DECIDEDLY UNORTHODOX
A small Jewish congregation has chosen a rabbi who is both female and gay, writes DRAKE FENTON.
Elizabeth Bolton is gay, a mother, a rabbi, and she’s looking to create the Judaism
of the next millennium.
Sitting in a packed coffee shop on Richmond Road, Elizabeth Bolton blends into the crowd. There are grey streaks in the 56-year-old’s dark hair, and she’s wearing loosefitting beige pants and a black Tshirt with neon blue lettering that says, “Wear it ’n wear it right.”
A neon blue condom is etched onto the back of the shirt. It’s a keepsake from a trip to Africa where she helped promote safe-sex practices.
Sitting there, slowly sipping her coffee, she doesn’t look like a rabbi, let alone the first openly gay and first female congregational rabbi in Ottawa.
“It wasn’t clear when I started rabbinical school that I would ever get a job as a congregational rabbi,” the Montreal native and mother of two says. “I did have employment challenges as someone who was out. But it didn’t deter me.”
But after a decade of working as an apprentice, she got a job as a rabbi in Baltimore, where she’s been for the past 14 years.
She remembers a time when she was working at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital and people gave her quizzical looks when she roamed the halls in her rabbinical attire.
“A lot of staff would ask, ‘Are you a rabbi? I didn’t know women could be rabbis?’” she says. “The simple fact that I can bring that presence to the broader community of Ottawa is really exciting to me.”
And she’ll be doing that at Or HaNeshama, the 75-household reconstructionist congregation in west Ottawa that recently hired her.
“I don’t think we set about to prove a point,” says Mark Dermer, who was part of the congregation’s hiring committee. “We are proud of the fact that we are completely gender egalitarian and we have no issues in respect to gender orientation.
“We would have to be to hire a gay woman.”
While accepted with open arms by Or HaNeshama, it remains to be seen how the appointment of a gay female rabbi will mesh with the city’s orthodox community.
Young Israel of Ottawa’s Rabbi Ari Galandauer was the only orthodox rabbi who agreed to an interview request by the Citizen.
“Our families and worshippers are attracted particularly by a Judaism that is true to the traditions that have defined Judaism for more than 3,000 years,” he wrote in an email.
In his message, Galandauer did not address Bolton’s sexuality or gender, but did say the Jewish communities of Ottawa all “enjoy warm and cordial relations with each other.”
“The orthodox communities are Jews like we are,” says Dermer. “They don’t accept that a woman can be a rabbi and they have varied opinions on sexual orientation. I think they will look on it as perhaps riding a wave of what is a contemporary phenomenon.
“The orthodox thinking in Judaism is a very enduring but fixed thought. I think they probably think it (Bolton’s appointment) is kind of a fad.”
But Bolton says she isn’t concerned with how she’s received by orthodox Jews and doesn’t expect any controversy.
“Will there be moments where there will be contention?” she asks. “If there are, and if they involve a questioning of, ‘Am I a rabbi?’ or, ‘Am I a rabbi with legitimacy?’ then that really relates to broader questions of how we read the Torah.
“That’s not going to be resolved or altered because I am woman or I am out.”
In Baltimore, she says she was treated with tremendous respect by her rabbinical colleagues.
According to Dermer, that respect comes in part from her strong leadership and the variety of skills she brings to the table. Bolton is a former professional opera singer and worked as a cantor in Baltimore, lending her voice to the Jewish observances that have a musical component.
“We never imagined that we would attract someone of her experience and calibre,” he says. “Many congregations have a cantor to do the musical part and a rabbi to perform the other parts, so she’s like two for the price of one.”
Bolton has only been in Ottawa for a few weeks and says she plans to reach out to the city’s other congregations to work on broader social issues shared by the community at large. But she doesn’t plan on shying away from her progressive side, which includes making interfaith connections and performing interfaith marriages — in Ottawa, Temple Israel is the only other congregation that performs interfaith marriages.
“The paradigm of how to be a faith community is shifting,” she says. “What will Judaism look like for the millennium and for our children and their offspring? That’s what I’m here to join in on and work on.”