Denise Edger: The Lesbian Rabbi Cared for AIDS Patients When No One Would

LGBTQ&A

Jeffrey Masters

Society & Culture

4.7 • 703 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It was the late '80s, the height of the AIDS crisis. Rabbi Denise Eger was 28 years old—"a newly minted rabbi"—who would don mask, gown, and rubber gloves to visit members of her congregation in the hospital. Nurses were too afraid to enter the hospital rooms so they'd leave patients' meals outside. It was "the years when they thought you could catch it through the air," she recalls.

Rabbi Eger would feed those too weak to do it themselves, often removing her mask and gloves, providing a rare dose of human touch. Then she'd move to another patient, another hospital. At the same time, she was coming out publicly. "If you're hiding and lying about who you are," she says, particularly for a rabbi, that's not a good thing. "It's not healthy...it's not good for the soul." She came out and has since become one of the most famous rabbis in the world.

LGBTQ&A is hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. @jeffmasters1

Transcript

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0:00.0	You know, something that I'm continually surprised by is the number of queer and trans people who are religious.
0:14.0	On the whole, we very much are a people of faith. And I myself am Jewish, as you might have heard me say six or seven thousand
0:21.7	times, but I really do consider myself to be a late bloomer when it comes to religion. I
0:27.9	didn't grow up going to temple, I was never bar mitzvahed, but recently I've been getting
0:32.5	more in touch with that spiritual side of me and accepting that there's a lot of questions
0:37.4	that I have that
0:38.4	are not necessarily ever going to be answered. Now that said, that didn't stop me from posing
0:43.7	them to today's guest, Rabbi Denise Eger. She's a world-famous rabbi and perhaps the most
0:50.1	famous lesbian rabbi ever. Rabbis who are able to be out and queer are a relatively new thing,
0:57.1	especially for a religion that's over 3,000 years old. We spoke last month right before I went to
1:03.4	Israel, and while there, I did bring my mic into interviews. So today begins our four-part
1:09.6	series on queer life and Judaism and how the two intersect,
1:13.6	not just in me but in notable figures.
1:16.6	So you'll hear me talk to Rabbi Denise and other Jewish leaders, and I think you're going to be
1:21.6	as surprised as I was.
1:23.6	We talk about Israel and Tel Aviv specifically as the safe haven for queer and trans people in the Middle East.
1:30.1	And as I found being there, it's complicated, of course, but that's not necessarily true.
1:36.4	From Luminary Media, I'm Jeffrey Masters, and this is LGBTQMA. LGBTQ and A.
1:56.2	On the way over here, I was thinking about just our history, and you must be part of the first generation of openly queer rabbis.
1:58.8	Yes.
1:59.4	Right?
1:59.8	I am of the first generation of openly queer rabbis. Yes. Right? I am of the first generation of openly queer rabbis.
	...

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