Shavuot 5777

Shavuot is a Biblical holiday, coming fifty days after Passover. It was originally a harvest holiday for wheat and barley in ancient Israel. The rabbis added the idea that we assembled at Mount Sinai and received the Torah on this date. Some congregations read the Book of Ruth, because much of it takes place during this harvest season. Today, the holiday is not often celebrated. Some have all-night study sessions, which come from the medieval period. Rabbi Joe said they couldn't do this until coffee was introduced to the Middle East. This year at Tree of Life here in Morgantown, we decided to do a dairy dinner (also traditional), a short service and study sessions, not all night, but maybe until ten or eleven. Although the holiday was Tuesday night and Wednesday, the Tree of Life observance will be Friday night. Conservative and Orthodox congregations outside Israel celebrate for two days.

Since my election to City Council in April, I've had meetings, dinners and Council events to attend, even though I will not be on the Council until July. The City Council met Tuesday night, and the Suncrest Neighborhood Association met at 7 P.M. Wednesday. I unhappily agreed to go to both events, since there was no local observance of Shavuot at those times. At the last minute, we were  invited to a congregant's home for a holiday get-together Tuesday night. I was sorry I couldn't go.

The City Council event was a "Meeting of the Whole" where events and issues are discussed, questions asked, but no decisions made. All seven of the current councilors were there. Only two of them will be on the new council. I was the only one of the five newly-elected councilors to attend as an observer. I had prepared, in my head, something to say about Shavuot, then decided not to talk about it and write it as a blog post. I changed my mind when I saw that the three councilors who lost the election were wearing identical t-shirts with a map of West Virginia and the words "Born and Raised" on them. After the election, one had noted that none of the new City Councilors were born in West Virginia. During the public portion of the meeting, I improvised what I wanted to say on my blog. This is pretty much what I said:

" Tonight begins the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, which occurs fifty days after Passover. We will celebrate this holiday Friday night at Tree of Life. It is traditional to read the Book of Ruth on this holiday. Ruth was a Moabite, from present-day Jordan, married to a man from Bethlehem. When her husband died, leaving her childless, her mother-in-law, Naomi, encouraged her to go back to her family in Moab. Ruth famously said " I will go with you. Your people will be my people, and your God, my God." The two returned to Bethlehem, and Ruth eventually found a kinsman of her late husband who married her and provided an inheritor for the dead man. Ruth was accepted into society in Judea, and was an ancestor of King David.

" July 11 will mark five years since my spouse Joe Hample and I arrived in Morgantown. We were outsiders, a same-gender couple who had lived in California for decades and were raised in liberal East Coast families. Our marriage was not legal in West Virginia until the Fourth Circuit ruling three years ago. Joe was offered a two-year contract with Tree of Life Congregation here in Morgantown. We didn't know how this would work out, and there were doubters in the congregation as well. But we made friends and became involved in the community. After two years, Joe was offered a five-year contract at Tree of Life with the possibility of an extension, and we were able to buy a modest house in Suncrest.

"Last year, we visited our six favorite cities in the world: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Everywhere we went, people asked us 'Why are you still in West Virginia?' Maybe we didn't realize it until we were first asked, but we are here because West Virginia, and Morgantown in particular, is our home. This is where we live. We are grateful to the people here, that we have been accepted, as Ruth was in Bethlehem, as part of the community, and we have both found a place in this beautiful city. I am happy that I was elected to City Council. Maybe an outsider's point of view was what people were looking for this year, fresh ideas and a different way of looking at Morgantown." The councilor I am replacing sent me a note later thanking me for stepping up.

I had suggested to Joe that we look for a morning holiday service in Pittsburgh. Rodeph Shalom and Temple Sinai offered a joint service at Temple Sinai at 10 A.M. Wednesday and we decided to go. We left the house just after eight Wednesday morning and almost made it to the service on time. Sinai is on Forbes Avenue in Squirrel Hill. A beautiful Gothic-style stone mansion was preserved as  part of the temple. The main sanctuary has clerestory abstract stained glass windows in a semi-circle, dark blue at the ends and bolder yellows and oranges in the middle, symbolizing the move from dawn to dusk. With the two congregations combined, there were about fifty people there, plus five rabbis and two women cantors, both with gorgeous voices. One of the rabbis, a young woman, was in school the first year of rabbi training with Joe in Jerusalem. Congregants took turns reading from The Book of Ruth in English, with the words projected on screens above the altar. We loved being observers of a traditional Reform service, and being a part of the community.

The congregation provided a dairy lunch of cheese blintzes, a spinach-tomato casserole, salad and fruit. We sat with one of the rabbis and some couples we had not met before. One of the women mentioned Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, so I asked her if she grew up in Baltimore, as I did, and where she went to high school? We played Jewish geography and it turned out that her sister was in my class in eighth and ninth grades at Sudbrook Junior High. I remembered her and her sister and I  talked about people we both knew, quite a few, as it turned out.

We drove home and I crashed out for an hour and a half. The Chabad rabbi had invited us to their sanctuary for a service and meal Wednesday afternoon. Chabad is black-hat religious, and although we are different from them theologically, Zalman and Hindy, the couple who run Chabad here, have included us in events and we like them and admire what they do, even if we don't do it. They have a new baby, a girl, I think their fifth (I've lost track) and she was introduced to us, spitting up on her father. Rabbi Zalman placed a table in the middle of the room, put plastic plants on it to create a barrier, and the men stood on one side, women on the other. He chanted the ten commandments to us in Hebrew at lightning speed, left us alone for a brief silent memorial service, then we broke for dinner: blintzes, cheese casserole, ice cream, bagels and lox.

I spoke with another Chabad couple, he all in black with an untrimmed beard, she in a long skirt and a stylish wig. He is a cousin of Zalman's, and they had come to visit with their children. She told me they live in Long Beach, California. I told her that we had met a Chabad rabbi from Long Beach, when he came to Crescent City to certify that our local cheese factory was kosher. She asked if we meant Nechemiah Newman  (we did!) and she said she is his niece. More "small world" stuff.

I had told Joe we had to leave Chabad early so I could make it to the 7 P.M. Suncrest Neighborhood Association meeting. Suncrest is the neighborhood I will be representing on City Council, and the school superintendent was to speak about the lately-vacated primary school, an issue. Sometime at Chabad, I realized that being with people on a Jewish holiday was more important than a meeting. I showed up anyway, late , after the superintendent had left. Still there were things I learned at the meeting, and I was greeted by many people, and had a chance to introduce myself. That felt good, too. It's all about balancing things. Yes, I'm a Libra.

Meanwhile, I'm preparing for our Friday night study session. At Osher Life-Long Learning, I just finished teaching a course for seniors called "The Great Hits of 1963." I agreed to teach a half-hour class Friday night focusing on Jewish songwriters and performers from that time. Stop by Tree of Life at 6:30 for dinner, service and learning. Rabbi Joe is cooking macaroni and cheese with broccoli.

I was worried our holiday wouldn't be meaningful, but it was. We were both able to worship and socialize with a larger Jewish community, and I feel, more than ever, that Joe and I  are exactly where we should be.

Unity, Part 2

I got into town from the Democratic convention in Charleston just about 6:30 P.M. Saturday, and met Joe at a restaurant downtown. Services at Tree of Life for Shavuot, Jewish Pentecost, were called for 7:30. Not many people showed up, and Joe was home by 10:30. The plan was to have study sessions and blintzes (traditional, but I don't know why) until midnight. I was exhausted and left early.

We awoke Sunday to the horrible news about Pulse in Orlando. There was a meeting in the afternoon of an interfaith group started to counteract gun violence. It then moved into combating Islamophobia and supporting Syrian refugees.  I don't always go, but I wanted to discuss what had happened in Orlando. I thought the group would draft a statement. The group from the local Islamic Center didn't show up, and not many people came. We all expressed support for the LGBT community, agreed not to condemn Islam generally for this crime, and said we would work for gun control. Eve Faulkes had designed headscarves for women and t-shirts for men with a message of peace, inclusion, and a plea to accept refugees. Joe bought t-shirts and Eve photographed us with a statement on cardboard from Rabbi Michael Lerner.

Facebook was awash with chatter about Orlando. There was a push from WVU people to have something, a ceremony of some kind. It was scheduled for Thursday night. Because so many people on Facebook were angry that there was silence from clergy (not entirely true), I checked with Joe, and he was willing to speak at the event. He is  probably the only openly gay clergy in the area. Word came back that they wouldn't need him. The event was well-attended, despite horrible storms just a few hours earlier, with some roads blocked by fallen trees. The speakers they had: a Vice President at WVU in charge of the Division of Diversity and Inclusion, the mayor of Morgantown, a Muslim student involved in student government, and a self-identified transgender Latina woman, an honors student in the Women's and Gender Studies Department.They all spoke well. The weather cleared and we were able to go outside to light candles at the end. I knew many of the people there. I know Morgantown has a large population of involved and caring people. It was for them that I ran for office.

Meanwhile, the local newspaper had run an anti-Muslim column from columnist Cal Thomas on Tuesday. The Islamic Association of West Virginia put out a strongly pro-gay statement, which I saw on Facebook. I called the paper and asked if they would run that and they said they would not without a local angle. So I wrote a letter critical of Thomas and excerpted the Islamic Association's post. Meanwhile friends of friends on Facebook whined about their "Second Amendment rights"; others went on about "Islamic extremism." A minister in California said it was too bad more pedophiles weren't killed, and a Republican from Texas said it wasn't really a gay bar. We have a lot of work to do.

A week after the tragedy, Morgantown was scheduled to have its first Gay Pride celebration, at 123 Pleasant, a hipster locale downtown. This being not West Hollywood, it was indoors in the evening, with a panel discussion called "Activism, Advocacy and Our Rights" organized by a friend from the LGBT Equity Commission at WVU. She asked me to be on the panel, and I agreed. I didn't have much to say, but I felt bad for one panelist, a gay male high school student who said he rarely goes to school because he is harassed. Apparently no one, including his parents, will stand up for him. This made me feel powerless. There was a poetry reading and some acoustic music. A band was coming in later. Joe was with me, and we left about ten.. That's as late as we stay out. I knew some of the people there, some gay and some straight allies, and I met a group of transgender women and heard their stories. That is a hard life.

Despite all of the negativity in this country, there is a core of people who care about where we are heading. They grieve with us for LGBT lives lost, and for Latino men and women out for a night of fun, who were gunned down or held hostage. They know blaming Islam is not a solution, that Republicans have never been in any way concerned about the LGBT community, even as they now try to paint Islam as the enemy of gay people. Banning assault weapons would be a useful start. I'm glad for all of that, yet we really need to look at why there are so many deeply disturbed men (almost always men) who fetishize weapons, have a deep-seated hatred of Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, applaud deaths of gay people even as they ask us to condemn Islam.

Our Shavuot holiday was a bust, and I am just coming out of a week of depression over the events that weekend. I'm feeling more hopeful now. Maybe we can make a coalition of people of all races and faiths to see the United States as a unified country, one where we all care for each other and respect diversity in unity.

Here is what I wrote to the paper. They edited it; this is the original:

It's hard to tell when I'm not dealing well with the world, but there are tell-tale signs. Like when I don't want to go out of the house, or I spend time on Facebook arguing with people I don't know when I should be doing something else, or if someone asks how I am and I don't want to answer.

That's how it's been this week, and I know it is about the shooting in Orlando. I feel close to those people. I am no longer them; I would never be at a bar at two A.M., but there was a time when I would. I think of younger gays and lesbians as my children. Many of them have parents who support and nurture them. Even today, though, parents inflict pain and grief on their LGBT children. I'll take them in as mine. I feel like it was my children mowed down by a killer in Orlando.

Young people I know locally, college and just post-college, are mostly what we now call "allies," not gay, but supportive. Many of them still have friends in the little towns where they are from, and some of those friends have posted about their "Second Amendment Rights" on social media even before expressing sympathy to the gay community and our friends, who are in mourning. I tried to tell them to respond to our grief now, and talk about guns later. They mostly don't get it.

In your paper Tuesday, June 14, Cal Thomas expresses no sympathy for gay and lesbian people, for the general population of Orlando, or for the Latino population, mostly Puerto Rican in that bar from what I have read. He never has expressed any sympathy for LGBT people nor, for that matter, for people of color. Instead, he launches into yet another attack on President Obama for calling for control of assault weapons, and he says "No more mosques should be built in the U.S. until we gain an upper hand against radical Islamists." I'm sure Thomas thinks he is a great patriot, but that is clearly unconstitutional and hateful. He has the right to say it, but the Dominion-Post has the right not to print something that demonizes a whole religious group.

I got comfort from this, from the Islamic Association of West Virginia:

"We will continue to spread our belief in the tolerance, kindness and peace we have found within Islam, and we will stand with and support the LGBTQ community during this difficult time.We will prove that love conquers hate."

I would love to see that sort of statement, perhaps from other religious groups, on your pages more frequently. 

And here is the full statement from the Islamic Association of West Virginia.

Statement on the Mass Shooting in Orlando

Early this morning, as we woke to eat the suhoor meal before the beginning of our Ramadan fast, we received news of a horrifying shooting at Pulse, a gay bar and nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that has claimed the lives of fifty people, and seriously injured fifty more. It is the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Based on the information presently available, the perpetrator was twenty-nine year old Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, who was very likely motivated by Islamic extremism.
The Islamic Association of West Virginia strongly and unequivocally condemns this attack. We denounce acts of extreme cruelty and violence without reservation, and we offer our sincere condolences and heartfelt sympathy to the victims and their loved ones. We pray for the recovery of those injured, for the comfort of grieving friends and families, and for the healing and safety of LGBTQ communities the world over.
While the perpetrator claimed to be Muslim, he did not practice any form of Islam that we know. Our Islam vehemently forbids these heinous crimes, and the killing of innocents violates countless sacred laws and traditions of our religion. Furthermore, as Americans, we strongly believe that LGBTQ rights are an integral part of American civil rights and, more broadly, basic human rights. People of all gender identities and sexual orientations are entitled to dignity and respect, and we fully support their right to live, work and celebrate openly and without fear.
We will continue to spread our belief in the tolerance, kindness and peace we have found within Islam, and we will stand with and support the LGBTQ community during this difficult time. We will prove that love conquers hate.

Dr. Fryson, of WVU, speaking at the memorial event June 16

Candle lighting and traditional bell ringing outdoors at WVu's event, June 16

The panel discussion at 123 Pleasant, June 19