This is My God (Pride Shabbat)
As part of our series of events to honor Pride month many of you attended the interfaith conversation I hosted with Brother Keith about our experiences as gay religious leaders.
When I spoke with some of you after the panel the question was posed how, as a gay person, I could possibly believe in God, given how hostile religious institutions have been towards people like me.
This question struck me, not just as a gay person, but as a human being. Given the violence done in the name of religion, how can I…how can anyone…consider themselves religious?!
Before I respond, a little context: though LGTBQ Pride month is celebrated these days with a popular parade supported by corporate sponsors, it wasn’t always this way: the reason we celebrate in June is to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a spontaneous act of resistance, at a time same-sex relationships were punished as crimes.
This uprising became known as the major turning point in the Gay Liberation Movement. Judaism and other religions, too, were countercultural in their founding: they arose as spontaneous acts of resistance to challenge an oppressive status quo, and offer a prophetic vision of a just and liberated future.
As we sang Mi Camocha tonight, we recounted one of the most powerful moments in the Jewish Liberation Movement as our ancestors leave Egypt under their revolutionary leader, Moses. They stand as the Reed Sea parts, and – in awe of their miraculous liberation, proclaim: “Ze eli” / This is my God!
Rashi, quoting a midrash, famously writes:
God revealed Godself in God’s glory to [the Israelites], and they pointed at God with their finger. By the sea, [even] a maidservant perceived what prophets did not perceive.
What an incredible moment for our people.
After years of labor in Egypt, they are liberated. At this moment of salvation, even those at the margins can point at their immediate experience, and say, “Here is something greater than me, that’s given me the gift of a freedom and love that I could not have possibly imagined before!”
Since that moment, though, religion has frequently been bent by the powerful into a tool of oppression against the very people who most benefited from its establishment.
Because of this I, and so many other marginalized people, have struggled to find a spiritual home — much less a relationship with a loving God. My belief in God was not given to me.
I fought for it, and am so grateful I did.
This moment at the Reed Sea reminds me that each of us has a different immediate experience of something greater than ourselves, that gives us the gift of a freedom and love that we could not have possibly imagined before.
Because of this I cannot just abandon religion and God to those who seek to oppress me – to those who, to this day, disenfranchise LGBTQ people by willfully confusing individual “religious liberty” with religion’s true goal of collective liberation.
To those people, we must say, each in our own way: your God is not my God: this force of love and liberation…zeh Eli – this is my God!
May the revolutionary spirit of this month reignite the liberatory spirit at the heart of religion, so we can use it as a powerful tool to challenge an oppressive status quo, and work for a just and liberated future for all.
And let us say: Amen.