Keep Open the Gates
There is a precious moment in the final Yom Kippur service of Neilah, when we beseech, “p’tach lanu sha’ar, b’et ne’ilat sha’ar,” open a gate for us, at this time of the gate’s closing. As the sun sets and darkness is about to envelop us, we cry out for one more chance to open up space more fully. What a powerful metaphor: to ask that the gates, the doors, the barricades that close us off from one another remain open, remain permeable, remain inclusive. This prayer has sat in my heart throughout these Ten Days of Awe, as I’ve reflected on who remains inside and who is left outside when those gates close.
The deep theological and practical question crystallized for me this season at Radio City Music Hall, at the Ishai Ribo performance with the Israel Philharmonic. It was, genuinely, an incredible pre-Slichot experience. It was also a masterclass in hadarat nashim. The women musicians of the Israel Philharmonic were visually present, seen on stage behind a translucent curtain. Yet women’s voices were noticeably, deliberately, absent and silent from singing on stage. I can hold both of those truths. I can embrace the musician. I do not need to embrace the container he was delivered in. And yet the organizers of the evening spoke of their perception that this was a powerful display of achdut, of the unification of a large, diverse community of Jews for one special evening.
This is the bind of the “big tent.” When religious Jews talk about pluralism, about diversity, about “achdut am Yisrael,” the unity of the Jewish people it is clear that I am, more often than not, not who they’re picturing. When they look out at the audience, they are not seeing a middle aged woman rabbi in jeans and a tank top in their midst. The tent gets described as wide. The gateway stays narrow. That same night, members of the Conservative movement organized an egalitarian minyan in the lobby and celebrated it as a win. I understand why. But I want to be honest about what that celebration felt like to me: a consolation prize. On U.S. soil, at a non-sectarian venue, the free expression of religion in a lobby minyan should not require courage. It should not be a story. That it is one tells you exactly how closed that gate has been.
Current events in Jerusalem this week brought this to a head. At Kol HaNeshama, a Reform synagogue that has been a cornerstone of non-Orthodox Jewish life for years, members were attacked with eggs on the second day of Tishrei. That same week, Rabbi Dr. Dalia Marx my colleague of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem and a leading academic authority on Jewish liturgy, was invited back to speak at her own former high school before Yom Kippur. She was met with signs reading, amongst them, “We want a real rabbi, not a woman rabbi.”
P’tach lanu sha’ar, open the gates. But what tent, what gates, are we actually holding open? If we mean it when we say big tent, when we say diversity, when we say achdut, that has to include everyone, and it has to run in both directions. It can’t simply be a request that egalitarian, or liberal, non-Orthodox Judaism shrink itself to fit inside this Jewish tent. It cannot be a tent that leaves the heavy lift of working in together to preserve pluralism, working together to oppose rising religious violence as work done only by the liberal community under attack. It has to also ask the broader religious community to do its own tzimtzum, its own contraction, its own making-room. For the gates to stay open, community cannot be built through erasure. Our gates cannot be propped up without everyone inside vocally denouncing any violence against the others in the tent. The gate is open, the tent flaps are expansive, only when there is recognition, participation, and validation, and when it is dialogical, when it goes both ways.
For three years now, facing antisemitism from outside and violence in Israel, Jewish communities have pulled closer together, for very good reasons, in very powerful and meaningful ways. Now I find that, gently or not so gently, we are being asked to keep setting aside the egalitarian, the feminist, the religiously plural parts of our identity for the sake of maintaining and nurturing this united front. Minimize yourself, we’re asked. Now is not the time, we’re told. Keep the gates open by contracting who you are, we are messaged.
P’tach lanu sha’ar! What might it mean, now, at this late hour, to welcome our diverse religious identity inside our religiously diverse tent instead of asking it to keep waiting outside? The day has faded. The gate is closing. We can still choose a vibrant, pluralistic religious life that respects everyone in the tent this year.
