The Courage and Dignity of Being Present, Happy Pride

By: Rabbi Joel Alter

What first attracted me to Nehirim a bunch of years ago is what has kept me coming back, and led me now to serve on its board. Nehirim’s retreats come together in a way that creates a near-instant caring community among GLBT Jews of many stripes. There is something about how we gather that encourages us to see one another as full people. To be patient with, curious about, and loving toward one another. To be modest and restrained enough to give one another room to emerge, and bold and honest enough to show our own true face, even if sometimes only in profile. The all-here, all-in spirit of Nehirim regularly dissolves social barriers – some, anyway, making it possible to discover affinity with people I’d not have connected with otherwise. However good this discovery might feel for someone else, it always feels like an especially generous gift to myself. It’s wanting that gift again and again that keeps me coming back.

When we join together, we do so as Jews and typically around Shabbat. This is not coincidental. Our retreats actually echo the unity – the coalescing of disparate parts into an integrated whole – of the Shabbat of Creation. We enjoy a powerful feeling that we are all better for our reliance upon and relationship to one another. What is true for the created world feels true for our queer little human communities. And though our gatherings are temporary – they are retreats after all, they gain their transformative power from the sense that they partake of the permanence and natural beauty of Creation itself. As at any good retreat, Nehirim models how the world ought to be and asserts (as does Shabbat each week) that at a deep level the world already is as it ought to be. Our job is to see that it is and then to go out and make it so.

For me, Nehirim’s integrative spirit relies upon the embrace of God and God’s holy presence with our joyful, grateful, queer gatherings. Yet how we spend our time together during Shabbat makes space (when we are at our best) for participants whose Jewish expression has a religious vocabulary and for participants whose Jewish dialect is strictly secular or cultural. And this is why Nehirim’s early tag, Jewish LGBT Culture and Spirituality always resonated with me.

I’m writing this in June. It’s Pride month. Politically, culturally, religiously, institutionally, we’re in the midst of a season of extraordinary opening. Opening of hearts and minds, rewriting of rules, reimagining of established structures. It’s a time of joy. We’re not naïve. Progress doesn’t eliminate all barriers overnight. But still. It’s a great, great time to be one of us. In the loving and integrated spirit of Nehirim,Let’s be grateful for ourcourage and dignity in being present, and for the wisdom and courage of those who have joined the season of opening. Happy Pride and Thank You, Nehirim.