Alef: The NEXT Conversation
Gay Travel Hot Spot
By Josh Furman
Israel has become known as a gay travel hot spot in the last few years, but it has been a personal gay destination for me since I was 15 years old. Although tourism companies have only recently started offering “gay themed” tours of Israel, there has been something very gay about the holy land for me for quite some time now.
I first went to Israel with a youth group. At this point in my life, I was pretty clueless when it came to sex. I never went to Jewish summer camp, and didn’t have years of experience of Jewish hook-ups like many of my peers did.
It was in Israel that I got my first crush, and while it wasn’t on another man, it was probably the gayest crush I have ever had. I was infatuated with the madricha (guide) on another bus, and I finally built up the courage to show her I was interested. Thinking that the best way to impress her would be to match my clothes to her red hair, I chose just the right outfit – an orange hat, orange shirt, and shorts with orange accents.
It gets worse. During the next stage of the courting I gave her a stuffed hippo. Looking back, this might have been the first sign that I would never be a ladies’ man, because you just don’t give a girl an animal known for being overweight.
This won’t be a shock to anyone, but she wasn’t my bashert. She wasn’t impressed by my orange ensemble or strange gifts, and our relationship quickly fizzled. I’d like to think that she saved the hippo and looked at it fondly, but I would be surprised if it made it past a trip to Goodwill. We saw each other a couple other times on the trip, but I quickly became shy and avoided actual communication. It was awkward. Although my ability to garner paper plates and construction paper into elaborate Shabbat decorations might have impressed some, I quickly took the hint that she wasn’t the type to look for such skills in a mate.
Years later, I was back in Israel, this time with a solid awareness that I was gay. Fortunately for Jewish continuity, I have always been attracted to dark curly hair and brown eyes – stereotypically Jewish looking guys. Israel became a candy shop, and I’ll admit that I had my fair share of olive-skinned encounters, and if it wasn’t for the whole fact that I was gay, I would definitely have helped to increase the population of Israel. Outside of my first crush on the madricha, Israel has been a place where I have experienced the multiple facets and challenges of being a gay man. In the U.S. I am limited in the number of eligible gay Jews who I encounter, but in Israel I have been able to tackle my opinions on love and what I value in a relationship.
Objectively speaking, Israel is one of the world’s most progressive countries in terms of legal rights granted towards the GLBT community. But by no means is Israel a perfect society, and I will be the first to admit that parts of Israeli society are run according to Jewish laws that sometimes come into conflict with homosexuality. But Israel has also been a place that has helped me embrace both my Judaism and my homosexuality. My experiences with Judaism and homosexuality in Israel have been diverse: I volunteered with the GLBT community at Jerusalem Open House and dressed in drag (my first and only experience doing so) while acting out the Book of Ruth at Pardes in Jerusalem.
I hope Israel will continue to be a formative place in shaping my identity, because when I’m there, I’m both proudly gay and proudly Jewish. It’s fitting that God used the rainbow as a symbol of a covenant with the Jewish people in the Torah, and that the rainbow is also used as a symbol for the GLBT community. In some ways, going to Israel is my own personal version of the rainbow covenant.
Photo by victoriapeckham, licensed under Creative Commons.
Be Fruitful and Multiply
By Danny Sharron
It’s been almost two years since I came out to my parents, and I still remember the first two things my mother said to me: “I love you” and “…what about grandchildren?”
I’m sure we’ve all heard this question from our parents in one form or another. Being young and Jewish in the post-Holocaust era comes with certain responsibilities, primarily to sustain our culture and help repopulate the Jewish race. After all, at the foundation of the Jewish faith is family – loyalty to the family you were born to, as well as the responsibility to build your own.
I was 20 years old when I went on a Birthright Israel trip. On my last night in Israel, the trip organizers rented out a club and invited about ten different groups to take part in the celebration. After fighting the masses to claim my first drink at the bar, I turned to face an overwhelmingly large and blinking proclamation projected onto screens throughout the club: MAKE JEWISH BABIES.
Coming to terms with my sexuality was hard enough without the added strain of procreation. This glaring imperative made me feel totally inadequate. If I’m gay and can’t make babies, then how do I fit into the Jewish faith?
It has been four years since my trip to Israel, and with each year that has passed the pressure to build a family has only increased. I’m not ready to get married or raise children any time soon, but the question remains: When I do want these things, when I’m ready to give my mother the grandchildren she so desires, what will happen? Will I find a surrogate? Will I adopt? And if I do adopt (and bring my generational line to an abrupt halt), what repercussions will this have on raising my child as a Jew? Will my child feel as Jewish as I do, even if the history and tradition aren’t in his or her blood?
I don’t have the answers to these questions and I don’t know if anyone does. For the first time, the politics of homosexuality are being brought to the forefront of our collective conscience. It is our generation that will define how homosexuality is ultimately incorporated into both American and Jewish culture, and I want to be proud of the choices I make. Although I once felt shamed and alienated by my grim reproductive prospects, I have a new-found pride in my identity. I am a gay man of the Jewish faith, and I will venture to set an admirable precedent for the future generations of gay Jews to come.
Photo by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL, licensed under Creative Commons.
Why I Give
By Robby Kaufman
I donate to a few Jewish causes that I care about deeply. I can give you the 30-second elevator pitch on why you should stop what you’re doing and open up your wallets to these organizations, but this is not my goal.
While I had a Bar Mitzvah and attended Hebrew school growing up, I never had a desire to involve myself Jewishly until I went on my Taglit-Birthright Israel trip in college. I can go on and on about how incredible, motivational, inspirational, etc., the trip was, but I want to talk about one outcome of my Taglit experience – the trip made me understand why many Jewish organizations exist and how donations from generous individuals literally enable them to exist.
When I returned from the trip as a freshman at UC-Berkeley, I became involved with two particular Jewish agencies: Hillel and AIPAC. I learned a lot from these organizations and they helped me develop into the person I am today. Without Berkeley Hillel, for example, I would not have had a rich Jewish college experience or met some of my best friends today. I think these two organizations have important missions and are successful in achieving their goals. At some point, I realized that I wanted to help these organizations because I am a true supporter of their goals and purposes and that they are vital to the Jewish community.
Although I have limited knowledge of the philanthropic world, I have become a strong believer in developing a culture of giving. A Jewish nonprofit organization that is seeking to be around in the future needs to grow and develop a donor base. This may be common sense, but the harsh reality is that large donors that make up a significant portion of an organization’s budget will likely not be contributing in a generation or two. Most Jewish organizations lack significant endowment structures that are designed to sustain them indefinitely.
Instead, younger donors – such as myself – may very well be the donors that enable these organizations to succeed in the future. So when I write my $18 check and motivate my peers to do the same, my goal is to instill a sense of importance to donating to causes that we find important. These $18 checks may not be terribly meaningful by themselves, but my hope is that each individual who is donating at a young age will gain an understanding of the importance, necessity, and value of philanthropy. I am also hoping that these donors will step up to the plate when the time comes many years down the road when an organization they care about needs them more than they do today.
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by Mr. Kris, licensed under Creative Commons.
Loose Change
By Benjamin Pinkhasik
My first lesson in dealing with money took place on one of those long double buses with a stretchy accordion middle. I must have been six or seven years old at the time and was holding a shiny new coin. While this doesn’t sound like much, it was enough to buy a delicious, carbonated, syrupy drink, and I was looking forward to having one that day.
For a six-year-old, those long buses held incredible allure as the middle rotated while the bus took turns.
“You should put that away,” I remember my father telling me, pointing to the coin held loosely in my fingers.
But did I listen? You can probably predict how this story ends. The bus hit a pothole, Newtonian laws of motion took over, and the coin escaped from my fingers, leaped into the accordion part of the bus I was so fascinated by, and got lost in an abyss of wrappers, chewed gum, and grime. The loss of this coin was agonizing and brought on much personal unhappiness at the time.
My view on money – why we need it, the drive to have it, and the best way to spend it – took shape as I grew up and observed how my family dealt with money. While I never had a real need for money, by the time I reached my early teens, I realized it was important to have it. It gave you the ability to buy things without being a burden on your parents, without having to ask anyone for anything. It gave you personal freedom, which I strived for, and so I started working to amass it. At fourteen, I packed my briefcase, put on a suit, donned shiny shoes and a pink tie, and got a job. I spent the summer building park benches and flower boxes for the town – hard, sweaty work – and I still remember that first paycheck. I felt incredible – I cashed that check, asked the teller to give me all singles, and for the next few hours I had a “stack” of cash.
A decade ago, my thoughts on money could be summarized by this opening line of an essay I wrote in high school – “Whoever said money doesn’t buy happiness surely didn’t know what he was talking about.”
i.e., money=happiness.
I predicted that George Bush Jr. would be the next president. My logic: “the monetary contributions to his campaign are greater than the other candidates. Doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know who the leader of Pakistan is.”
i.e., money=power.
I espoused that happiness and money are intricately linked – “just ask the local bum if a little money would make him happier.” I proposed and reflected on the idea that the rich don’t really have problems. These were childish sensibilities, for sure, as I had never, at that point, given money or even talked to those bums.
A little more than ten years passed and my thoughts on money evolved. While money is still important to me, today I focus on the the ability to earn it and how to utilize it once I’ve attained it. You can go to that hot new restaurant, buy yet another piece of clothing, purchase that new iPod when your old one is still good, but do you really need it and would it actually make you happy?
My first trip to Israel was not a traditional tour like a Birthright Israel trip. It was titled “Mission Possible” and it had a philanthropic bend to it. Before leaving, all the participants were asked to present an Israeli charity that they were interested in and convince the rest of the group why it should support that charity. Then we voted for the best four. While in Israel, we visited these organizations, saw what kind of work they did, and in the end, the top charity selected by the group received ten thousand dollars. I wanted to learn how to best choose a deserving charity and was pointed to the Torah. In Deuteronomy 15:7, there are references to the “maser” or what’s called the 1/10th rule – the eight levels of tzedakah and the explicit guarantee that the mitzvah of observing maser comes with a assurance of wealth.
My lofty goals for earning money didn’t change over the years, but what has changed are my goals of what to do with it once attained. Armed with the power of tikkun olam, I think about how to become active in philanthropy, why one charity performs over another, and how I can have a lasting impact. Today I realize that money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it can buy happiness for others. For many, a few extra dollars are meaningless, but for a homeless person, the money can mean survival and potentially the start of a new life.
As I learned on that bus, money can be in your possession one moment and not the next. Today, I’m determined not to let it slip away, and to do some good with it.
If you feel you have the answer to why and how we should choose one charity over another or on philanthropy in general, please comment below.
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by cometstarmoon, licensed under Creative Commons.
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