Cantor Vera's Corner
Cantor Vera's Message
August 2020
Shalom, chevre,
This August begins mid-Av—the month the rabbis called M’nacheim Av, Comforting Father/Parent. We’ve observed the catastrophe of Tisha b’Av, together with four other local congregations, and are gladdened now by the love-festival of Tu b’Av. (How fitting that on Saturday, August 8, we’ll celebrate the aufruf of Sandra and Andrew Deardorff’s son Ben and his fiancée, Carol Teitelbaum!) By the end of this month, we will have entered Elul together and begun our preparation for the High Holy Days (and I hope you’ll join Rabbi Rachel and me for the Elul programs we’re offering).
August is a month in which we think hard about the words we use. On Tisha b’Av we name and try to dismantle sin’at chinam, baseless hatred, most often audible in language: the sin for which, the rabbis say, the Second Temple fell. In Elul we use the most sincere language we can muster to make t’shuvah (repentance/return), t’fillah (prayer), and tzedakah (justice), and to prepare for new beginnings.
Our words create our worlds. They carry enormous power. We live together in a time when both English and Hebrew are being expanded to reflect and support more diverse gender identity. Traditionally gendered language can hurt if a person is addressed by the wrong pronouns or is left out entirely if words for gender only include male and female, just two ends of the gender spectrum. The “rainbow thread” (Noam Sienna) of gender identity includes but is not limited to:
These words might feel new, even confusing. Yet our Torah teaches us, and Reform Judaism emphasizes, that each one of us, of every gender, lives “b’tzelem Elohim”—as both part and image of God. Sometimes we collapse our individual natures into one sprawling familial body, k’lal Yisra’eil, the Jewish community.* But particularity matters. Each one of our individual natures—and genders—also needs and deserves to be named. We can approach identities and points of view we don’t understand, including our own, with curiosity and affection. We can let the Divine sparks in each one of us emerge.
I invite you during this August, this Av and Elul, to notice language you use and hear around gender. (Gender identity is not the same as sex, not necessarily based on a person’s body.) Notice common metaphors and expressions that you use; do they assume a gender binary (“Ladies and gentlemen!”) or assert that some activities or characteristics are only found in people of one gender?
I want to offer you a practice of pronoun affirmation for this month of intentional language. Try out adding your own preferred pronouns to the bottom of your email signature, and to your username in video calls, and to your name when you introduce yourself aloud in a meeting or class. This practice can encourage everyone to share our genders as routinely as we share our names. You can’t always know someone’s gender just by looking at them, but if you both announce your genders, nobody has to guess! We all can learn. (This is also a practice we can take forward past this month, and even into our in-person gatherings, once we’re able to resume those. There are little round stickers with pronouns on them that we keep with nametags for Shabbat and events, and I hope you’ll use them.) Notice your own feelings: does it change how you feel about yourself when you include your pronouns in an introduction? What do you notice when someone else shares their pronouns with you? Are you ever surprised by them?
Av is here to comfort us. Elul is coming to open us. Life is never exactly as we expect, and each new surprise can be an opportunity to know one another better. Kol tuv, may all good result.
Bivracha,
Cantor Vera (she/her/hers)
*Rabbi Tanchuma said, in the name of Rabbi Benayya and Rabbi Berachia, [who said it] in the name of Rabbi El’azar: “At the moment when the Holy Blessed One created the first adam [person], God created them as an unformed mass [golem] which stretched from one end of the earth until the other, as it is written: ‘Your eyes saw my unformed mass [golmi]’ (Psalms 139).”
—B’reishit Rabba, parashat B’reishit, 8:1. Translated from Hebrew by Noam Sienna. In A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Philadelphia: Print-O-Craft Press, 2019), 32–34
This August begins mid-Av—the month the rabbis called M’nacheim Av, Comforting Father/Parent. We’ve observed the catastrophe of Tisha b’Av, together with four other local congregations, and are gladdened now by the love-festival of Tu b’Av. (How fitting that on Saturday, August 8, we’ll celebrate the aufruf of Sandra and Andrew Deardorff’s son Ben and his fiancée, Carol Teitelbaum!) By the end of this month, we will have entered Elul together and begun our preparation for the High Holy Days (and I hope you’ll join Rabbi Rachel and me for the Elul programs we’re offering).
August is a month in which we think hard about the words we use. On Tisha b’Av we name and try to dismantle sin’at chinam, baseless hatred, most often audible in language: the sin for which, the rabbis say, the Second Temple fell. In Elul we use the most sincere language we can muster to make t’shuvah (repentance/return), t’fillah (prayer), and tzedakah (justice), and to prepare for new beginnings.
Our words create our worlds. They carry enormous power. We live together in a time when both English and Hebrew are being expanded to reflect and support more diverse gender identity. Traditionally gendered language can hurt if a person is addressed by the wrong pronouns or is left out entirely if words for gender only include male and female, just two ends of the gender spectrum. The “rainbow thread” (Noam Sienna) of gender identity includes but is not limited to:
- cisgender people, whose assigned gender at birth matches the gender with which they identify—for example, if you were called male when you were born and still identify as male
- transgender people, whose assigned gender at birth did not match the gender with which they now identify—for example, if you were called female when you were born but now you identify as male
- nonbinary people, who don’t identify as female or male
These words might feel new, even confusing. Yet our Torah teaches us, and Reform Judaism emphasizes, that each one of us, of every gender, lives “b’tzelem Elohim”—as both part and image of God. Sometimes we collapse our individual natures into one sprawling familial body, k’lal Yisra’eil, the Jewish community.* But particularity matters. Each one of our individual natures—and genders—also needs and deserves to be named. We can approach identities and points of view we don’t understand, including our own, with curiosity and affection. We can let the Divine sparks in each one of us emerge.
I invite you during this August, this Av and Elul, to notice language you use and hear around gender. (Gender identity is not the same as sex, not necessarily based on a person’s body.) Notice common metaphors and expressions that you use; do they assume a gender binary (“Ladies and gentlemen!”) or assert that some activities or characteristics are only found in people of one gender?
I want to offer you a practice of pronoun affirmation for this month of intentional language. Try out adding your own preferred pronouns to the bottom of your email signature, and to your username in video calls, and to your name when you introduce yourself aloud in a meeting or class. This practice can encourage everyone to share our genders as routinely as we share our names. You can’t always know someone’s gender just by looking at them, but if you both announce your genders, nobody has to guess! We all can learn. (This is also a practice we can take forward past this month, and even into our in-person gatherings, once we’re able to resume those. There are little round stickers with pronouns on them that we keep with nametags for Shabbat and events, and I hope you’ll use them.) Notice your own feelings: does it change how you feel about yourself when you include your pronouns in an introduction? What do you notice when someone else shares their pronouns with you? Are you ever surprised by them?
Av is here to comfort us. Elul is coming to open us. Life is never exactly as we expect, and each new surprise can be an opportunity to know one another better. Kol tuv, may all good result.
Bivracha,
Cantor Vera (she/her/hers)
*Rabbi Tanchuma said, in the name of Rabbi Benayya and Rabbi Berachia, [who said it] in the name of Rabbi El’azar: “At the moment when the Holy Blessed One created the first adam [person], God created them as an unformed mass [golem] which stretched from one end of the earth until the other, as it is written: ‘Your eyes saw my unformed mass [golmi]’ (Psalms 139).”
—B’reishit Rabba, parashat B’reishit, 8:1. Translated from Hebrew by Noam Sienna. In A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Philadelphia: Print-O-Craft Press, 2019), 32–34
Cantor Vera's Video Teachings
Cantor Vera's Writings
D'var for Pesach 5780/2020 (video)
"Practicing Failure, Cultivating Resilience," d'var for Yom Kippur 5780/2019
D'var for Kol Nidrei 5780/2019
"Israeli and American Jewish Identity," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5780/2019
"The Geir Without and Within," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5779/2018
"Ki Hinei Kachomeir: Desiring our Yeitzer," for Kol Nidrei 5779/2018
Cantor Vera's Report on Trip to San Diego and Tijuana with T'ruah in July 2018
"Practicing Failure, Cultivating Resilience," d'var for Yom Kippur 5780/2019
D'var for Kol Nidrei 5780/2019
"Israeli and American Jewish Identity," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5780/2019
"The Geir Without and Within," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5779/2018
"Ki Hinei Kachomeir: Desiring our Yeitzer," for Kol Nidrei 5779/2018
Cantor Vera's Report on Trip to San Diego and Tijuana with T'ruah in July 2018