412 - Judaism and Polyamory (with Rabbi Nikki DeBlosi)
This week we're joined by Rabbi Nikki DeBlosi, PhD. She is a queer, polyamorous, entrepreneurial rabbi who brings expertise in queer theory and belonging to Jewish teaching and ritual. She holds a BA in Women’s and Gender Studies from Harvard University, an MA and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, and an MA in Hebrew Language and Letters and rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion. She’s an avid reader (especially of steamy romance), a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and an occasional choral singer.
Rabbi Nikki is a proponent of queer belonging, sex positivity, creative ritual, and inclusive Judaism. Throughout this episode, she talks about the following topics:
Her article in The Reform Jewish Quarterly in Fall 2022, “The Family Issue.”
An informal survey she ran of 65 polyamorous Jewish folks and the project she has undertaken to develop new frameworks for CNM in the Jewish community.
Representations of non-monogamy in Jewish texts and history.
Her own lifecycle and ritual work, including gender affirmations, breakups/letting go of a relationship, and upholding boundaries.
Find out more about Rabbi Nikki and her work at rabbinikki.com, and check out her Instagram @ravnikkid!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about polyamory and Judaism with a very special guest, Rabbi Nikki DeBlosi. She is a PhD and a queer, polyamorous, entrepreneurial rabbi who brings expertise in queer theory and belonging to Jewish teaching and ritual. She holds a BA in Women's and Gender Studies from Harvard, an MA and a PhD in performance studies from New York University, and an MA in Hebrew language and letters and rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion. Gosh, that's a lot of schools.
Nikki: Has no time for anything but school.
Jase: Welcome, Rabbi Nikki.
Emily: Welcome. I want to start right off because our other show that we do, some people may or may not know, is called Drunk Bible Study. On that show, we are reading through the entire Bible and so often we get to a moment in the text where we see that there are people with multiple partners, often men with multiple wives or concubines, or things of that nature and you were actually part of a panel last year called Open Tents and Open Hearts: Jews and Polyamory.
The little pamphlets that we were sent about that panel, the first line said, although Jews have been practicing polyamory since the days of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham, the practice is a cultural taboo among contemporary mainstream Jews. Can you just speak to that a little bit because that's a really interesting place to start?
Nikki: Yes, you're starting from the absolute beginning, which is where the Torah begins “bereshith” means “in the beginning.” Abraham being the first Jew, he's known as the first Jewish person, he's the first person-- he has this special relationship to God and he has a wife, Sarah, and he has this other person in his household named Hagar. To me, it's interesting because lots of us as Jews know that story and we know that there are three people in that household. Not only that there are three people in that household, but there is a sexual relationship, at least in what a polyamorous person might call a V-shape, that Abraham has a sexual relationship with both Sarah and with Hagar.
I think that's where the similarity ends, or I hope that's where the similarity ends for most people, because Hagar is actually a person who is enslaved. She works for Abraham and Sarah. As far as we can tell from the text, it is not her decision to enter into a sexual relationship with Abraham, and we could call it a story of sex trafficking just as easily as one might call it a story of polyamory. The problem is we can't go back and ask Hagar and ask Abraham what was it like for you, what was it like for Sarah?
There's a lot that we're going to get into in this conversation, I'm sure, but one thing that I want to point out right from the beginning is that we never see a story of more than one man with a woman or more than one woman in the Torah, it is always multiple women with one man. The word to refer to your co-wife if you are a woman in a household where your husband had women with whom he had other sexual relationships, whether they'd be called wives or other terms which we'll get into, that word for co-wife is tzarot.
If you've ever heard someone say in Yiddish, "I have so much tsuris in my life right now," they mean sadness, trouble, tribulation, challenges. The fact that we call the co-wives tzarot, there's a clue right there that this is not beautiful compersion, consensual, ethical non-monogamy. They're a pain in our butt. It's something that the husband does.
Emily: It's just that they’re a pain.
Nikki: The husband is called the ba'al ha-bayit, the master of the house, and it is a centralization of power. The word for husband in modern Hebrew continues to be ba’al, which means master, so modern Hebrew speakers, feminist Israeli women, there is a trend of not calling your husband ba'al, but having a different Hebrew word, because that metaphor is baked into the system, which I'm not saying to badmouth Judaism, but when I inherit the same text that y'all are reading in Drunk Bible Study, except you're reading it translated at least twice, probably four times. You're reading it from Hebrew to Greek.
Emily: Oh, more than twice.
Nikki: We have to slow down. When I receive the text, the same text that you're reading in Drunk Bible Study, I'm receiving it in Hebrew, not in Hebrew that was then translated to Greek and to Latin and to English. Hebrew is a really small language. There's not a huge vocabulary in it that we can have a whole conversation about words that come into modern Hebrew, but how we know about what things mean is looking around in other places. When we get the introduction of this story, I've already taught us a couple of Hebrew words, one of them being ba'al, husband. The word for wife is ishah, which also just means woman.
There are some complicated things already going on there. Sarah, she's called Sarai at the time, she is called eshet Avram. She is the wife of Avram, she is his woman, and she doesn't have a child, and so she has a shifchah mitzrit. She has a Egyptian servant girl or servant woman. There's already different titles for these women and their relationship to this man. None of them are ethical non-monogamous lovers. That's just not a word that would make sense to use in this text, and I think that's the challenge that anyone who inherits a religious tradition that's text-based, the challenge we have is that the words we use now, the words didn't exist then.
Obviously, human beings and sexuality and the way we have sex with each other, we haven't invented that much new. We have electricity and silicone now. It's not that different. Body parts were the same, we're human beings, they were human beings, we relate to each other, they related to each other, but we really have different understandings about the word sexuality and what it means and identity and equality and-- just all of these things that are required. I don't know, Avram and Sarah, we use them as an example in Judaism all the time, because the idea of Open Tents and Open Hearts, open tents refers to the fact that these two were really known for welcoming people into their tent.
The strangers are walking by and Abraham runs out to say come in. He also volunteers his wife to cook them dinner, which is a little-- let's discuss. He says come in. He doesn't say who are you, why are you traveling by my house? Just, come in, my tent is open to you, and that's beautiful, and that's hospitable. Isn't that wonderful when we say to people, "May your house be welcoming like Abraham and Sarah's tent was welcoming"? I think, but also maybe don't mistreat the person who works for you in that house, don’t participate in sex trafficking if that is what was happening.
They're great, amazing, wonderful ancestors in our story and they also were human and did some things that I don't think the Torah is telling us to imitate by giving us their story.
Dedeker: I have questions about that, because I was raised Evangelical Christian. We have the same figures in that text as well, and a lot of the patriarchs were polygamous, had multiple wives or multiple concubines, and I know in the Christian tradition, it was so interesting to see all the different ways that basically church leadership would really try to distance ourselves from that practice while also justifying it at the same time, because it's like we can't just trash the patriarchs, but we also can't say, "Oh, yes, having multiple partners is okay."
I'm curious about that complication today of how do you point to this as, "Oh, there's an example of multi-partner relationships that's very closely interwoven into our faith, but also it's not quite the "right" version of it." I guess I'm just wondering the contemporary Jewish take on that.
Nikki: Well, let's acknowledge also that this is thousands of years of history that we're now squishing into a 45 minute podcast conversation, right? The way that Jews have related to poly relationships, multiple partner relationships over time has changed, and to give a gross generalization of that, part of it was in response to our neighbors. That Jews have lived in different places over history, and most of the time we haven't been the ones on top, politically, in the places where we lived, right? We lived under the Romans, we lived under the Babylonians, we lived in Muslim Spain, beautiful, great relationships actually in Muslim Spain between Jews and non-Jews, but there are times when Christian church starts to downplay not only the poly relationships of the patriarchs, but also the celibacy of early Christian leaders, to try to say to lay people-
Dedeker: Oh, interesting.
Nikki: -"You should be married and you should--" Around that, this is medieval, there are times when Jews are worried about being judged by our Christian neighbors as immoral. This is really a generalization, but we've got the patriarchs having these multiple relationships, and we have in our version of Bible, we call it Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi'im, which is prophets, and the Ketuvim, the writing. It's like an acronym, TANAKH, T-A-N-A-K-H. That's what I would call the Hebrew Bible.
In the Tanakh, there are examples of Jewish kings who have many wives, and there's already a discussion in those books, like in the books of First and Second Kings, first and Second Chronicles saying, "Well, is there too many? Is there a number of wives that's too many wives for a king to have?" By the time we get to the later interpreters of the Torah who are trying to-- Basically, what happens is Judaism is one kind of religious system until the temple in Jerusalem gets destroyed. Those times before when we were bringing the goats, if you read through the book of Leviticus, Vayikra together, you read about a lot of goats-
Emily: We did.
Nikki: -so much blood being dashed against the altar. Oh, yes.
Emily: As a vegan that was very hard.
Nikki: It is. I'm working with a vegetarian bar mitzvah student, and it's really rough. Except that when the temple was destroyed, it was destroyed twice, rebuilt once, and it was destroyed for good in the year 70 of the so-called common era. The rabbis started to make a different system for being religious. One of the things they had to do was figure out how to translate the things that Jews used to do in our ancient times to their contemporary times.
The question of the king was one of these questions in Jewish law and the question of whether it was the king who could have what were called pilegesh, concubines, and not just wives. It was always the case that men could have more than one wife, so long as he could maintain three things for her, guaranteed basically her food, her clothing, and regular sexual intimacy.
Dedeker: That's all a lady needs.
Emily: We're very easy creatures.
Nikki: Think about this in terms of, except think-
Dedeker: Really easy.
Nikki: -about this in terms of when we talk about polysaturation, and what your partner expects of you. Maybe we might not have a list of three that are the only three. In a contemporary poly world, I might say, what are the basic needs that you need met in your relationship? When the rabbis of the Talmud are writing this down or talking this out in around the year 200, they're assuming a certain kind of power differential between men and women, which might mean that a woman might not speak up and ask for what she wants, and they have a notion of what they think women want and need.
We could debate whether they knew. Did they ask enough people? There's not a lot of women's voices in the Talmud, but they did have a notion that if you added another wife to your family, that you could not then give your first wife less food, less clothing, less sexual intimacy than she had before, which again, it's not like we're measuring this out in polyamory, but how do you decide if you have capacity to add another partner into your life.
Do I actually have enough to give this person? I'm not an apologist for the sexist or androcentric or heterocentric or transphobic parts of Jewish tradition, but I do want to acknowledge that these rabbis knew that there was power differential, and I really think that they felt like with power comes responsibility, and one of those responsibilities was if you had more than one wife, you can't just be like, "Well, I like this other person better now. She's new and shiny, this new wife, so forget you."
There are some rabbis, even later commentators on this who say, there's one guy, the Ramban, he's a Spanish commentator and he says actually, it's not even food, clothing, and sexual intimacy, it's the qualitative nature of the intimacy. It's, do you touch each other? It's the closeness of your flesh. Instead of flesh as in meat that you would eat, he's saying like, "Do you touch each other still?" Instead of clothing, he interprets it as the coverings of her bed, meaning the place that you get together with your wife.
When your one partner who isn't nesting with you, and you have a date and you make it look all beautiful and you and your nesting partner are like, "Just push the laundry off the bed." How are you tending to the qualitative nature of your relationship? These all are-- I got off on a tangent of myself, but what I was talking about was that the way that we've thought about multi-partner relationships as Jews has changed over time. There was this permissibility of having multiple wives, for men to have multiple wives. It was never permissible for women to have multiple husbands.
Dedeker: Sure. Well, I want to jump back on your tangent, honestly-
Nikki: Yes, that's fun.
Dedeker: -maybe unhelpfully-- Well, no, it's so interesting. To think about, again, this older approach that's like, "Okay, all women need is the food, the sex, and the clothing," right? To think about that today when thinking about, judging, do you have the capacity to be maintaining multiple relationships without getting polysaturated? I feel like I'm just populating this imaginary argument in my head where I think I have heard people be like, "Oh, but different relationships have different needs. It's okay if I just-- it's different if I have a live-in partner versus a hookup over here," things like that, but I'm trying to think of what might be these things that qualitatively could apply to any type of relationship or any type of format. Things like being able to afford everybody dignity, honesty, safety, respect, the kind of things that apply regardless of how entangled or not entangled the relationship is.
Nikki: I think, in this particular text that I'm thinking about, the husband can't reduce these things. The implication if you're just reading that text is that he can't reduce them from whatever he was providing to her before in their particular relationship. We teach this text about how frequently people are supposed to offer. What does regular sexual contact mean? The word in Hebrew is onah, which does not mean pleasure, it means season or period of time.
If it means a season or a period of time, actually I want to see if I can open the text. This is in the Mishneh. The Mishneh is the very first level of-- The Torah tells us what to do, how do we actually enact it in everyday life, and so this thing of, well, what is regular sexual contact? How often do you have to provide your wife an opportunity for sex? According to Jewish law, you cannot coerce your wife. If you're a husband, you cannot coerce your wife. You can't rape her. Marital rape is something that the Talmud knows about and condemns, which is huge.
US law didn't know about that until the 1970s. This is the Talmud saying and you can't verbally coerce your partner either. There's lots of other times when you're not supposed to have sex. Again, it's like in this context, it's the husband because he has more power under this sexist system. My response is always like, why don't you change the sexist system and talk about how everyone is balancing power between and among us, but the times for regular sexual contact, if you're a person of leisure, should be every day.
If you are a day laborer, it should be once a week. Hold on, Dedeker, I see the face of like, she wants to-- Oh, laborers is twice a week, sorry, mule drivers once a week, Camel drivers every 30 days, and sailors once in 6 months. Why is the sailor only once in 6 months that he has to?
Emily: Do you really have to keep to this schedule? Is this just a suggestion or is somebody going to come around and check off and make sure?
Nikki: We can debate for days and days ever if it's a suggestion.
Emily: I see.
Nikki: Think about how many times each of you have probably been asked, how often should a couple or a cule have sex? What's normal? People have been asking that question for a jillion years, and the rabbis are like, "Let me tell you, you have an obligation to offer your wife pleasure." Why does the sailor get off with six months? Why can he--
Nikki: He's going off and running.
Dedeker: Because he's sailing. It takes a long time.
Jase: He's gone for six months.
Nikki: He's on the boat. They can't have Zoom sex with each other. He's on the boat. It also meant that if he came home from that six-month's sail and he is at the harbor and there's another chance to go out on the next boat and make more money, he has to go home first and check in with his wife. She could say, "It's okay, honey, you can go," but he can't just walk away.
Now, I remember teaching this to college students at New York University, where I worked for eight years, and one young woman said, what my job-- Oh, the other rule is that you can't switch jobs from a job that allows you to have more frequent sexual contact with your wife to one that would allow you less contact without talking to your wife first.
Emily: That's nice.
Nikki: You have to get the consent of your partner to walk away now. A student said, "This is ridiculous. My job is my business. I would never let a man dictate to me." I thought, "Hold on a second. I'm teaching this class. My co-teacher also was a married person. I'm married. I have two kids at home." I said, "Do you think that neither of us said to our wives like, "Hey, I'm going to teach a class once a week that keeps me on campus until 9:30 at night, so I'm never doing bedtime on Thursdays?"
Did I just announce that or did we have a conversation to work that out together in some way? Not that I had to ask permission or that my wife has schedule veto power or anything like that, but these are live issues in our conversations with each other. The rabbis here are saying, "If you are going to add another sexual relationship into the mix, you have to still think about tending to that regular opportunity for intimacy with your other partner."
I don't think, Emily, that it has to be scheduled. I do think some people interpret it that way. This is where you get the myth of every Jewish person has sex on Friday night because having sex on Friday is a double mitzvah.
Emily: I've never heard that one.
Nikki: A double commandment. Oh, man.
Emily: Oh, that's cute.
Nikki: You got to hang out at Jewish Summer camp.
Emily: I guess I do.
Nikki: That sex on Friday nights is a double mitzvah, comes from this idea that it's once a week that you would have an opportunity for intimacy.
Dedeker: I see.
Nikki: As an old married person, sometimes tending to intimacy is awesome and spontaneous. Sometimes it's like, "Do you know what? How many days has it been? Maybe we should pay attention to that."
Jase: I can relate to that for sure.
Dedeker: What I'm really excited to talk about is you, not too long ago, published an article titled Toward a New Framework for Reform Jewish Views on Polyamory and published it in the Reform Jewish Quarterly in fall of last Year, 2022, ironically, in what they called the family issue, which we could definitely talk about. Can you talk to us a little bit about the process of even writing that article in the first place?
Nikki: Yes. I did not begin my career as a rabbi. I thought I was going to be an academic, and I was in graduate school doing queer theory when I told my dad alav hashalom, he has passed away 11 years ago, but when I told him I was going to become a rabbi, he said, "Oh, thank goodness, because I've never heard of performance studies professor, but I've heard of rabbi before. Maybe you'll get a job." I really made a change from academia to rabbinical school.
I had been used to thinking and writing about these critical ideas about what sexual freedom actually means, and studying with people like the two of my late professors whose memories are a blessing, Eve Sedgwick and Jose Muñoz, studying with Ann Pellegrini, folks that your listeners would-- Some of their stuff is really esoteric and highbrow, and some of it is pretty accessible, but all of it, I think, classic queer theory.
To go from that world to a rabbinic world where there is an unwritten model of what a good Jewish life looks like. First of all, to even say Judaism, as though that's one thing, is just completely false. There are denominations of Judaism just like there are denominations of Christianity. One might say Judaisms. Also, there's the-
Emily: Interesting.
Nikki: -perennial joke, 2 Jews, 3 opinions, even we can't agree with each other within our own community. There's always a multiplicity of thought even within one stream of Judaism. The major streams are Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform, and Reconstructionist, and they all developed for different needs in different times. I went to this movement that I chose as my Jewish home, the denomination I wanted to be a part of, because at the time I thought we had both the most robust structure in the US where we're a really large movement in the US.
There are 2200 Reform rabbis in North America now, but also because we very much have stood for increasing equality. I was on the editing committee of this family issue and had this opportunity to push and say, "Are we going to redefine what family means in this issue? If we're not going to redefine what family means, I'm probably not interested in being a part of it."
Thinking about concepts like chosen family. Thinking about things that I've thought about since rabbinical school, like what about single folks in the Jewish community? What about people who do not want to raise children, who know they don't want to raise children? This is tangential, but I think connected, Dedeker, to the question. It really reminds me that folks should re-listen to your episode on queer theology as well.
A huge thing that happened in my movement while I was in school is that one of my teachers who has since died, Rabbi Doctor Eugene B. Borowitz, the preeminent theologian of 20th-century Judaism. He had for a long time, while he had personal relationships as a teacher with gay and lesbian students, he would not sign the ordination certificates of gay and lesbian students.
Dedeker: Oh, wow.
Nikki: This is something that in speaking to my queer elders in the Reform movement, people are still really carrying trauma over.
Dedeker: Sure, of course.
Nikki: I had a complex relationship with Dr. Borowitz, but I will say that he helped me when my dad died. He was amazing and a real Mensch, a real ethical person. He asked me to present on feminist theology because he knew that I had a PhD in queer theory and I had a background in women's studies and asked me to teach the class, a history of feminism and women's rights.
This is someone who doesn't need anyone else to teach most things because he knows all of it, but he changed his position officially, and I think it was 2011. It was after one of my classmates gave a really moving sermon about queer inclusion. When he stood up to make his speech, and not a dry eye in the house, and also there were rainbow cupcakes. It was a wonderful, beautiful day, and behind me is my Semikhah, my certificate of ordination, and his signature is on there.
Basically, his argument was that really important to him as someone who was a young person during the Holocaust, the Shoah, and who was involved in the civil rights movement, this white Jewish guy went down to the South and swam with Black ministers to integrate a segregated pool. He had always thought that the command to be fruitful and multiply, to have children, was so important, and his notion was gay people can't have children.
Over time, my students have changed my mind and they can have children and raise families and so now I will sign their certificates. Everyone was so happy. Then we went back to class and I went to my history of Reform Judaism class and someone said, "We just witnessed history," and everyone's clapping. I raised my hand and said, "Respectfully, what if someone came up to Dr. Borowitz and said, "I know I'm not going to have children." Is he going to refuse to sign their ordination certificate?"
I was watching in real-time with absolute utmost respect to the gay and lesbian rabbis who came before me, who made it possible for me to get into rabbinical school. I was watching in real-time the politics of normalization. The gay people are accepted because they can look so close to straight people.
Dedeker: Because they can match us.
Nikki: I literally right now have two kids and a white picket fence in front of my suburban home, and at the same time, I want to make more room for more people to belong in Jewish community, and to see ourselves in those When I was asked to write this article, the person who asked me to write the article was like, "You have this background where you know about theory and the theory of sexuality." I worked with college students. I had many students who would do things like hide their tattoos, also frowned upon in Jewish law, but then introduced me to their boyfriend and their girlfriend.
I'd be like, "Oh, you don't think I'll judge you for being poly, but you do think I'll judge you for having a tattoo?" Really interesting, and I am a tattooed rabbi, but that's a whole-- I was just like, "You don't think that I would--" Interesting, the younger folks just thinking, "Well, of course Rabbi Nikki will be okay with this." I think that was the assumption too, was like, "You probably know about this." Then I had to make a decision whether to write as the expert or to write from a personal perspective.
Dedeker: Because at this point, professionally, you were not out.
Nikki: Professionally, I was not out and I actually had become de facto monogamous when I got into rabbinical school. I hadn't really identified properly as polyamorous. I read The Ethical Slut in 2000. It's fun that I remember. If it came out in 2001, then that's when I read it, but I had--
Emily: I think it came out in '97.
Nikki: Oh, well, I was late to the game.
Dedeker: Yeah, even older.
Emily: We looked this up recently. Yes, I believe it came out in '97.
Nikki: You would think I would have read it in college, but I hadn't. I read all the other things. So much Foucoult, and so much Freud. I read the book and thought, "Well, this is a theory that makes sense to me." At this time in my life, I actually was not Jewish yet. I was raised Catholic, but I was like, "Goodbye religion. Religion is for people who want to oppress women and gay people." That was my naive thought. It's part of why I love y'all's podcast, because you have an open-minded, open-hearted approach to how people might respond and relate to religion that isn't, it's good or it's bad.
Dedeker: I want to talk about that later.
Nikki: Nothing. There's only so many hours in the day. My then partner, now wife, we've been together since 1998, so poster children. We really were the poster children. If you look at The Harvard Crimson 1999 commencement issue, there was an engagements page, and one of our friends told us, and this was in the height of don't ask, don't tell, and should ROTC be allowed on college campuses, and are there even anti-discrimination laws for queer people? Every episode you talk about religion and polyamory, you have to talk about structural sexism, homophobia, transphobia, all these things, and so someone said to us, "There are no gay people in the engagement issue."
We said, "Oh, we can pretend that we're engaged. Send a reporter." They sent a reporter and a photographer and my wife and I basically made out the whole time so that they couldn't possibly publish a picture of us where we weren't kissing. Where it wasn't clear. We really didn't want them to-- I am so sick of actually being asked if we're sisters. If another person asks us if we're-- I'm like, "You can't imagine why two women--" we got asked if we were sisters on our babymoon. My wife was visibly pregnant. It was like, "Who is this lady that's sitting with you at dinner?"
The other parent of this-- Wow. We were in that engagement issue as a matter of activism. We stayed together. We've been together this whole time and when we moved, and we were working, of course, in feminist nonprofit, reproductive justice organization in D.C. after we graduated college, and it was there that I met people who identified as ethically non-monogamous and who said, "You should read this." I think the term that was going around then was open relationship, not even ENM or poly. I thought, "Oh, maybe this could be for us." It was for a little while but, I really, really got scared of intimacy.
I thought, "Oh, this can be about sex, and fun and on the side." Then I was like, "Oh, I have feelings. Is this okay?" My wife was chill the whole time. She's a very chill person. I went to her and said, "I think we either need to break up with each other or get married. Talk about escalator situation." We got engaged and then I continued to have, and everyone can attack me for my biphobia at the time. I'm not like this anymore, but I continued to have an intimate and sexual relationship with a male friend. I think in my mind it was, "Well, this is about me figuring out if I'm bisexual," and so that's okay.
That's not really-- being open is not part of my identity. It's just this thing that I'm trying right now to make sure that I understand myself as a sexual person. Lots of things happened in our lives over the years. Eventually when I was accepted into rabbinical school, I just decided that I would not, and I hadn't been pursuing other relationships, but that I also would break off with this friend who I hadn't seen or had sex with in a really long time, but I was like, called him and said, "That's it. I'm going to be a rabbi now, so this isn't allowed anymore."
I'm going to respect that and just decide that it's not allowed anymore. I think there are a lot of people over time who've probably done that. Just as there were people in the history of my movement. I think it was in the '80s, when we finally agreed to ordain gay and lesbian people, the conservative movement, I think it was 2015. I'd have to check on those dates, very recently. We have a lot to contend with those trauma verses that, what did you all call them in the Christianity episode?
Emily: Oh, the clobber verses.
Nikki: We have them in Hebrew. We unfortunately handed them to you, I'm so sorry. I think there was a sense of, and I do think that there are boundaries. I do think rabbis should be boundaried people. I think in a day and age when we have seen that rabbis can sexually abuse people just like any other human being unfortunately can, I certainly believe in ethics and boundaries and being a responsible human being. Over the past probably five or so years for myself, I just started to really realize therapy'll do that to you.
This is actually a part of my identity. The talking to someone's identity is something that has been crucial to my sense of why I am a Jewish person and why I wanted to be a rabbi. This can be your poll quote for your show. I'll just give you a Hebrew poll quote, Dedeker. The Passover story, there's a line that you read from the Passover Haggadah that says, b'chol dor va-dor, chayav adam lirot et atzmo k'ilu hu yatza mi-mitzrayim. In every single generation, a person is obligated to see themself as if they had made the exodus from Egypt.
The central story that we're told to reenact as Jewish people, which is a story that Christians also inherit, the story of the exodus from Egypt, is not you were slaves and therefore, but in every generation, no matter how far from that time in Egypt you physically live, you have to act as if, you have to see yourself k'ilu, as if you had had that experience. If I know that someone else has had an experience of-- in Hebrew, mitzrayim means narrowness. That someone has been constricted, restricted, put in this narrow place, wouldn't I want to help them into a broad open space? Cheesy as it is, it has been what I've wanted to do since I was a kid. I don't like when people don't belong.
It's not fair. I was the kid stomping, that's why I was bossy DeBlosi. It's not fair to leave that person out. It's not fair to tell that person their life is less than, or the way that they love someone is less than. At the same time, if the exodus from Egypt wasn't the water coming as a wall, and the water just went everywhere, and there were no boundaries to it, that's also not helpful. I say as a parent, I have to give my children some boundaries or we're all going to have a meltdown at the supermarket.
Jase: Before we continue on and get to talking more about this article as well as some of the results that have come from that, we're going to take a quick break to talk about some ways that you can support this show. If you like getting this content out there into the world for free, the best thing you can do to support that is take a moment to listen to our sponsors and support our show if you're able to. It really does go a long way to helping us get this out there. Thank you so much.
Emily: What's coming to mind for me is, the scene here is that you've been approached to write this article as an expert, as an academic. Approached this like you're someone who probably knows about this, so why don't you write about it? In that service of taking people out of this constricted space into a place that's more expansive and more free, I'm wondering, you could have done that, again, as the expert in the academic, someone who knows about these things, but you chose to essentially come out. To be like, "This is my life as a polyamory Jewish person, and this is what it's like." I'm wondering why it was important to you to take that particular approach.
Nikki: Two reasons. One is an academic or ideological reason. The other is a personal reason. The first is that I believe that at this point in time, the conversations that Jewish communities are having about polyamory are in two places. One is polyamorous Jews saying, "I pray to Avram," and we don't pray to them, but when I pray to God, I mention Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and Leah, and that's three dudes and four women. Why? Because one of those dudes has two wives and yet I don't see myself reflected in the synagogue. What's going on here?
Can I be out to my rabbi? When my rabbi is doing a wedding for two partners can I say we're not going to promise sexual fidelity because we are ethically non-monogamous and we practice that? People are having those conversations. This is a generalization, but there are some Jewish professionals who are like, "This isn't allowed either. This is retrograde. This is this old-fashioned thing that people used to do that is obviously wrong." They're not wrong in that Judaism has moved away from allowing in 1100 Ashkenazi rabbi in Europe, a German rabbi says no more plural marriage for men. We don't have it anymore or they're saying things like, "Why would we bring back an institution that's sexist?" From a feminist point of view.
These two conversations are happening in separate places. What I wanted to do was say we all actually need to be having one conversation that pays attention to a bunch of different things. I take this from the structure of this from a nun named Margaret Farley, who writes a book called Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. She says that there are sacred sources that you need to take into account when coming up with a sexual ethic and making rules about how your religious community makes boundaries around sex.
If I translate what she writes into Jewish talk, I would say that that is our Torah, so our entire sacred literature our Talmud, our halachic literature, our Jewish legal literature, our liturgy. What do we emphasize when we pray and what do we de-emphasize in our liturgy? Then also modern scientific knowledge. We understand sexuality and gender differently now than the rabbis. They didn't have the information. The fifth source is the one that I personally felt like even rabbis in my own movement were in danger of ignoring when it came to poly people, which was the testimony of actual human beings who are polyamorous.
You cannot talk about me if you're not talking with me. Then I was like, "Am I going to ask someone else to be the me, to write that that speaks or am I going to be my own me?" Now I'm going to tell a story that's going to make me cry and it's okay that your listeners are going to listen to me cry, which is that I went to a mentor who was one of the first gay people ordained in my movement. This person was closeted and said, "I was closeted at the time. You do not have to be some hero to write about this and to lead a conversation about this." I am now part of really an international conversation. People know it's me. As far as folks know, I'm the only out polyamorous rabbi that they have heard of.
This person said, "You don't have to do that." They also said to me, "Look, every time I've come out as a queer person, I've never regretted it." Then they said to me, I'm going to use some Hebrew words. One word is parnasah, which means the money you need to live on, and the other is Torah. Your Torah, you each have a Torah that you're teaching, you're not each the same person. This person said, "If you are going to worry about increasing your parnasah at the expense of shrinking your Torah, then you're going to be miserable. That to me goes right back to that idea of narrowness versus breadth. I wouldn't do that to anyone else. Why would I do it to myself?
Which is a hard decision to make. I do not begrudge any Jewish person, rabbi or not, employee of a Jewish institution or not, who is poly and closeted about it because parnasah is not little. We have to have what to live on and we don't want to damage all of our relationships and burn all of our bridges. I felt I had the privilege to spend in this capacity and so spent it.
Dedeker: Wow. I had tears in my eyes, I'm just going to let someone else
Jase: I think that really speaks to a lot of the debates that I think people have when it comes to speaking publicly about their relationship styles or their identity of that. I don't have to be, but can I afford to be and could I make a difference in that way without hurting myself too much? It's that constant debate. I think it's not even just in terms of those big things of writing this article that's outing yourself to everyone or starting a podcast or coming out to your family or whatever. Even that calculation comes up in little everyday interactions of, "This could come up organically in the line at the grocery store, but do I want to go there?"
That equation is constantly rebalancing based on the circumstance you're in, who you're talking to. "I'm at a new job, do I bring this up?" All these things. Unfortunately have to be making that calculation all the time.
Nikki: I think that's a thing that folks don't always understand. If you're not queer in any way, this thing feels to other folks like privacy that we're airing in public. My dad of blessed memory didn't like that I wore a rainbow necklace in college. He didn't know what it meant until I told him what it meant, but then he didn't like it. He said, "You're advertising your sex life to everyone." I was like, "First of all, I just got to college and just came out. I assure you my sex life is theoretical. There's nothing to publicize, my friend, so A. B you wear a gold ring on your left hand, on your ring finger. That means you have sex with my mom. Gross. It's private. I don't need to know that." He never bothered me with that again.
Jase: That's always my response too.
Nikki: Yes, totally. Then you add on that for me, being a rabbi which means that when I say Judaism believes X, number one, I don't say that, I say Judaisms believe a bunch of things, but that people really believe what I say. Then that becomes a statement about Judaism. I just want to make sure that your listeners know that my existence does not mean that any branch of Judaism endorses or celebrates or ritualizes polyamory. We do not. Polyamorous Jews ritualize their relationships and have Jewish practices, of course, but none of them are like endorsed by an official rabbinic body or there's no movement of Judaism that has an official position about polyamory, writ large specifically.
Dedeker: Do you want to continue the thread on rituals because a lot of your work has to do with creating rituals? Can you talk more about that? We just had an episode on rituals recently, and I'm interested in the intersection between rituals and then also the ones that we talked about on that episode.
Nikki: Yes, it's so funny. I was listening to it earlier and I didn't finish it yet. I'm trying to remember where the part was where you started to talk about performing rituals. Because I have my performance studies hat background on, I can stand on my performativity soapbox for a second.
Dedeker: Sure.
Nikki: Which is that in performance studies, performativity actually means the opposite of how most people use the word. Most people use the word to mean. It is just a performance with scare quotes on it. It's fake, it's put on. Performativity means actually the opposite. When a performative is done correctly, felicitously, J.L. Austen would say the book is called How to Do Things With Words, it means that the words, the gestures, the people performing them or enacting something. My favorite example of performativity versus performance is have the three of you, or any of you seen The Muppets Take Manhattan?
Emily: Of course.
Dedeker: For sure.
Nikki: In The Muppets Take Manhattan, there's a play at the end of the movie, spoiler, everyone. Kermit and Piggy are playing the groom and the bride respectively in this play. That is a performance. Now Piggy loves Kermit and would definitely want to marry Kermit, and it's a back-and-forth thing the whole time. We can analyze their relationship and whether it's the right amount of consensual, another time. I also love Miss Piggy, but in this play, Piggy realizes, or rather, Kermit realizes at the end that Piggy has changed the casting, and now there is a real ordained minister playing the minister.
It's not a performance anymore, it's a performative. If they say those words, I now pronounce you pig and frog or whatever, they're going to actually be married, right?
Dedeker: Correct.
Nikki: Performativity is what ritual tries to do. When we, the ritual that I referred to, Dedeker, when we talked with each other previously, is this ritual called Tashlikh that originates in Eastern Europe and is a preparation for Yom Kippur for the Day of Atonement. When you want to change your ways, and atone for all the things that happened in the past year. We physically go to a body of water that feeds into the ocean. We used to throw breadcrumbs. Now people throw things that are more environmentally friendly to animals, but we would throw breadcrumbs into the water to symbolize casting away the mistakes that we made in the past year that we want to distance ourselves from.
There's something really powerful about a physical act. It's at the ocean or the river, and you're hearing the water and you feel the breadcrumbs in your head, and you put them and you watch them go out and you say these words, "I'm distancing myself from these mistakes that I made." That does something for you. Whether you believe in a soul or spirituality, it does something for you that it is not an intellectual exercise. Polyamorous people are basically saying, "We need that moment for us, for our relationships, we need to have a physical, spiritual, embodied acknowledgment of who we are."
Even if that's a kid who's being raised by more than two parents, and there's no divorce, wants to have all their parents up with them on the bema at the front of the room when they're reading from the Torah at their bar or bat mitzvah We want to all physically present. We want to be acknowledged as a family in that moment. We have a human need to connect, like the brain to the body, to the heart, to the soul. All of these, that's what all this is about. Incense in a Catholic church, it goes into your nose. The vibrations of the songs are going into your ears. It's doing something to you as an embodied human.
Emily: I don't know, I just started cracking up because for something happened when I after I hit my 30s. I don't know what happened, but suddenly I was like, "I want jewelry from my partners," when I never had before. I think especially in my 20s when I'm deconstructing all these messages about relationships and about marriage and what it means is very much like, "Ah, whatever this is like sexist in a terrible institution. I don't want any part of it." There was something where I was, it wasn't like I want to get married. It wasn't necessarily I want a marriage ritual, but it was just like, I want jewelry.
Dedeker: I want jewelry? It sounds great.
Emily: There was just something about, and I wasn't attached to it having to be a ring or the diamond or whatever. It was just some jewelry. I found there was something so nice about that of like, I put on my rings in the morning and I think about both my partners when I do. Like you saying that, I'm like, yes, from a legal standpoint, it didn't change anything. It didn't necessarily change how I go about my day-to-day, but it is just that I guess that that performative as you would call it, just, that's something that just makes it feel tangible and feel real, and is witnessable.
Also is something where like when people ask about my rings, I can be honest of like, yes, this is from one partner, this is one from the other. I don't know, that really clicks for me when you were speaking.
Nikki: Yes. There's, and it's so not rational. It's not irrational, it just isn't in the realm of the rational. I think about, why do Jewish people-- I'm not wearing a , a Jewish legal ring because the ring has to have no stones in it. If you're following Jewish law when you get married. People will say, "Why does the ring have no stones in it?" Often people say it's uninterrupted and eternal like your love should be, so beautiful. A back-formation on what the practical answer is, which was that legally the man was obligated to gift a woman with an object of a minimal value, a certain value. It was much easier to, what do you call it, to assess the value if it didn't have stones in it.
If it was a sincere metal, you knew how much it was worth. You didn't know if this diamond was a diamond or a cubic zirconia. How would you know? Super practical reason, also baked into things like not being reciprocal. The woman is the one who receives the ring and says nothing. The man doesn't get a ring in a traditional Jewish legal wedding according to the Talmud. I would never tell a couple today she shouldn't exchange rings. That's just all about property and objects. You should put stones all over it, even though your Bobbi from Eastern Europe said, you don't put stones because it's supposed to be eternal because it's not rational.
It comes from a tradition that was both an emotional tradition and a legal tradition. Even the Rabbis of the Talmud, I teach this to folks that I do weddings for all the time, they could've-- The word for, "To get married," in the Torah. Did you ever come across the word to marry?
Dedeker: Perhaps.
Jase: I bet you didn't.
Dedeker: Oh, maybe not.
Nikki: It's, "He took her, he lay with her. She became with--" There was no Chuppah, no one stood under Chuppah, no one broke her glass in the Torah. There was this, and they could have used the word for, for get married, could have been the taking. That could have been the root they chose in Hebrew. They chose a word. Actually, the word for marriage in Hebrew is kiddushin, which you might translate as holiness. That's actually the sticking point that most folks have when talking about whether Judaism or a rabbi could ever endorse polyamory, which is, does it not interrupt this idea that we have of kiddushin, which means special, distinct and set aside?
That is a thing that I acknowledge in my article and just in my work generally, is that I am indeed calling for a radical overhaul of the way that we think about sacred relationships in Judaism. Not that we throw away this model that we have had for many, many years of kiddushin, but to look critically at that model, which was not reciprocal, and which was basically the man setting-- Access to this woman was set aside just for this one guy. That's what it meant. It was not romantic. It wasn't romantic. She is set aside for him. Now we say, well, we mutually set one another aside.
What I have been saying even since before I came out to myself as polyamorous, but was already ordained as a rabbi when I was working with my first couples, was this is what kiddushin meant in the past. A lot of people now think what's different about marriage? You've lived with your, all the people I've talked to who I'm counseling for weddings have slept with each other. They're already melding finances most of them. I'll say, for a lot of folks, kiddushin, setting aside specialness, weddings meant melding finances, being open to or raising children together, and sexual exclusivity. Those three things might be the most important and only things on your list.
They might actually not be on your list. There might be other things that are more important to you. You don't have to tell me what they are, but you should know with each other. Do you agree on what those important things are that you're setting aside for each other? Maybe that makes me a heretic or a bad rabbi or whatever, but I do think that it is a lesson that I learned from queer theory, which is that you shouldn't assume that the notion in your mind of the relationship you're constructing is the exact same as the one in the other person's mind.
I knew I couldn't do that because like the boy asked the girl out. Am I going to stand around and wait forever? Neither of us is going to ask each other out, this is going to be terrible. I'm going to be alone forever, which probably would've made my dad thrilled to know. I joke. All of these things are things that I think we need to, we need to look at. I have the option, the gift of, and the responsibility and the burden in some ways of looking at what the Hebrew says and seeing where the possibilities might be. It's so loaded. All of this is so loaded with sexism and history and, and all of these negative things.
Dedeker: I mean, such important work though. I can see like how valuable this is to be counseled by someone who has done all the thinking that you have done and all the reading, and all the writing and all the research to meld these things together. To take a long and ancient and really important tradition and find ways to make that still meaningful for people who still want to practice today instead of-- I mean, you said at the top of the episode, you talked about how people tend to look at religion as like, either it's all good or it's all bad when that's not really the case. I do think people should have a right to be able to practice their religion, their spirituality, and meld it with their identity as well in the ways moving forward.
Nikki: I think that also means that we as rabbis are not, we are in so many ways a gatekeeper for the tradition, but we should be stewards of the tradition and not gatekeepers of it. I shouldn't be saying, "Let me let you weirdos in." I should be saying, "If you're a part of this community, how can I ensure that you belong in this community?" It is my responsibility as the rabbi to create the space for folks to belong, but I'm not doing anyone a favor by like letting them into my circle.
I'm opening up and saying, Judaism is going to change as it has, thank God, always changed, or we would just be crying about the fact that we can't sacrifice goats at the temple anymore. We do still cry about that. There are days that we are designated to mourn for that, which I think is also an important thing. If that's all that we did, we'd be frozen. I don't like that. I like that move toward openness and breadth and inclusion and just affirming people.
Jase: Wow. That was beautiful. Thank you so much, Rabbi Nikki for joining us today. Before we let you go, we want to ask, where can our listeners find more about you and your work, read these articles, things like that. Where can they find all of that?
Nikki: They can find that on my website, which is rabbinicki.com. I am on Instagram at ravnikkid That's R-A-V-N-I-K-K-I-D.
Dedeker: Excellent. Awesome. We have a question that we're going to be throwing up on our Instagram stories for this week. If you, your listener, are a spiritual or religious person, what do you wish that your religious leaders knew about non-monogamy? Again, go check our Instagram. That question's going to be on our stories. Really excited to hear what you have to say about that.
Also, the best place to share your thoughts on this episode with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server. You can also post about it in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups, and you can join our exclusive community by going to patreon.com/multiamory. In addition, you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Multi Amory is created and produced by Jace Lindgren, Emily Matlak, and me, Dedeker Winston.
Our episodes are edited by Maurizio Baldenetta. Our production assistants are Rachel Schoenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.