Hard and Holy Work: Happy Pride Month!

Just a few minutes ago, the entire school gathered for Shabbat B'Yachad, our last pre-Shabbat full community assembly of the year. This Shabbat B'Yachad is special, honoring our now annual Pride Shabbat tradition to celebrate all our Beit Rabban LGBTQ+ community members and allies. Dressed in our rainbow finest, we read Torah, sang, recognized birthdays, and watched a special video. The video is a compilation of short recordings from staff, students, alumni, board members, and parents explaining what Pride means to them.

Assemblies are interesting moments for schools. An assembly is not the time for deep reflection or nuance. Big ideas and historical events are not conveyed in sound bites at assemblies. We are committed to teaching with complexity, encouraging children to wonder, question, and reflect. In fact, oversimplifying things when teaching is ineffective and often counterproductive. So, why would we mark something as complicated as sexual and gender identity in a twenty-minute block of dancing in rainbow clothing?

These gatherings, however long or short, are moments to convey our communal values to our children in effective ways. These are times when we implicitly and explicitly showcase our priorities and let our children know what their grown-ups believe. By having children read Torah each week at Shabbat B'Yachad, we convey to them that our people's texts and traditions are in their hands; they are the stewards of Torah going forward. When we name each student and teacher's birthday, we communicate that each person in our community is essential. When we dance together at the beginning and end of each assembly, we remind our children and ourselves how critical it is to celebrate and to "worship God with joy" (a saying and song based on Psalms 100). These are the experiences that memories are made of.

During Pride Month, we hold a particular type of heavy burden and holy responsibility as educators. We know that countless children have suffered and continue to suffer because they are not confident that who they are is affirmed by their grown-ups. As Jewish educators, we know it can be excruciating not to feel you belong in your religious community. This is true for LGBTQ+ kids and other children who do not fit neatly into the identities expected of them. As we all know, there are drastic consequences to this. There are also lifelong benefits to growing up with an anchoring sense of belonging, and religious communities have a unique capacity to provide this. In our 20 minutes of Shabbat B'Yachad today, we will affirm to our children that their grown-ups love them for who they are because each of them is created in the image of God.

We affirm something else in this short gathering. We demonstrate our commitment to optimism, to Jewish optimism. We are a people who prays for a Messiah who we are not intellectually confident will arrive. We are a people who prayed for thousands of years to return to a Jerusalem that was more of a metaphor than a literal place. We are a people who have internalized the maxim from Pirkei Avot: "It is not on you to finish the work, but neither are you released from the obligation to do the work." We work to make the world better because we believe it can be improved, and we believe it is our responsibility to try. We do this work even if we will not see the entire "tikkun" (repair) in our lifetimes, even if we see more breaking than repairing.

Even in the current climate, when I reflect on the impact of LGBTQ+ activism over my lifetime, I see it as an optimistic reminder of what we are capable of achieving. The work of LGBTQ+ human and civil rights has been long fought, and it has a ways to go. Needless to say, none of this did or will happen overnight. Instantaneous miracles are of a different time when God was obviously manifest from moment to moment. Today, we are responsible for manifesting God's work. It turns out that we work a lot slower than God, need to work a lot harder than God, and need many more partners than God needs. It also turns out that our advancements are more susceptible to undoing. 

Celebrating Pride as a school community affords us the ability to talk about all those who have worked hard to bring change and to name so many things that have improved in our lifetimes while affirming that there is much to be done and also pointing out how important it is to actively protect all advances that have been made. It still should give us and our children hope and optimism and make us feel deeply responsible.

I hope and pray that Beit Rabban engenders a deep sense of belonging for each child and that this foundation inspires them toward optimism. It takes work, just like all social change. It is holy work, and we are grateful to do it in the community.