You’ve got hate mail!

Last week, when I announced that applications were open for the first ever Fat Torah Teacher Training Institute (yes, FATTI!), here’s what landed like a wee turd in my inbox:

“I am unsubscribing from this email. I find this new program an embarrassment given the real issues in the Jewish community. It is so self serving, all about ‘me’. One thinks of the malnourished, emaciated hostages, of the students being assaulted in the universities, of the world wide anti-Semitism and wonders why anyone should spend time justifying obesity based on Torah.”

I’ve been taking some deep, if not calming, breaths. I’ve slept several nights on it. And here is my response:

First of all, your opening salvo was….mwah! Chef’s kiss! Dismissing anti-fat bias as not being among the “real issues in the Jewish community” and describing FATTI as being “all about ‘me’” pushes every button my inner little fat girl has. All those ancient fears come blub, blub, bubbling up to the surface: that I am too much, too loud, too desirous, and clearly taking up more than my fair share of space and oxygen.

Yet, it is this button-pushing, this triggering itself, that helps me remember that, hell yes, the work of birthing a world that embraces fatness and fat people is absolutely about me and for me. It is also for every other fat girl, and boy, and sweet soul of any gender or none, who has ever been bullied and belittled by the likes of you.

You then go on to contrast Fat Torah’s work of using traditional Jewish wisdom to confront and heal weight stigma with, of all things, the plight of the hostages in Gaza and the victims of antisemitism worldwide. You seem to be drawing some kind of bizarre false equivalency here. Do you imagine that I am sitting in my home in Jerusalem eating more than you think I ought to and that if only I could control myself the hostages would not be starving? Or is there some other way that you think combatting the discrimination that fat people face in healthcare, education, employment, and public accommodations is somehow making things worse vis a vis what you deem “the real issues?”

Ultimately, Fat Torah’s work in general and this training in particular is about extending caring to all, connecting with plenitude, and teaching and learning a Torah of abundance. By contrast, yours is a narrow and narrowing vision, as if there is not enough justice and healing—and food and territory and concern—to go around. But there is; I promise you, there truly is.

Let me be clear: If I thought for one second that shutting up about fat liberation for the rest of my life would save even one of the hostages or shorten this war by even one death-full day, I would shut up immediately. And then you and I could celebrate together and you would never have to be “embarrassed” by me or for me again.

But the truth is that I don’t think the work of Fat Torah takes anything away from efforts to end antisemitism or bring the hostages home. It is also true, of course, that each of us has limited time and energy and that we each make choices about where to direct our work and our attention.

The ability to be thoughtful and heartfelt about those choices is a huge privilege that I do not take for granted. So far, I have been living through this horrific time with my own roof over my head, with my own shoes by the door, and with a leisurely 90 seconds to get myself, my children, and my disabled husband down three flights of stairs to the bomb shelter. For far too many people in this region right now, these “luxuries” are completely out of reach.

Yet, if anything, this war has made it more and more clear to me that I want to spend whatever time I have on this planet and whatever life force remains within me doing the work that I yearn for, body and soul, and that is uniquely mine to do. I am here, as I believe everyone is, to sing the song that I was born to sing. And my song is a song of freedom for every body. In this way, the work of Fat Torah is actually deeply resonant with the work of peace and justice in the Middle East: both call on us to humanize those who are too often dehumanized. Nothing embarrassing about that.

When I was a relatively new rabbi, a congregant whose spouse had just died lashed out at me, yelling through the telephone. We were talking about arrangements for the funeral and for sitting shiva at the family home and this congregant suddenly got extremely angry about my suggestion for who would lead the prayers in the house of mourning. I was taken aback at what seemed to me like a strange thing to be upset about at a time like this and I did not know how to respond. So I did what any responsible rabbi would do: I called my mother.

My mom spent many years of her career working as a hospice social worker, and I was always glad for her experienced counsel about how to be around death and dying. She said, “It sounds like your congregant is ‘flailing.’” She explained how one common response to grief is to lay into whoever is right in front of you, regardless of whether they are a “deserving” target or not.

Beneath your twisted logic and your obvious anger and disapproval, I have to believe that like so many of us right now, you too are grieving. And in your grief you are flailing. And in your flailing, you could not help but hit that “Reply” button when you saw my joyful announcement that we have chosen to move forward with our Fat Torah teacher training program even in these difficult times.

I want to invite you instead to be in our grief together. At the heart of fat acceptance is the willingness to be, at least momentarily, with this body, with this reality, exactly as it is.

This too is the work that I hope FATTI will spread: increasing our ability to sit with what is so deeply painful in this world; deepening our understanding that the people we seek to reach will have all kinds of reactions to our message; continuing to widen our capacity for appreciating the wildness of human diversity; opening to a Torah of expansive hope.