Brian Schwartzman: From the recording studios of Reconstructing Judaism, welcome to evolve, groundbreaking Jewish conversations. Reverend Gaffney: In the Western world, which includes Christianity and depictions of biblical characters, everything around you is white. Brian Schwartzman: I'm your host, Brian Schwartzman. We have two special treats for you today. The first is that I'll be joined by my executive producer, my friend, my colleague, Rabbi Jacob Staub, who directs Evolve project and oversees everything we do. Our second treat is we have as a guest, Reverend Dr. Will Gaffney. We'll be discussing her Evolve essay, white washing, biblical characters, and a little bit her follow up essay for Evolve, reading the Bible scriptures while womanist. I'll give more of her bio in a minute, but just know she's an African American Bible scholar and Episcopal priest, who I first heard of when we were members of the same Philadelphia synagogue. As we found out, she's really into sci-fi and Star Wars stuff, and it comes up briefly in the podcast interview. Truthfully, if Rabbi Staub hadn't been there to hold me in check, I might have just veered off and become a Star Wars podcast for better or worse. Instead, we look at the ways in which the history of art, biblical criticism, even popular culture, that's why we veer into Star Wars, have shaped the misperception that major and minor biblical characters were white. One of course, they weren't. They were darker skinned, Afro Asiatic people. Reverend Gaffney talks about what this has meant for people of color, including Jews of color, for white Jews, and why it really is important, especially now to have more accurate mental and actual images of what our major biblical characters look like, what cultures they represented, what assumptions they may have carried with them and we have about them. We also get into Reverend Gaffney's engagement and involvement with the Jewish community culture and religion. After all, it's not every Episcopal priest who becomes a regular at Shabbat services and gives dvar Torah, divrei Torah. So there's a lot to jump into. A few notes, first off a little Wikipedia here. There are references to a couple of thinkers, including David Yum, the Scottish enlightenment philosopher. I've got his treatises on my bookshelf. No, just kidding, I don't. And Martin North, a 20th century German scholar of the Hebrew Bible. Gaffney describes how both of these renowned thinkers brought a white supremacist view to biblical scholarship that impacts our view to this day. Okay, more fun. The Star Wars references, Reverend Gaffney refers to John Boyega who plays the storm trooper turned freedom fighter Finn in the sequel trilogy. He does a great job, even though his character could have had a better character arc. And Moses Ingram, an actress who plays an inquisitor and former Jedi, that hunch Jedi in the Disney Plus series Obi-Wan Kenobi that came out earlier this summer. I promise this will all make sense if you listen. There's also a reference to Jephthah who, unlike Noah or Moses, has not gotten to Hollywood treatment yet, but he is a biblical character from the book of Judges. If you want to look up his story, it can be found in chapters 11 and 12 of a book of Judges. As a reminder, all Evolve essays can be found at Evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. Reading Reverend Gaffney's essays will give you a richer listening experience, but it's not necessary to follow along with the conversation. If you're interested in nuanced discussion about race and Judaism, there are plenty of other in depth essays on the Evolve site. Okay, now I want to officially welcome Rabbi Jacob Staub, PhD to the show. Rabbi Staub is often behind the scenes, but here you are on the microphone. Welcome. Great to have you here. Rabbi Jacob: Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm a great fan when I'm not on, and I guess I'll listen to this episode also, even though I am. Brian Schwartzman: Fantastic. Okay. Now it's time for the official introduction of our guests. The Reverend Will Gaffney, PhD is professor of Hebrew Bible at Bright Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. She's the author of several books, including Women as Midrash, a reintroduction to women of the Torah and the throne, and Daughters of Miriam, women profits in ancient Israel. Her latest book is Women's Lectionary for the whole church and we have a link to purchase in our show notes. So Reverend Gaffney, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you here. Reverend Gaffney: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here, especially with a friend and colleague from years gone by. Good to see you. Rabbi Jacob: Wonderful. Wonderful to see you. Brian Schwartzman: I guess I want to dive right into your essay because it has so many implications for so many things we're thinking about now as a society. I was struck by some of your writing about when you were a little girl, really first becoming conscious of the world and seeing and internalizing white Jesus, depictions of white biblical characters. I'm wondering how that affected you and how you had the strength, the resolve the knowledge to know, at whatever age we're talking about, know something about this is wrong, and I'm going to explore what. So I wanted to learn more about your origin with this as we discussed this topic, Reverend Gaffney: It means that I had two sets of ideas that didn't live together well at the same time. So I was well formed and well cultured in the Western world, which includes Christianity and depictions of biblical characters. Everything around you is white. The classical works of art are white. The music that is deemed classical comes from Europe. So I was nurtured in that as we all are, if we were raised in a Western country or particularly in the United States of America. But at the same time, I was a black child, the child of black parents in the sixties and seventies who had their own radicalizations into black power. So I had a secondary curriculum at home. My very first book was She Wanted to Read about Mary McLeod Bethune. And then my first book I checked out of the library was the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. So I'm reading about all of these folk and getting nurtured in my culture and nurtured to prepare me to encounter difficulty when I walk out of the front door. But then we walk into a church with a white Jesus. At some points in the black power movement, those visualizations were challenged. I remember hearing people talk about black Jesus or white Jesus, and some black Jesus as a symbol of power and authority. Others were like, that's cool, but that's not the real Jesus. So I lived in that world trying to make sense of that, but there came a moment reading scripture. I remember reading this. I know I've heard it, but this was when I read it. I was reading in the Song of Songs where it says that the woman is, in the translation I was reading, dark, but comely, black, but beautiful. Meaning beautiful in spite of being black, because that does not lead towards beauty. I knew that was wrong. I was comfortable in myself to be able to say this part of the Bible is wrong. I didn't say it out loud to a lot of people. I was bothered by it, but I was absolutely convinced that line was wrong. Didn't know all the things that went into it being wrong, but I knew as a black girl, that I was beautiful because of my blackness and not in spite of it. Rabbi Jacob: Beautiful. Brian Schwartzman: There's a lot there to unpack and I'm really grateful I have Rabbi Jacob with me to help me unpack it. Rabbi Jacob: So let me begin by saying, I just love the "whitewashing biblical characters" essay. Before I read it, I kind of knew that the Israelis were not white. I taught that they weren't, but I didn't have any evidence except por boxwoood reference, post biblically. So we were not German, not Ethiopian, something in the middle, but I would say right now, I'm in the middle. I'm not as light as German. So, it wasn't very definitive. I just had to say it. This is part of a white rereading, but I didn't know why I knew it. You make it so simple. Were there any white people in the ancient Afro Asiatic world, as you put it, and you know, duh, the answer is obvious. So I just want to first say, wow, it changes a lot, not just about biblical characters, that was really helpful to me. But second, it is obvious once you hear it, and I just want to ask whether you're a lone voice here, whether lots of people saying this nowadays. Reverend Gaffney: It depends on the circles in which you're discussing. This is also an example of having two sets of realities going on at the same time. Biblical Hebrew, modern Hebrew, but really I'm going to focus on the ancient language. Languages are categorized in families. People may know that French is a romance language bonded up with Latin and some other languages. The scholarly categorization of Hebrew is Afro Asiatic, and there's a list of Afro Asiatic languages that include GEZ, which is the ancient language of the Ethiopian people, not surprisingly Arabic and Aramaic. They're in that family. So scholars have the word, the concept of Afro Asiatic to categorize these languages in the family tree. So, that's a longstanding term. What's newer is some of us using it instead of ancient near Eastern, and the reason for this is this same reason for not using the Middle East, although it's almost impossible to get rid of the Middle East and MENA, the Middle East and North Africa. The reason is middle of the east from where? That original designation is a Europeans perspective. So from Europe, it's Eastwood. So rather than naming a region of the world, it's languages, it's cultures, it's religious literatures from a Eurocentric perspective, literally in terms of the geography rise to the name, we talk about the region. So it's Afro Asiatic because those are the two continental masses on which these people lived and thrived and left religious and cultural legacies. So I do have this happen with my students when I say we're going to be Carmen Miranda, or another cartoon character. Where in the world are we? So tell me in my intro to interpreting the Hebrew Bible in context course, what continents are we working with? Somebody will always say the Middle East. Which of the seven continents is the Middle East? I didn't learn that as a continent. They will struggle, and they'll say Africa and Asia, and then somebody will say Europe. Okay, well, when you get to the New Testament and Paul's writing to the Romans, we can talk about Europe, but that's not where we are. There is always that moment of shock, confusion, acceptance, and, oh yeah. So I also have them look at maps and point it out with their fingers so that they can contextually do it. Brian Schwartzman: I kind of wondered reading that in your essay, if by extending that out, you think it would be helpful to lose terms like the west or the east, because all of these are subjective based on wherever you are in the world. Reverend Gaffney: That would be useful. It would be difficult to talk and communicate with the way the world has been shaped and the ideas that go along with those. But the notion that we're now seeing where occasionally countries, the way they name themselves, rather than the way English speakers name them. Doing the same thing with people's names. So naming is important and it would be useful to hear the way peoples and communities and regions name themselves, because naming is also a colonizing tool. We organize these peoples, we categorize them, we name them, we put them into groups. Rabbi Jacob: So it speaks to the whole imperialistic supersessionist viewpoint of medieval and modern Christianity, that it was and is inconceivable to people, to white men that biblical characters would not have been white. Reverend Gaffney: Right. Rabbi Jacob: It's inconceivable. Christianity, we run into this Jewishly also. Since Christianity is the true Israel, so Israel must look European. Thus European Christians are the true Christians. Of course, it's inconceivable that the biblical narrative, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses could be peopled by non-white people until the film, the Moses film. Reverend Gaffney: The Prince of Egypt. Rabbi Jacob: The Prince of Egypt. Yeah. But I wonder if you can review. I thought you did a great job. You review some of the ways in which people like David Yum and Martin Note just make this scholarly counter factual claim that everybody's white. Reverend Gaffney: Certainly. I have written in the essay for Evolve and in some of my own scholarly writing, pointing out how some of the scholars that have been important to lots of intellectual work were at the same time, deeply entrenched in white supremacy and writing out of that white supremacy into their discourses. So Martin Note is a noted Hebrew, biblical Old Testament scholar whose theories are still engaged by my PhD students because they are important steps in the building of the field. He wrote that essentially ... well he didn't wright essentially. This is a quote that the Egyptians were wrong when they portrayed themselves with brown skin. At this point, I think most people have seen a piece of Egyptian Papyrus with characters, maybe the gods, maybe ordinary people, maybe royals, but they're brown. They were browner 3000, 4,000 or 5,000 years ago. Particularly the Nubians, who are sometimes translated as Ethiopians in the Bible, that they were wrong. Then he went and describe their specifics with dark skin, with thick lips, with broad noses. He uses Negro, I believe, that they made themselves look Negro. Now I went and looked at the date in which he was writing this, and it was right in the middle of the civil rights struggle. So I make an argument that he's doing his academic work, being bothered by these images because he's bothered by the black people in the streets demanding the right to vote. But he actually wrote that these ancient folk were wrong to present themselves looking as though they might have been Negros, because that just simply was not possible in his worldview. Brian Schwartzman: If you're enjoying this interview, please hit the subscribe button and be among the first to know when a new episode appears. If you're a new listener, welcome. Bruchim Habaim. Check out our back catalog for lots of other groundbreaking conversations. And please, please take a minute to give us a five star rating or leave a review. Positive ratings really help other people find out about the show and we want other people to listen. So it works. Thank you. All right. Now, back to our interview with Reverend Dr. Will Gaffney. Rabbi Jacob: One of my favorite lines in your piece is decentering the white male scholarly voice that mascarades as normative and neutral. Reverend Gaffney: Right. Rabbi Jacob: I wonder if you'd just expand on it, and also, maybe if you'd expand on how a womanist reading is. Your other Evolve recent article of the text addresses this, but basically what needs to be decentered? You know what I mean. Reverend Gaffney: So there was a time when all of our education was ... scholars of education called the banking model. You sit in your chair with your pin or now your tablet, and actually we started with tablets. Now we have a different kind of tablet. From clay tablets to digital tablets. That's a book in there somewhere. You wrote down and learned what the voice of authority told you. That's how biblical scholarship and other things have worked. This is what the text means. If you translate this way, you follow these rules, you'll get the true meaning of the text and the intent of the author. The scholarship that acknowledge the writer is a person who has feelings and preferences and prejudices, and how those things shape the work that they do. So feminists would talk about their identity as women or their identity as women and how that gave rise to their questions and how it helped them answer them. But questions of white male scholars and those trained to write as they do, write as though they have no body, no culture that influences their outcome. So womanists, which are black feminists that have a much more intersectional approach to scholarship, looking at the ways in which the oppressions that arise from race, ethnicity, class, gender, immigration status, ability, disability, and more affect black women in our communities. Womanists also talk who we are and how that shapes what we do. So a brief example, right now I'm working the next volume of Electionary, which is loosely a calendar of preaching that puts the readings together and gives reflections on them. As I'm writing, I'm very much aware of Vivaldi. What happened in Buffalo, of the Russo Ukrainian war. So I talk about how I see some texts differently because I have these spectacles of violence before me. So that comes out in the work. Whereas someone else writing from that white male, no culture, no voice perspective might not acknowledge what's happening in the world, how they feel about and how it shapes how they hear texts. Rabbi Jacob: Thank you. I also want to elicit maybe an example from, again, the second article on reading the Bible as a womanist. That wasn't the exact title. I liked your title better. That shows how you read a text and pay attention to the people who are not centered in the text. So Jephthah, whatever you want. Reverend Gaffney: So since you mentioned Jephthah- Brian Schwartzman: Jephthah is from the book of Judges, is that right? Reverend Gaffney: Judges, yes. Some people are familiar with the text about his daughter and some people are not. It is a brutal and horrific text in the Hebrew Bible, in which a young woman, who's not at the age of marriage. She's on the cusp of womanhood is offered as a sacrifice by her father. That has a front story that tells about the life of her father, and I've written on both of them. But in this article, I decided to do the piece on the father because of brevity and also not to do all the gory details that would need to be done to do the daughter's story justice. So this man who makes this vow that's not in keeping with the way you worship the God of Israel in the book of judges, or at any point in the Hebrew Bible, how does a person get to the point where they make that kind of vow and let alone carry it out? For me, it was very much like watching stories of notorious criminals who have done grotesque things in the community. Then when they get to tell their story for their sentencing, the way they were raised or abused or mistreated does not excuse their deeds because perhaps a life was lost or damaged significantly. But it explains how a woman who was battered her entire life struck back and killed her husband. You get a different perspective on the violence when you hear the backstory. So I dug into the background of Jephthah because I wanted to tell the whole story of the daughter of Jephthah, and that meant doing a generational, multi-generational look if possible, but I also wanted the reader to have some empathy for Jephthah as a person, for this void who was treated in this way, who didn't have a good role models, good coping skills, good nurture in raising, and how this broken boy became a broken man who went on then to break his daughter in the most terrible way. Rabbi Jacob: Just to add to that. One of the moving parts of your rendering of that text is the portrayal of his mother as an unwed, poor person who just got me to empathize with Jephthah's mother, which I had never done before. That in itself is an important piece, I think, of the decentering. It's not just about men. Reverend Gaffney: Right. Yeah. So the picture of the women around him, you have the birth mother who is a sex worker from whom he's taken. That's traumatic at any age for a child. He's taken from his birth mother, then he has a stepmother who doesn't want him. At some point, he had a wife because he produced a daughter, but she's not in that story. So is she deceased or just gone, because he may not be worth living with. He may not be much of a husband. Then he has this daughter. So he doesn't seem that he has any normative stable healing relationship with any woman from infancy to adulthood into being a father himself. Rabbi Jacob: Yeah. Okay, Brian, take it. Brian Schwartzman: Oh, I guess from listening to you and from reading your essay, I've been wondering about the stakes in terms of people getting a better, clearer understanding of who the biblical characters were, what their culture was. Especially considering in this country, fewer people are identifying as religious. Where does this fit in with how we relate to one another as human beings? I think I'm curious with how it compares to how our views of the world of race and identity are shaped by pop culture. I sometimes like to joke, but I think it's serious that my sense of good and evil was shaped more by Star Wars than, than the Bible. I grew up at an age when I think TV Guide used to list, or there used to be a list of the number of positive portrayals of black characters on TV in a week because it was so few. So clearly, pop culture is, has warped our sense of the world. So I think I spread that out beyond a question. I apologize, but that's what some of the things your essay brought for me. Reverend Gaffney: So white supremacy is the foundation of our shared country and culture, and it's white supremacy that's active in whitewash and biblical characters and the teaching and preaching of Bible and Christian Jewish context. Also, the whitewashing of the world in pop culture in sci-fi. We may have to [inaudible: do another] podcast because I am absolutely a sci-fi person. So you get in the Star Wars universe fantastic aliens. How is it that they're aliens when they're at home? That's us calling somebody. They're natives, they're not aliens, but we get this fantastic creation of characters, the infamous bar scene and you've got music playing and all these different kind of aliens, but the humans in Star Wars are all white until you get to Lando Calrissian. So even though they're teaching us good cultural and interpersonal values, they're replicating white supremacy as normative to the point that when you get John Boyega cast as a storm trooper, before the clone of what's his name- Brian Schwartzman: Darth. Reverend Gaffney: Before the cloning of Boba Fett, that you get this hostile reaction. You get people trying to tank the film, you get bad reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Now that this young woman whose name is Moses Ingram is playing one of Darth Vader's enforcers in the very latest Star Wars series- Brian Schwartzman: I've been watching that, I admit. Reverend Gaffney: She is also getting terrible hate mail all because she's a black woman taking a role in the storied franchise. So they are really actually the same issue, the inability to see the world, whether our world or the world of the biblical text, or the worlds we imagine in a galaxy far, far away, to see them outside of a white dominant white supremacist paradigm is the same issue. So the space in which I work against white supremacy is Christian interpretation of the scriptures. Not just Christian interpretation, because I write for Jews as well. I give divrei Torah and I speak in synagogues, but to undo that corner of the white supremacist paradigm from the Christian perspective, it's important because a particular type of Christianity, a particular way of reading the Bible has been at the foundation of this country and the way we see and do things. So unraveling that so that we can have a healthier, more nuance understanding of this text. Then if the text becomes the basis for ethical and moral decisions, like are women fully human and fully created in the image of God so that we can make our own ethical and moral and medical decisions, even if someone doesn't agree with them, do we have the full capacity as human beings to make a decision that someone else thinks is unethical or must our agency be controlled by the state because we can't be trusted and we don't have the right to make those decisions. Some of that is religious and some of that is bad exegesis, bad interpretation of religious passages. So that's part of what's at stake for me. It's this part of the foundation of our culture and implications. Brian Schwartzman: While we got another second to your time, if you're being inspired, enlightened, challenged by these groundbreaking conversations on the podcast, on the Evolve website, in the web conversations, you can support us. There's a donate link right in our show notes. Every gift matters. Make a statement about your values and support conversation at a time when dialogue is really challenged across so many sectors of our society, but right here it is happening. All right, now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Rabbi Jacob: So if I may indulge in a personal story that I think is relevant to here. So back in the 1980s, the reconstruction are Pinnacle College participated with many Christian seminaries in a program. God, I don't even remember the name of it. It doesn't matter. Reverend Gaffney: Seminarians interacting. Rabbi Jacob: Yes. Seminarians interacting. Thank you very much. As part of this program rabbinical students would visit Christian seminarians every two or three years, because we were really outnumbered. Every two or three years, Christian seminarians would visit RRC. Part of what they did when you visited another seminary was sit in on classes. In this particular case, this particular year, they came on the week that we were studying Christian antisemitism in medieval Europe, medieval Jewish civilization seminar that I taught. That was what we were up to. So the whole thing got transformed, because I wasn't going to go through all the ways Jews were depicted. I wasn't going to go through the way I would do it with my rabbinical students. But we did talk about it, and what I remember most distinctly is I asked whether they studied this subject matter when they were in seminary. Cause they seemed to be utterly unaware. What was most striking about the answers, there were nine students, nine seminarians in the class, and eight of them didn't know what we were talking about. The only one who did was an African American woman. I don't think she was you, but I don't think you were in that class. Reverend Gaffney: No. Rabbi Jacob: That was very instructive. I learned a lot from that. That, oh, we are not the only people who suffer from Christian supremacy and colonization and discrimination. That this has consequences for African Americans, for Africans, for Asians, but it was so striking. First, it was striking to me that Christian ... and the reason they said they don't study Christian antisemitism is because that's not Christian. It's not Christian to be antisemitic. So it's not part of your training. Another piece of it. What you're teaching here, what you're talking about is a white centric, a European centric, a Christian centric view of things that don't take into account the experiences of other people or give them credit. So I just wanted to share that story, part of the stakes that we're talking about. Reverend Gaffney: Well, thank you for sharing that. I participated in that program in ... it was the nineties, the mid nineties. That's how I met Fred Dobb, who is one of my dearest friends. He's recon rabbi. We maintained our friendship from then till now, so that I'm godmother of both of his children and chanted one of the sheva berachot at his wedding. So I really got an interest and appreciation for Judaism for the inside. But I just appreciated hearing the Torah chanted and hearing the liturgy in Hebrew. The point that you raise about antisemitism and anti antisemitism, not being taught was brought home to me when I moved into the community where I met you. I was teaching at a Lutheran seminary and Lutheran has just a horrible treatise called on the Jews and their lies in which he calls for the burning of Torahs and other sacred books and tearing down synagogues and so what, and which what. So I had many Jewish friends and got connected with the synagogue and became a dues paying member of Dorsha Derek. As you know, for 10 years, I was there and my Jewish friends were asking me, do they teach this about Luther? Do they teach about antisemitism there? So I just poked my nose around and, to my horror, found that they did not. What the Lutherans were telling me was, well, that's over, and we passed a resolution condemning that about Martin Luther. I said, when was that? It was in the eighties. It was very recent. One faculty occasionally taught a course on antisemitism and Luther, but it was a cyclical course. It wasn't a required course. So I began shaping my teaching as anti antisemitic approach and being aware of anti Judaism. So that's why my courses are Hebrew Bible. I am a scholar of Hebrew Bible, not presented as Old Testament. I study with Jews, trained with Jews. So we teach the Hebrew Bible. I teach the Hebrew Bible as an independent body of scripture that has its own merit and worth as a full and complete canon and revelation of God, not as a stepping stone to another text or Testament. When we look at how the New Testament writers use it, I always frame it as they saw in this passage, this, rather than this is predicting that. Sometimes those two things work well together. Sometimes they don't, but it's been very important for me to address antisemitism. As you know I did at the beginning of the paper, the essay on reading scripture as a womanist, because we get the name womanist and the definitions from Alice Walker, who has her own history of antisemitism. So you're right, Jacob, that antisemitism and anti-black bias, xenophobia, the hatred of others anti-Muslim bias, it's all tied together, and it's tied together in white supremacy. Whether the person enacting it is themselves white is irrelevant. We had a group of men arrested for, or we have charges pending for their participation in the January 6th activities. The leader of one of these white supremacists groups is Hispanic, but the ideology is white supremacists. I do want to say something about Christians not owning our stuff. People who enslave people who go on crusades, people who do anti-semitic violence, they're not real Christians because the love of Jesus commands us to love neighbor. If you pull out of the family tree all of the people who do horrific crimes to other people, then you are left with a fictional innocent Christianity. The reality is people who identify themselves as Christians, who participated in the life of the church, who receive the sacraments, who had their children baptized, heck, who were pastors and priests themselves, committed atrocities in the name of Christ. That is part of the history of Christianity. We can reject those actions, but we do not have the right to pretend that there's something about the way in which Christianity has developed and been passed on that has not only made space for that kind of behavior, but in some ways would seem to have called for it. You're right, Jacob, that the Christians who sometimes wrestle with this the most and out loud and in public are Christians who have markers of minoritization, native Christians, black Christians, queer Christians, some of whom are all of those things at once. Brian Schwartzman: So at the same time, I think it's no secret at this point that many Jewish communities are still struggling with racism and even owning up to the idea that Jews who've suffered so much can at the same time be racist or that you can have people of color and Jews are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What should Jews be doing? What should Jewish communities be doing in wrestling with these texts in gaining a fuller understanding and perhaps not just going around thinking of our forefathers and foreign mothers as white Europeans when they clearly weren't? Reverend Gaffney: One, I think it's important that when the community is being represented in speech, as you just did, what should Jews do? I think what you are really asking is what should white passing Jews do. Because Jews of color are doing this work. I know some of them, some of the organizations. Brian Schwartzman: Great point, yes thank you. Reverend Gaffney: And begging white passing Jews to join and partner with the work. So one, acknowledge that when you say Jews, you have a set of assumptions that you now know are not correct. So part of it is training yourself in your speech, in your writing, in your publication, to talk about what it means to be so deeply in cultured, that the presumption of Jew is this. A small piece is what happens when someone you don't think is Jewish or doesn't look Jewish, is what it really is, shows up on your doorstep? I'm not Jewish, but I participate in the life of Judaism, but I get what black Jews get when I go someplace, even when I'm invited, because my last name Gaffney is a Jewish name. That's a whole nother story. My name Will, many people think I'm a man and, I'm not naming names, but a particular rabbi I know was insistent that I was a male scholar and perhaps thinking a Jewish scholar, and I didn't get the same welcome when he saw that Will and Gaffney went with black and woman. He knew I was a Christian and professor of Hebrew Bible as a seminary. I have gone into synagogues. It's almost a cultural joke. You speak so well. Nobody tells white people, you speak so well, unless you're perhaps recovering from a speech impediment. So having people say, how did you learn to read Hebrew. The same way I learned to read every other language. That surprise that you're competent in something. I won't even tell you the number of people who, when they ask me, what do you do? And I say, I'm a professor of Hebrew Bible. They will ask me, then, do you read Hebrew? I really want to ask them, do you read the literature of your field? Are you competent in your job? What kind of question is that? So that all comes out of the assumption of what a Jew or a Hebrew scholar is or should look like. Rabbi Jacob: So I didn't want this conversation to end without me asking you, you started to talk about what it's like as an Episcopal clergy person to participate as fully as you have. I know about your participation in reconstructionist minyan Dorshei Derech in the Germantown Jewish center that I belong to, where I heard a number of just dazzling divrei Torah that you offered, and you were part of the conversation. You were very much an active member, but what the experience is like, and what can the rest of us Jews, I guess ... what can Jews learn about the advantages and the opportunities involved in really getting in deep and in being part or just really familiar with other religious traditions ritual. Reverend Gaffney: I have to acknowledge that my participation and my response are both shaped by my Christian privilege. So I am coming from a dominant tradition into a minoritized tradition. So while we share the Hebrew Bible unequally and uneasily, my tradition does some things with the Hebrew Bible that are not appropriate to your tradition. So there is sort of hierarchy when I come to service rather than when you come to service with me. So I want to acknowledge that. What I experienced personally is completely new set of windows on the word and world of the text and its interpretation. I had that experience with seminarians interacting. I also really fell in love with rabbinic literature when I was doing my PhD, and I spent a lot of time with it and it shaped my first two monographs. So you mentioned the boxwood text in the Mishnah, and I've actually written on that. That's the one piece I had published in Rabbinics and I'm going to send you that if I remember. So for me, what I love particularly about the reconstructing movement is the way people interpret the text, discuss it, argue with it and read it in a world in which it's a source for helping to shape them as moral and ethical beings. Now, I bring a particular set of religious beliefs about God, even beyond my specific beliefs as a Christian. One of the things I appreciated about the community is that people have different ways of thinking about the biblical text and the deity it represents, and whether or not there is a deity and whether or not there's a deity active in the world, and there's space for all of those things to be in conversation. Honestly, that's the thing about the rabbis that I love, that you'll get opposing responses on a question, but unlike Christians, they don't cut each other off and form an entirely new community and not speak to each other, or go to war and slaughter each other. So for me, I was just getting a secondary and tertiary education in a text, and I love the liturgy. I love the language, but I appreciated people who were really wrestling with a complex text in a complex world, in complex and nuanced ways and came a model. Those divrei Torah that you heard were bundled and enlarged in my book, Womanist Midrash, a reintroduction to the women of the Torah and of the throne. I've just finished the second volume on the early prophets and sent that off, bit that's part of what I got, and I miss it since I'm out here and there's no recon anywhere near me. Rabbi Jacob: And we miss you. So I just really want to thank you for being on this podcast and for writing the two essays for Evolve, groundbreaking Jewish conversations, which we will have the links to in the show notes. Every one of your answers have been really illuminating, and I always learn very valuable things from you. Thank you. Brian Schwartzman: I just also wanted to say thank you. Thanks for making me think again about, so much is communicated in questions and so much subtlety and assumptions. So, thank you for holding a mirror up and giving me an opportunity to learn. Reverend Gaffney: Appreciate you all. It's been privilege. Brian Schwartzman: Thanks so much to listening to our interview with Reverend Dr. Will Gaffney. Thanks Rabbi Jacob Staub for being in on this interview. Your voice in questions were invaluable as always. Now I'm talking to you, the listener. What did you think of today's episode? I want to hear from you. Evolve is about conversations and you're a part of that. Send me your questions, comments, feedback, criticism, if you have to, whatever you got. You can reach me at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. We'll be back next month with a new episode. Evolve, Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song Ilu Finu is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. The show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Brian Schwartzman, wishing you a [inaudible 00:54:10] happy holidays. May it be a good year, a sweet year, a sweet, happy new year. Let us have much to look forward to and let us build a better world this year.