02/07/2024
NOW IS NOT THE TIME
The Rabbi Has A Secret
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A Sylvia Allen Story
Shulie Berman, the mother of one of my daughter’s classmates, convinced me to bring my kids to services at Beit Yisroel, a large reform congregation in San Francisco. I was just doing it for the kids, but it was there that I converted, seduced by the thin, cold, starlit melody of Jewish scripture chanted in Hebrew.
Rabbi Martin Jakoby was my guide through the conversion process. He was in his 50s, heavy-set though not fat, with graying curly hair and a thick beard. He usually wore a tweed suit, black-rimmed glasses, and a yarmulke. He had come to Beit Yisroel from another state at about the same time I started there.
Jakoby was generous with his time for a busy rabbi, maybe because he could see I was interested—not some young bride wanting a conversion to satisfy someone else’s parents, which was probably the usual situation. I spent some hours in the rabbi’s office, which smelled like a California hillside, that dry-grass fragrance of old books and parchment.
I wanted to understand the language of the biblical texts we read in services. The rabbi and I spent time breaking down the Hebrew, the possible meanings of each word. We compared the way passages and phrases had been translated and mistranslated through Greek, Latin, and King James English, to arrive at our own conclusions about what the original authors meant. It was exhilarating.
Rabbi Jakoby’s warm, deep voice is what I remember most from the mikvah—the ritual bath meant to wash away the past, leaving only the future, like a newborn child. The rabbi sat out of sight, outside the doorway of the dim stone room, and his voice chanting Hebrew floated in to me where I sank naked under the water. The late-afternoon light shimmered above me until the Russian attendant called “ko-SHER!”
I suppose what the rabbi and I had was a friendship, if a congregant can be friends with an over-scheduled, well loved rabbi of a large congregation.
Over the years we had many conversations in that oak-paneled office. Each time, I came away excited by the way the Hebrew prophets—who were men, most of them men of privilege, from a time and place so far away it was almost unimaginable—sometimes spoke in ways that my very body recognized as true, about our relationship with the universe, about what is more vast than I can perceive, and holy.
I learned to read Bible passages for services, which meant to sing them, chant them, in Hebrew, with those ancient, heartbreaking melodies, and I stood up in front of the congregation and I felt the power of every word I sang.
When I eventually left my marriage to the programmer, Rabbi Jakoby must have known—that kind of news gets around. He didn’t mention it, so neither did I. In those days I sometimes wore t-shirts that said “Nobody knows I’m a le***an,” or “Don’t die wondering” in rainbow letters, that kind of thing. We didn’t talk about that either, except that one day he asked me if I had noticed that the Bible does not say anything about le****ns. Anything at all.
At some point I realized that, among thousands of congregants, some of them my friends, I didn’t know one single other q***r person at Beit Yisroel. It was a lonely feeling.
Synagogues everywhere, like many Christian denominations, were finding their membership aging and dwindling. To survive into another generation they needed younger members, but young people just weren’t showing up. Beit Yisroel’s board of directors had hit upon the idea of forming chavurot—what you might call friendship groups, affinity groups, small intentional communities within the congregation—as a way to attract and encourage younger members.
We had a chavurah for families with small children, two for families with older children, one for recent emigres—that kind of thing. It occurred to me one day that we needed a q***r chavurah.
I went to Rabbi Jakoby and told him. An LGBT synagogue had opened in the city, but there was room for multiple options for q***r Jews. If they knew we had a chavurah for them, they might come to services at Beit Yisroel. And, I said, we must already have many gay members who just aren’t visible. Starting a chavurah might prevent their leaving Beit Yisroel for a more welcoming place, encourage them to be more involved.
I was excited. I thought it was obvious. Of course we’d do this.
Rabbi Jakoby gave me one unhappy glance and then looked down at his hands folded on the desk. “Now is not the time for this,” he said. I stared at him, shocked. “I understand,” he said. “It’s a good idea, you’re right. And I’m sure it will happen. Maybe a little later.” He nodded, and met my eyes again. The rims of his glasses caught the lamplight. "A little later. But I’m not going to take this back to the clergy, not now. It just isn’t a good time.”
He refused to explain why, just repeated that it wasn’t the right time for him to propose this. I left his office disappointed in my rabbi and feeling alienated from the shul where I had felt at home. I also thought of the many moments in history when activists were told to wait, that now is not the time.
I didn’t go back to Rabbi Jakoby’s office. I didn’t decide not to, I just never went. I could have gone to the other leadership to fight, but I didn’t do that either. I had a lot going on in my life already. For a long time I just wondered, sad and hurt, why my rabbi and my shul wouldn’t step up for us, when it was so obviously the right thing for everybody.
Rabbi Jakoby moved away, to another shul in another state, and then I moved away too and stopped attending services, and that was that.
Within the next couple of years, though, two things happened. Beit Yisroel hired an out, q***r rabbi, who drew hundreds of new young members. And my friend Shulie, who made me promise not to say where I’d heard it, told me something about Rabbi Jakoby: He had a secret. One that was shocking, in the 1990s. One that certainly would have shocked the elderly, conservative majority of our congregation—who were his employers.
At first I was even more disappointed in him. It wasn’t Beit Yisroel that had turned its back on me, it was the rabbi alone, choosing career security over the welfare of the shul and of my people. Later, though, I realized it wasn’t that simple.
Rabbi Jakoby’s secret was that his daughter, Celeste, a quiet young teenager when we met her, had been known to the rabbi’s previous congregation as his son, Noah.
I imagine you can see how my plan could have threatened her fragile new life. The rabbi wasn’t protecting his career. He was protecting his child. I might have done the same.
