"Please stand" instead of "stand": the Conservative movement makes adjustments to non-binary Jews | Israel today

The Conservative community continues to "adapt" the language of Jewish law to a multi-gendered language, and now Reform rabbis have begun to change the language of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony and adapt it to non-binary Jews.

Five years ago, Rabbi Guy Austrian instituted a small but significant change in the synagogue he heads: he decided to adopt the expressions used by his non-binary community to call on its members to ascend to the Torah.

It is a language that has developed informally over time in a process that Austrian calls 'a bit awkward', due to the need to adapt the language while moving for members of a community whose gender did not match that of the Hebrew prayer language.

This small change has made it possible to include non-binary people or those who do not identify as a man or a woman, Austrian said.

From now on, instead of calling "stand / stand" to invite the worshipers to ascend to the Torah, it will be possible to say simply: "Please stand" and instead of describing "son / daughter" in reference to the ascending parents' Torah, it will be possible to say "home" or "home."

"It respects the person called to ascend to the Torah and to the community," he said in an interview.

Austrian, rabbi of the Fort Trion Jewish Center in Upper Manhattan, is one of three authors of a religious opinion approved last week by the Conservative Movement's Laws Committee that officially approves a gender-neutral language in a call to aliyah.

The wording of the prayer words was reformulated by part of the Conservative movement, which represents about a quarter of adult American Jews and is considered the second largest in the United States. Reflects a marked change in a time when people who are not gender-identified, a-binary or transgender, are facing widespread criticism in the United States, especially from Republican lawmakers, who have made 2022 a record year for legislation against the LGBT community across the country.

In recent years, there has been a great deal of activity in the Jewish world of thinkers and clerics trying to reshape the role of gender in the religious experience.

Gender-neutral terms, such as "mitzvah" instead of bar or bat mitzvah, have become common in some communities.

The Trans Halacha project, which creates Jewish legal practices, customs and resources for the Jewish trans community, launched last year a Jewish learning group serving queer Jews.

At the same time, activists in the United States and Israel are working to create a broader non-gendered version of the entire Hebrew language, a language in which, in contrast to English, nouns, adjectives and even inflection of verbs bear masculine and feminine forms.

One of them, Lior Gross, devised a way for non-binary people to speak Hebrew, in part because they had difficulty accepting the idea that they would be called Torah in the old style that traditionally uses gender terms.

"While both biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew present grammatical gender binaries, it does not tell us anything about the genders that may exist among Hebrew speakers," said Raklan, one of the proponents of the new wording.

"Even beyond the historical precedent, the recognition of the existence of non-binary Jews and the creation of ways to receive us for aliyah to the Torah seem to me an excellent example of world correction."

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