by a neat, binary sex-gender system. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. When the Talmud looks at these verses it immediately asks- what if the infant is something else?1 No fanfare or angst, just acknowledgement that we need to respond appropriately to a world that contains more than female and male.

Sometimes, it can be affirming to try to see myself reflected in the rabbinic conceptions of the varieties of gender. Thousands of years ago, my ancestors also knew that there are more than two ways of having a body, of interacting with social norms, of growing and changing throughout your life.

But mere acknowledgement of existence is not enough, especially when these categories are described by people who were not living within them. And even in a modern egalitarian framework, there are many cases where I feel that I’m supposed to pick a side, or filter my experience through the lens of cis reality.

For example: What gendered brakha do non-binary people say in the morning blessings?

Is niddah (which we just learned about in our parsha) more connected to womanhood, or what particular bodies do?

I can’t just dismiss or ignore these questions, but neither do I want my relationship to tradition, to halakha, to be about solving a “problem”, or fitting into something where trans people are out of place.

Laynie Soloman, one of the creators of the Trans Halakha Project, distinguishes between euphoric and dysphoric halakha. ‘Euphoric halakha’, they write, is “the process by which we uncover legal principles and applications that enable us to find authentic, affirming, joyful and liberatory expressions of who we are. Instead of asking, “what are the points of dissonance between our tradition…and trans experiences?”, we must ask, “what are the profound opportunities for revelation that trans people can offer?”²

The work of trans scholars and trans poskim has been essential to me as nonbinary trans person who wants to live a life guided by halakha. I am deeply inspired by the hiddushim, the insights, that emerge from responses to the rich, varied, and completely normal lives of other trans people.

There are so many questions I never even thought to ask which can deepen my relationship with Torah, with tradition, with Hashem.

Euphoric halakha reminds me that living in my wholeness is part of the continuous revelation of Torah.

^[1]  bNiddah 40a

^[2]  Laynie Solomon, “Euphoric Halakhah: The Trans Halakhah Project,” published on Evolve, 2023. https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/euphoric-halakhah-the-trans-halakhah-project/

Pride D’var by Abigail

I'm trans and bi, and I grew up with rigid and literal interpretations of the verses in Torah that condemn people like me. Based on those verses, my family believed that queer people should be executed by stoning. After leaving that culture behind, I read so many progressive reinterpretations of those verses. They said that perhaps those verses don't apply now, maybe they only apply to some people. Maybe we apply the verses in a way that adapts to each individual, or maybe we reinterpret them so narrowly as to be meaningless. Maybe we re-read them to mean something else entirely, or we say that another verse overrides them…. There are a lot of options, but none of them felt truly convincing to me. All the progressive reinterpretations felt like motivated reasoning to twist the verses away from the p'shat, but the clear and direct meaning of the verses was still there looking back at me.

What finally helped was Molly Moses teaching me some halakha about tefillin. Traditionally, the relevant verse in the Torah is interpreted that one must use their right hand to lay tefillin on their left arm. However, at least by the time of the Talmud, it was accepted that if you were left-handed, you would use your left hand to lay tefillin on your right arm. The mitzvah was thus reinterpreted more abstractly: each person should fulfill it in the way that is right for them. Learning this astounded me, first because of the clear application to the mitzvot of how we should dress and who we should love, but then again with the realization that, of course, I should be comfortable with reinterpreting mitzvot. Our tradition does it all the time!

• Circumcision is required for many converts, but if it was already done, they're pricked with a needle. Many rituals require grape or grain products, but if you're unable to consume those, you get something else. If medically you cannot fast, your mitzvah of fasting on Yom Kippur is fulfilled through eating. Each mitzvah must adapt to the individual.

  
  

• We are commanded to love our neighbors and honor our parents, but that looks different, sometimes wildly different, in every situation and relationship. Each mitzvah must be adapted to our circumstances.

  
  

• We are commanded to kill and sacrifice animals for a variety of reasons and occasions, but we now instead just pray in place of sacrifice. Each mitzvah must adapt to the actual world that we live in.

  
  

• Traditionally, women were exempted from many mitzvot, even some mitzvot that were clearly commanded without exception. This is because the lifestyle and child care that that patriarchal culture expected of them did not allow them the time and flexibility to fulfill those mitzvot. For all we may reject that culture now, we see that if a mitzvah does not make sense for you, it cannot apply to you.

  
  

• We are clearly and unambiguously commanded in the Torah to put rebellious children to death. We reinterpret and narrow this over and over until this mitzvah means nothing at all and can be thrown away. We do the same to many other mitzvot involving the death penalty. A bad mitzvah must be discarded.

  
  

All that said, the Torah is not in heaven, but in our hands. And our hands and minds have to grapple with each and every mitzvah. We have no less license to reinterpret verses affecting our queerness than we do to reinterpret any other verses. I must tweak, stretch, and mold the mitzvot about my identity, just as all of us must tweak, stretch, and mold every mitzvah.

Pride Sameach! By Lars Howell

I’d like to take us back in time, either a few months ago or a few thousand years depending on how we’d like to count. To the moment where Moses first encounters and speaks to God (Exodus 3). Specifically, I want to talk about names in this scene. The conversation starts with God saying “I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” But then something interesting happens. Moses asks how God would like to be known. “When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘By which name?’ what shall I say to them?”

And God said to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh,” continuing, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you.’” (often translated as “I will be what I will be”). This moment is God choosing a name for themselves for the first time and asserting that it is the name they should be known by.

And I think this is a section of the Torah where perhaps God is the most relatable. There’s a Kabbalistic idea that there are many attributes to God that are all wound up in one being but one or more may be forward facing at any moment, and I think the same is true of people. When I last visited my Mom, there was someone coming over to do some work on the house, and she pulled me aside and asked, “how do you want me to talk about you, as my son or as my child?” Being trans is constantly negotiating how we are seen in the world and how we want others to perceive or interact with us. Putting one face forward. Choosing which name to be known by. And we all do similar things throughout our lives. Maybe you use a nickname with your friends but would never use it at work. Or you speak differently to strangers than to your family. It’s not that one version of you is a lie but rather that you bring different parts of yourself forward. And, thinking about names again, people are changing names constantly throughout Tanakh, Jacob becomes Israel, Naomi says to call her Mara, Avram and Sarai become Avraham and Sarah. It’s everywhere. When you convert to Judaism you get to choose a new name, you get to say, “this is an aspect of myself or my family or my life I would like to represent”, or just “this is something I think sounds cool.” I think that, in this moment of Moses looking at God manifesting as a burning bush, the Torah is teaching us how to interact with someone whose sense of self we don’t fully understand. Moses looks at God and asks, “how do you want to be known?”

Shabbat Shalom and Pride Sameach!

Pride D’var by Emet Marwell

I am queer, trans, and Jewish. My synagogue community growing up was very inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community. As I was starting to explore and understand for myself my own queer and trans identities, I knew I would be accepted within my Jewish community. But I also knew that some Jewish communities aren’t as accepting and exclude LGBTQ+ folks based on Jewish texts. In particular, I was worried about my trans identity because I knew I wanted to start gender-affirming hormones and have gender-affirming surgery but Judaism prohibits body modification. Even though I knew my own Jewish community would be supportive of my queer and trans self, it was crucial to me to find out what Judaism itself says about my identities. I searched through Jewish texts looking for any type of validation of my queer and trans self. There were three things that I found: 

1. Psalm 15, verses 1-2 says: “Lord, who may sojourn in Your tent, who may dwell on Your holy mountain? He who lives without blame, who does what is right, and in his heart acknowledges the truth.” The Hebrew word for “truth” is “emet” — the name I chose for myself.

   
   

2. The concept of pikuach nefesh, the preservation of life, which says almost any Jewish law can be broken to save a life. Gender-affirming hormones and surgery were what I needed to live. The choice was modify my body or not exist at all. And beyond just allowing us to break a Jewish law to save a life, pikuach nefesh actually OBLIGATES us to do so. Judaism was telling me I MUST receive gender-affirming health care, that is what God has commanded.

   
   

3. All people are made b’tzelem elohim, in God’s image. And that includes me in all my queerness and all my transness. I, too, am made in God’s image.