Join Ruach and Nehirim for a fascinating, fabulous, and fun evening of Jewish learning, spirituality… and food. We’ll begin at 6:30 with a short Havdalah service, marking the end of the Shabbat and ringing in a new week. Then we’ll enjoy a festive “Melaveh Malkah” Saturday evening dinner with delicious catered food.

From 7:30 to 8:30, we’ll do an hour of interactive “speed-learning” on Jewish queer texts, done in paired “chevruta” style. Finally, if you haven’t had enough, some of us will join Next@19th’s “CHAIku” program at 9pm, featuring Jay’s ecstatic and energetic queer Jewish poetry and music. Bring your own 17-syllable celebrations of queer Jewish experience to share.

All this plus a diverse community of LGBT Jews, families, friends, and allies (straight allies and non-Jewish partners welcome too!).

Cost is $25 (which covers the costs of the dinner) or $18 no-questions-asked discounted rate. No one turned away for lack of funds. RSVP by February 10. CHAIku is free.

Religious people should support equality for gays and lesbians not despite religion — but because of it.

So writes Jay Michaelson in his new bestselling book God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, which Publisher’s Weekly called “a salvo in the case for equality” and which was recently #1 in gay/lesbian nonfiction on Amazon.com.

Contrary to the myth that the Bible prohibits homosexuality (the myth of “God versus gay”), Michaelson shows how the handful of Biblical verses sometimes used against LGBT people are ambiguous, and subject to interpretation. The real question, he says, is not “what about Leviticus?” but what values cause us to choose one interpretation or another, and how we as human beings grow when we encounter other people.

In this text-based and no-holds-barred discussion, Michaelson discusses his own personal journey of acceptance and affirmation, and how the overwhelming majority of our religious values support inclusion of LGBT people. Plenty of time will be allowed for questions and conversation.

“Kabbalah” as mass-media and New Age phenomenon has become a resource for spiritual seekers, entrepreneurs, and many feminists and queers constructing postmodern theologies on the basis of non-normative Western antecedents. Yet theosophical Kabbalah is relentlessly sexist, heteronormative, and homophobic. This paper presents a queer reading of three theosophical Kabbalistic themes on the relationship of masculine and feminine, suggesting that the Kabbalistic use of these categories can productively undermine the very heteronormativity it reinscribes.

In this text-based and no-holds-barred discussion, scholar and activist Jay Michaelson, author of the new bestselling book God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, discusses his own personal journey of acceptance and affirmation, and how the overwhelming majority of our religious values support inclusion of LGBT people. Plenty of time will be allowed for questions and conversation.