Your God Hates Sluts

A poem several millennia in the making

Image Description:

“Evening” by Adriaen Collaert after Maarten de Vos, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art. Image description: “This is a drawing of a landscape scene. The image features a large, seated, nude figure on clouds in the sky with a crescent moon. Below her is a busy landscape with buildings, including a church-like structure with a clock tower, people walking towards it, small houses, a farm with livestock and people working or resting, and trees in the background. The drawing is rich in intricate lines and shading, typical of a detailed etching, capturing architectural elements and scenes of daily activity. The foreground and background seamlessly blend to create a composition of human interaction with nature and the divine.”

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Long live

Vashti

Strong and staunch and cross and

Done so wrong and

I wanted to be Esther

Trojan horsing my way into tolerance

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I feared being

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Greedy like Eve

First of a species

Goaded into what she chose

but then

Groped and suddenly

The viper coiled her throat

Maybe Eve was

Just needy

Why was that

A breach with God

Is it a lesson in sin or

A warning to the Valjeans

Destined for dirty cells

To curse their own empty stomachs

Rather than the glutton in the sky

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Okay well then the four mothers and three fathers but the mothers only made

The fathers that talked to God

So you mean to tell me that your God

Only speaks to me between my legs?

Am I merely a head attached to a womb?

God made all this Eden to savor and

The whole time I was merely an incubator?

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No, no

Let’s try again

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Women can read from the bimah now and

That’s why we place the orange on the Seder plate and

Wait a minute, you’re telling me it took how many thousands of years for you to let a woman tell you what to do?

And the orange is apocryphal, actually

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Or rather, the story I was told about it which

Had usurped the real story

Which I learned from a convert:

Susannah Heschel, a Professor of Jewish studies, got the idea from a story told

In a Haggadah made by a group of lesbians

During the 80s

Wherein a female rabbi, a Hasidic rebbe,

Surrounded by her disciples at a Passover table, was asked

“Rebbe, why is there a crust of bread on the Seder plate?

And she told them a story of a 15-year-old girl who had asked a rabbi

None of the four questions but

“Rabbi, what room is there for a lesbian in Judaism?”

And he leapt up, grabbed her by the shoulders

Started shaking and went red in the face and said

There’s as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the Seder plate

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Y’know, because we give up the leavened bread to remember what we left behind and learned

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Taught over and over to our people over millennia

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This man panicked, the rabbi who had studied the story of

Moses leading the people to the promised land and then

Being locked out himself

À la Eve

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So then—sorry, the Jews never were a terse people—Susannah Heschel took that story within a story and made her own story wherein she would bring something dissonant to the dinner table, but what?

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Thought of ways to stand in solidarity…with a fruit

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She thought, well, apples are already set in their symbolism so

Why not oranges?

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Sometimes I myself think yes, the thing that grows in Florida

Where all the oldest Jews migrated from around New York having been diaspora-ed there

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So long from the Palestinian olives

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Yet men turned to settlers stake this colonial claim

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Not just the men, but also those many mothers who told the wrong story about the oranges

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Which Heschel tried out at a Seder and peeled the orange

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Passed it around so everyone had a segment and said

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You notice how every time you peel an orange, there’s never a segment missing?

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It never happens

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And that’s what it means to be in community

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She told them to eat their segment and spit out the seeds

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Symbolically repudiating homophobia

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And re-asserting their solidarity with gay men during the AIDS crisis

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In this way,

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Their crisis too

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I also like the image of these

Wombs with heads

to spit out seeds

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Being Jewish can be a mindfuck in this way:

We can preserve the story of Passover for all this time but

a warped version of a story can outpace its teller in just a few years

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We can hear never again all our lives and

Be haunted by those horrors and

Still have this misaligned Zionism shoved down our throats

Clinging to these myths and what we’re told

About Palestinians just as

Everyone was told crazy things about the Jews

When my great great grandmother immigrated, her paperwork said that

She was born in Russia but

That her nationality was Jewish

So now we say that Palestinians also cannot even claim the place of their own birth??

Suddenly we had to get in on the game of

Genocide in the name of an invading religion?

FOMO for the Crusades??

It’s not a joke, I know, but it’s ridiculous

A vigil for Sarai yet

Hate for Hagar’s children

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But I choose which Seder to sit at

Which Haggadah to have in my home

I was born and will die a Jew but

Lock me out of the promised land because

of those texts and the Rabbis that read them and chose what to believe about the chosen ones and as a representative for my people you will

Never Again

stop me from telling the right story

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I also urge those who can to donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, or a similarly involved charity, or any direct action/mutual aid organizations supporting Palestinians. Thank you for reading <3