Published: 2 August 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
LGBT+ Jews are flocking to traditional learning, using Talmudic concepts to overcome exclusion.
This week 60 people will gather at a synagogue in Essex, in south-east England, for a four-day intensive course on the Talmud. It is the first summer school to be organised by a new British educational enterprise, the Queer Yeshiva.
While its unique feature is that it is aimed — particularly but not exclusively — at the LGBT+ community, perhaps what is most remarkable is that it is sold out, demonstrating a wider interest in classical rabbinic literature beyond the Orthodox yeshivah world.
The course draws inspiration from SVARA in Chicago, a “traditionally radical” yeshivah that approaches the Talmud through “the lens of queer experiences”.
Rabbi Lev Taylor said for a lot of queer people who feel on the margins of Jewish life, the program is an invitation to come in and “talk with your ancestors about fascinating issues — what is justice, what matters, what does a good life look like, how does the People survive?”
And it is an opportunity to do so not as passive consumers of knowledge but as active players who, as they wrestle with the language of the original text, have the freedom to come up with fresh interpretations.
Their choice of text for the summer program might, on the face of it, seem rather obscure: it is a section from tractate Sanhedrin about letaher et hasheretz,“to purify the creepy-crawly”, as Rabbi Taylor explained it.
“For some of us, it is a way of seeing ourselves as the people who get to decide what is clean or unclean, as a way to undo some of that trauma that many queer people have about feeling excluded, unclean, unwelcome. Some of us see the sheretz in ourselves, as that creepy-crawly thing from the Bible that couldn’t possibly be purified and yet here the Talmud is doing it.”
READ MORE
Tackling Talmud at the Queer Yeshiva (Jewish Chronicle)
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