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Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them.
CATANIA, Italy (JTA) — Rabbi Gilberto Ventura believes his synagogue has the most beautiful view in the world. Located in the tower of a century-old castle on the slopes of Mt. Etna in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania, the synagogue is wedged between a snow-capped volcano and the sun-kissed Mediterranean sea.
The 49-year-old Brazil-born rabbi also thinks his congregation is one of the most unique in the world. It’s made up mainly of Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forced to hide their religious practice and convert to Catholicism after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Before that infamous decree, Sicily was home to tens of thousands of Jews.
The synagogue, which was first inaugurated last fall, is the result of decades of grassroots efforts by those descendants in Catania to find each other and forge a sense of community that had been lacking for centuries.
Hiring a full-time rabbi was the last piece of the puzzle, and Ventura, who has a long history of working with communities of Bnei Anusim in Brazil, was a natural candidate. He arrived in Catania in January.
“I really believe that the future Judaism in the world, especially in some places like Italy and, of course, Brazil, is connected to the Bnei Anusim, and the need to embrace the Bnei Anusim,” Ventura said.
But in an ongoing point of frustration, the formal organization representing Italian Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), does not recognize them as Jews.
“In the case of Catania, this strange Jewish community hasn’t passed all the steps the law requires,” said Giulio Di Segni, the vice president of UCEI.
He was referring to the fact that the community did not seek UCEI’s permission before establishing themselves under the name “Jewish community of Catania.” Per Italian law, UCEI has a monopoly on acknowledging and establishing Jewish communal life in Italy — including authority over who can use the term “Jewish community of” in formal ways.
“UCEI can’t accept this because it is too easy,” he added. “We are not against their synagogue or their way of prayer, but they cannot use the name ‘Jewish community of Catania.’”
The rooftop of the Castello Leucatia, where the community meets, has a large menorah and a view of the Mediterranean. (David I. Klein)
Catania’s Jewish community members told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a variety of stories about their Jewish backgrounds. Some came from families that always outwardly identified as Jewish. Others identified the source of family traditions practiced by parents and grandparents who — as descendants of Jews who faced persecution for practicing Judaism — still felt the need to hide aspects of their Jewishness from the public eye.
In the midst of questions about their ancestry, the majority of the Jewish community members have undergone Orthodox conversions. But that hasn’t led to their acceptance.
Benito Triolo, president of the Catania Jewish community, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he first came to Judaism at the age of 40, thanks to the insight of a Jewish friend in Palermo, Sicily’s capital and most populous city. Working together, they established a Charter of Sicilian Jewry, which aimed to identify and highlight the Jewish heritage of neighborhoods across the island.
While working on that project, Triolo came closer to his own Jewish heritage, and after years of study, he completed an Orthodox conversion through a rabbi in Miami 25 years ago.
Another community member, who was born Alessandro Scuderi but today goes by the name of Yoram Nathan, first felt drawn to Judaism as a child watching news of the Six-Day War in 1967. At first, he was laughed at by other members of his family — except his grandmother, who happened to have a tradition of lighting eight candles in early winter and baking flat unleavened bread around Easter time.
Decades of study later, Scuderi also completed a formal conversion to Judaism before an Orthodox rabbinic court, or beit din.
Others had more straightforward backgrounds.
“I was born in a Jewish family,” said David Scibilia, the community’s secretary. “Frankly speaking, we were not hiding or deep in the shadows in this part of the country.”
Scibilia said that his father explained to him that he was a Jew as early as the age of four. Within their own home, they observed holidays and kept Shabbat — no easy task since Italian schools at the time of his childhood in the 1970s had class on Saturdays. He did not eat meat until he was an adult and was able to acquire kosher meat.
He said that his family had maintained their Jewish identity since the days of the Inquisition and married amongst a small group of other similar families.
“I was a Jew, but not part of any community,” Scibilia said. “Just my family was my community.”
An aerial view of the city of Catania shows the Mt. Etna volcano in the background, Jan. 28, 28, 2022. (Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
Scibilia explained that once he had a child of his own, he realized he did not want her to have the same lonely Jewish experience. But when he reached out to UCEI, he said he found the proverbial door to organized Jewish life shut. Earning membership in Jewish community organizations across Western Europe involves a strict vetting process, and many groups require applicants to prove their mothers’ Jewishness according to varying standards.
Scibilia’s experience was echoed by Jews outside of the community in Catania and across Italy’s south who talked to JTA — a feeling of neglect or rejection by UCEI for those who fall outside of the norms of Italian Judaism.
UCEI currently recognizes 19 Jewish communities across northern Italy and just one in the south, in Naples, which has jurisdiction over the rest of the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The organization recognizes around 28,000 Jews in total across the country.
Scibilia noted that despite his Jewish upbringing, he has multiple certificates of conversion from Orthodox rabbis. The first came from a beit din of American rabbis from who traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, to assess Scibilia and others like him in Sicily. His second comes from the conversion court of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is known for its exacting Orthodox standards.
Both were rejected by Italy’s own Orthodox rabbinate, and he was forced to stand before another rabbinic court in Italy.
“I have at this moment — don’t start to laugh — three documents that prove that I am a Jew, two Ketubah [marriage contracts] for my wedding, and so on, again and again and again,” Scibilia said.
Others’ experiences in the region have been even more fraught, he said.
“The problem in Italy, that if you try to study with any rabbi here, you can study for 20 years, maybe you can die even before you reach the end of the tunnel,” he said. “From my point of view, they are playing with the spirituality of these people.”
In a statement last year, UCEI called the the Catanians “a phantom ‘Jewish community’” and accused them of “misleading the local institutions and deluding believers and sympathizers into adhering to traditional religious rites, never actually recognized or authorized by the Italian rabbinical authority.”
“Between UCEI and the Italian republic is an agreement signed in ‘87,” Di Segni said. “This law means everything about Jewish communities in Italy is through the Union Jewish community in Italy (UCEI).”
Noemi Di Segni, shown in Rome in 2017, is president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. (Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images)
Triolo said he isn’t too concerned about UCEI’s recognition.
“Ours is a process of refounding old communities that existed as early as 200 and up to 1492,” Triolo said. “Our recognition is already in our history. At that time the UCEI did not exist. We were there and we simply returned!”
No one knows when Jews first arrived in Sicily, but the Talmud tells a story that claims Rabbi Akiva, a well-known early rabbinic sage, visited the island in the early second century and told of a small Jewish community in Syracuse. Some historians believe the Roman writer Caecilius Calactinus — who was born in a town near Messina in the first century B.C.E — to have been of Jewish origin.
All agree that over the course of history, Sicily’s Jews watched as the island was traded between Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and half a dozen other empires. The narrative has also long been that Jewish life there ended five centuries ago, under Spanish rule.
The Spanish empire’s Jews suffered the same fate as Jews from the Iberian peninsula, who would become known to the world as Sephardim when they were expelled in 1492.
The descendents of Spain — and Sicily — spread throughout the world, establishing communities in North Africa, throughout the Ottoman empire, in the Netherlands and ultimately the British Isles and North America, as it was believed that Judaism faded away in their homelands.
Catania’s Jews disagree, arguing that many Jews practiced their religion over the centuries, in secret.
Triolo and others in the community formally inaugurated their synagogue in October. It was furnished with Torah scrolls donated by the Ohev Sholom synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The synagogue is situated in the tower of the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. The building was granted to the community by the city’s municipality.
“So they had the people, they had a synagogue, but they needed somebody to teach,” Ventura said.
The community meets in the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. (David I. Klein)
Ventura, who is Orthodox, may be the island’s first permanent working rabbi in over 500 years, but it’s not his first time working with Bnei Anusim.
Back in his native Brazil, Ventura was the leader of the Synagogue Without Borders, an organization through which he served 15 communities in Brazil’s north that were made up of descendants of Jews who came with the first Portuguese colonists to South America and who ultimately had to hide their identity as the Inquisition spread to the New World.
His work there put him in conflict with Brazil’s Jewish establishment, too. But Ventura is unfazed.
In Brazil, he founded synagogues and summer camps and built mikvahs and yeshivas across the country’s north. Since 2015, he has facilitated the conversion of hundreds of Bnei Anusim, bringing them back into the fold of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.
“I am a teacher since I was 21 years old,” he said. “Now I am 49, along with my wife. It’s one of the things we love to do, and know how to do. To teach Jewish philosophy, to teach Torah, to teach Tanakh, to teach the story of the Jews in Brazil, and now we are starting to teach the story of the Jews in Italy, the story of the Inquisition etcetera.”
In Castello Leucatia, he leads Shabbat services with the energy of a gospel preacher, pausing between prayers to explain a verse, teach a new tune, welcome latecomers, or simply to allow the congregation to talk.
Catania community members are shown at a recent gathering. (David I. Klein)
“This is what’s most important,” he remarked during one such lull on a recent Friday night. “That they get to talk and be a community.”
Ventura had organized a Shabbat event for other Jews across Italy — from Naples to Turin — who shared his belief that the future of Judaism was in communities like the one in Catania.
“Our point of view of Judaism is that we have to be a part of society, we don’t have to insulate ourselves, we believe that Judaism has a lot to contribute to society,” Ventura said. “In Brazil, we have a lot of connections with people from the periphery, in the favela and other communities, immigrants, Indians, etcetera. So that is something we want to establish here, to teach the people a Judaism that brings good things to the wider society.”
Ventura isn’t the only one working with such communities in southern Italy. Across the Strait of Messina, Jewish life has also been on the rise in Calabria — the toe of Italy’s boot — thanks to an American-born rabbi named Barbara Aiello.
Aiello, though raised in Pittsburgh, is of Calabrian descent. She returned to the land of her ancestors in the early 2000s and began working with the Bnei Anusim there, ultimately establishing a synagogue called Ner Tamid del Sud, meaning “eternal light of the south.”
“Until now, nobody took care of Judaism in the south of Italy,” Scibilia said while looking out at the Mediterranean from the terrace of Castello Leucatia.
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The post Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The boycott of Israel is increasingly targeting individuals
As Israel’s international pariah status grows, the movement intended to boycott and isolate the country is starting to target individual Israelis — including many with little or no connection to Israel’s actions, and in some cases those who are aligned with its international critics.
Organizers of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which seeks to isolate Israel, have focused on organizations and companies that they contend support the Israeli state, whether or not they are located in Israel, while cautioning that “it does not call for or condone boycotts of individuals because of their Israeli or Jewish origin.”
But that doesn’t stop it from happening.
Nadav Lapid, an Israeli filmmaker and dissident living in France, was the latest victim of this trend. But it has also hit Israeli celebrities who have posted perfunctory statements of solidarity with the country, Israeli musicians with no controversial statements and Israeli chefs operating restaurants in the United States. Israelis have been assaulted for speaking Hebrew abroad, and Israelis studying at American universities have reported being ostracized by classmates.
R.F. Kuang, an American author, even faced backlash from fans for including an Israeli character in her latest novel.
Sometimes the Israelis who face opprobrium are genuine advocates for the country. Others are just Israelis who have expressed warm feelings toward their homeland. Deni Avdija, a star forward on the Portland Trail Blazers, is a prime example of this. He has not shared his political views about Israel or its actions in Gaza, once wrote “Am Yisrael Chai” on his sneakers and wrapped himself in an Israeli flag courtside after Oct. 7.
“I obviously stand for my country, because that’s where I’m from,” he told the Athletic. “I don’t really get into politics, because it’s not my job.”
He scoffed at “all this hate” from fans who act “like I’m deciding things in the world.”
***
The justification for this kind of targeting varies, but it centers on a few key arguments. One is a misunderstanding of the boycott movement and its demands. An Israeli Harvard graduate student recounted a classmate who requested not to work with the Israeli student because “they had pro-Palestinian politics that required them to avoid normal relations, such as collaborating on a school group project, with an Israeli.”
This is not what the BDS movement classifies as “normalization,” which it describes as Israelis and Arabs sharing a public platform together.
Other arguments for shunning Israelis raise thornier issues.
Two major claims center on the premise that Israeli Jews are uniquely complicit in their country’s human rights abuses. If you believe that Israel is a settler colony operating under an apartheid regime, then the country’s Jewish citizens are benefiting from this dynamic in ways that, say, Russian or Chinese citizens do not inherently benefit from their own government’s problematic actions.
And, more tangibly, Israel’s policy of mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces means that most of its Jewish citizens serve in the military — helping the government maintain its policies toward the Palestinians regardless of their personal political views.
This can be distilled into a neat story of collective guilt — Israelis are all settlers on stolen land, and none of them are true civilians because they are either future or former soldiers — that was used by some extremists to justify Hamas attacking Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 and is used more casually to hound Israelis in the diaspora.
Some Israeli celebrities are sympathetic to those who expect answers from them about their stance on Gaza. “For many people to have me say something about that publicly is really important, like, ‘OK you’re from Israel what do you think about that?’” Noga Erez, one of Israel’s most popular musicians who has played multiple international tours, told the Associated Press two years ago.
But Erez has declined to share her own views, instead expressing a vague desire for peace.
This may be partly due to the social cost that Israelis can pay at home for speaking out abroad. Five years ago, Erez told a British magazine that “BDS did an important job in putting the spotlight on the situation” but that she hoped the movement would shift to “discourse and connection.”
After an outcry in Israel — where supporting the boycott movement is illegal — Erez hastened to insist that “I love Israel and do not support any kind of boycott of my people and my country.”
The incident underscored the relatively scant room in Israel for dissent over how the country treats Palestinians.
While Israeli Jews express plenty of disdain for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, only the tiniest fraction (1%) agree with the core contentions of anti-Zionist activists abroad that the country should be replaced with a Palestinian or binational state. And 82% support expelling the population of Gaza, while 76% agree that “there are no innocent people in Gaza.”
This is part of what happens when you have two ethnic or national groups engaged in a century of often vicious violent conflict. Seventy-one percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza recently ranked the humanity of Israeli Jews at a flat zero on a scale of one to 100.
But the point is that if you’re opposed to Israel’s existence on political grounds, the odds are quite high that you’re also diametrically opposed to the political views of most Israelis — something that is not true when it comes to American Jews.
That is a key distinction because even if one believes that Israel is an apartheid state that committed genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, it should still be easy to avoid harassing American Jews with no connection to the conflict.
But almost all Israelis have a bona fide connection, meaning that whether you find it problematic to demand answers from Israelis likely depends on your view of the conflict itself.
If you accept, for example, that the IDF has committed repeated war crimes and is otherwise oppressing Palestinians, then the objections from Palestinian students at Columbia and other universities to being in class with Israeli veterans may sound reasonable.
On the other hand, if you understand the IDF to be the world’s most moral army that sought to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, then any objection to working with Israeli veterans would smack of absurdity and perhaps antisemitism.
At the same time, the kneejerk tendency to assume that any Israeli is an enemy, solely based on their place of birth, can quickly slip into dangerous territory.
Lapid, the filmmaker, is perhaps the most absurd case of this. He has lived in self-imposed exile in France since 2021 and has accused his own government of “genocidal” actions but was nevertheless was by French activists after a film festival in Marseille named him to its panel of judges.
His supposed crime? Accepting funding from the Israel Film Fund for his movie Yes, a biting satire whose protagonist is recruited by a billionaire to write an anthem celebrating the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza after the European Union’s cultural fund turned him down because they thought the film was too anti-Israel. This prompted 10 filmmakers to pull their projects from the festival.
“What exactly do they want? That I stop making films? Should I leave France,” Lapid asked Le Monde.
For many of Israel’s supporters, Lapid’s experience is proof that the demonstrators don’t make any distinctions between Israelis like Lapid — a longtime thorn in the government’s side — and a celebrity like Gal Gadot, the Wonder Woman actress who has said she wants to “help obtain worldwide support” for Israel.
“Nadav Lapid doesn’t understand that Israel’s haters don’t differentiate between us, no matter how much he tries to curry favor with them,” Miki Zohar, Israel’s culture minister, wrote on X. “He will always be, to them, a Jew from Israel.”
But Lapid himself, who bowed out of the festival voluntarily rather than fighting the boycott directly, found himself reassured by two letters of solidarity from hundreds of French film industry leaders.
“Whatever crimes their state may commit,” the first letter argued, “no one can be reduced to a passport.”
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Rank Islamophobia in Congress is a crisis for American Jews
A growing caucus in the House of Representatives is targeting Muslims, and American Jews should be deeply concerned.
The Sharia-Free America Caucus, established in December, now boasts more than 60 members, all of whom are Republican. In announcing its establishment, one of its founders, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, warned that, “from Texas to every state in this constitutional republic, instances of Sharia adherents masquerading as ‘refugees’ — and in many cases, sleeper cells connected to terrorist organizations — are threatening the American way of life.”
His language was reminiscent of past xenophobic claims made about Irish and Jewish immigrants flooding the country with, respectively, Catholicism and communism. And the fact that the caucus has expanded in influence speaks to the continued radicalization of the Republican Party and the growing threat of American Christian nationalism. The attacks on our Muslim neighbors from the party in power call for Jews to stand up in defense of the value of religious pluralism in the United States.
American Muslims are the right’s immediate targets. But Muslims and Jews both stand to lose if the U.S. becomes an even less liberal and more strictly Christian nation than it is today.
A fictional threat
No one should dismiss the Sharia-Free America Caucus as a flash in the pan. Its membership includes a member of the Republican House leadership, Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who has said that “Sharia is completely incompatible with the American way of life and threatens the very fabric of our society.”
The caucus has introduced a number of pieces of legislation to combat the fictional threat of Sharia law, prompting a public letter signed by 119 Democrats demanding the House leadership not allow a vote on these ridiculous bills.
The Democrats are right to be drawing attention to this appalling demonstration of rank bigotry by dozens of Republican members of Congress. It should go without saying that there is no threat of Sharia law supplanting secular American law. Such talk is nothing but the crude fantasy of demagogues.
Instead, the caucus is twisting ordinary religious practices to demonize millions of Americans.
Sharia law, like Jewish halacha, is an unsettled body of religious law that has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and debated for centuries. In the U.S., scholars of Islamic law can weigh in on certain kinds of civil cases such as business disputes. This is exactly how batei din operate for many observant Jews: not as structures that replace American law, but as mechanisms that specific communities turn to voluntarily to help decide internal questions.
Just as the establishment of a Halacha-Free America Caucus would be an illegitimate and plainly hateful assault on the dignity of American Jews, so the existence of this caucus is an insulting act of bigotry toward American Muslims. The message being sent to them is clear: You do not belong here, and if you want to stay out of trouble, you can only practice your faith in ways the majority religious group finds acceptable.
A dark American history
These attacks against Muslims are continuous with a strain of illiberalism and xenophobia in the history of the U.S. with which Jews should be familiar. Yes, this country welcomed ships of Eastern European Jewish refugees at Ellis Island; but it also enacted the 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration quotas — which ultimately helped trap Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, American Muslims faced widespread discrimination in the name of national security — including illegal detainments and unconstitutional invasive police surveillance of communities. Once the terrorism panic subsided, Islamophobia became a standard part of the right-wing playbook.
Perhaps no one has been as brazenly hateful as President Donald Trump, who during his first campaign famously proposed a moratorium on Muslims entering the U.S., which he enacted shortly after assuming office; lied about witnessing thousands of Arab Americans in New Jersey celebrating 9/11; and has in recent years taken to using “Palestinian” as a slur. Right-wing panics over the construction of mosques and even the simple act of Muslims praying in public now occur with shocking regularity.
An alarming outlook for religious minorities
Political conditions have worsened considerably for American Muslims in recent years. Even amidst the hysteria and abuse of power after 9/11, the message of President George W. Bush was rhetorically often one of inclusion.
Such nods to religious freedom are few and far between today. Parts of the right openly portray American Muslims as an enemy fifth column. “Mainstream Muslims have declared war on us,” Rep. Randy Fine of Florida, who is Jewish and has drawn criticism for his Islamophobic rhetoric, declared. “The least we can do is kick them the hell out of America.” Just last week, months after signing a law supposedly banning Sharia from Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said Democrats in his state supported the institution of Sharia. And despite being the target of recent violent attacks, American mosques and Islamic centers are set to be largely excluded from the Department of Homeland Security’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
Trump’s administration has claimed to make defending American Jews from antisemitism a top priority. But a governing party that rejects religious pluralism and embraces Islamophobic conspiracy-mongering is not seriously committed to fighting religious hatred. Jews must understand that any “protection” offered on these terms is a poisoned chalice.
Efforts to circumscribe national belonging in the U.S. on religious and racial grounds have never been beneficial to American Jews. In response to the demonization of American Muslims today, Jews should not forget this truth. No minority is safe from the bigotry currently targeting our Muslim neighbors. We must stand up in their defense, and work continuously for a country that belongs to all of us equally.
Abe Silberstein is a doctoral student in the joint program in History and Hebrew & Judaic Studies at New York University
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You’re wrong, Ken Paxton: Obviously God is nonbinary
We are living in a time of reactionary masculinism. Roaring back not only against wokeness and MeToo but against half a century of feminism and a century of women’s suffrage, conservative American men have reasserted a hyper-traditionalist, hyper-violent form of masculine dominance, from the UFC matches on the White House lawn to Pete Hegseth’s pastor calling for the repeal of the 19th amendment.
And now, to the Texas Senate race, in which religious progressive Democrat James Talarico is running against the multiply indicted, investigated, and impeached Republican Ken Paxton, who among other things has taken bribes, committed adultery, and barely avoided conviction for securities fraud. Like all Trump wannabes, Paxton peppers his talks with vulgar schoolyard insults, calling Talarico “Low-T” (i.e. low testosterone, not manly enough), ‘Talafreako,’ and, I guess worst of all, a vegan. (Talarico is not a vegan.) Most recently, Paxton’s campaign has ridiculed comments Talarico made in 2021 that “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.”
But for anyone conversant with Jewish theology, this is obvious. Of course, God is nonbinary.
Genesis 1:27 states clearly: “And God created the human in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Meaning, both male and female are the ‘image’ (whatever that means) of the Divine. Of course, God has masculine pronouns here, but so do the words for socks, houses and money; Hebrew lacks a non-gendered case (until recent innovations). And just a few verses earlier, in Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of God gets a feminine verb form (merachefet, ‘hovers’). As Talarico put it:
The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis, use two different Hebrew words to describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine Hebrew noun for spirit. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.
More broadly, throughout the Bible, God is referred to in both masculine metaphors — Father, King, etc. — and feminine ones, like a loving Mother (Isaiah) or feminine Wisdom (Proverbs).
Jewish theological and theosophical speculation is even more clear. The philosophical God of Maimonides, for example, is beyond all form, and certainly all gender. The Kabbalistic Godhead, meanwhile, contains aspects (sefirot) that are masculine, feminine, both masculine and feminine, and genders that change depending on the moment. This is not merely abstruse speculation; every Friday night, traditional Jews welcome the Sabbath Queen to their places of worship. Who do you think we’re referring to here?
Indeed, one could say that God is the most nonbinary thing (or non-thing) in the universe, since in many Jewish theologies, God is nondual, beyond all binaries and dualities we humans construct to understand our world. In these conceptions, God is everything (yesh) and nothing (ayin), filling the universe and surrounding it, form and emptiness.
Now, obviously, Ken Paxton is not interested in theology; he’s just scoring political points, and desperately trying to change the subject. And with animus against transgender people rising (due to massive campaigns to lie about them for Republican political gain) he wants us to think that James Talarico’s God is nonbinary like a they/them teenager is nonbinary — i.e., conforming neither to masculine nor feminine gender roles. (In fairness, Talarico made his 2021 comments in the context of a political debate about transgender children and sports, and has lately has walked back the comments, calling them “cringey.”)
But just because Paxton is being cynical doesn’t mean his attacks aren’t harmful. They are at once ignorant and insulting, pathetically wrong and offensively backward.
I don’t mean to whitewash or wokify the often patriarchal Jewish tradition. Again, there are plenty of masculine images of God in Jewish liturgy, tradition, and text — maybe too many. The Biblical God has a bad temper, gets jealous easily and lashes out with violence. God is a Man of War, says Exodus 15:3, which scholars believe to be one of the oldest Biblical sources. And for every Lecha Dodi welcoming the Divine Feminine, there are dozens of blessings of God, the King of the World. Yet ultimately, these are aspects, projections and metaphors of the Divine, not the Divine itself. And just as the Greek and Indian pantheons include multiple manifestations of divinity, Jewish monotheism (and monism) contains within it multiple manifestations of a transcendent God ultimately beyond all myth, explanation, and categorization.
Likewise in the New Testament, which has ample male and female metaphors for the Divine, and ample statements that God transcends gender entirely (e.g. John 4:24). And not just God, but human souls as well; one of the most famous, and impactful, statements in the New Testament is the Apostle Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:28 that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Obviously, Paul doesn’t mean that there is no sex or gender at all, but he does mean that in terms of what matters most (which Paul understands to be the spirit), gender and ethnicity are irrelevant.
If only the Ken Paxtons of the world understood that.
Even if Paxton got the Bible right, however, his theological attacks on James Talarico would still be un-American. In fact, the myths and forms of religion are manifold and various, and in the America that truly is great, we don’t take sides among them. Sacred text and tradition portray many different faces of the Divine, and of course there are many different sacred texts and traditions. None of which should be defamed by a corrupt political hack.
But I admit, while I’m pluralistic as to religious worldviews, I do think some are better than others. And James Talarico has a compelling vision for an engaged Christianity that is justice-driven, heartfelt, and, to my mind, the rightful legacy of a certain rabbi who overturned the moneylenders’ tables in the Temple in Jerusalem. Even if you disagree with his political or religious positions, see what you think:
This is what religion should be for: the pursuit of justice, the cultivation of kindness, the commitment to not turn our back on the stranger, the marginalized, or the destitute. This is the God that inspired Jews throughout our history, whether we were activists or prisoners, volunteers at a hevra kadisha or teachers in a school, rabbis or homemakers. It is the source of compassion that can be discovered (or, if you prefer, invented) whenever the heart is broken. And as Talarico says, this God is the opposite of domination.
Amen.
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