This past Wednesday was Transgender Day of Remembrance and Resilience. It is a day to mourn trans people past and present who have lost their lives to transphobic hate and violence, and also a day to recommit to fighting for the dignity and rights of a community that in this moment is in the cross-hairs of the most reactionary elements of our society. We as a congregation have made great strides in becoming a spiritually nourishing Jewish home for trans/nonbinary/gender non-conforming adults and children, and I know that our new political reality is hitting these members of our community especially hard. In the weeks and months ahead, we will have the opportunity to take action both to support our members who are targeted as well as join others in the fight for trans rights and safety.
This past week the coordinators of our many Tikkun Olam initiatives, under the leadership of our VP of Tikkun Olam, Liz Reisberg, gathered to share about the incredible work that’s been done at CDT in the past few years, and to look ahead to the challenges that face us. Stay tuned for more information, but we are currently planning to convene the congregation on Sunday afternoon, January 26 from 4-6pm on Zoom, to hear about and get involved in the work we plan to do in a variety of issue areas. The forces of authoritarianism and chaos are banking on our despair; our resilience and readiness to resist is the first step in working towards a different kind of future.
This week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, begins with the death of our spiritual ancestor Sarah, and ends with Abraham, her husband, remarrying a woman named Keturah. In rabbinic tradition, Keturah is none other than Hagar, the Egyptian maidservant with whom Abraham fathered his first child, Ishmael. The midrash imagines their relationship not as one of master and concubine, but husband and his second wife, one who is unfairly forced from her home. The rabbis imagined Abraham going to visit Hagar and Ishmael during Sarah's lifetime, and then go as far as to imagine him remarrying her once Sarah has passed.
This midrashic tradition represents, to me, our rabbinic ancestors’ incredible chutzpah in rewriting Biblical stories. By bringing Hagar back into the story, they not only celebrate her as a worthy partner to Abraham, but implicitly make amends for the rift caused by Sarah’s insecurity. They imagine healing where there was rupture, and loving connection where there was painful separation.
May we, like the early rabbis, have the chutzpah to imagine—and then act for—a different kind of world. May we help turn the targeting of the vulnerable into a celebration of human difference, the violence of war into the rebuilding of devastated communities, the narrowness of hate into the expansiveness of love. May it be so.
