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311  The New Rabbis: A Postscript Benay Lappe The visionaries who picked up the pieces of a shattered Judaism two thousand years ago, after the destruction of the Second Temple and the crashing of Biblical Judaism, were courageous, creative, out-of-the-box-thinking, fringy radicals. Queer, if you will. Not in the sense of sexuality or gender, perhaps, but in what being those very kinds of people usually makes you: courageous, creative, out-of-the-box-thinking, fringy, and radical. And deeply attuned to that still, small voice inside and confident of the truth it is telling you even when the whole world is telling you something else. These guys called themselves Rabbis. Teachers. They were the architects of a Judaism that would have been virtually unrecognizable to those practicing the Judaism of the Temple era. Their Judaism, like ours, was crashing. Theirs, in many ways, was no longer physically possible. Ours, in many ways, is no longer morally plausible. They had a new take on what it could mean to be a human being and took a shot at playing it out. Their radically transformed Judaism survived, and we are its descendants. In a way, it was easier for them than it is for us. The Judaism they knew was over. They had nothing to lose. No one could pretend that sitting in (the) Temple was “working for them” anymore—there was no more Temple. It is harder for us. We have a lot to lose. But much of what we are afraid to lose is illusion, the illusion that Judaism today is working for us all even when it is not working for most of us. And it cannot work for most of us until it understands all of us. Queer people (along with women, the deaf, the disabled, and people of color, among many others) have important—essential—things to say about what life is really like that the Tradition needs to hear. And although the Rabbis may have delegitimated the God-spoke-to-me kind of prophecy as a source of new Jewish law two millennia ago, they elevated our informed internal ethical impulse to the status of Torah itself and called it svara. Those queer Rabbis took their outsider insights—their sensitivity to those marginalized and oppressed by the Torah itself, their courage to stand up for them and mess with the Tradition to incorporate them—and declared their informed internal ethical impulse an authentic source of God’s will. They deemed it a source of Jewish legal change as authoritative as a verse in the Torah itself—so much so that a law that they created out of svara has the same status as one that appears verbatim in the Torah 312 Benay Lappe itself—d’oraita. And they went even further than that. They declared that one’s svara could even trump a verse in the Torah when the two conflicted. Svara is a term and a concept that has been kept virtually secret—certainly in its far-reaching implications—for over fifteen hundred years. It is not taught even to rabbis or rabbinical students today. In my six years of rabbinical school at the Conservative Movement’s flagship, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the word was never uttered. Not once. We were never assigned a text that contained it—though hundreds do. Instead, we were taught, as if it were Jewish dogma, the lie that our leaders have succeeded in conveying to most Jews: that when it comes to certain verses in the Torah, “There’s nothing we can do,” “Our hands are tied,” “If we could change it, we would.” Understanding the Talmudic concept of svara exposes these excuses as the untruths that they are. That is why queer Jewish learning must begin with an understanding of the gamechanging concept of svara. Yet it is understandable that svara would not be taught in seminaries. Seminaries (particularly movement-affiliated ones) are typically in business to perpetuate the status quo of an era long gone—not to teach mechanisms of potentially radical change. Svara allows any change—even to the point of uprooting the entire Tradition itself—to create a system that better achieves that Tradition’s ultimate goals. It is a mechanism of change that arguably should be entrusted only to those who are committed stakeholders in the Jewish enterprise. My reading of Talmud also tells me that the Rabbis who came up with this potentially dangerous and potentially chaos-creating source...

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