I am guessing that many a rabbi spoke on a similar topic last night. Here are the words I shared.
Happy Pride, y'all!!!
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Marilyn
Monroe.
Anne Boleyn.
Eleanor
Roosevelt.
Wondering
what these three women have in common?
All are
credited with the well-known, if often misquoted, statement that “Well-behaved
women rarely make history.”
This week,
we proudly add a few more.
Tomorrow
morning, we open our sacred text to read the story of 5 women, the daughters of
Zelophechad. Dying without sons, his land holdings are set to be absorbed into
the communal pot. Their father, who had not taken part in Korach’s rebellion,
was in danger of losing not only his land—but his legacy. And so, our text
reads:
The names of
the daughters were Machlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirza. They stood before
Moses, Eleazar the priest, the chieftains, and the whole assembly, at the
entrance of the Tent of Meeting....and they said:…Let not our father’s name be
lost to his clan just because he had no son! Give us a holding among our father’s
kinsmen.
Torah: A Women’s Commentary
notes that the language here is bold. There is no polite petitionary language,
no please. It is a commanding imperative: Give us.
Their case
sought equal application of a right long granted to others, was appealed to the
Highest Authority, and ultimately was determined to further the cause of
justice. Perhaps these women too were not so well-behaved—and they did make
history.
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| http://bit.ly/1amIqx0 |
This was a
week for wise women, for bold women, for women who are badly-behaved in the
best sense—women who would not sit down and shut up. I felt privileged to watch—via
livestream, as State Senator Wendy Davis stood—literally stood-- for over 12
hours straight to filibuster a bill that would have closed all but 5 abortion
providers in Texas.
I cheered
along with the thousands of supporters when, in the final moments of that
session, State Senator Leticia Van de Putte (who had just returned from burying
her own father), looked at the chairman and said: At what point must a female
senator raise her hand, or her voice, to be recognized over her male colleagues
in the room.
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HOW EDITH WINDSOR LEARNED SHE WON
Photo by Ariel Levy (http://nyr.kr/1amINHV)
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And I
cheered, I cried, I celebrated on Wednesday morning when 5 of our nation’s
highest judges said that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional as a
deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth
Amendment; when Edie Windsor—and her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan—was told that,
indeed, her marriage was as valid in the eyes of the federal government as
anyone else’s.
On March 27,
as Roberta Kaplan stood before the Supreme Court to argue Windsor vs. the United States, Chief Justice John Roberts engaged
her in a conversation about the dramatic change in American popular opinion on
GLBTQ issues. In a piece published today—part of the words she will be sharing
tonight, on Pride Shabbat—she wrote:
My answer then
and my answer today is the same — what truly has driven the change we have all
experienced is not the so-called political power of gay people, but instead “a
moral understanding today that gay people are no different, and that gay
married couples’ relationships are not significantly different from the
relationships of straight married people.” That is the kind of change, the kind
of tikkun olam, or repair of the world, that lies at the heart of our
tradition. It is, I believe, what God commands of every individual, every
community, even of the law, even of God.
It’s been
quite a week for bold women.
The rabbis
of the Talmud teach that the daughters of Zelophechad were exegetes, they were
virtuous, and they were wise. How we know that they were wise, they ask?
Because they spoke at an opportune moment. Edie Windsor, when asked on Wednesday, said
she didn’t think she was a hero, that the timing was an accident of history.
And perhaps
it was, perhaps it is as Edie said, simply that: “I think what happened is at
some point somebody came out and said ‘I’m gay.’ And this gave other people the
guts to do it.” An article in Vanity Fair spoke of the courage of Edie and of Roberta, of others who came before them.
It’s important to not lose sight of
the fact that it’s not time that’s made the difference, although time has made
the real opportunity possible. It’s the coalition of allies that this time has
allowed gay men and women to muster. Forty years of coming out, of getting in
arguments, of shocking, of convincing, of cajoling, of marrying, of parenting,
and of merely being around—that’s what led us to where we are today. Forty
years of living and dying and loving and fighting.
But the
daughters of Zelophechad were not just an accident of history. Their time and
their place and their courage all collided, and they changed their world….they
changed the world. It speaks to the power of the voice, about what speaking up
means for you and the people around you. And it speaks to the power that
speaking out has to create a groundswell, to create allies, to create change.
I know that
I am not the only rabbi who rejoiced when I realized that this week, this
incredible week, would be the week that we read of the daughters of Zelophechad.
As a colleague said, though, there are no coincidences. The Torah is like a
mirror... most of the time, we can see our lives and the life of the world
reflected in the text.
Rabbi Silvina Chemen, the first woman rabbi serving in South America, wrote a
beautiful piece for Torah: A Women’s Commentary. She writes about the
daughters of Zelophechad, and the lessons we are to learn:
Perhaps the most important legacy of
Zelophehad’s daughters is their call to us to take hold of life with our own
hands, to move from the place that the others have given us–or that we have
decided to keep because we feel immobile-and to walk, even to the most holy
center, to where nobody seems to be able to go. After all, nothing is more
sacred than life itself and the fight for what we believe is worthy. Thus, this parashah inspires
us to discover that we too have the ability to know what is right for ourselves
and what our rights ought to be. When we believe in our capacity to shape our
history, to the point of being able to change even a law that came from the
Revelation at Sinai, then we pay a tribute to Zelophehad’s daughters.
As the
cheers erupted in the Texas Senate late on Tuesday night, a wise woman named Amadi Lovelace posted the following on Twitter. Others were as moved as I was; it was
retweeted over 100 times. She wrote:
And when the walls fall, scream until
the very earth quakes under their feet. Make noise. Raise your voice and don't
stop. Never stop.
And, of
course, we can’t stop.
It’s been quite a week for bold women (and men, of
course—we can’t forget the lawyers who argued Prop 8!). Then again, is it ever
not? Is there ever not a time to speak up, to speak truth to power, to demand
liberty and justice?
We can’t stop, because we are not there yet. Just
hours after Wendy Davis took her courageous stand, Governor Rick Perry
announced that—at great cost to the taxpayers—he is calling a special
legislative session in an attempt to ram this terrible bill through the Senate.
We can’t stop, because we are not there yet. Amidst the cheers and celebrations
this week, we cannot forget that an enormous blow was struck to the civil
rights; the Supreme Court invalidating significant pieces of the Voting Rights
Act, legislation that too many people gave their lives to win.
And we can’t
stop, because this morning, I had to sign up—for my own safety—to join Women of
the Wall in a special bus on the morning of Rosh Chodesh Av. We, women and men,
need to be bold, we need to be loud, we need to be badly-behaved.
We have a long way to go before
we truly celebrate liberty and justice for all. We celebrated raucously on
Wednesday in the shadow of true defeat and sadness on Tuesday. But we Jews know
what it is to celebrate amidst losss; we know what it means to move from joy to
sorrow, and back again. And so, yes, there is much work to be done. But as I
heard someone say this week: Measuring the emptiness of the glass in this
moment without celebrating its fullness makes no sense to me.
So in a just
a moment, we will raise the kos Kiddush,
the cup sanctifying this sacred day of Shabbat. In it, let us see the fullness
of a week that, despite its defeats, still brought us closer to the vision of a
world redeemed. In it, let us see the faces and hear the voices of the men and
women who helped us get here. In it, let us see the path we must walk now, the
fights we must fight, to bring about the world we imagine, the world that we
are called to create. And let us say: Amen.
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