Jeremy Sher, HDS MDiv Alum, Class of 2016

“I have a modest proposal to try a different strategy of radical inclusion and making sure everybody knows that they’re welcome at our table, regardless of who they are and regardless of their identity.”

Collaboration

Let’s learn to be together in a community of pluralism and shared struggle to transform the world into something better. One of my colleagues reminded me of the writings of Starhawk, where she talks about a good reality and a bad reality and a very thin sort of boundary between them. In Hebrew it’s called a krom. I forget what it’s called in English, but it’s like the skin on top of hot chocolate. It’s a very thin little thing, and we can pull each other through to a world that’s looked at in a good light and a world that’s looked at in a bad light. And in the good reality we’re friends and we collaborate, and in the bad reality, we’re in a struggle for whose God is the real one. The dividing line between the two realities is thin. It’s my HDS colleague Leanne Hildebrand who brought that to my attention recently, and it’s just something I think about—the line between the good reality and the bad reality, the line between love and hate. It’s very, very thin. So we need to be aware of it and make sure we’re together and finding instances where maybe we’ve spent some time in the bad reality and so we try to pull ourselves back through.

Mental Illness

I’m a person who’s living with bipolar disorder type II. It’s not a very big deal once you go to treatments—at least, it hasn’t been for me. In some ways I’ve been blessed. Many people go through a hospitalization experience, but that didn’t happen to me. Or I should say: it hasn’t happened to me yet. It could, but generally speaking, this is a common illness, and I was lucky with my first psychiatrist, Nassir Ghaemi at Tufts.

He is a scholar of psychiatry, so he’s really a teacher. He wrote a book called A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, a fantastic book because it’s a book that helps us get away from the stigma that too often surrounds mental illness. You think of mental illness and you have these kind of negative stereotypes. Well, you know who suffered from bipolar disorder? People like Abraham Lincoln. Ghaemi goes through people in history who probably, from the evidence we have, suffered from the same disorder.

One of Ghaemi’s theses was that, in some ways, mental illness creates the conditions for a good leader. That depression can give us empathy. We feel like we’ve been through something difficult, or we’re still going through something difficult. The manic or hypo-manic phases, for a lot of people and for myself, result in an immense amount of productive work, which I have to be very cautionary with. It’s not as good as it sounds. One of the first things Dr. Ghaemi said to me was, “I’m not going to deny that you have had all-nighters where you’ve created an entire website for a business or, you know, written an immense amount,” because those things had happened in my life. And he said, “Look, it’s true. But I bet if you look in the cold light of day at 90 percent of those experiences, for every one of those experiences where you really accomplished a super-human amount of work in one night, you probably had ten where you started 50 projects and didn’t really accomplish anything.” It was like the light of day had dawned on me and I thought, “that is so right.”

Dr. Ghaemi told me that for a lot of patients, we start treatment in our thirties. We probably should have started it much earlier. It wasn’t atypical for people to feel like, “Maybe I’ll just put off treatment because the highs seem pretty good.” And I think he was right; they seemed better than they were. But as we get older, the lows get lower and longer and the highs are not as much, and as a result, it’s common for people to seek treatment in their thirties. And when they do, they say, “I probably would have accomplished more in my twenties if I had gone to treatment 10 years ago.” So it’s a common trajectory, and the thing I want young adults to know is that it’s not anything to be embarrassed about. It’s something that affects an immense percentage of adults. It gets a lot better after that first diagnosis. I want people who need treatment or who even think they might need treatment to go and get an evaluation and, if indicated, to start treatment, because you’re going to be more productive, more stable, and probably happier. I probably would have been.

Ordination

In a way, I’m on the most traditional path to the rabbinate that there is, by a panel of three rabbis, which makes up what’s known as a rabbinical court or battei din. They’re going to confer upon me the title of rabbi. That’s how rabbis have been ordained from time immemorial and in Orthodox Judaism, and it’s not uncommon for rabbis to be ordained that way today. My ordaining rabbis are my long-time mentor Rabbi Natan Margalit, who in addition to being the great rabbi and professor is really a scholar in his own right with a PhD from Berkeley on the structure of Mishnah; Rabbi Debra Kolodny from Portland, Oregon, who’s been a great leader in the LGBTQ Jewish scene and has also been a pioneer in the Jewish Renewal Movement and just a wonderful person and great example; and Rabbi Mira Raz, a Reform rabbi from Tel Aviv, coming all the way to Boston from Israel to participate in my ordination. She is the Reform rabbi in Jaffa, in Southern Tel Aviv Jaffa.

Mira is part of the Reform Movement. She grew up in Tel Aviv and she’s a leader in Reform Judaism in Israel, which is difficult and, I would say, disadvantaged within Israel. There’s a real Orthodox hegemony and the Orthodox don’t really mind the secular sort of scene because it doesn’t challenge them, but Reform Judaism challenges them. So, the idea that Mira is a woman and the idea that she’s fabulous and the idea that we have a congregation that defines itself by progressive values rather than Orthodox Jewish values really challenges the religious power structure in Israel. It’s a great committee.

At this point, I’ve come a pretty long way upstream. I’m going to be the first rabbi ever to be ordained on the Harvard campus. It’s not unusual for people to go to HDS prior to rabbinical school, but the idea of using HDS kind of as the anchoring academic curriculum of a rabbinical study program under the advising of a rabbinic mentor is pretty unusual, and the idea of an ordination ceremony happening here is—as far as anybody seems to know— unprecedented. And I wanted to bring my worlds together and bring rabbis here to Harvard, and I can’t think what would be more appropriate for my ordination.

Acceptance in Religious Communities

I took this path to stand up for people in interfaith families who have been excluded and who feel excluded by the Jewish community. And I took this path primarily because I don’t believe that it’s a rabbi’s job to tell anybody who to date. I just don’t think that’s the right job for rabbis. I think we have an unhealthy focus on organized religion in general, and I think those of us who are progressive about religion have rightly rejected most of that and take Reform Judaism as a great pioneer on LGBTQ acceptance.

Organizations like interfaithfamily.com have done a lot of research on interfaith relationships and I think we see more in practice that a lot of people are dating interfaith, and that doesn’t mean they have to leave the Jewish people. We don’t have to assume that. The thing that I find ironic is that we then kind of scratch our heads and say, “Where did everybody go? Why aren’t they in the pews?” Well, we kicked them out last week—and that’s why I say we must stop kicking people out of our communities. We just need to stop. It’s time to step back and ask whether a different approach, one of acceptance, would work. I think after half a century of abject failure, it’s time to give this a try.

I don’t think we could possibly fail worse than we’re already failing in the Jewish community. This is my response to people who are concerned about Jewish continuity: Nobody’s more concerned about Jewish continuity than I, and I’m concerned enough that I don’t confuse a failed tactic with a strategic goal of preserving the continuity of the Jewish people, and I’m willing to try different ideas. I’m willing to say that the past 50 years have failed and that the assumptions, that the judgmental assumptions and the assumptions that intermarriage is necessarily bad for the Jewish people have not produced good results, and I have a modest proposal to try a different strategy of radical inclusion and making sure everybody knows that they’re welcome at our table, regardless of who they are and regardless of their identity.