Why will you alienate us?: Thoughts about Parashat “Korach” - Ziva Ofek (5783 - June 2023)

Twenty nine years ago, when I met the love of my life, there were no Jewish communities in Israel that would accept us and allow us to start a family.

Needless to say that we could not marry and hold a Jewish ceremony.

For many years we cried, shouted and pleaded for the sanctity of our family: “The whole community is holy…… why do you set yourselves above the ord’s assembly?”

It seems like our call has been answered.

During the 90’s there were LGBTQ people that were members of Reform congregations, and during the 2000’s they were allowed to have a wedding ceremony, even a Jewish one. This process happened more or less at the same time also inside the Conservative movement, therefore in the world of liberal Judaism, the LGBTQ fight won by knockout. The whole community became holy. In fact, in most places within Israeli society, even in more conservative ones, including in those where the society differentiate between strait, trans and LGBTQ emotionally, the boundaries of distinction are diminishing.

The whole community is holy.

“All of us” are against the Haredi (Ultra Orthodox) religious world views, due to which, LGBTQ members are being discriminated against by Israeli law. All of us tremble when we hear the dangerous messages of the “Noam” party, against life threatening conversion treatments. As simple as that. We all know that religious people in Givat Shmuel fought a nine years old child, for his gender. We all agree that it is not a coincidence that Yishai Shlissel was a Haredi, that took a knife and murdered Shira Banki, and the entire society paid the price by allowing this to happen.

From Shira to Sarit. Last week, Sarit Achmad Shakoor, from Kfar Kasra, was murdered for being a Lesbian. All of us were shocked. We all thought that the police and the welfare authorities failed to prevent the murder. We all identified with the protest that arose following her murder. But none of us blamed the society that allowed her blood to be spilled, the Druze religion that Sarit was a member of. In fact, hurting LGBTQ people, including murdering them for who they are, is not a unique Druze phenomena, but it characterizes large parts of the zealots in all religions of Israel, including the Muslim community, as well as their elected officials in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), led by the “Ra’am” party.

We often say that the whole community is holy, that God dwells with them, and we ask why then we set ourselves above the Lord’s assembly.

We call it multiculturalism, but is it true to say that the Haredi community is closer to us than the Druze or the Muslim? One quarter of the Israeli citizens are not Jewish. Most of them are Muslim. When one of each five Israelis is a Muslim, can we really allow ourselves to say that they are from a “foreign” culture? And that we are not allowed to fight for it? When Druze are killing their own people because of being LGBTQ, they stop being our citizens, our brothers and sisters? Can we really permit ourselves to treat the citizens of Kfar Kasra as a remote civilization that lives far away from the general Israeli public, and not just a few minutes from Peki’in?

LGBTQ hateful murders will not be eradicated only through the justice, enforcement or welfare systems. This war demands an educational, moral and cultural mobilization that will profoundly and comprehensively negate them. The societies that allow blood to be spilled will have to defend themselves against harsh public, spiritual and religious criticism. Criticism that will arrive from their friends on the Jewish side.

Such murders demand us to stop being silent. Let us not imagine that the price of our efforts for peace and brotherhood between peoples and religions will be paid by the LGBTQ members. The voice of our Druze, Muslim and Christian LGBTQ sisters and brothers is calling and asking us to guard the sanctity of their lives, their bodies and their souls.

They are part of the whole community. Because the whole community is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is with them.

They ask us, just like I did when I was young: Why do you set yourselves above the Lord’s assembly? and maybe even more than that:

Why will you alienate us?

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