Whenever I return from the Eshel National Retreat and someone asks me how it was, I always find myself reaching for superlatives: “Incredible!” “Wonderful!” “The best one yet!”  Every year the retreat seems to have topped the previous year’s retreat.

This year, the speakers panel on Friday night featured stories from a breathtaking range of LGBTQ people in the Orthodox world, and their stories were overwhelmingly positive.  A yeshiva student in Israel galvanized a community of allies and supporters around him when he came out. A frum woman transitioned without losing her home, her marriage, her Orthodox community, or her children’s school-community.  An ex-Hasidic woman who left her ultra-Orthodox world got full custody of her children and is raising them Orthodox. A recently- out gay man converted to Judaism and found an Orthodox community with whom he can mourn the losses and celebrate the joys in his life.

I then realized why each year’s retreat feels better than the previous one.  It’s because we get better.

We get healthier.  We get happier. With every year that we struggle to be included and celebrated within our communities for who we truly are collectively as a community, we get better. There are still many people in our community who are hurting. But even those who are in the depths of sorrow find they leave the retreat with hope for a new beginning.

Our theme Looking Back, Moving Forward helped us reflect on where we are on our journey between past and future.  As a collective body we have changed over time, and we are stronger for it. At the closing circle of the National Retreat, I asked participants to choose one word that best describes their experience.  The word I heard repeated most was “hope.”

I left the retreat feeling hopeful, because we, like the National Retreat, get better and better every year.

Miryam Kabakov
Executive Director

Eshel’s National Retreat:
A Blast from the Past and a Path Toward the Future

Every year, for the past nine years, over 100 Queer Orthodox Jews gather among the icicles and blowing snow in Connecticut for a weekend of support, renewal and celebration. It is a diverse group of LGBTQ people who all share a love of the Jewish tradition, alongside experiences of marginalization if not demonization in their communities. Some are still in the closet, some have opened the door and others are out, loud and proud. The retreat has created a space where these disparate identites are brought together and embraced. As one participant put it: For some of us this is the only opportunity to step out into the sun and spend at least one shabbos a year in our truth.

And since the two descriptors of “queer” and “Orthodox”, are themselves wildly variable, the mix of perspectives can be dizzying. Queer has included, for example: lesbian Talmud scholars, gay men in long black coats, transwomen and transmen: single, married and divorced, gender-queer grad students in Jewish studies, bi men and women and more. Orthodox has included Hasidic Satmar women with shaved heads and scarves, Bobov men with sidelocks, and Lubavitch rabbis, Yeshiva trained people from the prestigious Black Hat Talmudical Academies, Israeli academies and Yeshiva University, urbane Modern and Open Orthodox Jews and ex-Orthodox Jews who are no longer observant, but still feel very “Orthodox connected.”

Despite the rather boisterous cacaphony of difference, around which tensions do arise, every year a sweet and loving open-heartedness descends when the Shabbat is welcomed in prayer and song. The retreat center chapel is flanked on both sides with windows looking over snow covered trees on one side and a frozen lake on the other. The warm and calmly jubilant music of Kabbalat Shabbat, always leads to an uncommon sense of embrace that washes over everyone and brings tears to the eyes of many. One attendee wrote that he was moved by the Friday night singing…“feeling a part a community” in a way he hadn’t in a long time. Another commented that the prayer service was an island of connection, “in a lonely world.”

Among the traditions of this gathering is a Friday evening panel where four stories are told. This year a Chasidic mother shared the story of regaining custody of her children, taken from her when she came out. A semi-closeted yeshiva student from Israel shared how his calm dignity brought 80 of the yeshiva’s students to write a letter to the administration asking for more openness. An Orthodox trans woman shared how with patience and humility she has found a home in an Orthodox community and an Italian gay man found Judaism when his lover died in his arms and an Orthodox rabbi helped him to heal. It is a highlight every year that underscores the resilience, faith, courage, grit and wisdom of this remarkable community.

The weekend sessions are typically woven together by a common theme. The retreat this year, Looking Back-Moving Forward, invited participants to meet the ancestors of our present queerness in the form of unknown or forgotten figures from the 2000 year span of Jewish history. Attendees got an early peek at an exciting new book of queer Jewish historical texts, A Rainbow Thread, by Noam Sienna. A number of sessions were dedicated to historical recovery like Mystics, Poets, Lawyers and Lovers, Gender transformation in the Talmud, Gay Marriage in Jewish legal Texts, and Meeting our Sissy and Butch Ancestors.

And there were “forward-moving” sessions on topics such as Queering Contemporary Orthodoxy and Engendering More Inclusive Yeshiva High Schools. A new initiative was launched during the weekend to help queer Jews find each other for friendship, community and love. It will include social events in cities across the country tied to a new religiously sensitive matchmaking website. The initiative is an exciting collaboration with website developer Joanna Halpern, who invited attendees at the retreat to test the website and provide feedback.

To celebrate queer memory, on Saturday night we screened The Celluloid Closet, a documentary on the 100 years of cinematic representation of gay people. Most exciting, the movie’s producer, Howard Zvi Rosenman, gave us all the inside scoup on the film’s creation. Mr. Rosenman joined us for Shabbat, shared stories of his life from his childhood in Brooklyn, his service as a medic in the six-day war, the unification of Jerusalem and his career in Hollywood making 42 films.

But beyond the shared stories, the music, the learning and fun, people come away with a sense of hope for the future. Discovering that others are struggling to find ways to marry their religious sensibilities with their queer realities is enlivening. It begins with a new sense of community. “It was so beautiful to be able to feel like I belong…I’m a different person for having been there this weekend, and I’m forever changed.” One person shared that attending the retreat carried him from from feeling stuck and resigned to feeling empowered and hopeful. Summing up her experience, one Eshel member shared that the effects of the “retreat will last her lifetime, but added that it was her conviction “its inspiration and encouragement…literally save lives.”

Rabbi Steve Greenberg
Founding Director