Beshert | Shabbat-a-Bing-Bada-Boom!

“Someday,” my boyfriend David said to me dreamily, “we’ll have Shabbat dinners at our house.”  “Yeah right,” I guffawed. “I guess you’ll have to marry someone else. I don’t do Shabbat.”  Sure, I was Jewish. I went to Jewish camp. And High Holiday services. But I was not an every-week-kind-of-Jew, and had no intention of becoming one. Ironically, my father was a cantor at a Reform synagogue in New York City.  But he was a professional baritone who happened to be the cantor, not a classically trained chazzan. Raised by socialist Russian parents who spoke Yiddish, he got the message—Cultural Judaism: Important. Ritual Judaism: Not so much. My mother, the daughter of assimilated German Jews, was fine with that. David, on the other hand, grew up the son of a German refugee whose family arrived in the United...

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The Jew With Two "Beards"

By Steven Philp To their neighbors they look like every other Orthodox Jewish couple, a man and woman married for five years with two children in tow. Even the fact that their marriage is a product of convenience rather than love is not unusual, yet the particular reason for their union is unique: the man is gay, and the woman is lesbian. Their marriage owes its genesis to Areleh Harel, an Orthodox rabbi living on the West Bank; over the past six years, he has paired thirteen Orthodox gay and lesbian couples. For Harel it is a simple solution to a more complex problem: these are men and women who are attracted to people of the same sex, yet desire to remain in good standing with their communities by acquiring the familiar roles of Orthodox adulthood—a...

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The Jew With Two “Beards”

By Steven Philp To their neighbors they look like every other Orthodox Jewish couple, a man and woman married for five years with two children in tow. Even the fact that their marriage is a product of convenience rather than love is not unusual, yet the particular reason for their union is unique: the man is gay, and the woman is lesbian. Their marriage owes its genesis to Areleh Harel, an Orthodox rabbi living on the West Bank; over the past six years, he has paired thirteen Orthodox gay and lesbian couples. For Harel it is a simple solution to a more complex problem: these are men and women who are attracted to people of the same sex, yet desire to remain in good standing with their communities by acquiring the familiar roles of Orthodox adulthood—a...

Continue reading