"We Have To Be Able To Hold Multiple Truths At Once"

JEWS OF THE UNIVERSE: INTRODUCING RABBI SHARON KLEINBAUM

Photo by Harold Levine

“I came to Congregation Beth Simchat Torah — New York City’s LGBTQ synagogue — at the height of the AIDS epidemic. That was when CBST, which had never had a rabbi until then, decided it needed help. They had no staff; it was still very much a DIY operation – totally lay-driven, all volunteer. But they realized within that crisis that they needed spiritual leadership. So I came in August of 1992 and I was their first full-time hire. Our budget was about $40K a year back then, and it went mostly to rent.

From 1981 — when the virus was first identified as GRID — to 1997, when the first effective medications were introduced (there is still no vaccine): those were 16 intense years of sickness, sadness, fear, mourning, and death in the gay community, and it was my role to be a loving presence. We had no idea whether there would ever be effective medication. Though there were a few long-time survivors even then (which was a mystery), for those 16 years, it was a death sentence.

Roughly 40% of our congregation died from AIDS-related illnesses. The shul was overwhelmed with sorrow and grief, and my job was to support the community through that.

During my first several years at CBST, I was primarily focused on caring for people who were suffering, on being a presence and a source of support for them through the epidemic. In those days, our community experienced a lot of hostility from both the government and the Jewish world.

There was a constant feeling of being under siege. We felt the need to build a community that could create the kind of love and laughter and beauty that was necessary in a terrible time like that.”

“I was born in 1959 and I grew up outside New York City in Rutherford, NJ. I had three older siblings, which meant I was very connected to everything going on in the world through them. In the late ’60s, I was very politically involved in the Gene McCarthy presidential campaign and the United Farm Workers Grape Boycott, as well as peace / anti-war demonstrations and music.

My passions were politics, philosophy and theater. In 1970 — when I turned 11 — my mother started letting me take the bus into NYC alone. My parents didn’t give me money, so I’d make money in all the different ways that little kids make money. But I didn’t have much even with that.

I’d take the bus into the city and walk around Times Square. This was the very early 70s. Think of what Times Square was like in the 70s: seedy, filthy, dangerous, all sex shops and peep shows. And I was in heaven. I felt like I could breathe.

I’d go to the second half of every Broadway show I could get into. At intermission, all the smokers would come out into the street to have a cigarette, and I’d just drift back inside with them for the second act, when no one was checking tickets anymore. I’d stay in the standing room area until the lights went down and then find an empty seat.

Now, if I really, really loved a show, I’d save enough money for a ticket to see the whole thing. The TKTS Booth in Times Square opened in 1972, which was life changing for me!”

“My father ran a Jewish social service agency. At the time, it was called The Jewish Welfare Board of Northern New Jersey in Hackensack. It became the Jewish Federation many years later. He started and ran many social services, including Kosher Meals On Wheels and kosher homes for developmentally disabled people, so that observant Jews could avail themselves of those resources.

When I came out to them after college, my mother told me she was shocked but not surprised. My father said he needed some time, and the next week, he told me he’d done some research because he wanted to learn more. As this was way before the internet, he’d gone to the library.

When he was a young man, anyone who was gay was lonely and ostracized and miserable. And he was worried, because he didn’t want misery and loneliness for me. But he told me, “I read the Kinsey Report and was very heartened by it. My conclusion is that this is a societal problem, not your problem.” Can you imagine that? This was very typical of my father. He was an extraordinary human being.”

“My mother was from a religious family in the Boston area. My maternal grandmother was born in the US. She was a feminist and a college graduate (Jackson College ’22!). My maternal grandfather was an immigrant who became a lawyer. They were middle class and highly educated.

My father, on the other hand, was from a secular immigrant socialist family. They never spoke English. My paternal grandmother had a Yiddish version of a bodega in the Bronx, in a very Yiddish-speaking area. No one spoke English; everyone spoke Yiddish, and my father spoke only Yiddish with his parents. He was the first person in his family to go to college. And he knew nothing about Judaism. He never set foot in a synagogue until the day he married my mother.

His parents weren’t traditionally educated. As far as I know, they didn’t have much formal schooling. But they were very committed socialists and contemptuous of my mother for lighting Shabbos candles. They asked my father, “What are you doing marrying such a superstitious woman?” Because socialists had so much disdain for religion; they saw it as a sign of ignorance.

But my mother was in charge of our education, and so I did go to shul growing up. There was one synagogue in Rutherford; it was Conservative and we attended Hebrew school there three days a week. It reinforced my sense of Jewish identity that Rutherford was not a Jewish town and I heard the usual antisemitic remarks from local peers growing up. It didn’t shame me; it accomplished the opposite.

I went to an Orthodox yeshiva for high school. I was having a terrible time in junior high, so when this modern co-ed Orthodox school opened in Bergen County, my father suggested I go there, especially because he could get a discount on my tuition as a Jewish professional. So I went there starting in 10th grade, and I really fell in love with all things in the Orthodox Jewish world.”

“The first woman to become a rabbi did so in 1973. By then, I was already a teenager. I didn’t grow up with a single woman in the rabbinate, so I certainly didn’t think about a rabbinical career at that time.

At Barnard, I majored in political science, with an emphasis on Gandhian philosophy. I was very close with a Political Science professor there named Dennis Dalton; I took every class he taught. He was my thesis advisor as well as my spiritual and intellectual mentor. He and I are still very close. It was a perfect major for me. My father had been a pacifist during World War II, so pacifism was deep in my blood.

At Barnard, I also studied Judaism from a secular point of view, which was new to me. At Frisch Yeshiva High School, I became proficient in classical Jewish texts and history. But by the end of my senior year, I’d stopped being Orthodox.

So when I got to Barnard, I was thirsty –- I wanted to keep living and studying as a Jew, but not within an Orthodox framework. And Barnard / Columbia had amazing resources.

To fulfill my foreign language requirement, I studied Yiddish with Mordkhe Schaechter, who was one of the great Yiddishists of the 20th century –- ironic, right? Because here was my father, whose mother tongue was Yiddish and whose family of origin didn’t want the kids and the grandchildren to speak the language of the shtetl. They wanted us to achieve success as Americans. And there I was in an Ivy-League school, earning credits for studying Yiddish.

I also took a lot of Jewish history courses at Columbia, which were fantastic. I studied with Dr. Paula Hyman, a wildly brilliant modern Jewish historian and feminist. She was deeply religious herself, but she wasn’t Orthodox. And so she introduced me to the idea that you didn’t have to be Orthodox to lead a deeply meaningful Jewish life.

This changed everything for me, because the Conservative Jewish experience I had as a kid had felt vapid and empty, whereas Orthodoxy was rich but ultimately alienating to me as a feminist and lesbian. Paula showed me I could lead a rich Jewish life and be a feminist.

Her influence marked the start of my understanding that non-Orthodox religion could be deep and profound and immersive and transformative, all of which I had only experienced in the Orthodox world. She was incredible — one of the women who really changed Conservative Judaism. She co-founded a group called Ezrat Nashim at JTS (Jewish Theological Seminary), which advocated for women within the Conservative movement. And she was a great historian.”

Dr. Paula Hyman

“After I graduated, I was hitchhiking one day with my girlfriend at the time. We were on our way from Amherst to Northampton in Western Mass when a van picked us up. So I’m sitting in the back of this van surrounded by all these boxes of books.

And just out of curiosity, I opened a box and picked up one of the books, which was in Yiddish. Remember, I’d studied Yiddish for years by then, so I could read it very well. And I asked the driver, ‘What in the world are you doing with The Collected Works of Mendele Mocher Sforim?’

The driver did a quick double take. Then he yanked the van to the side of the road, slammed on the brakes, turned around and said, ‘How are you, a hitchhiker, able to read that?’”

Aaron Lansky

“So that driver was Aaron Lansky, who founded the National Yiddish Book Exchange (which eventually became the National Yiddish Book Center, or NYBC). And that’s how he and I met.

I’d just finished college, and not long afterward, he said to me: “Listen, move up here – I don’t know any other young people who can read Yiddish – and help me build the National Yiddish Book Exchange.”

So I moved there in 1982. There were three of us at the fledgling NYBE : Aaron, myself and one other woman. None of us were paid. To make money, I taught Hebrew school in a Northampton synagogue, and both of us went on the road giving lectures and teaching classes.

I started to teach Yiddish at the NYBE and realized you can’t really teach Yiddish without teaching Judaism. Even the most secular Yiddish writers were immersed in Jewish religion in Eastern Europe. They were reacting to it, in conversation with it, rebelling against it -– but they knew it. And I realized: we have an American Jewish population that’s completely ignorant of all this.

So we started teaching classes at the NYBE, and that was also another meager income stream. But we didn’t even have money for heat. We were teaching in an old elementary school in Amherst. There are photos of us at work with gloves and hats on. We had one of those little kerosene heaters that were so dangerous.

Aaron and I were teaching a lot of disaffected Jews who had moved to the hills and back to the land. They were very eco-conscious, into environmental issues and vegetarianism, and they felt as if Judaism had nothing to say to them. Aaron and I taught a lot of classes to that demographic, and I found that I was able to be a conduit, a bridge of sorts, between Orthodox Judaism and traditional Jewish texts — which I knew very well — and these people who were totally disaffected and unaffiliated, and even kind of hostile to organized religion, including Judaism.”

Aaron Lansky

“Aaron Lansky was and is a master teacher. I learned so much from him about teaching. He remains one of my great mentors. We went on the road a lot, giving lectures about Yiddish Literature, Yiddish Culture and the Yiddish Book Center.

And then Aaron — in his genius, and he is a genius — started a zamler program.

Zamler is the Yiddish word for collector. It’s inspired by the establishment of the YIVO Institute in Vilna, Lithuania in 1925. They created a zamler program, a collector program, where volunteers and a few professionals went out into the countryside of Eastern Europe and collected Yiddish stories and music.

Some of them lugged the earliest recording equipment that existed, which was massive. And so a lot of what we know about Yiddish music and stories –- not the ones that were written, but the oral tradition of Yiddish -– we owe to those zamlers.

Aaron had the idea of creating a zamler program in North America, to collect Yiddish books that would otherwise be thrown out. He created a vast network of volunteers who would be the collection point for Yiddish books and magazines and any other Yiddish material that would otherwise have been lost.

Once a month, he and I would get on the road from Massachusetts and drive mostly to NYC or Philadelphia or Boston. We would drive to the zamler locations – homes, apartments, institutions – where we’d pick up the books and bring them back to western Massachusetts.

The NYBE had so little money that we could only afford to rent a van for 24 hours. So we’d pick up the van at 5:00 am, drive down to NYC together, and go from one zamler collection site to the next. We would fill the van from floor to ceiling, drive back to Western Mass that night, unload the books into our makeshift warehouse and then get the van back to the rental outlet by 5:00 am. This is the kind of thing you can only do in your early twenties.”

“So we developed relationships with these local zamlers. One of them was in Philadelphia, at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), which let us use their basement as a collection point for these Yiddish works. Every time we visited the site, the president at that time — Ira Silverman (z”l) — would tell Aaron and me that we should go to rabbinical school.

And in time, I came to consider that suggestion, because I thought I had something unique to offer. I was someone with roots in Orthodoxy who could also speak directly to my own generation. While teaching these classes at the YBC, it occurred to me: whoa, I have this Yeshiva education but I’m also a progressive lesbian, so I can be a bridge between two factions that otherwise might never speak to each other.

So I started thinking seriously about rabbinical school — not because I wanted to be a congregational rabbi, but because I’d last studied Judaism as a teenager, and now I was an adult, and I wanted to do it with all of who I was, bringing my full self to it for the first time.

Then in 1984, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College passed the first non-discrimination-based-on-sexual-orientation policy. Up until then, it was not possible to enroll without being completely closeted. So I applied to RRC. I knew little about their philosophies or Reconstructionism. But I got in and started rabbinical school in 1985 and was there until my ordination in 1990.”

“I was ordained in 1990 but it wasn’t possible to get a congregational postion as an openly gay rabbi. I was blessed to be offered a position at the Religious Action Center (RAC) in Washington DC. That was a dream job for me. I was working as their Director of Congregational Relations and it was my job to help synagogues across America improve their social justice work. My background as an organizer really served me there as well. I was there for two years, from 1990-1992.

But then CBST, the gay and lesbian synagogue in New York, decided they needed help. With the trauma of the AIDS epidemic, they felt they needed either a social worker or a rabbi. Ultimately they chose the latter, and I became the shul’s first full-time employee. Now the shul has something like a $4 million budget with 20-something employees, but back then it was still operating on a shoestring.”

“CBST began with a Friday night minyan in 1973. No one ever imagined it would be the huge institution that it became. It started as a few people, mostly men, who wanted a place where they could attend Shabbat services and also be gay. And I think that’s such an important message: start with what’s at hand, and do that, carry on…

They started by just having a Friday night service in a church in Chelsea, because it was the only place that would welcome them. The apocryphal story is that they had a shopping bag with a challah and candlesticks. Everyone says there were ten people there, but all the people who can supposedly testify to this firsthand: they number in the hundreds. Everybody was somehow at that inaugural Shabbat.

That was in February of 1973. They kept meeting in that space, which was a children’s classroom in the church; the group was too small to even consider the sanctuary.”

“It was the second place in the Jewish community where it was possible to be openly gay and Jewish. The first was in LA, where a synagogue — Beit Chayim Chadashim (BCC) — had started a few months earlier. None of the national Jewish organizations, nor any of the major denominations of Jewish life, had a single position that was pro-gay.

There wasn’t a single rabbi in America in 1973 who said it was okay to be gay. They might have said it quietly, but certainly there was no public statement. The most progressive position emerged in 1965, when the Reform Movement’s National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods (now Women of Reform Judaism) –- which was very progressive then, and still is –- passed a resolution calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality. That was by far the most radical position on record. They don’t like to admit it now, but the Jewish world was very slow to accept gay Jews.”

“So anyone who was gay and Jewish essentially had to choose. If I stay in the Jewish world, I need to sublimate or hide — and if I go into the gay community, there’s nothing Jewish. It was really a bifurcation. And so CBST created a space where they didn’t have to make that choice.

CBST started to really grow with the Yom Kippur War, which shook up all Jews, even the unaffiliated ones. The ones who weren’t connected to a Jewish community really felt a need to connect, just as they did after October 7th. Until then, CBST had just been small gatherings — maybe they had 15 people, maybe 20 on a Friday night; it never got bigger than that. It was this lovely warm haimish space but that was it.

But with the Yom Kippur War, people were looking, and now CBST existed. It wasn’t incorporated; it had no official structure — it was nothing but a community gathering on a Friday night. No bylaws or officers. But the war brought a lot more people in.

I gave a eulogy recently for just such a person: Michael Levine. He’d been a real synagogue-going Jew when he left his family’s home in Brooklyn and moved to the West Village in the late ’60s. But every time he tried to go to a synagogue, someone would come up to him and say, you know, I have a daughter or a granddaughter for you, and of course he didn’t want that. So he had nothing.

But when the Yom Kippur War happened, someone told him there was a makeshift gay and lesbian synagogue. And from that first Shabbos that he came, he never missed another until his death, unless he was out of town. So he was a typical member. It was mostly men who grew up in 1950s conservative Judaism, who just wanted a place to be Jewish and gay.”

“One member had been a Bobover Hasid. He’d grown up in that community but left it in the late ’60s when he came out. And when he found CBST, he really became its spiritual leader. He had this incredible depth and richness of knowledge — deep Jewish knowledge.

He created this very rich spiritual depth which I benefitted from for many years. And he slowly came back to Jewish religious practice by serving in that role, to the point where, years later, CBST was no longer religious enough for him anymore. But it’s kind of beautiful that for him, CBST was a bridge back to being frum. He’d been totally non-religious when he came to CBST, because he’d left Orthodoxy totally. He had also responded to that choice — Jewish or gay — and he was gay. But CBST showed him that he didn’t have to choose.

He really wanted to move the energy of CBST to Saturday mornings instead of Friday nights, but all these gay men in the ’70s went clubbing after the Friday night service and they were not going to get up early on Saturday morning for a two-and-a-half-hour service. Since he was moving in that direction, he needed to get that elsewhere. He ended up finding a shtiebel that would accept him on the Upper West Side. At a certain point in NYC, people were looking the other way.

But he remained at CBST as a teacher for decades. He taught a Talmud class on Tuesday nights. And I think his trajectory is a very moving reflection of what a community can be. It doesn’t have to be a place where people stay forever. They can get what they need and then move on. The measure of a synagogue’s success is not necessarily retention, but rather meeting people where they are and sheltering them for as long as they need.”

“So I became the first official rabbi at CBST in 1992, and I stayed there for 32 years. In additon to pastoral care, which I loved, I became very involved in teaching, leading services, giving sermons, and political advocacy and activism. And I presided over countless funerals, which was a profound honor. Back then, gay men didn’t even have the legal status to execute their departed partners’ decisions. Sometimes the family of origin would make the funeral arrangements and there would be no mention whatsoever of the fact that he was gay and died of AIDS.

Often the parents wouldn’t even let me speak at their official funeral. So in many cases, we’d have a second memorial service where his authentic self and the fullness of his life could be honored. It was very moving and I felt that this was why G-d put me on the planet.

For my whole life, I’d felt that G-d put me here for a reason. It’s always up to us to figure out what that reason is. So I wasn’t crushed by the responsibility; I felt it was my work to do. It gave my own life meaning, and I hope that I was able to elevate and comfort people during a time that was very bleak. It’s hard to even articulate how bleak things felt then. But we created beauty and art and laughter and joy, and that was also part of what I saw as my job.

I think the gay community and the Jewish community of Eastern Europe share a gift for creating an amazing vibrant culture within conditions of severe persecution — with so much great humor, great joy, and I think there’s a lot to learn from that. In our current world, we get so morose when things are hard. But I think gay people and Jewish people have shown it doesn’t have to be that way. And that’s why I believe joy itself is an act of resistance.”

“Jews instinctually seek community in times of crisis. And just as the Yom Kippur War and the AIDS epidemic drove people to seek spiritual leadership and sustenance, so has the massacre of October 7th and the rise of fascism in the United States.

I believe there’s mystery in the Universe. I can’t understand everything. My relationship with that mystery is sometimes very close, and other times it’s very distant.

I use traditional prayer structures. At times they’re meaningful to me, at other times less meaningful. Language is always limited by nature. There are some things in the universe that are ineffable, beyond words, even though we have to use words to get as close as we can. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.

I pray but I don’t necessarily believe in a G-d who answers those prayers in the ways I want them answered. Because I don’t have the biggest picture, and that’s okay. We have to live with a lot of unknowns and a lot of uncertainty. I do believe in some ultimate redemptive arc to the universe but I don’t know the timeline for that. I don’t know the end game. Because I’m not G-d.”

“I consider myself ardently pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. Anyone who does not denounce what Hamas did on October 7th loses all moral credibility. And I feel the same way about anyone who doesn’t denounce the violence against Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, and even within Israel. I’ve been doing that for decades. I stand with the people who insist on the humanity of both sides.

Recently a Palestinian friend and I wrote a piece titled A Queer Prayer For Nonviolence in Israel / Palestine. He and I have been friends for a long time. He’s from Ramallah and he’s gay; I’m from New Jersey and I’m gay.

The inability of countless people to hold multiple truths at once continues to shock me. There are seven million Palestinians in the region and seven million Jews. The only possible future is a shared future, period. Without a shared future, there will only be flames and violence.

I really do believe our lives and futures are interwoven. And the strange thing is, honestly, I don’t think it’s so complicated. The extremists on both sides nurture and feed each other, but that’s not who most people are. So we have to keep resisting the extremists, and in both worlds it’s hard to do that. We have to keep insisting on the humanity of the other, because as soon as you lose the ability to see the humanity of the other, we’re lost.”

“It’s ridiculous that wearing a yellow hostage ribbon in the United States is often seen as a right-wing statement. It’s also ironic, because in Israel, wearing the same ribbon is often seen as a left-wing position. Because the right wing in Israel totally wants to silence the hostage families, given their criticism of Netanyahu. So it’s amazing that this little symbol, in two different spaces, is interpreted in such wildly different ways.

Toward the end of last year, I was called an anti-Zionist and a genocide-supporting rabbi in the same week.

I get a lot of strength from my connection to the Israeli / Palestinian groups who are doing this work. I’m very close with the people in the Parents Circle Families Forum; Combatants for Peace; Association for Civil Rights in Israel; Israeli Religious Action Center; Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance; Standing Together; Women Make Peace; Breaking the Silence; Hand in Hand: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel, and many more.

I focus on speaking my truth and amplifying the voices of people there who are speaking this language. The American conversation is less interesting to me. Maybe it’s because I want to be with the people who are on the front lines, who are much more complicated. So that’s where I find my inspiration: I stay close to the ones on the ground, Palestinian and Jewish, who are doing this work.”

“A lot of liberal rabbis have gone silent, because it’s easier. They were not comfortable with Israel to begin with; they couldn’t figure out a sophisticated position on the conflict, so they went silent on the whole topic years ago. Look, Israel doesn’t always make it easy. But I’m not going to give up progressive Zionism.

These are important conversations to have, but I feel that giving up the word Zionism today is like giving up the American flag. It doesn’t mean I don’t want Israel to change radically — I do. I want the people on the ground there, in a successful and healthy way, to make that decision; ultimately, it’s not mine to make. But I want them to find a way forward that respects the complete liberation, freedom, and dignity of both peoples.

My wife and I went to Israel for 10 days in November of 2023. As it happens, we were visiting when the first set of hostages were released, so it was an amazing time to be there. And I wrote this letter from Jerusalem to the CBST congregation.

In it, I said:

This isn’t about choosing one side or the other. That’s a cop-out; it’s too easy. We’re treating it like a sports game. Which jersey do I put on? Which bumper sticker?

Instead, we have to be able to hold multiple truths at once. I feel this with ever more intensity as time goes on. If both peoples don’t survive this with dignity, there will be no future for either side.

This is undeniably the much more difficult path.

But just as undeniably, there is no other way forward.”

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