Posted on June 5, 2026 by Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
Dear friends,
Tonight at TBE we will celebrate our LGBTQ+ community at Shabbat services. We have entered into Pride Month, and this Pride Shabbat will feature the beautiful and joyful participation of congregants who have become a part of our newly formed Love Is Love Initiative (LILI). One of our chief focuses this year has been our work of inclusion across a broad variety of fronts, and our congregation putting LILI together and watching that community grow and engage our members has been a true joy and point of pride for me as our rabbi. Join us tonight to celebrate the full, proud, and diverse beauty of our community! Pride is an absolutely beautiful expression of the human spirit, and it’s personal for me. I have so many in my family who find themselves somewhere in that glorious acronym we’ve come to know well. When I see images and videos from the pride march this year, I’ll be thinking of my relatives whose pride makes me proud, and of the so many generations who had to suffer in silence.
I’m not giving a sermon tonight, but I do still want to use my platform to lift up some powerful torah for us this Shabbat (apologies for the long letter!). This torah comes from Michaela Atencio, a nonbinary Jew who posted this incredible teaching on Twitter. The thread of posts from them was powerful enough on its own, but when I removed the text from the Twitter platform and put it onto a page it read more like poetry:
I’m nonbinary.
How does this reconcile with the verse, “male and female he created them,” you may ask?
The variety in God’s creation emphasizes God’s creativity as an artist.
Genesis gives us several examples of this…
God made “day and night.”
This sounds like a binary, similar to “male and female,” right?
That isn’t quite all we experience in 24 hours.
Sunrises and sunsets do not fit into the binary of day or night.
Yet God paints the skies with these too.
On the second day God separated the sky from water. seems like another binary.
yet the clouds hold water for us in the sky,
The condensation and rain cycle refreshing our earth constantly.
The sky, separate from water, contains and releases water.
God also said “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.”
That isn’t the full story, either.
Consider marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens.
Not fully land, not fully waters.
There is such glorious variety in God’s creation.
We see another binary in the celestial bodies God made:
“The greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night.”
And then, almost as a footnote, “and the stars.”
There is more than just sun and moon in outer space.
Planets, asteroids, black holes, supernovae.
Side note: these magnificent stars hundreds of times more massive than our sun,
as simple as that to God.
“And the stars.” I marvel. Hallelujah.
“God created the great sea monsters” and “every winged bird of every kind.”
A split again between water and sky.
Yet we see creatures like penguins that are definitely a “winged bird,”
But do not fly and instead walk and swim.
And finally “male and female he created them.”
First off, intersex people exist.
But, and perhaps more importantly, friends, look around. Listen.
Do you have friends or family that say they don’t fall under “male” or “female?”
If so, honor that.
Does all this variety invalidate God as creator? Of course not!
I believe that this instead is an example of how authors weave words to tell a story.
We see the author in Genesis give examples of the extremes that God creates.
It doesn’t exclude the possibility of more.
And so we worship the God of more.
The God of the marsh, the penguin,The God of the sunrise, the cloud, the supernovae.
The God of the nonbinary.
You are loved.
I want to worship that God. I want to sing Hallelujah to that God. The God of more is most certainly the God to whom I pray. The Rainbow flags that fly during pride and all year round are such powerful symbols of love and acceptance, yes, but also symbols of hope and mutual obligation. They evoke the story of Noah and the Flood, and the covenant made at the end of that story.
I will share but one piece of tradition with you from b. Ketubot 77b:
When Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi passed away, Elijah heralded his arrival saying: “Make room for the Son of Levi, make room for the Son of Levi!” As he proceeded on his way, Rabbi Yehoshua found the great sage of old Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai sitting on thirteen golden mats. Rabbi Shimon asked: “Are you the Son of Levi?” “Yes,” Rabbi Yehoshua answered. “Has a rainbow ever appeared in your lifetime?” Rabbi Shimon continued. “Yes,” answered Rabbi Yehoshua. “If that is so,” said Rabbi Shimon, “you are not the Son of Levi.” But Rabbi Yehoshua had lied. In fact the rainbow had not appeared in his lifetime, but he thought to himself: “I ought not take too much credit.”
What is the meaning of this story? According to the opinion of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the rainbow in the sky, the token of God’s pledge never again to bring a flood, does not appear in the sky during the lifetime of people who themselves are a kind of rainbow, and whose presence therefore shields their generation from the floodwaters’ return.
When I see the smiles on the faces of folks marching at Pride, I am reminded of the covenant God made with humanity, and that even during the generation of Noah, when there was so much violence and harm being done between people, that God saw something worth saving. I share this story because we now have so many rainbow people. So many who, just by being themselves, prove to us and to God the worth of humanity. There is still so much violence in our generation. So much hatred, so many harmful policies being enacted all over the country even in just these recent weeks that I hesitate to even begin to list them. But with the arrival of Pride, and the marching of the rainbows, we are reminded that—while all those harmful people are shrinking the world, limiting possibility, taking away—we worship the God of more. You are loved.
Pride Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Noah Diamondstein