Rabbi Eger: Sex, Spirituality & Evolving Past the Gender Binary
Podcast Transcript Season 2 Episode 24
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Illustration BY Black Women Animate
This week, our guest is Rabbi Denise Eger, who leads Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood. Rabbi Eger is one of the first lesbian Rabbis to work openly in the United States, and was the first queer President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which is the largest organization of Rabbis in the world. Rabbi Eger gives a blessing before a conversation about sex and spirituality; the myth of Lilith; ordaining California’s first legal lesbian wedding and how she is leading her congregation to evolve past the gender binary.
The following is a transcript of the interview from the episode:
Rabbi Eger:
I'm excited to be with you.
Liz:
I feel blessed by your presence already.
Rabbi Eger:
Well, we should do a blessing for you and for everyone who enjoys a healthy, sexual life because it is life-affirming.
Liz:
Should we start with that?
Rabbi Eger:
Sure.
Liz:
Okay.
Rabbi Eger:
Let's bless the source of life who helps us transform the world into place of goodness and justice and through the ways we love and the many ways we love. Let that be a force for truth and kindness and softness and gentleness and healing. Amen.
Liz:
Amen. Wow. Do you do guided blessed meditations?
Rabbi Eger:
I do. I do guided meditations during worship and try and help people refocus a little bit on their lives and bring them back to center. You know, in our very polarized world that we live in today things are either black or white and the grayness that is really the reality, including the moral ambiguity in the world, we need to bring people back to center, including the center in themselves. Some of that is the work that I do with people, all kinds of people from all walks of faith and all walks of no faith.
Liz:
Because you grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, which is kind of an interesting place to ...
Rabbi Eger:
It's a very interesting place, a place with a troubled past. Of course, it's the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April of 1968. It's also the land of Elvis and Stax Music and Isaac Hayes and it is a city of racial tensions still until this day.
Liz:
I know you were telling me when we spoke on the phone that as a kid you saw the Klu Klux Klan marching up and down the street on the weekends.
Rabbi Eger:
Yeah. They would bring out their white sheets and march up and down the main street near the main center park, Overton Park. I remember seeing that as a kid. As a Jewish person growing up there, Jews were not white. Let's be really clear. Jews were in a separate category and so there was a lot of affinity between the African-American and the black community and the Jewish community because we were all targeted by the right wing crazies of the Klu Klux Klan. Friends, family stores were firebombed by the Klan.
We're not talking in the 1960s. I'm talking about the 1970s. Yeah. It was definitely shaping of my youth and shaping of my efforts to continue reconciliation work and healing work and work with people of many different identities.
Liz:
Is that when you first decided to go into the spiritual work that you're doing now?
Rabbi Eger:
I was really lucky is that we have a very strong Jewish community in Memphis. In fact, in the South a Jewish community tends to be very connected to one another. You all end up being family. New Orleans, Memphis, Little Rock, Nashville.
It's a way because you're on the outside and Jews were in those years, especially outside the social circles, you couldn't join the same clubs at school that Christian kids could join a lot of times. Certainly that was true in certain neighborhoods where people didn't sell to Jews just like they didn't sell to blacks.
Your synagogue was a focal point in one's life. It was a place of nurturing and a place where I could really grow my leadership skills and was a place of safety. That's really why I was I think called in many ways to become a rabbi.
Liz:
Were there other female rabbis at this point?
Rabbi Eger:
Well, when I went to rabbinic school in the early '80s the first woman rabbi was ordained in 1972, Sally Priesand. In those first few years there was maybe one or two a year being ordained.
I had met some of the rabbinic students. They were seminary students through our Jewish summer camp, Henry S. Jacobs Camp in Utica, Mississippi, a one streetlight town that I think doesn't have a streetlight anymore actually, outside of Jackson, Mississippi.
I'd met some of the young women who were entering rabbinical school and they really influenced me to show me that it was possible to be a woman and to be a rabbi and I feel very lucky.
Liz:
You got ordained in 1988?
Rabbi Eger:
1988 at the New York campus of our reform movement's seminary, Hebrew Union College, a Jewish institute of religion. I had gone to USC as an undergrad and so came right back to California to work as a rabbi after that.
Liz:
You were telling me that you started an underground seminary group for LGBTQIA because you couldn't get hired.
Rabbi Eger:
In those years, in the '80s, '70s, you could be kicked out of Jewish seminary, whether you were a rabbi or a canter, the person that chants and sings the music of the synagogue, if you were known to be openly gay or lesbian. It was stuff that removed people from that.
We were very underground and very hidden, very closeted. There were a number of us and two of us started a group at the New York campus to try and advocate for ourselves even if we were in the closet. It was kind of a weird thing to try and do when you're hidden but, yeah, we called ourselves [Foreign language 00:05:59] which in Hebrew means, "I'm here."
We used to hold meetings off campus just to offer each other support. The closet is a dangerous place. It's a place that it's dangerous because you have to compress and separate yourself and isolate parts of yourself one from the other. That's a very painful place to be.
I think especially in Judaism kind of the theology, if you will, that I adhere to is a theology of shalom, which is a word which we know means peace. The root word of shalom [Foreign language 00:06:35] in Hebrew we also can read it as [Foreign language 00:06:39] meaning completeness or wholeness.
You can't be whole if you've got the disparate parts of yourself cut off from one another, split off as the psychologists would say. The answer is to try and integrate all of who you are into a healthy and whole human being. I think that's what the divine source of the universe really calls us into being.
Liz:
You can't walk in your spiritual truth and lead others in a spiritual path if you aren't yourself...
Rabbi Eger:
Right. You're not in integrity and that is why you have to really work on not compartmentalizing who you are.
Liz:
Was there a big movement then within Judaism around this time
Rabbi Eger:
There was a conversation going on in liberal Judaism and Reformed Judaism around homosexuality and Judaism. Our denomination, Reform Judaism, was struggling and talking a lot and learning and thinking about it.
In fact, in 1990, our Central Conference of American Rabbis, which is the Reform Rabbinate, really helped change the rule at our seminary and after 1990 you could be openly gay and apply and become a rabbi or a canter. It wasn't a bar to ordination. That's really changed the dynamic for so many people.
Liz:
I was reading that in 1964 there was a sisterhood, a women's group, that called for the decriminalization of consensual sexual acts between the same sex.
Rabbi Eger:
Right. It was a resolution of the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, which was like the Women's Auxiliary. I think it really was a groundbreaking resolution in the sense that who in the early '60s was talking about sexuality in such open ways. It's the beginning of that Feminine Mystique discussion that consenting adults should be able to engage in relationships as they see fit as long as it's not abusive and it's not with a minor.
Liz:
The Reform Judaism movement started in the 1800s in America?
Rabbi Eger:
Yeah. It started in the 1800s in America. It started earlier, 1820s, 1820 in Germany. It became a German/Jewish hybrid here in America. It's interesting. There is many different waves of immigration of Jews to America. The earliest in the 1600s were from Sephardic Jews, Jews of Spanish, Portuguese, and Mediterranean origin. They came as the first wave to the Americas.
Then the German Jewish immigration came in the late 1700s through to the late 1800s. From 1881 to 1921 was the great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration until 1921 when the United States government did exactly what it's doing today, which is stop immigrants from coming to America. There are a lot of parallels to that.
Liz:
What exactly was Reform Judaism? How did that differ from ...
Rabbi Eger:
Oh, that's a great question. Reform Judaism ideals were that men and women were equal in religious obligations. In the tradition it had been very sex-segregated, gender-segregated. Men did the public Jewish acts like pray in synagogue, wear a prayer shawl, a tallit.
Reform Judaism in Germany was building off of a wave of German feminism in the early 1800s in Germany and began to educate boys and girls in school together, which was sex-segregated schools, gender-segregated schools. Men and women sat together. Prior to this men and women sat separately.
Using the vernacular to give a sermon and to pray in, not only in the language of Hebrew, which most people still didn't know. At that time it was pre-the formation of the modern state of Israel so Hebrews ... The only language Hebrew was was a language of prayer but you could give a sermon now in German or in English here in America.
You could use instrumental music. After the destruction of the ancient temple in the year 70 by the Romans in Israel Jewish religion transformed and didn't use instrumental music in its worship. Vocal music but as a nod to the grief and sadness on the destruction of the temple.
Reform Judaism said, "We should introduce some life and living back. We're not going to rebuild the temple in ancient Jerusalem anymore." In early years it was the organ. Today you're lucky to go into a synagogue in a Reform synagogue and hear piano and guitar and drums and wind instruments. All kinds of beautiful music.
Liz:
Reform Judaism is looking at integrating more liberal applications of what's going on in the modern world and integrating that.
Rabbi Eger:
Exactly. That was part of the ... To bring our contemporary lives and our Judaism into sync with one another. We're talking about in the Industrial Revolution to look at how the world transformed from agrarian culture to much more urban culture.
That's really been what Reform Judaism says is that we are continuing to have progressive revelation. It didn't stop at Mount Sinai when God gave the 10 Commandments or with the prophets of old, Isaiah and Jeremiah, but we're continuing to learn new things in the world today. We take into consideration discoveries in science, in psychology, in understanding the human condition and try and weave our Judaism with that and through that. Again, not compartmentalizing science and religion on the one hand.
Liz:
Was the conversation around being more inclusive of queer communities happening at the same time as the height of the AIDS crisis in America where you needed to combat this idea that AIDS is a punishment from God?
Rabbi Eger:
Oh, yes. Reform Judaism was one of the very first religious groups, official bodies if you will, to say, AIDS is not a punishment from God. It is a disease. It is a bodily disease that we have to fight with science and medicine and also with love and caring for those afflicted, those who are affected HIV/AIDS.
I know I wrote in the late '80s ... I was still in rabbinical school. I helped to edit one of the first curriculum, religious curriculum if you will, Jewish curriculum, on teaching our teens and our kids about HIV/AIDS. From a positive, if you will, angle in understanding the Jewish values and caring for the sick and caring and visiting the sick, of staying healthy in mind and body, and promoting ... At that time what we did was try and promote safer sex and a consciousness about it.
Liz:
Then in terms of visibility were you among the first openly lesbian rabbis to get ordained?
Rabbi Eger:
Well, I wasn't the first but, yes, I'm among the ... I'm in the first seven if you will. First five maybe.
Liz:
In all of America?
Rabbi Eger:
Yeah. Pretty much. I was ordained in 1988 and I came to work in Los Angeles as the rabbi of the world's first LGBTQ synagogue, Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles. As I said I think earlier to you, our movement was struggling with how do we welcome and ordain LGBTQ people and in 1990 was when that came to a head. I came out in the press here in the LA Times. It was then picked up all over. By 1990, I was very out in the public sphere and in the media as well as to put a face with the cause if you will.
Liz:
What are those numbers like now worldwide?
Rabbi Eger:
Oh, well, it's so interesting because there's lots of LGBTQ clergy worldwide, both Reform Jewish, conservative, reconstructionist. There are a few even openly gay orthodox rabbis. Certainly in other denominations, in Christian denominations. We have an incredible interfaith network of people around the world.
Liz:
Which you are president of, right?
Rabbi Eger:
I was president of the Reform Rabbis. Yeah. I was the first openly gay person to be a president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and only the third woman. It's the oldest rabbinical organization in North America. More than 165 years old. It was a great honor. From 2015 until 2017 I served. It's an organization more than 2300 rabbis worldwide.
Liz:
Oh, wow. You were telling me a little bit about, we were talking a bit about some of the Biblical stories and reinterpreting those texts or interpreting those texts. You were talking to me about King David had a relationship with Jonathan and the lament for Jonathan.
Rabbi Eger:
Yeah. It's an interesting story. It's one that if you read some of the commentaries on those kinds of things they'll tell you that, "Oh, they were great friends." If you really read the text closely David and his advisor Jonathan, who happened to be the son of the previous king, were more than I think just friends, if you will, in quotation marks, because when he dies, when Jonathan dies, David writes this amazing lament, amazing mourning poem for Jonathan, which says, "Your love was sweeter to me than the love of women."
Now David was married to women but I think in the queer community we try to read that in a way to say, wow, that two men can openly profess their love and support for one another. That's a model that we want to uplift and uphold.
Liz:
You were also telling me about the story of Ruth and Naomi.
Rabbi Eger:
That's another text that we often refer to. Ruth and Naomi were actually mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Ruth was married to Naomi's son who died. What's interesting about them, they weren't lovers but they setup a woman-identified household.
After Naomi's husband dies and her sons die there were two daughter-in-laws. One goes back to her father's house. Ruth pledges her loyalty to her mother-in-law, Naomi, and says, "Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and where you die, I shall die."
Now in those ancient Biblical days women weren't on their own. They were always attached to a male household, a father's house, a brother's house, a husband's house. You didn't have women living by themselves. You didn't have women's liberation, right?
It's pretty remarkable that these two women, a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law, would setup a household together. It's a very powerful story about women's empowerment. I think that's a queer story in the Bible as well.
Liz:
Speaking of women's empowerment I'm really fascinated by the mythology around Lilith. I was hoping you could explain or your interpretation of who Lilith was or is.
Rabbi Eger:
Well, Lilith is not in the Bible. We need to understand that. Lilith is a story of a woman who the rabbis wrote a fantastical story. The rabbis liked to write amazing, fantastical stories to fill in blanks that the Bible doesn't answer. If you read the opening chapters of Genesis, the beginning of the Bible, you'll see that there are actually two versions of how the cosmos and the earth and the universe were created.
In the first version on the sixth day there is a human being created that is both male and female, right? Nonbinary if you will.
Liz:
Is that who we know or who we've come to know as Adam?
Rabbi Eger:
That's what we call Adam, the first human being Adam. Adam also means "of the Earth" because the word earth in Hebrew is [Foreign language 00:18:59] God takes the clay of the earth ...
Liz:
Is Adama a masculine or feminine?
Rabbi Eger:
Well, Adama is feminine but Adam is the ...
Liz:
Interesting.
Rabbi Eger:
Right. As we're having this conversation about gender language. In the second story, the story that most people are more familiar with, that's the Adam and Eve story where God takes a rib out of Adam and forms Eve, right? Adam, literally the male, gives birth to the woman. Absolutely opposite of what we know about how the world is created, right? Women give birth to human beings.
The rabbis are confounded by, "How can we have these two different versions of the same story?" They create an answer in the first story. In the first story, God created Adam and divided the being in two and it was Adam and Lilith. Lilith wants to be equal with Adam. She's absolutely on a par with him.
The tensions in the two stories can't handle that because in the second story with Eve, Eve is made subservient to Adam. We have to look at this. That's not to read ... The Jews don't read it as literally as often Christian fundamentalists read the Bible. We play with the text.
Lilith is this empowered, early creation by God. Now the rabbis have to make it terrible in the end and the patriarchy has to come in and of course Lilith becomes a demoness.
Liz:
Because from what I understand Lilith didn't want to lay underneath ...
Rabbi Eger:
Right. Again, she was an empowered woman. She wanted to be equal. She was assertive of her femaleness. Again, the two stories intention can't ... The rabbis have to figure out how to reconcile those two stories and so they do it in a way where women are not equal of men. They're again I think limited by the culture that they live in and the societies that they live in.
I think we have to ask what is the story looking ... What is the larger story pointing to? A lot of these myths, like a la Joseph Campbell, are really talking about other kinds of things. We don't need to be literal that there was an Adam and that there was an Eve but rather we're talking about patriarchal religion and matriarchal religion, right?
At the time what was Judaism wasn't Judaism, Israelite culture, what were these creation myths, and Eve ... The story of Adam and Eve is a way to kind of say, "God is religion" is suppressed. That's really what I think is going on in those stories.
Liz:
Then Lilith essentially gets ... I've seen Lilith's story appear in other cultures and religions. She gets turned essentially into a demon who kills babies.
Rabbi Eger:
Right. It's ridiculous, right? Ironically, she's been reclaimed because there's an amazing Jewish feminist magazine called Lilith.
Liz:
Right. There was Lilith Fair in the '90s.
Rabbi Eger:
Right. It's a really powerful and positive reclaiming of who she is.
Liz:
I still feel like we're in the midst of uncovering that and this idea that this sexually empowered woman is not something to be ... Well, I guess she is something to be feared. She has been something to be feared.
Rabbi Eger:
Well, isn't that true?
Liz:
She takes away our idea of the man, woman, nuclear myth.
Rabbi Eger:
I don't think it's just the nuclear myth. It's what are heavily identified roles with defined by one's gender. I think part of smashing the patriarchy is to get rid of what those heavily defined roles are, both for men and for women. I mean, they're constricting for men too, right?
Men are not allowed to cry. We know this. This idea of having to be super machismo, toxic masculinity. We've been talking about that in the larger society, right?
That's just as constricting for men as it is the idea that women should be quiet and subservient and stay-at-home moms and not be able to fulfill their dreams and their callings.
I think for all of us ... What does it look like to be in a post-patriarchal, human-centered, expression of our spirit and of our lives? That's what I work towards everyday. Not patriarchal, not matriarchal, but to really allow human beings to fulfill their best potential in the world rather than constrict everybody.
Liz:
Well, and constrict them according to this idea, this construct of gender, right?
Rabbi Eger:
Yes.
Liz:
Then you were saying that Hebrew is a gendered language.
Rabbi Eger:
Right. Just like French or Italian or Spanish. Hebrew is a gendered language. There are some people thinking about, both in Israel and the US, about how do you create nonbinary, non-gendered language to describe things? One example, for example, everybody knows about a bar mitzvah ceremony or a bat mitzvah ceremony.
Liz:
But in case they don't?
Rabbi Eger:
In case they don't it's a coming of age ceremony where a Jewish teenager at the age of 13 demonstrates a body of their Jewish knowledge about their faith and their heritage and ethnicity. Often leading a Shabbat, a Sabbath service, and reading Hebrew and leading the service. Often doing some kind of mitzvah project to transform and heal the world.
The bar/bat mitzvah ceremony is this transformative ceremony where the child leads this public worship often, invites family and friends, and they're celebrated and they're considered an adult responsible for their own sins in Jewish tradition. Not the parent, doesn't have to cover for them anymore. They have to take responsibility for their own actions.
Liz:
And their own faith?
Rabbi Eger:
And their own faith. Exactly. They're called to perform acts of charity on their own. It doesn't mean they're all grown up but it does mean that they have the responsibility to make their own ethical decisions and that they know enough about our tradition and heritage and teachings to make those decisions.
It's interesting. When you do it how do you call someone to bless the Torah? We use gendered language to do that. How do you do that if somebody is nonbinary? That's part of the challenge and the gift of these discussions about gendered language and people are doing it and creating it.
Liz:
Where have we landed on with that?
Rabbi Eger:
We haven't yet. It's in process and there's lots of different experiments happening about language. One of the things that we do in our congregation in West Hollywood, California, we call people based on their family, their [Foreign language 00:26:28], their family name.
When we call people to bless the Torah scroll and the public reading of the scroll you're called up to recite the blessing with your Hebrew name. For example, my Hebrew name is [Foreign language 00:26:45] Davida is my Hebrew name, like Denise, but my parents' Hebrew name [Foreign language 00:26:53] and the word bat and that means daughter of. Rather than call me daughter of Benyamin and Esther we might call somebody [Foreign language 00:27:02] from the house of because that's not gendered, right?
Liz:
Right.
Rabbi Eger:
As a way to reshape what we're doing in these days and times.
Liz:
That's so interesting. I vividly recall the period of being 12, 13, awkward and puberty, and everyone else I knew was in those awkward phases. You're questioning so many things. I remember going to tons of bar and bat mitzvahs. I wasn't raised with religion.
I'm born on Christmas Day but my grandfather spoke Yiddish as his first language, was from the Warsaw ghetto too, and for me even the memories I have of going to bar and bat mitzvahs are really tied up with my burgeoning sexuality and my mother not letting me wear strapless dresses, which all the other girls were wearing and just feeling like ... Looking at the bar and bat mitzvahs as the symbol of adulthood and feeling outside of that.
I'd always wanted to go to Hebrew with my Jewish friends growing up because it just seemed so fun and there were boys and there was hot dogs, there were kosher hot dogs. There were really good snacks. I always liked the ritual of religion but that ceremony seemed so interesting to me. Like reclaiming adulthood or claiming adulthood.
Rabbi Eger:
Right. Claiming adulthood and giving the kid the benefit of the doubt to take what they're learning and to try and have them learn to integrate it. It doesn't mean ... See, we're not perfect. Nobody is perfect. I think one of the things I like about Judaism and I like about the bar and bat mitzvah, or both mitzvah I guess was the New York Times article about it, was the opportunity for kids to try and learn on their own.
As parents we help shape our kids as much as we can do and then you have to actually live in the world. Are we going to make mistakes? Absolutely. Are we going to screw up? Absolutely. If you don't try how will you know what feels right? How will you know right from wrong? Hopefully you've learned something about right from wrong and then we try and let our kids live it and hopefully create safe spaces enough for them to come and check it back out with family, with friends, with responsible other adults like your rabbi or your canter, your principal of your religious school.
Liz:
Your wife is also a rabbi, right?
Rabbi Eger:
She is.
Liz:
Is that how you met?
Rabbi Eger:
It is. We met through the rabbinate. She's a rock star and a rock star educator and educates teens and young people and she's quite talented.
Liz:
I know that you do a lot of gender diversity training your temple and also through your summer camp.
Rabbi Eger:
Yeah. I've done a lot of work through the years in part because I've served in an LGBTQ community and world and because of my role within our denomination as a leader in LGBTQ rights and also then in California. I've worked very hard on marriage equality.
Liz:
You performed the first ...
Rabbi Eger:
I did. I performed the first ceremony for the plaintiffs in the California case, Robin Tyler and Diane Olsen, and on the steps of the Beverly Hills courthouse with a big huppah.
Liz:
In 2008?
Rabbi Eger:
2008. June 16th. The day before it went public for everybody else the plaintiffs were allowed to get married. I had the great honor of officiating at their wedding as the first legal wedding in California.
Liz:
What blessing did you use?
Rabbi Eger:
We did a Jewish wedding ceremony. We used the same words and the same rights that Jewish brides and grooms have used throughout the centuries. I think the only difference is at the end I got to say, "I now declare you spouses for life" at the end, which was ... They didn't want to both be brides at that time. I think it was really transformative and certainly for them. Diane just passed away just a little bit ago after 10 years. I know I'll give a shout-out to Robin Tyler who has been a longtime lesbian, feminist activist, a Jewish activist. Our hearts are with her.
Liz:
What kind of pushback have you received from non-Reform Judaism? Is there pushback on things? As Reform Judaism moves closer to places ... For example, talking about bar and bat mitzvahs and teenagers is there a big divide? Has more orthodox Judaism come closer?
Rabbi Eger:
Well, there are many places that orthodox Judaism has come closer. There's been more conversation about LGBTQ issues, at least in North America, about LGBTQ issues in orthodox synagogues. Most orthodox rabbis still will not officiate at a wedding for gay men or lesbians. Some will not officiate at baby namings for those of us that have had children. There's definitely a conversation that's going on in a way that didn't happen even 20 years ago.
The orthodox Jewish world is very diverse also. In the very far right places, if we talk political right or religious right, in Judaism, fundamental Judaism, [Foreign language 00:32:37] in Hebrew we would say, being gay or lesbian is still ... They still boot people out for that. It's still a painful place.
You know, the good news is that most of North America are liberal Jews, Reform, conservative, reconstructionist Jews, and the orthodoxy is a small segment, maybe 10% of the Jewish population in North America.
In Israel it's a different beast which is the other largest Jewish population in the world. Really, it's a tale of two cities. You have Jerusalem, ancient Jerusalem, which is a much more "observant" city. Tel Aviv, which is a lot like Los Angeles, is a very open and welcoming city. I was just with the deputy mayor of Tel Aviv, who is also head of the national LGBT group in Israel. It's a very welcoming ...
Gay pride in Tel Aviv in June is the biggest, certainly in the Middle East, but it's one of the biggest gay prides even in Europe. There will be 250,000 on the beaches in Tel Aviv. The city helps co-sponsor gay pride and the municipality.
There are a lot of rights for LGBTQ people in Israel. If they get married outside of Israel ... There's no civil marriage in Israel for anybody. You only can get married by a religious authority. Even secular Israelis, people who aren't religious, they have to leave the country to get married. They all go to Cyprus to get married.
For LGBT people who get married to their same-sex spouse if they get married in Cyprus or Canada or the United States and come back their marriage will be recognized. Nowhere else in the Middle East, I'll say, does that.
Liz:
In Los Angeles there's a very big Hasidic Jew community.
Rabbi Eger:
It's okay. It's big. It's not that big actually. It's not the majority of the Jewish community anyways. It's not really that big. It's visible because of the particular kinds of clothing that are often worn but it's certainly not like New York or Chicago.
Liz:
Where does Hasidic Judaism fit into all this in terms of conservative?
Rabbi Eger:
Oh, no. That's exactly what I would call ... That's the [Foreign language 00:34:57] That's the far fundamentalist part of Judaism, so not welcoming and not empowering either of Jewish women in that way that we were talking about. The sex roles are very stereotyped gender roles both within the religion and without.
Liz:
When you were talking at the beginning about black and white and all these gray spaces even within Judaism there's so many different flavors.
Rabbi Eger:
Yeah. There's many, many different flavors of Judaism and denominations and levels of observance. We don't talk about that. You think about Protestant Christianity there's Methodists, there's Presbyterians, there's Episcopalians, there's 7th Day Adventists. There's all kinds of Protestants. Same thing, Judaism has many, many different streams within it.
Liz:
How do you create dialog amongst those many streams to try to come to that middle ground?
Rabbi Eger:
Not easy. Not easy at all. You know, we hope that there are places that you can have that dialog. I feel really lucky. I took a group of rabbinical students to Israel with the American Israel Education Fund, which is the educational foundation of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs committee, in December.
It's one of the only places where Jewish seminary students from orthodox, conservative, and reform, the three major denominations, actually can dialog with one another.
That's a really positive. We're helping with building relationships between these young seminarians that hopefully will carry out to their communities once they're ordained. We're starting to see that happen.
Liz:
I would imagine if you're raised with beliefs that are more conservative and you don't see people like yourself reflected in leadership positions, like seeing a lesbian rabbi or gay rabbi or a gender-nonconforming rabbi, it must be very difficult to reconcile that within yourself.
Rabbi Eger:
Well, yeah. I also think we live in a much more media-focused world. It's not unusual to see a rabbi of color anymore. It's not unusual to see a gay or lesbian rabbi anymore. It's not unusual to see a woman rabbi anymore. Although, it's surprising. I still get people, "Wow. You're the first women rabbi I ever met." You still get that every once in a while.
We hope that ... I had the privilege of also being the first woman president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis also about 11 years ago. That's a place where rabbis of all different denominations meet and talk and learn and study together. Those are also places. Community places like that.
Liz:
You told me a really great phrase, Tikkun Olam.
Rabbi Eger:
Tikkun Olam. Beautiful. You're doing great.
Liz:
Which is to heal the universe.
Rabbi Eger:
Yes.
Liz:
You were telling me ... I don't know if this is the direct translation or what you feel that every human being has a task to bring justice and healing to a broken world.
Rabbi Eger:
Right. The mystics, the Kabbalists, of our tradition had a way to understand creation. Again, you won't find this story in the Bible but this is how they imagined it, that God sent out a great light and that light was to be contained in seven sacred holy vessels but the light was so powerful and so beautiful that it shattered the vessels, sending the pieces, the shards through the seven heavens down into what became the Earth and that those sparks of divine fire reside in each human's soul and in everything. They're called the sparks. Even a table has sparks in it.
Our job is to help uncover the sparks and to find those broken shards and put them back together and when we do that in that task of healing and putting back together the brokenness of the universe that's how we'll heal the world. We do that through acts of justice, acts of truth, acts of justice, in the world. Charity.
Liz:
I'm curious why you think there's such a heavy segregation between spirituality and sexuality. When you talk about light or you talk about healing sexuality can be a great source of light and healing even if you're not having sex with another person.
Rabbi Eger:
Well, you know, I think that ... Look, sexuality has been something that is very powerful and it can be misused as well. There's a lot about sex and power and a lot of lack of understanding. If you don't know how to self-regulate you can easily slip into the side of being abusive to self or to others with anything, right?
Religion found a way to control people and control sexuality. The question is are those controls still healthy? Are you just controlling to control or are you controlling to help? Are you creating limits and boundaries to help or are you creating limits and boundaries for power and control?
I think this is a really sophisticated conversation that we don't always often have and so part of the work that I try to do in my rabbinate is to help people fulfill and be who they are with a healthy and positive view of their sexuality and how to use their sexuality for their own empowerment while also respecting others and respecting what in Judaism we call the divine in the other person.
It does take control to do that. We can be very dismissive. We can be very cruel. We see how easy it is to slip into cruelty in our society with the Other. I think the best of spirituality, the best of religion is how to see the other as fully human and fully empowered to make decisions in her, his, or their right.
Liz:
If we're walking in our truth as you said at the beginning of our conversation for if we're fully walking in our truth and some of our truth is faith-based it would make sense to integrate that with our sexual truth, our sexual nature?
Rabbi Eger:
Right. As I said earlier, you can't compartmentalize who you are. It's going to come out so let's figure out how to be healthy psychologically, physically, emotionally, and to put all of those pieces of our lives together because then you're going to live a different kind of life than if you're suppressing or repressing parts of who you are. I think that especially includes sexuality.
Liz:
Yeah. We've discussed a lot on our site and with our users we've got a lot of sex positive Christian, for example, users who have a strong faith. They have a very strong faith in God but they also have a very strong desire to explore their sexuality. They don't agree with a lot of the doctrines.
I would love to see more room and more tolerance for people to be able to explore their spirituality and their faith and also explore their sexuality without being either condemned by their own church or temple or mosque but also by others.
Rabbi Eger:
I agree.
Liz:
I think on the liberal side too. I think there's a very strong trend in the last 15, 20 years where if you're liberal you have this immediate distrust, dislike of religion across the board.
Rabbi Eger:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) That's for sure. People don't know what to do with it. I mean, America is becoming a much more secular country, believe it or not. Sometimes it doesn't seem that way but it is. It's true in Europe as well.
I often think people throw the baby out with the bath water. What religion tries in its best, in its best form, to help people live lives filled with meaning. That living a life with meaning it can be done in many ways but we shouldn't cut off the spirituality from religion I think for me anyways.
I think for some people there have been ... We have to also name that there have been abuses of power among certain religious denominations. Of course, people don't like hypocrisy. I don't blame them. I don't like hypocrisy either.
You know, as we said, we try to live with integrity, we try to live what I call my Jewish values in the world, and try to figure out how to become the best Denise I can be and help others be the best they can be.
Liz:
I have one last question for you. What are you still learning about the intersection of faith and sex?
Rabbi Eger:
I'm still learning that there are still many different ways that people express who they are in the world. I have had to learn over the last number of years how to use pronouns differently and to honor and respect that and get out of my nonbinary thinking. I'm still learning about that and hearing people's experience of the world and wanting to learn how to do that and do the best honor for them.
Liz:
Thank you.
Rabbi Eger:
Glad to be here with you. Thanks for the invitation.