Sermon on 29th Anniversary of Congregation Sha'ar Zahav

Here's a sermon that I delivered in 2006 and somehow never got around to posting on this blog:

Sermon on Chukkat and Synagogue Anniversary, July 7, 2006

Last month I marched with the synagogue in the Gay Day parade for the first time in several years. I first marched in the parade in 1979, and marched every year after that for about a decade. Every year I marched, I collected the official parade pin. At the parade this year, I wore a necktie on which I displayed my pin collection. The first pin said simply 1979 Gay Freedom Day Parade and Celebration. Several people asked me what the parade had been like back in ’79. Smaller, I said, and less corporate and marchers didn’t give beads to the watchers. The real difference, though, was that marching back then was much more serious and risky. If we marched in public in a gay parade, somebody might see us.

Those were different times. Back in ’79, most homosexuals were in the closet – our families didn’t know we were gay, our friends didn’t know we were gay, our co-workers didn’t know we were gay, and most especially, fellow congregants of our churches and synagogues didn’t know we were gay. Most religious organizations believed that homosexuals were sick and sinful and unfit to pray to God. When we were allowed to pray, it was only to acknowledge how sinful were our desires and actions and to pray that we might be converted to heterosexuality.

But the gay rights movement had been percolating along for several years, and it was beginning to reach into the hearts of religious people. Congregation Sha’ar Zahav was founded on July 9, 1977, by three gay men – Daniel Chesir, Shamir Ofel, and Bernard Pechter. 1977 was a particularly intense year for gay rights. Anita Bryant had spearheaded the passage of a law in Miami that prohibited gays from being teachers. That hateful slap at our humanity galvanized the gay community and our supporters into the largest San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade so far. I haven’t asked Daniel, but I suspect it’s not an accident that the three of them decided to claim their Jewish gay identity shortly after that year’s Gay Freedom Day parade. And I don’t have to ask them to know that they wanted to create a place where they could be Jewish and gay at the same time – a place to be Jewish without having to give up being gay, and a place to be gay without having to give up Judaism.

So, Monday, July 9, marks the 29th anniversary of the founding of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. The challenges of founding a gay synagogue included finding a regular place to meet, finding publishers who were willing to accept advertisements for Sha'ar Zahav services, and gaining acceptance from Jewish organizations.

I first attended the synagogue in 1980. At that time, services were being held at the Jewish Community Center. The first night I came to shul, I was asked to do a reading. That made me feel welcomed and honored. I had grown up in a Reform synagogue; so some parts of the service were familiar and other parts were new to me, but not for long. After a while I was asked to deliver a guest sermon, even though I was a member of a Lutheran church at the time (it’s a long story). I grew away from the church, and joined the synagogue.

The congregation was small then; maybe 40 people came to Friday night services, and most of them were men. There was a part-time rabbi named Allen Bennett. He and I had already met, having served as co-chairs of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual for a couple of years. Then more women started attending services, and there was some wrangling until feminism took hold.

The congregation grew, and we moved from the smallish room into a gymnasium. After another while, we bought the building on Danvers Street and hired a full-time rabbi. We joined the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. In addition to Shabbat worship, we conducted weddings, and funerals, and baby namings, and Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. We acquired land in a cemetery and started taking congregational trips to Israel. We became a full-sized, full-fledged, full-service synagogue.

In this week’s portion, Chukkat, the Israelites are still developing into a congregation. The portion opens with the laws concerning purification of those who have touched a corpse by anointing them with the ashes of a red heifer. Eleazar the priest is commanded to sprinkle the heifer’s blood towards the Tent of Meeting before the heifer is burned and turned into ashes, which are stored outside the camp. Everyone who touches the heifer or its ashes becomes unclean by so doing, but the ashes are to be used for purification. It’s rather mysterious.

What draws my attention is that the blood sprinkling is to be done by Eleazar, the son of Aaron. Sometime between last week’s portion and this week’s, 38 years have passed. This week’s portion records the deaths of Miriam and Aaron, and we know how much time has passed because the Torah tells us elsewhere that Aaron lived 40 years after leaving Egypt. In this portion, also, God tells Moses and Aaron to take the rod and assemble the community and order a rock to bring forth water. Instead, Moses hits the rock with the rod, and is therefore condemned to die outside the promised land.

A changing of the guard is happening; the generation that left Egypt is dying off, and only Caleb and Joshua of that generation will survive to cross the Jordan. Those whose minds were shaped by slavery could not get the hang of following God’s laws and depending on God for food and water and safety. Only a new generation could trust in God enough to succeed in conquering the land and making it home.

We’ve been having something of a generational shift at Sha’ar Zahav, too. We’ve shifted away from a synagogue founded by and for single gay men to one that consists largely of families, of all configurations, and many of them with children – there’s an aufruf, a wedding, or a Bar or Bat Mitzvah nearly every week. Children of members are starting to co-lead services. Not to fear, the synagogue is still a good place to meet someone special; there are still some single members (such as yours truly). In fact, there are some liturgists among us who are interested in writing rituals for non-family occasions such as menopause and retirement.

A synagogue is a place for communal prayer, and is also a place to make friends, to learn about Judaism, to receive prayers for healing, to be comforted on a loss. Sha’ar Zahav has for 29 years been the place where we come to present ourselves to God in all our diversity and uniqueness. And it’s where we come to help each other with our life journeys, and to get encouragement and guidance in our task to help repair the world. Long may its banner wave.