Pride Month As A Palace In Time

Hello and welcome to Contact Chai. Pride Shabbat was a beautiful celebration of what makes this community special, a place to bring our whole selves to something larger than ourselves. Rabbi Steven drashed on Pride, love, and our obligations to our fellow humans.

We also kicked off Builder Drive 2025! Our community is only possible through the support of our Builders, and for years our Builders have depended on the dedicated service of our beloved Builder Experience Manager, Amy Nadal. This month, we’re saying goodbye to Amy as she strikes off on her her next opportunity, so today's episode begins with a tribute to Amy's incredible work and an appeal to become a Builder and help us build the Mishkan.

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

I remember when I saw my first rainbow flag. I must have been in grade school, visiting my father for the summer when he took me to get lunch at a popular burger joint; the restaurant happened to be in Hillcrest (which was and still is the epicenter of queer life in San Diego). I was young and still figuring out my sexuality, and so I tried not to look at the flag directly – as if staring at it too long or with too much interest might inadvertently out me. The 90s were a scary time to be outed, especially as a child.

I was thinking about those furtive glances earlier today, as I walked through Boystown (the epicenter of queer life in Chicago), with its explosion of rainbows – the flags, the banners, the crosswalks – which are displayed year round. The world has changed a lot since I was a kid. And for kids today, the ebullience of Pride is the only world they have known. Yesterday, we marked ten years since the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized marriage equality nationwide. Writing for The Atlantic, Emma Sarrapo observes that a decade is a long time for a young person. More than one in five Gen Z adults (that would be folks between the ages of 18 and 28) identify as LGBTQ – and these individuals grew up in the most queer-friendly climate our country has ever seen. But, Sarrapo also notes, this Pride Month “the backlash has officially arrived.”

Rescinding rights for the LGBTQ community has become official policy for the Trump Administration. There has been a startling attack on transgender individuals, and especially children, from their ability to secure identification to their participation in school sports. His administration has cut funding for HIV research and prevention. It has severed ties with suicide hotlines for LGBTQ folks, calling them “radical grooming contractors.” And at the beginning of June, instead of recognizing Pride Month as his predecessors have done, the Trump Administration celebrated “Title IX Month” – a not-so-subtle wink at efforts to ban transgender students from the spaces that match their gender identity.

It was President Bill Clinton who declared through proclamation that June would be “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month” in 1999. President Barack Obama expanded the official definition of Pride Month to include the entire LGBTQ community in 2011. And regardless of who sits in the White House, June became indelibly connected to queer history when our community resisted arrest at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City, on June 28, 1969 – throwing the actual and metaphorical brick through the barriers that had kept us on the margins of American society.

When asked about the lack of official recognition for Pride Month, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that while there are no plans for a proclamation, “This president is very proud to be a president for all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed.” Which is a nice statement, taken at face value. The only problem is that, as a queer American with many trans friends and community members – it doesn’t feel very true.

Judaism prizes debate (as they say: two Jews, three opinions). And when looking for a model that might show us how to speak across ideological differences, the rabbis point to the conversations between Hillel and Shammai – two sages who lived and taught in the first decades of the Common Era. Their debates were called makhloket l’shem shamayim, disagreements for the sake of heaven (their obverse is actually found in the Torah this week, with the violent dissension of Korach – but that’s another story). What gave the conversations between Hillel and Shammai this particular holiness? The rabbis point to how they conducted themselves: before offering a rebuttal, they stated the argument of the other person in the best possible light. And so, for the sake of heaven, let’s do just that.

I recently listened to a Munk Debate on the motion: “Be it resolved, this is America’s Golden Age.” The Munk Debates are a Canadian non-profit that hosts discussions on contentious, often controversial topics (highly recommended). Those arguing against the motion were the journalist Ezra Klein and Ben Rhodes, a former senior advisor to Obama. Those arguing in favor of the motion were Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, and Kellyanne Conway, who was Trump’s senior counselor during his first term. Quite a lot of the conversation focused on economic indicators of success. But it was Conway in particular who interested me. Sure, she talked about job protection and lower taxes and the proliferation of products “Made in America.” Yet Conway opened her arguments by saying that we stand at the precipice of a new golden age because we have arrived at a moment when people have started to say “you’re no longer going to tell me who I am, what I believe, or how I should vote.” For Conway, this era is one in which the individual citizen can be who they want to be, with less regulation and more freedom. It is a time in which you are not forced to bear the burden of other’s mistakes, whether they were born here or only arrived a short while ago. She argued that no person should be given preferential treatment, nor should any barrier be placed in front of them. This golden age, Conway explained, is “one in which everybody can share, [or] at least aspire, without being snickered at, without being [made to feel] less than, without being judged by people who really don’t know them.”

There is a radical (and understandably appealing) equality to the “live and let live” libertarianism Conway is proposing, one that grasps at the promise that all people are created equal and have been endowed by their creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we are all, as Judaism offers, beings created in the divine image and therefore people of equal dignity and worth – who are we to elevate the needs of one person over the needs of another? Are we not entitled to our own corner of the world, where we can live undisturbed and untroubled by the problems of others?

But this is not who we are, as Jews. The queer and feminist scholar Mara Benjamin describes us as an obligated people (if you haven’t read her book The Obligated Self, go buy it after Shabbat). She writes, “Acts of service to one’s neighbor and to God devolve on the individual simply by virtue of being a Jew.” Our history informs our empathic response to the other (we know the soul of the stranger, after all, because we have been strangers ourselves) but our obligation to help the other is incumbent upon each of us – regardless of how we feel about them. There are no contingencies to the commands to care for our neighbor or to aid the marginalized.

When speaking of our obligation to those who exist on the margins, our tradition identifies three people: the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. I like to think of these individuals as metonymies, specific cases that point to larger categories of people defined by similar circumstances. The widow is the person who encounters hardship that is outside of their control, but expected. We know that our loved ones will die, and while we hope that they will live a long time there will be a moment when one of us must bury the other. She is joined by other mourners, of course, but also people who take risks that don’t pay off, or those grappling with the natural end of things – a job or a relationship ended too soon, the loss of a friend or a sibling. The orphan is the one who faces a tragedy that is outside of their control, and unexpected. Whether through death or separation, a child without parents disrupts the order of things. He stands alongside the person living with sudden disability or illness, the trauma survivor, someone who recently miscarried, or the refugee fleeing war. Finally, the stranger is the one who carries a burden that they may have chosen but also one that might be inherent to who they are, with consequences that were either expected or unexpected. In them, I see the migrant hoping for a better future (or even someone who moved cities), but also people carrying identities that they have inherited or were born with – identities that they chose to embrace.

And here’s the thing: whether the choice was theirs, whether the potential consequences were known, whether we would have done something differently had we been in their shoes – our tradition tells us: love them. Love the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. V’ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha, love that person as you want others to love you. To be very clear (and this is important), love is not a feeling. Writing about the experience of motherhood, Benjamin observes that the new parent feels a whole range of emotions toward their child – yes, tenderness and awe but also rage, frustration, and disappointment. These emotions are not love, and it would be a mistake to think that they are (or worse, believe that they indicate its absence). Rather, she writes, “love [should be] understood in terms of profound concern and acts of care.” We are an obligated people, and when addressing those we are commanded to love (that is, everyone but especially the marginalized) this is expressed through how we show up – and also, how we bear witness to who they are, how we understand their needs and their strengths, how we celebrate what they bring to the world. Treating everyone the same erases what makes them, them. How amazing, the rabbis marvel, that when a human creates a stamp and impresses that image upon an object it looks the same every time – but when God shaped each person in the divine image, somehow every single one of us came out unique. Yes, we want equality – but equality that acknowledges our differences (and even celebrates them, as evidence of God’s infinite and bold creativity).

To recognize the differences of a person or a group of people is not an act of discrimination, but sanctification. The word for holiness in Hebrew, kedushah, also means to set something apart, to elevate it, and to consider it l’shem shamayim, as if made for the sake of heaven. This is the lesson of Shabbat. For six days you shall work, but make the seventh day – make it holy. By treating this day differently, shedding our habits of the work week and reconnecting with that which feeds our hearts – we bring sanctity to this moment, building (in the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel) a palace in time where we can, for just a moment, find refuge and rest from a world that is not always as it should be and remind ourselves of what the world could be. We don’t denigrate the other six days of the week by lifting up the Sabbath – quite the opposite, we see in the week all its power and potential to transform the world through hard work. Lifting up and celebrating difference must be a “both/and” for it to be true sanctification.

So for me, Pride Month is also a palace in time  – we set it apart, we elevate it, and we sanctify it to create a safe harbor for all who are bearing the burden of hatred and discrimination. And as each person arrives in this holy space, carrying their hope and their heartbreak we turn toward them and say: I love you. I love you, as you are. Tell me what you need. Tell me how I can help. And then we hit play on our favorite Pride anthem, and we sing, and we dance, and we march under the rainbow banner borne by our community for generations as a reminder and a promise of the future that we are fighting for – a golden age, just within our grasp, where each of us is celebrated for who we are: unique, unlike any other, a being of inherent dignity and worth, stamped with the impression of the divine, able and obligated to love, deserving of love in kind, and, above all, sacred.

I hope that I will see some of you at the Pride Parade on Sunday. But even after the festivities end, know this: no matter who or how you love, no matter your gender identity, you belong here with me in this community. We will get through whatever lies ahead together. Happy Pride. Shabbat shalom.