Friday, March 6, 2015

Honor Your Father and Mother

Each morning, when I pray Shacharit (the morning service), there is a line at the very beginning that I ponder every single day.

אֵֽלּוּ דְבָרִים שֶׁאָדָם אוֹכֵל
:פֵּרוֹתֵיהֶם  בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה  וְהַקֶּֽרֶן קַיֶּֽמֶת לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא, וְאֵֽלּוּ הֵן
 כִּבּוּד אָב וָאֵם,  וּגְמִילוּת חֲסָדִים,  וְהַשְׁכָּמַת  בֵּית הַמִּדְרָשׁ
 שַׁחֲרִית וְעַרְבִית, וְהַכְנָסַת אוֹרְחִים, וּבִקּוּר חוֹלִים, וְהַכְנָסַת
כַּלָּה, וּלְוָיַת הַמֵּת, וְעִיוּן  תְּפִלָּה, וַהֲבָאַת שָׁלוֹם בֵּין אָדָם
 לַחֲבֵרוֹ , וְתַלְמוּד תּוֹרָה כְּנֶֽגֶד כֻּלָּם

These are the things whose fruits we eat in this world
but whose full reward awaits us in the World to Come:
honoring your father and mother,
acts of kindness,
arriving early at the house of study morning and evening,
hospitality to strangers,
visiting the sick
helping the needy bride,
attending to the dead,
devotion in prayer,
and bringing peace between people - 
but the study of Torah is equal to them all.

I read this passage every day when I pray, and everyday I think about honoring my father and mother, but as a future parent, I also think about what our children will say. How will they view the line "honor your father and mother" when Emet and I aren't those roles, per se? Will they overlook it, as just another text that doesn't adequately reflect their experiences as Jews? Will they acknowledge its existence, but still say it because it's part of tradition? Will they insert their own words? We could so easily include "הורים," the word for parents, which doesn't indicate gender. Maybe that word wasn't in existence yet when the prayer was written - or in this case the Talmud, as this section comes from Shabbat 127a.

Recently, I finally got my hands on a copy of Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires, edited by Miryam Kabakov. One of the vignettes discusses lesbian visibility in Jewish texts. Like the absence of women's experiences in Jewish texts, queer women tend to be absent as well, because let's be honest, the ones writing the stories were men. They didn't always know what was going on in the women's spaces. Event so, queer women were there. They didn't have a label, like we utilize today, but with the inclusion of stories about "women rubbing against each other" by Maimonides, it can be assumed that women were loving other women.

I say this because I know that even though the text disregards my own family and doesn't see my family, we exist and we are working to show people that we exist. We may not be seen by everyone, but we know we are here, and we are doing our best to be visible and utilize tradition in a way that makes sense for us.

Reading through the English translation in my Koren siddur, I was surprised to see that Koren translated אָב וָאֵם as parents, not father and mother. This gives me hope that perhaps we are more visible than I thought.

Shabbat Shalom!