“Hear the gay shouts of liberation in the tents of the just!” (Psalm 118:15).
Reciting the festival liturgy on Pride Shabbat was an important innovation at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York, founded in 1973; so was this early gay-inclusive new translation.
Join us for this CLGS Jewish Queeries event program as we trace the evolution of LGBTQ-informed and -inclusive liturgy from the founding of the first “gay synagogues” (as they were known) to the publication of printed prayer books to today’s efforts to bring trans visibility and gender neutral Hebrew prayer to the mainstream of Jewish life.
Rabbi Yoel Kahn, Ph.D. (he/him) is the Interim Coordinator of the Jewish Roundtable at the CLGS. He was ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, and received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. He served as Rabbi of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, San Francisco’s GLBT outreach synagogue, from 1985 to 1996, and recently retired as Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Berkeley. He has spoken and published wisely about liberal Jewish decision-making, Judaism and sexuality, homosexuality, and the history of Jewish liturgy. His research on the prayer book was published as The Three Blessings: Boundaries, Identity and Community in Jewish Liturgy (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Rabbi Ariel Tovlev (he/they) is a poet, public speaker, and educator who has taught across the United States on gender beyond the binary in Judaism. His original liturgy has been published in Mishkan Ga’avah: Where Pride Dwells and he is currently writing a trans theology.