Finding My Religion: Reflections from A Queer Jew in Israel on Yom Kippur

Sitting in the outdoor synagogue in Tel Aviv, hearing the Rabbi rock back and forth and sing-song the prayer of the closing prayers of Yom Kippur felt cathartic to me. It was an Orthodox yet progressive synagogue in the outdoors. The men sat on one side, the women on the other. But the women sang the prayers, and a woman blew the Shofar, signaling the end of the fast. I wept from the nostalgia, the feeling, the sense of lost life, the alienation, the burden of being a gay person who survived the AIDS crisis, a single parent, my aging mother, all the institutions I built, some that survived, some that didn't, and the feeling that comes with the Shofar being blown: New Life, the sins wiped off, okay, let's open our arms to the people, the community and what "God" has in store for us. I accept, I radically get, all that was and all that will be. I forgive. I forgive myself for being so full of shortcomings and now too old to do some things again. But New Life with the blowing of the Shofar.

All my life, I have wondered about the place of Judaism in my life. I have often thought to myself that I am a For Real Jew in terms of my culture, my identity, my firm faith in my own social justice feelings, and my ties to the great Jewish thinkers of the past, including Kafka and Freud, and Emma Goldman, and let us not forget the great existentialist Martin Buber.

Children Freely Filling the Carless Streets with DareDevil Bicyicling (that could run you over!)

But the religious part I felt more ambivalent about. But I never disputed the Jew in the Jewish. Everyone who knows me, including my former boss, Dr. Joy Turek, knows I sprinkle Yiddish everywhere. My foster son, African American and from a broken home, but is today 24, is AMAZING and WISE and a great teacher. He has entered my life daily these last five years. He may not understand what Jewishness means. Still, he certainly knows about the watchful eye of the Jewish parent, the blend of maternal and paternal, and the faith in the healing powers of relationship, as annoying as I can be (I so take after my mother).

Once I left New York City thirty years ago and pursued a more "GAY" life, the God-Image shifted, as we say in psychological circles. As an LGBTQ-centered and avid homosexual, I would have told you over the last thirty years that my "religious" feelings could find support from two sources. The first (Number #1) came from my Gay Spirit (don't ask me to define this now, but it is a quality of energy that is not necessarily related to the act of sexuality but overlaps). The second (Number #2) came from the gay erotic intelligence that has guided me into all my community activism and into being a psychoanalytical queer professor and hard-ass-working psychotherapist. I felt confident that Numbers #1 and #2 were informed by the "three keys," meaning Sappho, Plato, and Socrates. These figures were the early conceptualizers of sacred same-sex love and Eros. By "keys," they opened the door to understanding who I was in an ancient sense regarding what, believed it or not, Freud himself called "homosexual libido," an intelligence in the unconscious everyone has. But back to the "three keys." They and many other teachers, both dead and living, gave me the feeling of having a GAY CENTER or a queer sense of self.

Sorry for the usage of so many words. Oy. Each of these words means so many different things to different people and are not part of community parlance but have been around. Each deserves a Talmudic inquiry. We need a Queer Talmud. Hurry up, future generations, write this shit down, not just as deconstruction, but a reconstruction, and don't leave out the feeling, please. These terms and their disputations need a great deal of consideration. I do what I can in session for my clients whose healing and health involve addressing their problems and the failures of education. I hope my next book inches the dialogue along more. It better. It's been decades since my last books. A lot of percolating still feels immature and needs more scholarly.

So, I am going off on a tangent. Back to the Jewish religion question. I shifted my "religious" feeling to being gay and queer and less to being Jewish. I would attend Jewish religious events and even loved them. Still, it would almost seem as if I had two gods, the superior being the homosexual one, the more compromised one being the God whose name is repeated hundreds if not thousands of times with each Jewish service.

Now, I am still determining. I was too moved during the Yom Kippur service here in Israel. You have yet to experience Yom Kippur like it is done in Israel. The whole nation stops. Everyone walks in the streets wearing white. People, even the non-religious ones, fast. It is a Day of Atonement. The roads are dangerously filled with "yiladim," or children, ridding bicycles in the streets, screaming for freedom. More to be said about the Yom Kippur service. But felt my grandparents, Ida and Gustave, the Jewish immigrants. I felt my mother's warmth, kindness, and overbearing care. And the music, the sound, the voice of the men and women "davening," which is a hard-to-define word for praying or muttering the prayers--I can't deny the feeling I felt.

fOf course, who can say who GOD is. We have different cultures, and they all refer to God. People also fight over this term. It's loaded. No wonder so many Israelis scoff at the religious bullshit. They don't like many of them how the religious people have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon. Such a God, nu, we could do without. If all this religious feeling produces a nation that only looks at one side of the problem and doesn't look at its oppressive and racist practices, it's "gornischt." So, I am not talking about God with any sense of surety other than what I am calling my personal sense of the "numinous."

But the numinous comes in many other areas than religion, yes? In psychological terms, let's refer to Bion, but we could also speak of Jung and all the relational analysts. It is what is happening in the relationship. Anyone who works hard in the transference (what the client sends your way) and the countertransference (what you send back) can almost laugh off any concept of God that doesn't have to do with the "ANALYTIC THIRD," or what is produced when two souls meet and the chemicals that get stirred up that neither can escape or should escape, although escape happens all the time. Who can bear God, after all? Even Moses' hair turned white. Not to mention the "projective identification," or what happens when the client splits off a colossal continent of feeling and the therapist is trapped on that continent kicking and screaming. Neither knows what to do because each person's fragmentation is being enacted. No thought or feeling will be permitted in breaking "these" vessels--anyone who survives projective identification can talk about really facing shit in its most Job-like forms: pure horror, pure life, pure possibilities. No therapist who stays the projective identification has not also atoned for their sins. I'm sorry. It goes on behind closed doors, but if you want to throw the word "religion" around, psychoanalysts don't talk a lot about it, but it is what makes the work so important, so involved in "Tikkun Olam," or healing the world.

But today, notwithstanding all these misgivings and many more, I began reconsidering what Jewish means to me during this special Yom Kippur service. I even left myself feel more open to the religious question. Of course, it's always been around. The concluding service of Yom Kippur is called the "Neilah Service," which means closing the gates. Some say it refers to the closing of the Gates of Heaven, which have been kept open to receive our final prayers and supplications.

What had been the more leisurely rhythm of the day shifted. The people stood up louder. The clapping of the hands was more fierce. The children stopped playing and sat on the lap of the parents. As the initial hunger from the fast was searing off, many in the outdoor area felt a revitalization of their spiritual strength. I remember the tempo from my childhood. WOW: There is a single recitation of the SHEMA, then a threefold repetition, a statement about God in the past, present, and future. And finally, another verse is repeated seven times. This declaration is followed by a long blast of the Shofar, "Tekiah Gedolah," a proper ending. It's also worth mentioning that the Season of the Year has changed, and our world has moved into Libra at this time. I said goodbye to the queer Jews who had befriended me with tears in my eyes, and I was invited to their homes. I know it's all so complex and wrought. I don't have the answers while being but a bystander in this terribly complicated country. I don't see a lot. I did have an immense feeling, though. Thank you for listening. A good year to you.