“If I am not for me, who is for me; and if I am (only) for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
– Hillel, Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14
These are words taken to heart by this week’s profile. Rabbi Beth Kalisch is the first female rabbi in the 70-year history of Beth David Reform Congregation in Gladwyne.
A longtime LGBT advocate and ally, both inside and outside the synagogue walls, and a passionate social-justice activist, she has traveled with the American Jewish World Service as a volunteer in El Salvador and as an advocate at the White House; volunteered with new Ethiopian immigrants to Israel; worked as a legislative assistant at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; and was honored to be the closing speaker for Philadelphia’s rally celebrating marriage equality in Pennsylvania, breaking a glass to symbolize the end of marriage discrimination here. This past summer she represented the Reform Jewish faith’s stance on nondiscrimination at the Equality Pennsylvania press conference in Pottstown, where she said, “Discrimination is personal for me because … lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and families are part of my synagogue community.”
PGN: Are you a PA person?
BK: No, I grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y., about 30 minutes outside of Manhattan. After going to undergrad at Yale, I moved back into the city for rabbinical school, which is like five years of graduate school, the first year of which I spent in Jerusalem, and the other four in Greenwich Village.
PGN: What was your major at Yale?
BK: I was a religious studies major, which is basically comparative religion, so I studied Judaism, Christianity and Islam, mostly ancient scripture.
PGN: So what misconceptions do we have about Islam?
BK: I think it’s much more diverse than people realize. I took a fascinating class on West African Islam and my undergrad thesis compared some of the academic studies that both Jewish and Christian scholars had done as they began to critically assess the Bible and the works of an Islamic scholar who had begun to apply some of the exact same techniques of study to the Quran. He had to flee Egypt and spend the rest of his life in some place like the Netherlands, but what I took away is that Islam is not as uniform as we might think. But I’m certainly no expert on the subject. I studied it for a few years but that’s about it.
PGN: That’s probably more than most of us know. Describe your family.
BK: Well, my mom is an attorney — she spent her career with the New York City Housing Authority — and my dad started off in finance and ran a small junior college in New York City.
PGN: Did you get your social activism from them?
BK: No, my dad would not call himself a social activist. But my mom felt very strongly about feminist issues. Her dad was an immigrant and also a lawyer. He went to night school while running the family business after his father died. He had two daughters and, although it was the ’50s, he always told them they could do anything a man could and should do something impressive. So my mom became a lawyer and her sister a doctor. But it wasn’t easy; she went to a specialty high school where they had a quota for how many women they would allow in. When she went to law school, she was in a very small minority and said during her first few days of school the professors certainly picked her out. And she experienced sexual harassment and discrimination during various points in her career. She raised me to be very aware of women’s issues. But I think one of the reasons that being a rabbi was a natural fit for me was that my rabbis were very socially active and concerned people. I remember listening to their sermons as a little girl and it sparking conversations with my mother when we got home. It was one of the ways I learned that there were issues all over the world and that we could do something about them.
PGN: So what are your duties as a rabbi?
BK: Ha! Sometimes people ask me what I do when it’s not Shabbat, the Sabbath, when I’m not leading worship services. I always laugh because my schedule is actually pretty busy. I think first and foremost rabbi means “my teacher,” so I teach Torah study, which is an informal Bible-study type of class. Religious school teachers are in charge of the class, but I come in and teach the kids. I also do other adult-educational programs about all different topics. I just came back from a trip to Israel and shared information I learned there. Last year we did several sessions on death and mourning asking how do we, as reformed Jews, adapt ancient customs to be meaningful today. People today are afraid of death or want mourning to be over quickly but there’s a lot we can learn from ancient wisdom. We also have a lot of different committees and task forces and a lot of what I do is help to empower volunteers. I also help advise laypeople in our community to add a different perspective and seek out their help and perspectives. I do plenty of pastoral work as well, such as visiting people in the hospital or at home. I’m also available for people who want to talk about anything from a spiritual crisis to a major family change, like putting an aging parent in the hospital, divorce or separation, etc. I also do a lot of lifecycle events: officiating at weddings and funerals and other ceremonies, premarital or couples counseling and, of course, weddings.
PGN: Sheesh, that’s a lot on your plate.
BK: It is. A friend of mine said rabbis are the last career generalists. That’s one of the things I enjoy about it. I always knew that I wanted a career connected to social justice, and being a rabbi is a wonderful way to be involved in civil justice as a community leader and builder. I love that on any given day I get to stop into kindergarten, tell a story during my service or be with someone during sacred moments in their lives.
PGN: How did you get the synagogue involved in LGBT issues?
BK: So, the main reasons are it’s an issue that’s very important to me and our synagogue has a history of social-justice involvement. They hadn’t done as much recently and when I came in, they were looking to get back to it. The high holidays, such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are usually where you have the biggest crowds and do the most important services. I gave my Yom Kippur morning sermon on LGBT equality. There’s a portion of the traditional text that Orthodox Jews read on Yom Kippur that discusses proper and improper sexual relations. It’s the section that includes that verse from Leviticus about, “You shall not lie down with a man as you would with a woman,” and I talked about the ways of understanding what that section is really talking about and how we think about what holiness really means to us as people of faith today. The Reform movement has a strong record of LGBT support that I’m very proud of. Before I went to rabbinical school, I spent a year in Washington, D.C., working with the Religious Action Center. I worked with David Saperstein, who’s a pretty prominent rabbi. He has a fellowship program where he takes five or six college grads each year and it’s the best job ever. You do awesome stuff you have no qualifications for! You get to choose which issues you work on and I was there the year George W. Bush was trying to amend the Constitution to declare marriage as between a man and a woman. Along with the Unitarian Universalists, we were one of the two main denominations with a clear policy on the books supporting civil- marriage equality. And at that time, no one really knew what that meant, so I got to have long conversations with HRC lawyers working with faith communities to educate people. I have friends in the community and because I believe in LGBT social justice, it seemed like the perfect issue for Beth David to get involved in. Nurit Shein’s wife is a colleague of mine and she connected me with someone at the Mazzoni Center. We decided to work on passing ENDA and eliminating workplace discrimination. So after the high-holidays service, my congregation passed out fliers to people in the carpool lane and had them take out their phones and make calls to Pat Toomey to say, “I am a person of faith and this is important to me.” When Pat Toomey voted for ENDA, he stated he’d heard a lot from the religious and business communities and that it helped sway his decision.
PGN: Who is Rosie?
BK: She is a wonderful young lady with two dads. Steve and Ira have been members of Beth David for years. She’s an awesome kid and was the very first Bat Mitzvah I did as rabbi there. I thought it was great that the first family I met with and the very first Bat Mitzvah of the year was with an LGBT family.
PGN: When did you first discover LGBT people?
BK: Growing up, my cantor was gay and he was a really important figure in my life. The cantor is a clergy person in charge of the music at the synagogue. My family was pretty secular, but the cantor discovered I could sing at my Bat Mitzvah and was the one who pulled me into synagogue life. I also remember there being a textbook in Hebrew school that was titled simply “Homosexuality,” and I remember us sixth-graders giggling at it. Then in high school, being part of the drama club, I was certainly around gay people, and our high school created its first GSA, which was a big deal. I guess that’s when I really started thinking about the issues faced by LGBT people.
PGN: I don’t hear about the kind of scandals like with the Catholic Church in synagogue. Do you think that perhaps it’s because rabbis are allowed to marry?
BK: I think Judaism embraces sexuality as part of what it means to be human and as one of many things that are blessings from God, and there is the potential to be holy but also realize that there is the potential for it to be abused and used as a source of oppression. I think that very open and real understanding of what it is to be human makes it very livable for me. I feel very lucky that I come from a religion that doesn’t view sexuality as an impediment to holiness. There is no rabbinic addition of celibacy; we believe you should have a full life, with all of God’s blessings.
PGN: Random questions …
BK: I’d like to tell you one more story of how LGBT issues became important to me. The year that I was working at the RAC, we ran conferences for high-school students; we’re still doing it today — I’m taking the kids from my high school to the same conference this January. We’d run different workshops and teach about certain subjects and how they are connected to Judaism. I worked mainly on women’s reproductive rights and LGBT issues. At the end of the week, the kids would pick one issue that they felt strongly about and we’d help them write a speech to give at their congressional office. There were several kids waiting in line for their one-on-one with me. One student kept letting everybody go in front of her. Finally, we were the only ones left. Her paper was on reproductive rights but when it was just the two of us, she said, “I wanted to ask you something about your other issue. I heard your presentation and you mentioned something about people who are transgender.” I said yes and told her about the Reform movement’s policy and how we believe all people are made by God and are beautiful and understand that sometimes their gender identity doesn’t match their bodies, etc. I was 22 and didn’t know a whole lot about the subject matter but I was doing my best. She interrupted me and started telling me that when she was born, the doctor made a mistake and gave her the wrong genitalia, that everybody thought she was a girl but she was really a boy. Her story began to flow out like something she couldn’t contain. She spoke without taking a breath and told me her girlfriend had broken up with her because of it. She hadn’t told anyone else except her parents, who told her not to say anything. What struck me was that all I had said during my original presentation was perhaps two sentences about transgender people being created by God. That was all it took to make such an impact. She had never been in a situation where anyone acknowledged gender diversity, never mind a religious person saying it. I made a couple of connections for her and never heard from her again, but it was a turning point for me to realize that the words that I said, especially in a position of religious leadership, could open up a world of possibilities for people or could have the opposite effect. And how important it was to talk about issues. She had two very young, great rabbis who were very progressive and, if she’d ever said something to them, they would’ve been great supporters but because they’d never mentioned the subject, she never brought it up either.
PGN: Yes, it drives me crazy when I hear people say, “I’m not going to say anything until my family does,” and then I hear parents say, “I’m not going to ask anything until they bring it up.” And the result is both people being left in the dark.
BK: Yeah, we certainly talk about it and have safe-zone stickers throughout the synagogue and on my door.
PGN: I think a lot of times all religions are lumped together as homophobic. I’m the token atheist in my family but I recognize that many religions do good. Just because I don’t believe in some old guy with a staff controlling the universe doesn’t mean I think they’re all bad.
BK: [Laughs] Yeah, we get a bad rap! And by the way, I don’t believe in the guy with the cane, and there’s probably a chunk of my congregation that doesn’t believe in any kind of God.
PGN: Three people alive or dead you would like to have at synagogue?
BK: There are a number of ancient rabbis that I spend a lot of time teaching and quoting. But I don’t know, if I met them in person, would I hate them or love them? I guess the first would be Hillel, then Maimonides and then I would choose my grandma. She died when I was 8 and I was very close to her. I’d love to be able to talk to her as an adult and see what she thought of what I’ve become. n
For more information on Beth David Reform Congregation, visit www.bdavid.org.