Allyship as Sacred Work

I was recently privileged to be the featured speaker and teacher at Temple Israel of Sharon, Massachusetts for Pride Shabbat 2026. This is the d’var Torah I gave during that Shabbat service.

When I was young—a kid in the 90s—and just starting to explore my own identity, and my place in the world, I signed onto an Internet chat service called ICQ. I made many friends there, some of whom persisted in my life for years. Some of those friends were other trans people, all around the world. One of these people was a trans woman called Sandra. She was one of the first people in my life to address me by a chosen name and chosen pronouns, to really care about who I wanted to be, and to help me identify those parts of myself that I wanted to bring to the forefront and make part of my authentic self. Sandra told me something profound. The key to living as a trans person, in a world that barely recognizes you as human, is to find your joy, and to affirm yourself through it.

But Sandra was not a happy person. In a classic demonstration of how it’s easy to give someone else advice but difficult to take it yourself, she struggled with depression, born of living in a society in which she was isolated for two reasons: first, because she was trans, and second, because she was HIV positive, and even in the queer and trans community, she was treated as an outcast. She was always struggling to find her joy and to affirm herself through it. She died about a year after I made her acquaintance.

The AIDS crisis is not front of mind for many queer and trans people of my generation and younger. Due to the advance of medical treatment, blood testing, antiretroviral therapy, and far greater public awareness than existed in decades past, HIV is no longer the automatic death sentence it once was. Many people living with HIV and who respond well to treatments can expect more or less normal lifespans. But it never went away: there is no cure. The disease is still with us. And, of course, everything I just said refers to those of us living in the so-called “first world”: in other places in the world, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is a full-blown pandemic, and it’s very easy to forget this. In 2022, fourteen percent of the population of South Africa was HIV positive: eight and a half million people. AIDS is not over.

What hurts the vulnerable—what killed my friend Sandra, what kills millions still, both globally and here in our own communities, what afflicts the suffering—is not simply a virus. It is isolation, which breeds despair: being cast out by the very community, the world, that should have held the needy and the desperate with care and tenderness and love. On Pride Shabbat, I want to lift up the sacred work of allyship and ask ourselves the question: how can those of us who are not inside the community do the work to break down this kind of separation, these barriers of artifice that keep us from one another?

I think we may find some answers in this week’s parasha, which contains the famous incident where Aaron and Miriam speak against the “Cushite woman” that Moses married, and God strikes Miriam with tzara’at as a punishment. It’s worth reading the whole story so that we have the full context: this translation is the Revised JPS 2023 version.

Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman he had married: “He married a Cushite!” They said, “Has God spoken only through Moses—and not through us as well?” God heard it. Now Moses himself was very humble, more so than any other human being on earth. Suddenly God called to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, “Come out, you three, to the Tent of Meeting.” So the three of them went out. God came down in a pillar of cloud, stopped at the entrance of the Tent, and called out, “Aaron and Miriam!” The two of them came forward. “Hear these My words: When prophets of God arise among you, I make Myself known to them in a vision, I speak with them in a dream. Not so with My servant Moses; he is trusted throughout My household. With him I speak mouth to mouth, plainly and not in riddles, and he beholds God’s likeness. How then did you not shrink from speaking against My servant Moses!” Still incensed with them, God departed. As the cloud withdrew from the Tent, there was Miriam stricken with snow-white scales! When Aaron turned toward Miriam, he saw that she was stricken with scales. And Aaron said to Moses, “O my lord, account not to us the sin that we committed in our folly. Let her not be like a stillbirth that emerges from its mother’s womb with half its flesh eaten away!” So Moses cried out to God, saying, “O God, pray heal her!” But God said to Moses, “If her father spat in her face, would she not bear her shame for seven days? Let her be shut out of camp for seven days, and then let her be readmitted.” So Miriam was shut out of camp seven days; and the people did not march on until Miriam was readmitted. (Num. 12:1–15)

Quite a few things are going on here. Who was the “Cushite woman”? Was she Tzipporah, the wife Moshe already had, or was she somebody else that Moshe married at some other point while in the wilderness? Why exactly did Miriam and Aaron “speak against” Moses because of her? What was the content of that speech? Why does God react so strongly? What, even, was God reacting to?

The text seems to suggest that God was angry with Miriam and Aaron for speaking against Moses, since he speaks to God directly. God even says that he is unique in this regard: when God wants to speak to other prophets, He does so through dreams or visions. But ironically, God is directly addressing Miriam and Aaron!

The rabbis of our interpretive tradition pick up on some of these threads. They famously suggest that Miriam is punished with tzara’at because she spoke lashon hara: in fact, in the rabbinic imagination, tzara’at is the specific punishment for lashon hara. Ibn Ezra even finds an allegory for this in the word metzora, “one who is afflicted with tzara’at”: it contains the initial letters of the phrase motzi shem ra, “to bring a bad name” against someone else.

And note that there is always a “someone else” here: lashon hara never happens in the abstract. It is always speech against a specific target. Our tradition’s intense focus on the sin of the speaker can have the somewhat surprising effect of obscuring the one who was actually targeted. In the rabbinic framing of this story as being about lashon hara, the victim of the story is Moses. It’s really easy to forget that there’s another victim here: the anonymous ishah kushit, the “Cushite woman”, whom the Torah’s narrative skips lightly over.

So who was the ishah kushit? In the Hebrew Bible, Cush is a rather vaguely-defined area of northeastern Africa. The Greek Septuagint calls her a gyne aithiopissa—an “Ethiopian woman”—though, again, what exactly was the extent of “Ethiopia” in the Greek-speaking world was somewhat vague. Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore the racial implications: she was not Israelite, she was not even from the Near East—and she did not look like Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. Chazal spend quite a lot of time pointing out that there was nothing specifically derogatory about being a Cushite woman, and that it was even seen as to her credit in some particular ways. But it’s a difficult factor to ignore.

I want to ask another question: why did Aaron not get punished? There are several classical explanations. Perhaps since he was Kohen Gadol, it would have seriously compromised the people’s ability to function in a ritual or religious sense. Aaron seems to have admitted fault and pleaded with God for mercy, though one should note that he only did that after Miriam’s punishment had already taken hold. One strain of interpretation reads the text as pointing to Miriam specifically as the instigator of the whole incident, since her name shows up first, and the verb is specifically directed at her: the Torah’s exact language is va-tedaber miriam ve-aharon, which we earlier translated as “Miriam and Aaron spoke”, but va-tedaber is a third person singular feminine verb whose subject is “Miriam”.

It’s important to name this dynamic: the text removes agency from Aaron and assigns it entirely to Miriam. Like the rather ugly undercurrent of racism in this text, there is also a rather ugly undercurrent of misogyny. Sometimes women get punished and bear the blame, when, fairly, the burden should be more equally apportioned. It’s important to name that dynamic; too often it goes unsaid. Here, the text hands the woman the whole bill and doesn’t exactly tell us why.

Miriam’s specific punishment is tzara’at, which is often translated as “leprosy”, but, as is well known, is not actually what we now know as Hansen’s disease. For our purposes, it isn’t really important to come up with a specific identification of what the disease was. What is sufficient is to discuss how it functions socially.

Tzara’at is a disease of avoidance. There is no “cure” in the medical sense: the patient is not administered medication or therapy. As the disease runs its course, the patient is to be kept in isolation, fully quarantined from participation in society. It is enforced invisibility.

And this is the connection between the two threads I’ve been talking about. Lashon hara is a disease that infects spiritually. The Gemara in Sotah tells us that people who speak lashon hara do not merit to be in the Divine Presence. The precise language the Gemara uses is instructive: it calls people who speak slander kat mesap’rei lashon hara, the “band” or “cohort” of people who speak lashon hara, and that they are ein mekablot p’nei shechinah: they do not literally “receive the face of the Shekhinah”, the Divine Presence. They are spiritually isolated by their actions. In the Torah, there is a physical manifestation of this spiritual isolation enforced by the quarantining of the afflicted individual.

In our day, when there is no physical manifestation of lashon hara like tzara’at, we must rely entirely on the community to notice and name the isolation itself: to see who has been pushed outside the camp when nothing overt flags them for us. But first, we must choose to look. Earlier I referred to the barriers that keep communities from caring for their vulnerable as “barriers of artifice”. These barriers are human-made, and therefore human-removable.

The story in our parashah closes with one of the most famous prayers in all of Scripture: Moses’ prayer: el na refa na lah, “God, please heal her, please!” The master stroke of the narrative is that Moses, the injured party, intercedes for the one who injured him. This is the sacred work of allyship: Moses, the man with the most standing and power among the Israelite people, spends that capital interceding for someone in a position of vulnerability. When he prays, he is using his voice, his place inside the camp, to advocate for someone outside of it.

And of course, the story doesn’t end with Miriam still in quarantine: the people do not march on until Miriam is readmitted to the camp. The entire camp refuses to move forward while a single person is left outside. Granted, she’s a very important person, but a single person nevertheless: everyone waits a full week for her; the community declines to proceed on its way until it is whole. And this, right here, is the sacred work of allyship. My friend Sandra fell outside the camp twice over: from the physical disease of AIDS, and from the social disease of transphobia. What would it look like if we had a community, a world, in which we refused to move on without her?

The world is a scary place for queer and trans people right now. It’s a terrible, gut-wrenching feeling for me to tune into the news every morning and wonder what new thing the world is going to inflict upon us. The optimism many of us were feeling a decade ago has been replaced with a deeper existential dread: what new societal ill are they going to decide we are responsible for, and use as a cudgel to try to shunt us out of existence? And how will the next blow land: by legislative and administrative fiat? By economic injustice? By physical violence, by murder?

Right now, the world is a scary place for many people: war, environmental catastrophe, unprecedented economic pressures under late-stage capitalism, what feels like a constant erosion of respect for the rule of law. And I can’t really blame anyone for not feeling like they have the bandwidth to care about people other than themselves. But the Torah is calling us to more than that. It is calling us to reject the urge to throw members of our community under the bus so that we may achieve an apparent compromise. The Torah knows that such a compromise isn’t really a compromise at all, but a defeat. The Torah calls us to not march on until every member of our community is restored to us.

This Pride Shabbat, I pray Moses’ prayer for all of us: El na refa na lanu. Please, God, please heal us. Heal our communities, and heal our world. Heal our souls from the disease of lashon hara, from being motzi shem ra on the most vulnerable among us. Help us to build communities that do not leave people behind when we march on. Grant us the strength to build ourselves up, out of the pit of desperation, past grudging inclusion, to affirmation and to celebration. Then we will truly feel pride in ourselves, in our communities, and in our future.