Talking My Way In

Abstract

AbstractIn the lecture she gave at the Day of Celebration to mark twenty-five years of ordaining LGBT rabbis by Leo Baeck College on 23 June 2014, Rabbi Dr Rachel Adler spoke persuasively and encouragingly of ‘newcomers’ to the ongoing Jewish ‘conversation’, ‘affecting the tradition’ by teaching the tradition ‘to re-understand its own stories’, and also by telling ‘stories that the tradition does not know at all’. For most of my rabbinate, I was engaged in the first kind of storytelling. More recently, I have been doing more of the second kind. In my response to Rachel Adler’s lecture, I trace my journey, both within the context of the developing women’s rabbinate and as a particular journey taken by a lesbian feminist queer rabbi determined that the voices, perspectives and lives of LGBTQ Jews are included within and transform Jewish life and teaching.