by Zev Chafets
“They don’t always attend our services, of course, but occasionally some of them drop by. They have the status of paid guest worshipers,” Gamze told me.
“How much do they get paid?” I asked.
“Two bucks a shot,” he said benignly.
There were a couple guest worshipers in the congregation that afternoon. Gamze introduced me to Willie “The Barber” Schwartz, a nonunion man with a patch over one eye and a suspicious glare in the other. Curtis Dennis introduced himself. A thin black man in his fifties, he was dressed in a war surplus leather bomber jacket, work pants, and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. Curtis Dennis is a convert to Judaism and a major player in Gamze’s game plan for achieving a daily minyan.
The day before, in a ghetto neighborhood not far from the synagogue, an eleven-year-old boy had been murdered by a fourteen-year-old in an argument over an imitation silk shirt. Dennis took me aside and confided that the victim had been his cousin. He also mentioned that he needed ten dollars to send the bereaved family a wreath. “I hope you come up with the money,” I told him, and he gave me a baleful look. A few minutes later I saw him talking earnestly to Rabbi Gamze, who listened respectfully, took out his wallet, and handed him a bill.
We went upstairs to the chapel. “Come on, rabbi, we’re running late,” said one of the businessmen, anxious not to get trapped downtown after dark. Mayor Coleman Young, in his ongoing cold war against the suburbs, had just erected a monument to Joe Louis—a giant black fist that extends over one of the city’s main freeway exit ramps. Most white merchants like to pass that statue heading north by sundown.
Gamze picked up his prayerbook and began to read. From the row behind me I felt a tap on my shoulder and Curtis Dennis, in a deep ghetto accent, said, “mincha, page one hundret and eleven.”
After services, Rabbi Gamze walked me to the door. “Tell me something, did you believe Dennis’s story about that kid being Dennis’s cousin?” I asked. The former spiritual advisor of Greasy Thumb Guzik looked at me closely, perhaps wondering if he had overestimated my sophistication. “Of course not.”
“Then why did you give him the ten?”
Gamze’s expression changed to one of gentle reproach. “Lying is a sin. But poverty is a worse sin. When a fellow Jew needs help, you help.” He turned to Sam Glass, standing at his elbow. “That is known as tzedaka. Are you familiar with that term, Sam?” Sam nodded vigorously. “Uh, yes rabbi, I, uh, learned it from you.”
Over two millennia Jews have been accustomed to turning to each other in times of crisis. In America, where the crises are few and far between, this tendency has been blunted—but not abandoned. When Jews are in real distress, they still turn inward, as if by instinct. That is true in the inner city of Detroit, and it is equally true at Temple Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco—a gay synagogue in the midst of a deadly epidemic.
There are homosexual congregations in almost every large city in the United States. But San Francisco is the capital of gay America and Sha’ar Zahav, with 250 members, is the most visible and influential gay synagogue in the country. I first heard about the congregation from a reporter on the Northern California Jewish Bulletin with the wonderfully unlikely name of Winston Pickett. I assumed that it might be difficult to make contact with Sha’ar Zahav but Pickett assured me that it would be easy, and it was. I simply called Rabbi Yoel Kahn from Sacramento, where I had gone to give a lecture, introduced myself and my project, and asked for an appointment. Kahn was more than agreeable; he suggested that we spend part of a day together, so that I could get a firsthand look at the inner workings of the temple.
Kahn’s openness stemmed from the fact that San Francisco takes Sha’ar Zahav in stride. The city is a liberal, tolerant place where Jews have long been accepted as members of the local establishment. Many of the old-line Jewish families, like Caspar Weinberger’s, have converted to Christianity, and the intermarriage rate is among the highest in the country. At the time San Francisco had a Jewish mayor, Dianne Feinstein, who was reportedly taken aback to learn, during a visit to Israel, that her Christian mother disqualified her as a Jew in the eyes of the Israeli rabbinical establishment.
This kind of Talmudic distinction is not taken seriously in San Francisco. Orthodox rabbis in the Bay Area maintain cordial relations with their Reform and Conservative colleagues, and even the local Chabad representative is said to be soft on heresy. Aquarian minyans and other New Age worship groups dot the city. San Francisco is probably the only place in the country where a gay synagogue could become a part of the Jewish establishment.
I took a bus from Sacramento, sharing the ride with commuters too smart to drive and travelers too poor to fly. As we boarded the Greyhound, the terminal’s loudspeaker boomed, “All aboard for San Francisco. Cigarette smoking is permitted in the last six rows of the coach. Please, no cigar, pipe, or marijuana smoking on board.” It was seven-fifteen in the morning. I laughed out loud and a businessman in a dark pinstripe suit standing behind me said, “California.”
Temple Sha’ar Zahav, which was once a Mormon church, turned out to be a disarmingly plain two-story white frame building located on a quiet residential street in the Upper Market area. Its ground floor is an unadorned chapel that seats several hundred on spare wooden benches. Upstairs there is an equally functional social hall and the rabbi’s modest office. I had expected something garish and lurid—a strobe ner tamid, sorcerers’ moons, and astrological signs on the ark—and I was a bit disappointed by the austere decor.
To an Israeli, the notion of a gay synagogue is as incongruous as kosher pork chops. The religious establishment in Israel takes the Scriptural view that homosexuality is an abomination, and even the nonreligious Jews tend to see it as a perversion or a sickness. There are a few gay bars and clubs in Tel Aviv, but homosexuality is far from accepted, and it takes considerable courage to come out of the closet. I entered Sha’ar Zahav full of wonder that there could be a synagogue for homosexuals, or that so many would be willing to publicly affiliate with it.
Rabbi Kahn was as disarming as his temple. A sturdy, apple-cheeked man in his late twenties, he was dressed in a ski sweater, blue corduroys, and loafers. And, although he is a Reform rabbi, he was wearing a yarmulke. The synagogue is a member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), but many of its members come from Conservative or Orthodox backgrounds, and ritually it tends in some ways to be a right-wing Reform temple.
Kahn’s study had all the standard rabbinical equipment—a UAHC diploma on the wall, shelves of Hebrew and English books, a complete set of the Babylonian Talmud, and another of the Encyclopedia Judaica. Kahn’s library is of limited use, however; traditional Judaism offers little precedent to the rabbi of a homosexual congregation in the midst of an AIDS panic.
At the time of my visit, five of Temple Sha’ar Zahav’s members had already died of the disease, and Kahn told me that a number of others—he wouldn’t say how many—were ill. “Judaism becomes harder and stronger for people like ours during an AIDS epidemic,” Kahn said. “It raises questions about God and mortality, questions people wouldn’t normally consider. A lot of people wonder if they are being punished, and there’s a strong sense of guilt. That’s one of the main issues we have to deal with here.”
On the high holidays, when the rabbis of suburban America were discussing South African divestment, environmental protection, or Middle Eastern politics, Yoel Kahn preached to more than one thousand people about life and death, God and suffering.
“We enter this New Year with uncertainty,” he told his congregation. “Some of us are ill and others will become ill. Some of us are going to die—whether from complications of AIDS or of some other cause. We cannot undo actions we took years ago, before we understood what we understand today. Let us each forgive our pasts, which cannot be changed, and look to the future, which is in our power to alter.”
There was an almost Jobian sense of doom in the sermon, a call for faith in the face of inexplicable sufferi
ng. Kahn then led the congregation in a meshaberach, or special prayer, for the victims of AIDS. There is a Talmudic injunction against praying for the impossible, and since there is no known cure for the disease, Kahn had labored over a prayer that was theologically acceptable. “Source of mercy, spread Your mercy on the ill among us and our loved ones, and protect with a special love those who are struggling with AIDS … and may we all see the day of healing, amen.”
For the gay Jews of San Francisco, the synagogue is a refuge. An average of 150 people come to services on Friday nights—the biggest Sabbath eve attendance in the city. They come because they need comfort; and because they want that comfort from their own people and their own religion.
In the shadow of the epidemic, the Jews of Sha’ar Zahav, once the avant-garde of the Age of Aquarius, have become almost as tribal as their ancestors in Poland or Russia. “A lot of our members come from back East, but they stay out here when they get ill,” Kahn told me. “Often their families don’t want to have to deal with them or admit that they are sick. Their real family is here, within the congregation.” The dead are shipped home for burial, but Sha’ar Zahav has developed its own one-day ritual to replace the traditional shivah, or week of mourning. There is also a Bikur Holim committee that carries out the commandment to comfort the sick by providing around-the-clock care for the terminally ill.
No one knows exactly how many Jewish homosexuals and lesbians there are in San Francisco. Kahn estimated that there may be as many as ten thousand, a figure based on his assumption that one person in ten is gay. That number may be high, but obviously there are thousands of gay Jews in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Jewish Federation was the first in the country to take on a full-time social worker to deal with AIDS patients.
“People out here are a little more sympathetic than in other parts of the country, but there’s still a conspiracy of silence,” Kahn said sadly. “Jews are liberal in the abstract, but a lot of them don’t want to admit that they know any gays. Being homosexual remains a stigma in the Jewish mainstream.”
Kahn himself seemed comfortable talking about AIDS, but anxious to emphasize that Sha’ar Zahav is a synagogue, not just a crisis center. “Obviously AIDS is our first priority, but we’re going full speed ahead with the rest of our program, too,” he said. “You know, in a lot of ways this is just like any other congregation. People worry about their parents’ welfare, they grapple with the meaningful nature of life, the usual concerns. When I first got here I expected a lot of questions about coming out, but actually there have been very few. By the time people get to Sha’ar Zahav, they’re already out of the closet.”
That is a considerable understatement. The congregation is explicitly, even aggressively gay. Its statement of purpose defines it as “A progressive Jewish congregation with a special outreach to lesbians and gay men. At Sha’ar Zahav, we as lesbian and gay Jews, with lovers, friends and families, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have a supportive environment in which to express our spiritual, cultural and ethical values. Sha’ar Zahav enables us to integrate our Jewish heritages (sic) with our gay and lesbian lifestyles.…”
In some ways, this integration is straightforward. Sha’ar Zahav is active in the usual pursuits of the Jewish community—aid for Ethiopian Jewry, demonstrations on behalf of Soviet refuseniks, Chanukah book fairs, and outreach programs for the city’s Jewish elderly. The congregation has a relatively high percentage of leftists, many of whom are critical of Israel, but most of its members are, according to Kahn, mainstream Zionists of the AIPAC variety.
But along with Sha’ar Zahav’s traditional Jewish concerns and activities, the congregation is in the process of developing a unique Jewish homosexual religious culture. The temple bulletin, known as the Gaily Forward (a play on the Yiddish Daily Forward), advertises, “Out of Our Kitchen Closets: The San Francisco Gay Jewish Cookbook”—a new subcategory of Jewish cuisine. The bulletin lists anniversaries (Peter and Jeff, Marilyn and Marta) in straightfaced imitation of the middle-class style of the average suburban temple newsletter. And it announces special events not ordinarily associated with synagogues, such as Irene and Rosalinda’s lesbian hot tub Havdalah service.
As the spiritual leader of a largely experimental congregation, Yoel Kahn is customarily called upon to deal with issues not normally within the rabbinic sphere. His first appointment that day was with a lesbian couple who had recently had a baby boy through artificial insemination. The biological mother was Edith, a powerfully built blond in a lumberjack shirt. A Christian, she appeared at first to be a bit intimidated by Rabbi Kahn and his synagogue, but as the meeting progressed she grew more relaxed, informally flopping a breast out of her shirt to feed her baby.
Edith’s lover, Sally, was a Jew from New York, the daughter of old-time socialists. She had kinky black hair and wore jeans and a soiled red T-shirt. It was Sally who had initiated the meeting. She wanted their uncircumcised son to have a baby-naming ceremony in the temple. The baby was to be named Moshe, in memory of her father.
Kahn was agreeable in principle and he ran through their options. He seemed oblivious to the more unusual aspects of the situation and dealt with the two lesbians in a matter-of-fact style well beyond tolerance. But when Sally said that she wanted him to mention from the pulpit that Moshe’s parents came from two traditions, Kahn suddenly balked with the stubbornness of a Chasidic rebbe examining a badly slaughtered chicken.
“Either the child is a Jew or he is not,” he told the women. “If you want the ceremony in temple there can’t be any question of a dual identity.” Edith shrugged indifferently, but Sally was protective of her lover, and she and Kahn negotiated. Finally it was decided that Edith would be mentioned as the other parent, but that Kahn would make no reference to her religion.
“A couple like that puts me in a dilemma,” he told me after they left. “I want to help them, but obviously I can’t allow them to say in shul that the baby belongs to two traditions.”
I didn’t understand why this was obvious. Since Kahn makes up his rules as he goes along; every decision is a judgment call. Unlike many other Reform rabbis, he will not perform intermarriages; but he routinely officiates at “ceremonies of affirmation”—homosexual weddings—for gay men and lesbians. Similarly, Kahn was dismayed that baby Moshe had not had a ritual circumcision, but he didn’t insist on one as a condition for the naming ceremony. “An uncircumcised Jewish baby has an unfulfilled mitzvah. But that’s the parents’ fault, not his, and there’s no reason I should refuse to do the ceremony,” he explained.
Child rearing and education are traditional Jewish preoccupations, and Kahn proudly pointed out that his congregation has an increasing number of children. Some belong to homosexual men; others are the offspring of lesbian mothers, many of whom were artificially inseminated. Kahn told me that within a year or two there would be enough kids for a religious school, although it wouldn’t necessarily be gay. “The heterosexual-homosexual ratio among the children of gays is the same as in the general population,” he explained. “One reason that lesbian couples join Sha’ar Zahav is to expose their boys to male figures active in the temple.”
In Sha’ar Zahav’s early years there was considerable friction between the men and the women, but lately they had reached a modus vivendi. “The problem,” said Kahn, “was mostly the fault of the men. We basically weren’t sensitive enough to feminist thinking.” Under its constitution, Sha’ar Zahav alternates male and female presidents; and in general there is an effort to seek accommodation rather than confrontation. “After all, we’re all Jews. And we don’t have tough women in leather on one side, and decorator faggots on the other,” Kahn said reasonably.
The female-male issue has also surfaced in liturgical discussions. “We don’t say ‘Lord’ or ‘he’ when we refer to God,” the rabbi explained, “and we use ‘human’ instead of the generic ‘man.’ But it’s interesting; most people don’t want to make the same changes in Hebrew. We do say, ‘avinu malcainu, el
ohenu malcatenu’—our Father our king, our God our queen—but we haven’t made many other changes. Personally, I’m torn. I’m rooted in the traditional liturgy, but intellectually I’m committed to a change of language.”
Prayer is taken seriously at Sha’ar Zahav—both because of the AIDS panic and because many of Kahn’s congregants see prayer as a means to self-discovery and realization. The members of Sha’ar Zahav insist on participating in every aspect of worship, a demand Kahn enthusiastically endorses. He has veto power and occasionally he uses it—he recently banned the use of a Bob Dylan song from the singer’s born-again Christian period—but usually he goes along with experimental forms of worship.
That morning Kahn had a telephone appointment with a lesbian lawyer who was scheduled to lead services a few weeks hence. In the course of the conversation it emerged that the lawyer intended to turn the service into a public examination of her own spirituality. Kahn listened, feet on the desk and the earpiece cradled against his shoulder, as she outlined her main points. “I feel I don’t have enough spiritual content in my life, and I want to learn to find God in daily life, not just at temple. And I want to be better able to communicate with God, to use him as a resource in my life.…”
Kahn interrupted her in the patient voice of someone who had been through this before. “That’s very interesting,” Kahn interrupted in a diplomatic tone, “but perhaps it’s slightly self-reflective. Maybe when you tell the congregation how you feel you should pause, take a breath, let them reflect along with you.” They talked in this vein for a few more minutes, the rabbi swimming patiently upstream against the flow of the lawyer’s self-absorption. Kahn asked her to work on her ideas a little more and to call him later in the week.
“You have to understand that the people here are sometimes intoxicated by the chance to express themselves freely in a Jewish context,” Kahn said, defending the lawyer. “Mainstream congregations have no place for homosexuals, certainly not for avowed homosexuals. And a lot of the people here grew up afraid to come out of the closet.
