“It is interesting we say ‘Two Jews, three opinions’”, they observed in an interview. “It doesn’t mean everything is limited to three opinions – we say that in order to say there are many more opinions than two opinions. So we often use three to connote the plural, the beyond the binary.”
Their perspective has been shaped by the personal experience of someone who felt from an early age that their own gender was “in between” male and female, who at the age of three called themselves “John”, but has now come to see themselves as a “gender queer lesbian feminist progressive Jew”.
“I grew up in such a gender-binary environment that I wanted to be a boy,” they explained. “Why did I want to be a boy? Because my destiny and my brother’s destiny were so different just because he was born a boy and I was born a girl.”
As a young person, the LSE sociology graduate was “incredibly radical – I was Marxist, I then became a radical feminist, lesbian separatist, so I know all about being part of the problem in the sense of seeing things in binary terms”.
While having had “ a female’s experience of my body”, nevertheless they challenge the belief that biological sex is always a gender determinant. “Our biology is in a sense a social construct” because what is important is “what we make of it”, they said.
“I’ve been criticised by some people who have said, ‘You can’t call yourself queer and a lesbian.’ And I’ve said, ‘Yes, I can because it’s me.’ I can call myself what I like and the fact that it confounds your categories, well that’s tough.”
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In a chapter on “transcending the gender binary”, the characters of Joseph and Deborah are explored as examples of gender non-conformity in the Bible. Joseph’s “coat of many colours”, ktonet passim in Hebrew, is later described in the Second Book of Samuel as a garment worn by “virgin princesses” and he is unusually described as “beautiful”. While Deborah is introduced in Judges as the “wife of Lappidoth”, the Hebrew could mean “woman of torches”, signifying her martial leadership.
In another chapter, the divisive binary is “Israel versus Palestine”, as a response to which they offer the precedent of bi-national Zionism and the work of groups that strive for co-existence today. Historic bi-nationalists such as Rabbis Judah Magnes and Martin Buber were “both passionate Zionists but they didn’t feel that it mean you oust the majority inhabitants of the land”.
But the most controversial suggestion, they believe, is that communities could recognise a new status of “ger toshav” (“the resident stranger” in the Torah) for non-Jewish people who are part of Jewish communities. “You’ve got this anomaly of people who are non-Jewish and who are part of the Jewish community, who are not the same as a non-Jew who isn’t part of [it]. You can’t treat them in the same way. They are often members of families where everybody in the family is Jewish except them.”
Some more left-wing colleagues may baulk at such a distinction, but Rabbi Sarah said: “We are not making a soup here – when we talk about pluralism, inclusion, we are talking about diversity, we are talking about lots of different flavours, colours, tones and I think it’s about time we broke up that simple binary [of Jew or non-Jew] and enabled another category.”
Now 70, Rabbi Sarah, who retired from the pulpit five years ago, has been one of the most creative thinkers in the British rabbinate and one of the most radical. They launched the website Voices for Prophetic Judaism last year partly because in the aftermath of October 7, some in the Jewish community felt silenced; and also, with the union of Reform and Liberals in the new Movement for Progressive Judaism, “to provide a space for rabbis to be focusing on what we stand for rather than just the machinery of it”.
But what stands out in the book is a traditionalism in looking to anchor ideas in the Torah and rabbinic texts. Detailed analyses of biblical and rabbinic passages pay attention to the roots of Hebrew words and their connotations, Shabbat is emphasised as a core observance.
“One of the things I wanted to do was to bring out the complexity we actually have in rabbinic literature that goes against the binary grain, even though it is not acknowledged. I love that…
“People have often not known what to make of me because I am this radical person, but for me our Jewish inheritance is terribly important and it is up to us today, each one of us, to find a way of engaging with it. And that’s what I encourage people to do.”
Breaking Binaries – A progressive rabbi engages with contemporary issues will be launched at Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue on Sunday, March 22 at 3pm. From March 23 it will be available from www.unusualpublications.com
