BECOMING VISIBLE
SERMON June 23, 2023
The cover story in this week’s Jewish Journal is about Ben Freeman, a British activist for LGBT and Jewish causes. In the story, he recounts how much he hated being treated as ‘other’ as a young gay man and that he internalized this as shame about being gay. In his later teens and early 20’s, he began a journey from shame to pride in being gay, and one of the key moments was listening to Harvey Milk, the first elected openly gay person, speaking about the importance of pride and the legitimacy anger at oppression. For Ben Freeman, the shift toward pride was one of the most meaningful experiences of his life. What a simple, yet incredibly difficult thing it can be to simply be proud of who we are in all our parts.
For Ben, when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party began trafficking in antisemitic tropes and promoting blatantly antisemitic people, he witnessed the Jewish community in Britain rally to express both anger and pride. It was then that he made the connection between gay pride and Jewish pride, and began his life work of helping both communities make the journey he had made, to flip the script from shame to a deep and rooted sense of dignity and pride.
In our community, no one exemplifies Jewish pride more than Judy Alexander and Bruce Chalmer. It is not a chauvinist pride, but a beautiful sense of love, of dignity - a sort of light that exudes from them when they are speaking of Jewish learning, culture, history. What role models you both are, especially for our youth.
For 23 years, Judy has beamed that sense of pride to generations of our Hebrew school, and in a true “twofer” Bruce came with Judy and has enhanced the learning and music in our little community immensely. I am deeply grateful for all they do, but perhaps more deeply, for who they are as human beings.
In the Talmud, in Pirkei Avot, it says, “Joshua ben Perahiah used to say: appoint for thyself a teacher, and acquire for thyself a companion and judge all men with the scale weighted in his favor.”
עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב, וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר, וֶהֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת:
We can read this as three separate pieces of advice, or we can read them as one interconnected suggestion: If you find yourself a good teacher, you will make a friend, and you will learn to judge people graciously, giving them the benefit of the doubt. How amazing would it be in America today if more leaders taught how important it is to judge people on the side of merit, instead of cutting them down.
Judy and Bruce, you are teachers, you are friends, and you remind us to judge one another in love and kindness. I’ll say more tomorrow night, but tonight, I want to share a song that Saragail Benjamin wrote for you for tonight, based on the text of Pirkei avot. Aseh L’cha Rav.