Andrew Ramer has just published his collection of Queer Midrash, Queering the Text, in which he writes our stories back into the history — and the sacred texts — of the Jewish people.
Midrash is an ancient custom of creating stories the fill in the blank spaces, or explain the seeming contradictions in the Torah. The best example is the story almost all Jews know — that of Abraham smashing the statues of idols in his father's shop. Many Jews believe this story is in the Torah. It isn't. It was a midrach created by a rabbi centuries after the Torah was redacted into the form we have it today.
Midrash is kind of a sacred literary jazz riff on the story, giving it new meaning and relevance to later generations.
In the story Andrew reads in the video, he takes a text from Genesis and uses it as a window into the Biblical landscape to create a story of the first gay male lovers — and how their love was recognized as sacred.
You can read an interview with Andrew in Zeek. You'll find other posts about him and his work elsewhere on this blog. And you can order Queering The Text online.
Apologies for the poor quality of the image, but you can hear him read clearly, and if this kind of story is meaningful to you, you can be sure it will be a heart-opening experience. By rewriting the story, we can set ourselves free from the tyranny of the story. By recognizing it is a story created by others, we don't have to live out the old scripts — we can write new ones and truly live happily, in the moment, ever after.
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