on the eighth night of Hanukkah

[calimac]

Instead of lighting the candles quietly at home, I went out to a religious ceremony at our synagogue. (B. would have been with me, but she's feeling under the weather and didn't want to pass it on.) It was a ceremony of an unusual kind, dubbed a service of renaming and rededication.

One of my colleagues at the library has come out as a trans man and decided to mark this with a small ceremony surrounded by invited friends and colleagues. He had been hesitant about coming out, and approached it slowly, for several reasons, among them uncertainty as to how others would react. But everyone at the synagogue was welcoming. (My own practical response to the news, as the person in charge of the catalog, was to take the initiative to use the global change function to update the name in the donor field for all of his past donations.)

As I told L. in response to the invitation, B. and I have a number of trans friends and acquaintances (of both sexes), so we've seen this change of life before. What we hadn't seen before was a religious ceremony for it, and one to be of such thoughtfulness and spiritual significance. It was conducted by our principal rabbi, started with the lighting of five hanukkiyot, and continued with prayers, songs, sermons, and the ubiquitous Jewish blessings. And afterwards, the noshing of jelly donuts.

Throughout, the intertwining of this ceremony with other aspects of Jewish religious tradition was deep and thorough. This is the kind of thing that keeps me at home in my religion, even though I'm not much of a practitioner. Blessings on dedication and on namings were numerous. Some friends gave a Torah lesson in the form of recounting name changes in scripture, ranging from Abraham to Joshua. L. in his sermon compared this ceremony with the private one he held a few years ago to dedicate his apartment, which he'd done to make himself feel more at home in it. Now, he said, he's rededicating his home in another sense for the same reason. He wants to feel at home here too.

So I made a point of saying, when I talked with L. afterwards, that - on this first seeing of him in his new identity - that I thought it fits him, that he looks at home in it. I've noticed this before with trans people whom I knew before transition, that they look more at ease, more themselves, now than they did before. And it's this observation that - I started to say "convinced me," but I needed no convincing - showed to me that transition is a real thing.

Comments

[sartorias]

Seriously awesome in every way.


(Except jelly donuts, glurrp)

[calimac]

(Notice I put that sentence in the passive voice. I restricted myself to one donut hole, figuring it would be devoid of jelly. It wasn't.)

[cmcmck]

I like the idea of a specific service for it. :o)

[calimac]

Sure: one of the great things about Judaism is that we can create a service for anything. Just recite the Shehecheyanu (which we did) and build it around that with whatever seems appropriate.

[ex_inklessej388]

Very awesome and very powerful that your faith community is supportive of trans members. It goes without saying that this is not the case for the vast majority of religious people within the Abrahamic faiths. Thank you for sharing this heartwarming experience.

[calimac]

We are a Reform congregation with a long tradition of social justice and activism. (Our then-rabbi marched with Dr. King.) I know there are plenty of Christian churches, including Catholic ones, which could say the same. I regret not knowing enough about Islam.

[ex_inklessej388]

In my very high church Anglo-Catholic parish we affirm and support all members of the LGBTQ community. Which is odd in the Anglo-Catholic strain of Anglicanism because worldwide that tends to be the socially conservative branch but in Canada it is different, and especially in my little corner of the world. I've not had much interaction with Islam as well, but from what I have gathered it is similar to what we see in Judeo-Christianity with some leaders embracing support and others galvanizing themselves in so-called tradition.

I left the Roman Catholic Church because I could no longer be a member of a church that was not aligned with my own conscience. I am always full of joy when I read of faith communities who are supportive of LGBTQ people similar to what I found in my Anglo-Catholic parish from other people. In my conscience, and the conscience of many people, there is no conflict between what two consenting adults do in private within a loving relationship and the profession of faith. :-)