As faith leaders here in Greenwich, we want write about why Pride matters — not only to the LGBTQIA+ community, but to all of us. At its heart, Pride is a celebration of human dignity, courage, and love: love that refuses to be hidden, diminished, or shamed; love that reveals something holy about the breadth and beauty of God’s creation.
In this week’s Torah portion, Be’ha’alotecha, Moses’ brother and sister, Miriam and Aaron, famously speak against their brother “because of the Cushite woman whom he had married.”
This moment is notable for several reasons. It is the first recorded instance of gossip in the Torah. It is also a critique of an interfaith marriage, since Tzipporah is not an Israelite. But perhaps most importantly, it reminds us how quickly religious communities can turn another person’s love into an object of suspicion, commentary, or control. Again and again, communities have taken someone else’s love and made it subject to public judgment.
This is the dark side of religious life: judgment, self-righteousness, intolerance, cruelty, policing, and social control.
But it is not the whole story.
Not long before this incident, in the opening lines of Be’ha’alotecha, we read about Aaron lighting the lamps of the menorah in the Tabernacle at the center of the camp. But Aaron does not simply light the lamps. The Hebrew verb is multivalent: he lifts them up. He raises them up. He brings light forward so that it can be seen.
In other words, the same tradition that knows how easily communities can shame and police also gives us a different model: lift people up. Bring them into the light. Let God, and the community, see them fully.
Last week, Christian churches celebrated Pentecost, known informally as “the birthday of the Church.” At its heart, Pentecost is about the miracle of understanding, when people of many cultures suddenly heard themselves addressed by Jesus’ disciples in their own particular languages. It is the vision of a new world with welcome and unity at its center.
But Pentecost is also a story of courage. The disciples, who had been hiding in an upper room in the face of danger and oppression, step out into public. They leave the place of fear and begin to live out loud.
Keeping these stories from our two traditions in mind, we, as Jewish and Christian clergy, celebrate the spirit of Pride with the LGBTQIA+ community here in Greenwich.
We do so with joy. And we do so with grief.
We grieve that faith communities have so often failed our queer siblings — through outright hostility and exclusion, and through the quieter failure to embrace them wholly, with genuine welcome and delight.
And we affirm that there is a more faithful response.
That response is to embrace the light and resist the darkness. It is to work for justice, insist on love, and celebrate the courage of people stepping out of closets and into the fullness of their own sacred selves.
Our faith traditions both remind us, over and over again, of our responsibility to lift each other up. To love each other without judgment. And each June, Pride gives us an occasion to celebrate the beautiful tapestry of family structures, gender expressions, identities, and communities that love makes possible.
God bless Pride.
Join us and so many others in the community on Saturday, June 6 at 4 p.m. at Greenwich Town Hall to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Greenwich Pride.
By Rabbi Jordie Gerson, Greenwich Reform Synagogue & Rev. Dr. Maxwell Grant, Second Congregational Church
