Get Used to It: Ep. 69, "Voices of Our Lives: Rabbi Denise Eger"

[Applause] [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila cule your host uh every month every day whichever however often you watch the show and as you know if you watch the show we have an occasional series where we interview one person for the whole show and this is one of those but it's also a nice conjunction of a current event very very important to our community because today we're going to be talking to rabbi denise eger who is the founding rabbi of congregation colemie the co-chair of the gay and lesbian rabbinic network and the chair of the ad hoc committee on gays and lesbians in the rabbinate of the central conference of american rabbis and of course as we read the papers we know that that is the conference that recently passed a resolution thanks in part to rabbi denise supporting the ability of rabbis to officiate at same-sex commitment ceremonies and that was an amazing front page item all around the world we're delighted to have you here denise thank you for doing this glad to be here with you well you know i i've always been interested in what brings a person to really to a religious or a spiritual calling because you are at a very interesting junction for our community really between the person who is active in our community in the gay and lesbian community and a person of faith a leader in the community of faith uh a community that sometimes we've been having a great deal of struggle with so starting back not too very far because you're very young where where were you born and where did you grow up i was born in pennsylvania outside of pittsburgh but really claim memphis tennessee is the hometown that i grew up in our family moved around a bit when i was young and we landed with near other family in memphis tennessee and it's a wonderful community uh a small jewish community but we had a very large reform synagogue at that time probably about 1500 families one of four synagogues in town and uh interesting in the south people are connected and they're affiliated with the jewish community in america today in large cities most jews don't belong in a formal way to the jewish community just the opposite of what you might think though or what we might think right because you picture the south and it sounds like the bible belt and even though the jewish community can certainly lay claim to the bible it's not really what we mean when we say bible built and you don't think about jewish communities in the south and if you do you would think they would be quite beleaguered by the larger community but it's a very old jewish community in fact it's actually older in some ways than some of the major jewish communities around the country because the jews in the south came here really traced their roots to germany and came in the early 1800s and so it's a very old jewish community and uh it's but it's also very connected community and jews belong to the community and so it was actually a wonderful jewish place to grow up we had a wonderful community life a wonderful social life and because it was memphis tennessee and it was the replace where martin luther king was assassinated there was special ties between our jewish community in memphis and and that event our rabbi at the time rabbi wax was involved and connected with dr king who had come to memphis for the sanitation strike and so those were inspiring times and that connection actually does i think still fuel my work uh in what we do today well did you uh were your parents active in the the jewish community uh more than just in terms of worship uh my family history uh really that my family had always been involved in jewish life and active and jewish organizations in pennsylvania they had been very active my father had been president of that synagogue my mother president of that hadassah and that sisterhood when we by the time we moved to memphis they were past their leadership days but for me uh that was still a connection and and my involvement and i taught religious school from the time before my about mitzvah i was teaching in our sunday school and in our synagogue and very involved and attended jewish summer camp believe it or not in all places in mississippi in a small town between jackson and and vicksburg is the reformed jewish summer camp in utica mississippi and it was a wonderful place filled with jewish learning and for those of us who came from new orleans from memphis from small towns throughout mississippi and arkansas it was a real place of jewish utopia um because for once we were not in the minority and we had a sense of majority and a place where we could really be jewish all the time i know that even when we find a community where we feel even for just a summer that we can be part of a majority uh some of the experience that we have is being a minority you know within whatever our cultural heritage is even if we're already a minority within that and i wonder what your experience was about that well that that was problem um i've been known out to myself since i'm 12. but spent most of my adolescence trying to hide it and run away from it and so that was a pretty painful part for me as good as i felt about being jewish and involved and connected to other people that was a very hidden part and very painful part and so the south was not a particularly good place place to be gay or lesbian and as a result needless to say didn't stay well but while you were still in the south you clearly developed this notion even as a child i guess um that you might want to go further than most people go in their faith and i'm not saying hierarchical or anything but just to make the decision that you may want to study and become a rabbi you know it's certainly a step beyond what most jewish kids might be thinking how did that how did that come to you well you know sheila i know you know that i like music and that i studied singing and voice for many years and i um originally thought i'd be a cantor which is the other jewish clergy person because i love music so much and studied voice and and in my first couple years of college which i stayed home in memphis to pursue to continue to work with my voice teacher um really felt like music was going to be my avocation rather than my life's work but the jewish stuff still hung in me and the social justice issues still burned and i thought well what better way to do that than perhaps move to the other side of the pulpit well i understand that but tell me you also mentioned about dr king how that how the civil rights movement affected your consciousness still in memphis well it was interesting my our cousins owned a store on bill street i owned a wholesale business on bill street i have to take my mother to work every day she worked in the that family business as well and it's not so far from the lorraine motel where dr king was shot and in those years now it's all redeveloped and there's a civil rights museum there but in those years it was a hovel and i remember taking my mother to work and before i'd go off to school i drive down and sit in front of it and i just tried to imagine and contemplate why that would happen i couldn't imagine it was so much a part of what we were taught in at home about the dignity and equality of all people how something like that could happen and so i have very clear images of kind of being fueled in my own spiritual search and also in search for justice about how to make the world a better place that that's very present and very vivid image in my mind of the civil rights struggle that the african-american community went through and still goes through sometimes you know there's a um a deep intellectual aspect to uh not only uh to sort of the rabbinate but to the the whole i mean all people of of faith in the jewish community um it involves a great deal of study and analysis and i um have always admired and respected your ability to be enthusiastic about engaged in uh sort of really loving the intellectual strain in it too dr king was like that as well he read voraciously and was always bringing things in so did you feel well served by your education in memphis or is is that one of the reasons that you left um i i i really i left because i really was struggling with my sexuality and knew that it wasn't a place that i could explore that safely or really could try and come to terms with it and i also knew that if i wanted to gain a higher level of jewish study that it would have to take me from my home base in my home jewish community and so that's when i came to california and did jewish studies in college at usc southern university of southern california and because of the unique relationship between heber union college which is the reform jewish movement seminary and usc out here i took a law most of my course work really at the seminary as an undergrad and so that really began to feed in a real concrete way both my desire for more in-depth jewish knowledge as well as really kind of framing my decision to want to become a rabbi jewish studies uh what year was this i don't know that sc did sc know they had a jewish studies major they did but i was the first actually they always had a program on the books but you know in los angeles and you're a native you know you went to ucla for jewish studies not usc um but they did have this program on the books and what did i know i'm just a kid from memphis and so i was able to be a religion major specialized in jewish studies through the cooperative efforts of the university and hebrew union college and they have many programs on the books together still today from phds to mbas and the undergraduate program is quite strong hebrew union college today supplies most of the uh undergraduate jewish studies program for usc um and so that's really grown since that time so here you are in los angeles certainly out about being a jew uh not a bad thing to be in la i mean maybe not as much of a minority in the community as you said in a way more fragmented and maybe not as easy to connect with but you're also a lesbian yeah and that is a strand that doesn't sound to me like had quite come together yet it really didn't and actually i was pretty afraid of having it come together although dealing with it more once here in los angeles with the freedoms of being away from home and being a new community but still struggling about well how can i be a rabbi and be gay in those years you weren't out and so those were those were questions that i had for myself and um remember having dialogue with myself well i'll be a rabbi i'll choose the rabbinate okay won't get married i won't be partnered that's just a choice that i'll make um you know i'm lucky it didn't turn out that way right but you thought at the time i mean at the time i'd have to make some conscious choices right you know a single apparently straight rabbi apparently uh and not able really even to pursue i mean it must have been scary really to think that you would have either a hidden part of yourself or a celibate life there it was very scary um and i was very conflicted about it and i really i really struggled with it a lot and really but i really knew that um being a rabbi is something that i really was called to do and really wanted to do and felt like i could make a difference um in the world and how did it begin to come together well i did get accepted to rabbinic school and came went to israel for the year and uh as we all do at our israel campus and really when i came back to los angeles to finish my studies at hebrew union college i i really realized that there might be an opportunity to both be jewish and gay and had that chance to meet other jewish gay and lesbian folks and begin to connect through kind of the underground if you will with other gay and lesbian rabbinic students and rabbis um and really begin to see that well maybe there this wasn't such an either or position and i think that was a real eye-opener but it but many people still were not out publicly in that time there were gay synagogues it was still still fairly new within the first 10 years but nevertheless there was already beginning a network of gay and lesbian folks who were rabbis maybe closeted but at least there was a community of acknowledgement together and so already there seems to be a place to stand so what was the first evidence of it here in los angeles well beethoven is the first gay and lesbian synagogue here in the world and that was founded in 1972 and so by the time i came to los angeles that was already going strong and had the opportunity to visit there as a young rabbinic student on many occasions and was a member at one time and um so i think that was a place of safety and and that synagogue spawned other synagogues around the country uh miami san francisco and uh that san francisco had a rabbis a gay rabbi serving it and rabbi alan bennett and so that those are the things that gave hope at that time was there any real inherent conflict both either sort of religiously i mean one of the interesting things about the passage of time is that we tend to open our minds to inclusion more and more it's happened in this country from you know the whole last half of the 20th century but until that happens there's sort of an adamants about what the rules are what the truth is what god really meant etc and it it changes over time as we expand our own horizons was there what was the conflict like inside um the faith itself about these issues at that time well interestingly enough reformed judaism because it placed so much emphasis on social justice as an avenue for spirituality remember the reform movement was very involved in the early african-american civil rights movement in fact the first president and the founder of the naacp was a reformed jew kivy kaplan right and so there's always been this historic connection between the call of the prophets to be just and to be bring truth where there isn't any and for the dignity of all people that the reform movement has also been there all along the way in our gay and lesbian struggle for civil rights and so in the late 60s and early 70s the reform movement passed resolutions to already call for the decriminalization of consensual sexual acts between adults and in the early 70s welcomed gay and lesbian congregations into the mainstream fold of jewish life but not a lesbian rabbi but not yet officially ordaining gay or lesbian people but there was a sense that gays and lesbians had a place in the community both the jewish community and then our larger society and i think that compassionate response really helped to not just change the jewish community but really helped to change many different parts of our larger society as well did you have any personal doubts about your own sexuality being a positive aspect of your faith i mean if you're told by everyone else or so many other people i mean it was it's a struggle um did you have your own doubts about it that you resolved um at that time yeah i struggled greatly about it i mean how can you read leviticus and it says a man shouldn't lie with a man as it lies as you lie with a woman and and not feel some of those feelings um but i've never been a literalist and reformed judaism certainly has doesn't represent a tradition that is a literal fundamentalist tradition it's always been a progressive tradition that understands that we come to understand new truths about science about nature as we discover more that god gave us the talent and creativity to learn more and thirst for knowledge and quest for new things that that's also part of god's revelation to us and so those are the ways that i kind of began to struggle and ease that struggle within myself about some of those issues and how did congregation colamie come about well about eight years ago we're about celebrating our eighth anniversary this year a group of us decided to start a new congregation here in west hollywood we had a vision of how we thought synagogue life ought to be and that was not just a gay ghetto if you will but a community that was engaging of the whole spectrum gay lesbian bisexual transgendered and oh god forbid straight people as well and so we came to a city like west hollywood which had no liberal synagogue of its own and felt like we could make a difference here and make a kind of synagogue that we all wanted to see but maybe wasn't always out there a place that was really truly welcoming and celebratory of gay and lesbian life but also included our straight family and friends and who couldn't imagine their lives without us as much as we couldn't imagine our lives without them and most importantly that we were committed to social justice issues you can see it's a passion and a theme of mine sure mine as well but we really um focus a lot of our energy as a community on social justice issues on civil rights issues particularly gay and lesbian issues but not only gay and lesbian issues and we have a very activist congregation people in their own right are great civil rights activists in our congregation and have done much for our gay and lesbian movement as well as our jewish community involvements and so it's a really dynamic dynamic synagogue in that sense well it's interesting to me how each group or person really it can open the door for the next i mean tell the story of the founding of bcc well it's a yeah it's an interesting story because uh uh behind really got started because uh there were jews that were attending troy perry's church a metropolitan community church in the late 60s and my understanding is the story was told to me you know the jews couldn't be actually members of the church because they wouldn't profess faith in jesus but they were associate members and where else did you go but to troy's church if you didn't only want to hang out in the bars in those years um and the story that was told to me was that one night there was a rap group and um it got cancelled but they forgot to call the jews and everybody showed up at this meeting and they looked around the room and said oh we're all jewish maybe we should start a synagogue they went to troy and probably troy's the first pastor that ever founded a synagogue but helped the group get started and and interestingly enough they turned to the uahc the union of american hebrew congregations which is the synagogue arm of the reform movement and they received help there and and um so one group does help spawn another group and helps to build institutions which um which i think is really important thing i'm an institutional kind of person and believe that institutions are there to help people and are about the people and well it was interesting when you said you know the attention of cola me to the inclusion of the families uh and friends straight friends and transgender people and we sort of let this phrase roll off the tongue now that we're you know uh we include bisexual people and transgender but it it isn't that easy to to pay attention to really pay attention to the differences without you know because transgender people aren't necessarily gay people might be might not be and the the issues are different but the lack of acceptance even in our own community it was kind of like i'm here you know now gay and lesbians okay the rest of you guys have to wait you know please don't bother me because you're still not acceptable i think it's a very very important thing in communities of faith as well and probably i think maybe even more so there because community faiths you know it's no it's no secret that uh communities of faith have not been such so good on a whole host of issues um the patriarchy has held women back certainly gays and lesbians and we can't i don't think it's good for us to have communities of faith um that would then go around to do that to other folks we've walked those shoes we ought to know better and so you know that doesn't mean it's easy because it's not easy because the jew should know that's right you know i mean we would have said from the beginning that everyone ought to know that's right uh but you know you have to welcome our the jewish prerogative is to welcome the stranger in our midst and also we take that ethical responsibility to say that there's one law for the stranger and the citizen for the resident alien and the citizen and and i think that's true we have to figure out a way to work through our differences men and women in our community been doing it continue to do it and we have to do that with straight folk and we have to do that with bisexual folk and transgender folk and uh but i think that's i think that's the challenge to come and to be honest about our differences but also kind of just be accepting of them we don't have to convince each other all the time of that we're right and you're wrong sometimes we need to leave live in the tension of those differences i was thinking when you were saying you had thought early on that perhaps you would have to live a single closeted life in order to be a rabbi and yet the life of the family is so important in the congregation and and people look to the rabbi to if not set an example at least to do their very best you know about family and so that would have been even a greater loss but you have a family i do i'm very lucky tell us about your family my partner of uh 10 years now karen siteman who is an activist in her own right in in our community past chair of the gay and lesbian center board of directors here in los angeles we have a six-year-old son who's just a wonder and a joy and i think that this whole family issue is is also something that our community is learning about and learning how to deal with it is also another difference because there is a difference for those of us that have families with children as opposed to just families of adults right and um there's not always a lot of patience in our gay and lesbian community for families with children although getting to be more i know that's something to be more i mean some i know some of your congregants of course and i know those that have grown children and grandchildren uh i know a few who have just adopted um it's uh it's a growing congregation uh very very much like everywhere else everywhere else and but i think but i think the ability for our community to to do that and especially gays and lesbians having children for a long time it's not anything new but to do it perhaps in the constellations in which we're doing that with intent from the beginning is uh and in such numbers such great numbers both women and men is i think also a new trend and i think is something that will enriches our community and i think that really goes also to the heart of some of this the whole debate about marriage in our community because see what i think marriage is is about making family and making a statement not just of your love for somebody you can love somebody without getting married to them people been doing that for centuries and one of the greatest greatest love stories in the world about those who like can't get it together to get married right but it's about making family and making family commitments whether there's children or there's not children and yet you've made a family commitment absolutely but you can't get married and for many years of course your union wouldn't have been sanctioned because it wasn't really either encouraged not only by the jewish faith but all organized religion uh or there were some mavericks who you know like uh many of the pastors that lined up in sacramento and you know performed a ceremony for our couples um it was uh and then put on trial and then put on trial for it so they themselves like anyone who identifies with a beleaguered minority suddenly finds that they're now going to share the disapprobrium that you know that we have as as gay people but the notion of sanction i mean this in the positive sense where a religious body um or person or figure makes a marriage by officiating addict and on the secular side where the state recognizes a marriage or parentage i mean it's interesting parentage is the woman who gives birth to the baby that's the mother but the state says who the father is legally right could be the man who's married to the mother could be a natural father that claims the child could be somebody that signed the birth certificate we create laws to say who parents are could be adoptive parents and it's a great parent and it's a great power right and it's a power of approval not only that you form the families because as you have you can form a family without any of that absolutely and it's a real family but the power of approval is the one the question of that has been the question that you've been engaged in now yes most recently um and it was on the national level what what brought you from now you may have been doing this all along but from the local work uh in your congregation to want to participate on the national level not only in this issue but in all issues well i've been involved in this for very long time within our movement on gay and lesbian issues i mean i'm one of the first lesbian rabbis out publicly i mean there have been other lesbian rabbis who have gone before me but um really the one of the very first out publicly and so i've been involved kind of at a national level as a resource as someone involved in these issues in the reform jewish movement for many many many many years now but in this particular wonderful success that we just achieved in our conference in greensboro north carolina of all places again tied to the civil rights movement because greensboro was where the lunch counter sit-ins began and in fact the beginning part of our conference was all dedicated to celebrating that julian bond of the naacp came to speak to the rabbis because of our historic ties of the reform movement to the african-american civil rights movement and to have then this resolution play itself out there in such an overwhelm with overwhelming support again kind of for me was really kind of the fulfillment again of this per my own personal connection between being inspired by dr king sitting in front of the lorraine motel um all those years ago but the reform but so exciting about this resolution and the history behind it is that um in our movement we had some committees to kind of study different issues and the human sexuality commission was given the task of studying the issue of gay marriage because in 1996 the reform movement the rabbis endorsed civil marriage for gays and lesbians and that's really what we wanted is to endorse this notion of civil marriage because in our gay and lesbian understanding we were very clear that we weren't going to talk about religious marriage we were going to talk about civil marriage because that was the power of the state to decide who gives gets a license and who doesn't so that resolution in 96 was very clear it was about civil marriage but it did raise all the issues we're talking about marriage we're rabbis what does that mean in a religious or spiritual context so the human sexuality committee of the ccr was given the task to study it and they did for two years they brought in experts on gay and lesbian issues they brought in experts on marriage they brought in all kinds of experts and they were ready to issue a report in the spring of 98 and in the spring of 98 that report was and out of that report was going to come a resolution that that said basically what we've said this march 2000 which was that same gender relationships are worthy of jewish ritual sanctification the it the resolution never came before the plenum because concurrent with that another committee came out with a report that basically marriage between a gay two gay men or two lesbians could not be classified as the sacrament of kidushin as we say in hebrew it's a specific word that has to do with holiness and so there was a lot of controversy and a lot of back and forth and a lot of real rancor about what to do and whether it was marriage whether it was something other than marriage so the resolution didn't come before the plenum but out of that the committee that i chair the task force and gays and lesbians in the rabbinate was given the task of education programs and so across the united states and canada in each region of rabbinic region of the country we had workshops and we brought in couples who had gotten married and we brought in their rabbis to talk about the process what did they do there what did the ceremonies look like what were the liturgies like um and rabbis talked and studied and debated and argued is it real a marriage is it something else is it a commitment ceremony what is it what is the nature of it how does it look like we brought in rabbis to talk about the education processes they had to do with their synagogue communities and their boards of directors who like most americans are split on gay lesbian issues and in 1999 the women's rabbinic network which is the women's caucus of the central conference of american rabbis at our conference we brought forward a resolution there to say okay it's enough study let's get to the vote and it still didn't come in 99 and so again we introduced the women's rabbinic network introduced a resolution that basically repeated the language of the committee on human sexuality's finding that first of all we could support rabbis who officiate because certainly look at the methodists they were being brought to trial right it's clear that there was not there's different denominations and even congregations that might not let their rabbis officiate at same gender ceremony so first of all we want to sanction that each rabbi had the power to decide for him or herself which is a tenet of reform judaism we don't have that fiat right um and we wanted to support the notion that same gender relationships between two jews can be worthy of ritual sanctification and so that's the resolution that we brought forward and now that was studied for a whole nother year and debated within the movement and it and it was hotly debated and just like you earlier talked about when groups get identified with disenfranchised groups and and all of the trouble believe me there were plenty of nasty things said about the women rabbis why are they forcing us to deal with this issue they're just all a bunch of lesbians the two women who rabbi shira stern and rabbi susan stone who are our co-chairs of the women of rabbinic network were called just horrible names and i think treated rather poorly but the debate continued and i think the document that we were able to gather lots of support for is a really good one um in march and it's not the original one it's not as strong as some people would have liked it uh but and is there still a distinction then in terms of what it means to sanctify this uh it's left it's left open which i think is its strength because the truth of the matter is is that there are rabbis who will officiate and there are rabbis who won't and because we're not a denomination or a movement that says okay everybody has to toe the same line on any issue it would be disingenuous for us to have said that in this resolution so we spoke the truth we support rabbis who do and we support rabbis who don't however we also want to say that a relationship between two jews of the same gender can be worthy of ritual sanctification now we don't come up with a name for that but i think that is its brilliance because there even is a debate within our own gay and lesbian community is it do we want to call it a wedding do we want to call it a commitment ceremony tell you she i do a lot of icon wedding i do a lot of weddings i do a lot of ceremonies for our couples and oftentimes people have been together for a long time seven eight ten years um and so it's really often a public affirmation of the commitments they've been making to one another for a long time right so nomenclature we'll leave that up to the individual and up to the rabbi to figure out how it fits best for them for some it will be a wedding well it is an interesting thing for an excluded group i mean i remember when feminists first began to talk about marriage as an issue because the examples of what marriage meant to women were often as negative as they were positive for the women and there was a lot of discussion about whether we needed to in taking this look at it whether we need to jettison this notion and do something else and call it something else and no one ever really wanted to call it something else it was one of those once you can get into a thing perhaps you should reform it from the inside and this is the conversation we always have you know whether it's active asking whether anybody should run for the government or vice versa and i think it's a very good and healthy dialogue to have about any institution and of course we talk about marriage as an institution do we want it or don't we want it do we want it the way it is do we want to be fully equal and therefore we need the word but we'll do it a different way simply to open up the question by virtue of being excluded has been a very useful thing i think that i think is what's so great about this resolution is that by bringing together everyone really rabbis who will and rabbis who won't because nobody there was about saying that gays and lesbians are less than or not entitled to have their civil rights there's not i don't think there wouldn't be a reform rabbi that really would say that this was really about the religious and spiritual nature of that quality of what we call that and i think the beauty of it is that this resolution also calls for educational and pastoral materials to be prepared and published and so that a couple about a year from now be able to call the central conference of american rabbis and say do you have a katuba a wedding document or a covenant document for two for two gay men and there's going to be one available for them and the new rabbi's manual which is the book that rabbis use that has four funeral different kinds of funeral set services and readings from different poems and psalms and has you know baby naming ceremonies and wedding ceremonies has four wedding ceremonies and the one i have now well you're going to open up and there's going to be gay and lesbian ceremonies as well in the new one that's been a commitment as part of this so uh that will be as the institution developed as more and more people avail themselves of the opportunity to publicly proclaim what their family is whether regardless of the legal status but to publicly within the communities in which they worship in which they live proclaim their familial status and do it religiously do it spiritually do it jewishly um that is going to change the continue to change the nature of this dialogue and i have a feeling it's not the last word this resolution no probably not well it's interesting the work you've done because there are a lot of people um in leadership and communities of faith in the clergy who would i think although maybe not in the reform movement so much uh feel that being the you know the shepherd or the leader the teacher the council to their congregation is the spiritual work that spiritual work is not involved necessarily in a political national dialogue like this some people though do choose and i assume see it as an aspect of their faith to to do this what what is it that brought you to participate i mean a lot of people say i couldn't not do it but i'm not going to take that for an answer what is it that brought you to participate in the political really of this spiritual life for me it's a total spiritual journey i don't i don't separate it as just a political act see this is about my spirituality because i believe in very strongly that each person has an obligation to make the world a better place now we have a hebrew phrase for that that's tikkun olam the repair and healing of the world but for me that is a religious article of faith not just a political act so i guess it's how you look at it um and uh for me this is a kind of living out of that faith is to be involved in it and to read really read the scripture read the prophets isaiah and jeremiah in that same way that they were not afraid to stand up to the political powers of their day and take them to task when they stepped out of line or also was misusing the text i mean isaiah asks look i don't want the fast of great piety the fast i want is to feed the poor and that's a political act not just a spiritual act to challenge that say oh don't give me your your holy holier-than-thou business what are you really doing to help the people who need it so for me being involved whether it's at the central conference of american rabbis or in our own gay and lesbian movement issues it's not just politics it's about making the world a better place and helping people where they really live and for me as a rabbi the the value jewish value of family making is very very important and for us to have our gay and lesbian families seen as valid loving accepting families is very important so it's not just politics that leads me to do that when i when i when benjamin when our son uh asked questions and he's pretty savvy kid he wants to know who stood under the chuppah meaning who stood under the wedding canopy that's his way of asking hey are they married ema are they married mom and he does that with he does that with gay couples with straight couples he wants to know that they've made a familial commitment um to one another and i want him to be able to go to any reform synagogue in his denomination in the country and feel like his family could fit in as well we've said that in the reform movement all along in our resolutions about civil rights we've said it in terms of in 1990 saying oh yes we're going to ordain openly gay and lesbian people as rabbis this issue around marriage is really kind of the what i call the final link in terms of seeing someone's full spiritual life attainment and that is that our life cycle events will be full not just when we bury people we've buried way too many of our friends and our family members we know what it is to stand at a grave and say the cottage prayer the memorial prayer for the dead but we also have to have the other parts of our life cycle celebrated and acknowledged as gay and lesbian people and we learned that from being feminists i think we learned as feminists we had to have ceremonies and rituals that celebrated our womanhood right um and a challenge to the patriarchy it isn't any different i think for gay and lesbian people to also claim their natural celebrations of our lives and so my next goal i think sheila is to create religious coming out ceremonies so that we can celebrate our coming out and have our families participate in that too our biological family so that when a mom or a dad call me and say rabbi my daughter's gay and lesbian my son's gay i can wish them mazel tov and wish them congratulations that to me is the next challenge of our life cycle celebrations in our spiritual lives well we'll have to do it also with our own congregants who are gay with their straight kids absolutely absolutely absolutely and that's that's part of our challenges yeah i mean it's there are lots of possibilities of course so what is your greatest struggle now our greatest struggle well i think that's just trying to balance everyday life with everybody else our lives are so fast and furious it's trying to make sure that their family time is is really there as well as take care of the needs of of our community and i think that their our community still has great needs great health needs aids i think is not over by a far stretch and i think we have great pastoral needs and i think we have to start talking about aids again in a way we've been kind of silent for a long time we have to talk about our children both gay and straight and i think those are some of the great issues before us and i think these next years in terms of our civil rights issues are really really really critical and um i you know i i'm hopeful that um that our loss on proposition 22 will really be turned around into a renewed sense of social activism for our community we can't be complacent not one moment we're not there yet and we have some great issues and i think that we're going to have to really step up to the plate and address them i agree i mean i think that it in a way i'm happy to have an ongoing struggle because it really gives meaning to my life which really brings me to my maybe my last question of the show because it's not a short answer um i'm i've lived long enough to see sort of cycles in sort of majority values and i don't just mean majority like straight people are the majority of whatever race etc but sort of whimsically blowing through society of a set of values and the revolutionary fervor of the late 60s and early 70s and the complacency or the me generation or whatever you would see these cycles and it it seems to me and i could be wrong i want to ask you that there is a yearning in more and more people to have a spiritual component of their lives i don't know if there's more attendance at sort of traditional religious ceremonies i find that a number of people are going to smaller groups and sometimes creating their own spiritual communities um and you know if they were raised christian or jewish or whatever and i guess the question is kind of two-fold one is a little easier which is do you see this increase in among people in their in their yearning for a spiritual addition component peace integration of their lives and i guess the other part of the question is how does it enrich a person's life to have a spiritual or religious component well i think the answer is the short answer to your first question is yes people are very thirsty very thirsty for spiritual sustenance and nourishment it plays into the second answer and i think the reason why is because our lives move at such breakneck speed there's no time to reflect or consider we're pulled in so many directions i mean you know yourself back and forth to sacramento all over our state to learn about every issue and to know your constituents you know it takes a lot of energy to do that and and we thank god that you are doing it for us but we also know that there has to be time i think for the human person to reflect and to make some sense of it all and i think that's really in the best sense what religion does what spirituality does it gives us that opportunity to reflect and to put what we do in a larger context in relationship to other people into relationship to society and as a religious person i believe in relationship to the force that you know creates the universe and keeps it nourished and going and i and i really think that it also helps us clarify where we stand uh in terms of our ethics and our values and our morals and i think in our community that's a dialogue we sometimes don't have often enough with one another let alone with anybody else and i think that there is in our community a great thirst and hunger for that you know the other thing that's interesting to me is that in the in the jewish faith and in i was my mother a jew therefore i'm a jew but i was raised catholic my father a catholic and in both of these ceremonial lives there is this rhythm of nature yes that is also a part of it uh where we yeah but not just the life cycle but say in the year yes you know the harvest the the you know the the winter the uh rebirth yes uh and we share so many times of holidays you know between and among all the different faiths all based i think on the cycle of nature yes and we've lost that i mean maybe it's just me because we're in a city here but with all that concrete and never your feet on the you know it's hard hard to know well you know when do the seasons change you know i mean i think our rituals just spring forward or fall back you know for most people but i do think that's also part of what you know a spiritual life allows one to do is to literally stop and smell the roses and realize it's time to plant them as well as time to prune them and i think that's that's something that that is a spiritual life a disciplined life can give to us which is so powerful i mean that's what one of the reasons i'm so excited are you know our congregation's building a building from the ground up here in west hollywood which is really exciting and so i think that also allows us to appreciate having the sense of being planted in the earth planted in the ground instead of the wandering jews of west hollywood [Laughter] makes a big difference it does uh and i know that you started out this hour by talking about your your love for music and your training and i know that you integrate a great deal of music into all of the celebrations and worship in the congregation why is that an important aspect of worship well because i think that you know worship is really like drama in the best sense because it's an expression using all of our senses of what we're feeling what we're thinking and how how we can relate in the world now not everybody's all in their head not everybody's a verbal person some people are visual music allows us to get out of the other side of ourselves just as art does and dance so i think all of those components that as i like to call the drama of worship are really critical in having us able to express our innermost desires and as well as our needs and also helps us articulate perhaps in a less intellectual way sometimes we're all too much in our heads um well there aren't there's words to the songs either that's right they're i mean they're always an aspect they're just syllables we call them negoons words wordless melodies that also allow you to kind of transform the moment and kind of often move beyond the words to that inner feeling state and we believe you can tap that's one of the ways you can tap into the shrina god's divine presence on earth god's feminine presence one way you can tap into that energy is to do that without without words and i know that you also honor members of the congregation uh every year it's the show mercedes award it's a guardian of justices because we have this commitment to social justice and we believe it's an important religious component spiritual component and so we do honor people for their great civil civil rights work and justice work as we've honored you in the past well it's um it's wonderful to talk to you denise i i think that we haven't often really had on the show uh a person who's who's devoted their entire lives to sort of the spiritual in the world i mean the the thread of your intellectual pursuit your your calling to be a rabbi and the sort of coming through and then coming out about sexuality and making that work together the local work in the congregation and the national work you know with the conference and making that come together and i think it's interesting to me though that when i asked you your challenge um that what you said was really so much that is true for everybody these days how do i find the time to be all of these things that i now can be you know to be involved in this i have to travel i have my family etc but i was thinking as you said it i think you've done it very well thank you very well um and i and i hope that uh you will uh call on us to be of any help as the uh as colemy constructs its building it's and so we don't have to be wandering jews anymore that's right you know in west hollywood and i thank you very much for being on the show thank you so much for having me and for all the work that you do for all of us we appreciate what you do each and every day well thank you and thank you for being with us i hope you found this a spiritual experience and you should have a whole lot of them so you can get used to it [Music] [Music] [Music] you