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The Binds That Tie: Queer Judaism and the Liturgical Impulse

Tue, December 18, 10:15 to 11:45am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cambridge 2

Abstract

As the Reform movement was accepting the first LGBT congregation in 1974, the head of the Reform responsa committee, Rabbi Solomon Freehof, was penning a dismissal of homosexuality in Reform Judaism. What is perhaps most interesting, however, is the turn his essay takes in the last paragraph. In a nearly prophetic moment for the future of queer activism, Freehof remarks: "It is hardly worth mentioning that to officiate at a so-called 'marriage' of two homosexuals and to describe their mode of life as Kiddushin (i.e. sacred in Judaism) is a contravention of all that is respected in Jewish life." Freehof's rhetorical choice marks a major shift in arguments about queer Judaism; rather than being merely a crime against nature, queer Jewish life threatens the ritual and liturgical consistency of Jewish practice. This paper begins with the distinction between the ritual and the liturgical that has long characterized the institution of Reform Judaism. As I will argue, what I call the "liturgical impulse" tries to create a theoretically democratic Judaism by becoming bodiless. However, this tactic assumes legible bodies to begin with. Liturgical Judaism cannot account for the body that did not exist, thus practically eliminating the existence of queer bodies in Jewish contexts. Instead, queer Judaism resists liturgical erasure, as well as the category of liturgy itself, by instead ritualizing queer Jewish life through embodied writing and the will-to-adaptation. Considering such works as the "Blessing for Chest Binding" by Rabbis Elliot Kukla and Ari Lev-Fornari, Andrew Ramer's "Kavanah for Unexpected Intimacy," and "The Queer Mikveh Project," I suggest that queer Jewish work not only writes queer Jewish experience into existence, but invites those who might not otherwise identify moments as queer to engage the queer possibility that they cannot control.

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