This d’var Torah was originally given as a Pride Shabbat sermon on July 24th, 2022 for Beth Emet Synagogue, in Evanston, Illinois. It has been adapted for publication on New Voices Magazine.
Parshat shlach tells the story of the scouts going into eretz yisrael, the promised land, for the very first time. After decades of wandering through the desert, the Israelites have finally arrived on the doorstep of their future, sending twelve different tribe members to give a field assessment. But when the scouts return, there are two different reports: the larger set of scouts returns terrified, quaking in their boots. “There are giants there,” they say. “They’ll crush us like grasshoppers. We can’t go in.” But the second, much smaller contingent brings back huge grapes and foodstuffs. “This is a land of milk and honey,” they say. “We can and should enter the land that was promised to us. There is something much better waiting at the other side.”
These moments of collective choice, bolstered by fear and hope, are familiar to all of us who have ever been a part of a movement or community working towards change. In the moments after Pride Month, in the boiler plate of the United States, we’re living inside of a critical moment of choice around how we talk about gender and sexuality, with stakes that are higher than ever. As anti-transgender laws floods the legislatures of the country, including bills that would have direct and dire consequences specifically for queer and transgender youth, with an increasingly militarized and fascistic right-wing movement growing in momentum with gender non-conformity in its direct crosshairs, the struggle towards liberation and actual safety can feel hopeless. In the wake of SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade, the urgency to fight for bodily autonomy has only intensified. But it’s my belief that all change must start within the realm of what we can control, the personal, local, and immediate. We have decisions to make within our own Jewish communities about how we are protecting our LGBTQ+ youth.
In my work as Editor of New Voices Magazine, a national progressive publication by and for Jewish students and writers ages 18-24, this year has been one of major publishing around issues of a particularly taboo topic: youth sexuality. This past month, we came out with a major investigation entitled, “How Jewish Summer Camps Are Damaging LGBTQ Youth,” a topic that, as you can imagine, is quite heavy on my heart as both a transgender Jew and summer camp alumnus. The months spent collecting interviews and editing drafts was emotional to say the least, but what struck me most from working with journalist Julia Hegele to bring this story to fruition was all of the factors that resulted in so much trauma for young queer Jews, even long before they identified as LGBTQ. Yet, these factors are actually pretty non-obvious, especially for anyone who either hasn’t attended camp or isn’t under the rainbow flag.
In a nutshell, the most major contributing factors to experiences of alienation, discomfort, exclusion, and even abuse within Jewish summer camp environments were subtle but pervasive cultural forces:
- A hypersexualized, extremely heteronormative camp culture which put a constant pressure to participate in romantic or sexual activity, specifically with the so-called “opposite” gender, despite having ambiguous or no clear guidelines around consent or acceptable camp sexual behavior.
- Binarily gendered environments without non-gendered options, including cabins, tents, activities, units, chants and cheers, Shabbat dress-codes, and more.
- Camp’s brand of over-the-top enthusiasm for everything, including extremely gendered activities, leading to queer kids feeling like their coming out would “ruin everyone else’s fun”. To quote the article, “Many LGBTQ+ former campers expressed that a primary feeling of their queer beginnings at camp was guilt.”
- Staff members who either exacerbated camp heteronormativity by encouraging their campers to participate romantically or sexually with each other, or staff members who weren’t properly trained in how to support campers struggling with their gender, sexuality, or dealing with the aftermath of harassment and assault.
- An absence of policy and resources regarding consent and camper sexual behavior which leads to a culture of silence around actual sexual or romantic behavior between campers, including (and especially) when those encounters weren’t exactly consensual, leading to feelings of shame, confusion, guilt, and even trauma. Combined with the erasure and silence around same-gender attraction, assuming that sexual harassment and assault can only happen between boys and girls, many queer campers didn’t realize that many of the things that had happened to them at camp weren’t okay until years after they’d come out, often as adults.
The results of all of these combined factors were devastating for many of the former campers interviewed. It’s even more difficult to hold all of this pain because we know that Jewish spaces should be places where all of us feel the most safe in our bodies, where youth learn to respect themselves and each other, and see this as part of the sacred brit that we have to one another as Jews and fellow human beings. But we can’t get there by keeping silent about it.
Growing up at Beth Emet Synagogue in Evanston, Illinois, I feel that I was uniquely well-prepared to discuss these topics as I got older: throughout my 7th grade year at Hebrew School, the bulk of our beit-sefer time was dedicated to a curriculum called “Sacred Choices”, gender and sexuality education tailored to a Jewish spiritual context. The entire year was known as “Gesher”, or “bridge,” the year of b’nei mitzvot, between childhood and Jewish adulthood. At times, at that age, I remember the curriculum felt a little scandalous: led by trained educators, we made a huge list of all the slang terms for genitalia, got to write down questions about sex and bodies on little slips of paper that we thought we’d never really know the answers to. Though it felt shocking, it was actually demystifying; helping us understand that we didn’t have to be afraid of sexuality or our own bodies. Activities like these gave us a chance to openly discuss what respectful sexual language looked like, as opposed to more derogatory terms. Those lessons were coupled with workshops where we learned that consent is “YES EXCLAMATION POINT!” and events like an LGBTQ+ panel, where queer Jewish adults came in to talk to our class, which was also the first time I’d ever met an out transgender person. I cannot tell you what a gift this was to me, a child who had been gender non-conforming their whole life, but lacked any language or adults to help describe or legitimate my experience of the world, and the various ways I was punished for it, subtly and explicitly.
While some of these things may seem like basic sex education, they served another extremely important role: breaking taboo to alleviate shame, confusion, and all of the unsafety that can happen when experiences fester in the dark. And too often, issues of sexuality, especially youth sexuality, go completely unmentioned.
My childhood synagogue is a special place for a lot of reasons, but the Gesher program and others like it serve a phenomenally important role in creating a sexually healthy and loving Jewish future for us all. By teaching youth that our bodies, our genders, and our sexualities are actually sites of holiness in a way that isn’t about forbidding romantic and sexual expression, we give youth the tools they need to explore themselves and their relationships to others with confidence and care. Unlike most sex-ed programs, which talk about sex in terms of danger (stigmatizing STDs and unwanted pregnancy), this curriculum taught me that my desires were good, loveable, even g-dly. It taught me that I should not feel ashamed to speak about what I wanted and what I did not want, that if and when I wanted to have a relationship (or later, as I would discover in my queer young adulthood, lovers and casual sex), I should always feel empowered to make clear my needs and wants, give and ask for consent. It’s much easier to do this when you don’t feel like sex is some horrible awful secret that the grownups are avoiding telling you about – and the number of grownups who still feel that way is staggering, contributing to the deafening silence around all things sex, including harassment and assault.
In a heteronormative culture, it’s easier to stay silent about sexuality because it’s the water we swim in: there are clearly defined scripts and roles for men and women, boys and girls, and everybody learns them. We absorb it from Disney movies and popular book series, our parents, the news, Pew Research Studies about the Jewish future and how we need to make more Jewish babies. Assumptions can and will be made of all people sorted in this system, which often means that we don’t ever talk about it. However, queer genders and sexuality creates problems in this system: suddenly we can’t make the same assumptions.
As a transgender person, I can feel the eyes on me every time I walk into a room, trying to figure out if I am a man or a woman, which is to say, strangers are always trying to figure out what’s in my pants. This began young, long before I had access to terminology beyond “tomboy” or “sissy”. I can recall an experience at a birthday party when I was eight, maybe nine. I was the only “girl” at this all-boys birthday party, and when the time came to wash our hands for cake after laser-tag, I recall the attendant facilitator, some teenager working a weekend job, grabbing me by the collar as I entered the women’s restroom, spitting in my face that I was a little pervert for trying to go inside. It took my friend’s frantic protesting and his mom to rush over and clarify that I was actually in the right place, to assure this young man that I had not actually broken the system he was so furiously protecting.
Throughout both my childhood and my adult life, I have not had the privilege of ignoring the way that sex and sexuality informs every social interaction, unlike my cisgender peers. I have many more stories like this from those early years, which at the time were anxiety-producing and humiliating, and now looking back, can reasonably be called sexual harassment. For queer and trans youth who are just beginning to learn how to navigate a world that wishes to interrogate them for something as genuine and innocent as their own desire for self and others, facing that confused hostility, day in and day out, will wear on their souls – and when that happens in Jewish environments, the spiritual damage can be lifelong. This is completely unacceptable.
There is often a fear that talking about sex, gender, and sexuality is not “appropriate” for kids – but queer youth can’t avoid interactions about gender and sexuality because they can’t comply with the norms expected of them, appropriateness be damned. While all youth are affected by silence around sexuality, it often lands most squarely on queer and gender non-conforming children. This stigma around sex education manifests in backlash to programs like Gesher or the same absence of policy around sexuality in most Jewish summer camps and youth groups – and that often translates into is fear and shame for the children in their care. If g-d forbid situations of abuse do occur, a child who has received a meaningful and empowering sex education will be more likely to articulate, report, and heal through it than a child who feels that what happened to them was dirty, unspeakable, and worse, their fault. Jewish kids who feel supported in and empowered to talk about their genders, bodies, and sexualities grow into Jewish adults who treat themselves and one another with respect, consent, honesty, and love. We better protect our youth and our collective future by talking honestly and clearly about sex and sexuality.
Jewish spaces, especially camps and youth groups, must be environments where all of our children feel safe and comfortable to explore who they are, as Jews whose relationship to spirituality and peoplehood includes their bodies. It is up to us, the adults, to ensure they have the instructions, confidence, self-love, and resources to do so. That does, actually, mean talking about sex and sexuality, and having very clear, explicit guidelines around how we interact with our own bodies and the bodies of others, both sexually and not, rather than assuming that don’t-ask-don’t-tell will do anything other than embed shame in the kids we’re trying to raise. It means providing funding and resources towards programs and organizations doing this work, and educators who are writing curricula on these topics. It means explicit inclusion of queer and transgender issues as a standard part of training and education around gender and sexuality. It may mean addressing historical trauma around Jewish bodies, and how that impacts our relationships to our bodies and the bodies of other Jews. It absolutely means looking in the face our own adult fears and discomforts around issues of gender and sexuality and addressing the ways in which Jewish norms around reproduction, heteronormativity, and sexual pressure have affected us, so we can be sure to do better for the generation of Jews we’re trying to raise.
I truly believe that this is possible to do; that we can, actually build a Jewish world in which our youth’s first encounters with friendships, relationships, gender, and sexuality are informed, positive, loving, and even spiritually meaningful. And a Jewish world that is safer for our queer youth is safer for us all.
There’s another retelling of the story of the scouts entering into eretz yisrael, a perspective given by the Lubavitcher Rebbe: When we really think about the Israelites at the promised land’s gate, even with the scouts’ report that there were a few giants here and there, it’s actually a little bizarre that they were so nervous to enter Canaan. For the last 40 years, the Israelites had been miraculously sustained by a super powerful G-d and became a feared desert tribe which defeated all who attacked them. Seems like entering the land should be a piece of cake; so why was it that at this last, critical moment they became afraid?
The answer is not that they were afraid of failure – but rather, they were afraid of success. Success in entering the land meant suddenly they wouldn’t be taken care of, like children, how they’d been in the desert. In this next phase of peoplehood, they’d have to grow up and take responsibility for themselves and their future.
Growing up as a people means facing frightening frontiers – including the intimate landscapes of our own bodies. It can be scary to talk about gender and sexuality in these ways, especially in a culture that is often so violent and hostile around these issues. Yet, we can build a safer, more loving Jewish gender and sexual future. There is a promised land at the other side; our Jewish youth are counting on us to bring them there.
Photo by Frank Busch on Unsplash
