Episode 3.7 Transcript

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Welcome to Women Rabbis Talk, a podcast where women rabbis talk to other women rabbis about being women rabbis. I’m one of your hosts Rabbi Marci Bellows and with me, as always is –

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Rabbi Emma Gottlieb.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
And as we begin every episode, I’m going to turn to my co host and ask her: Hey, Emma, what are you thinking about?

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Well, Marci, I am thinking about how excited I am that you’ve started your sabbatical, and that you have so many beautiful opportunities ahead of you, including what you shared with us recently about your project to record your meditations, your Jewish meditations. And I’ve been thinking about how badly I want to experience one of these amazing meditations that I have heard about, but not had the opportunity to participate in, at least not a long time, probably at some point at camp, we, we did one but it’s been a while. So I wondered if you would be willing to give our listeners and myself a little taste of what’s to come and lead us into like, just maybe like a little short meditation.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
I would be absolutely honoured. Thank you for asking.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
So great. Okay, well, listeners get comfortable and off we go.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Let’s begin by becoming aware of our breathing. It’s something that we do all day every day. And yet we so rarely pay attention to this simple act. So just feel the oxygen entering your body and the air leaving as you exhale. If you are comfortable doing so close your eyes. And whether you’re sitting down or laying down, allow your arms and your legs to feel relaxed. Whether you need to cross them or uncross them, allow them to just be in their most natural state.

And now, I’m going to be counting each breath for a count of four. And I invite you to inhale and exhale with me. We’re going to breathe in 2-3-4 and out 2-3-4 And in 2-3-4, and out 2-3-4 And in 2-3-4, and out 2-3-4 and in 2-3-4 and out 2-3-4. Even this simple method of counting your breath, gives your mind something to focus on. When you are feeling stressed when you’re feeling anxiety. When you’re feeling in any way that you want to redirect your thoughts. Simply refocus your mind on your breath on your body. And count your breaths in for four out for four. Thank you so much for enjoying this short preview of many meditations to come.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
We are so honoured to have an incredible guest with us today, we are proud to welcome Rabbi Mina Bromberg to our show. Rabbi Bromberg, welcome to Women Rabbis Talk! During our show today, as well as professionally, what do you like to be called and why? And what are your pronouns?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Well, I always love being introduced with a little bit of pomp and fanciness. So I’m always happy to be introduced as Rabbi Mina Bromberg or even Rabbi Dr. Mina Romberg if you’re feeling even especially fancy, and then I like to be Minna in conversation with people who I’m actually talking to.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
(Laughs) So then, why do you prefer Minna then in conversation?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I think I think I just like I went to a very tiny little liberal arts college where we called our professors by their first names. And I think that really gave me a sense that people who are in conversation with one another, even if they are, in some way, in some kind of authority figure situation, that my preference when I am in an authority figure situation is generally to be addressed by my first name, and to have something a little bit more collegial rather than hierarchical. And I use she/her pronouns.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Wow, fascinating, a very different answer than we’ve often gotten. So thank you. That’s really fascinating. And where does the “Dr” come from?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I have a PhD in Sociology, which I did before I went to rabbinical school. My dissertation was on identity construction and interfaith families. And so I lived in Chicago for seven-ish years and went to Northwestern for my doctorate.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Yay, Evanston. I grew up in Skokie. So, Midwest represent. So tell us Mina about how you chose to become a rabbi after having this PhD and pursuing sociology in such a fascinating way. And then tell us about some other positions that you’ve held before you began your current project.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I was actually mid PhD, when I realised that I really wanted to be involved in something involving teaching and spiritual leadership in the Jewish world. I had, and I came to it through, actually through prayer-leading at at Beth Emet synagogue in in Evanston, Illinois, where at the time that the clergy were Rabbi Peter Noble, Rabbi, Andrea Londen, and Cantor Jeff Klepper. And really all three of them invited me into being a prayer-leader, and Jeff and I had a connection through folk-music connections. So I started leading prayer and it just became more and more obvious to me that that was where I felt like I was able to do my best work. And I do sometimes joke that sociology drove me to religion, because I just felt like there were questions that I wanted to be able to pose and answer, that I couldn’t do within the confines of a particular academic, that particular academic field.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
So since then officially entering the rabbinate, what have you done so far?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Well, I do love congregational work, even though it’s not my work currently. So I was a student rabbi at all kinds of different congregations. I went to Hebrew College for a rabbinical school and really enjoyed being able to serve congregations that were in a number of different movement contexts. And then my first pulpit that my last year of rabbinical school and then for four years after that, was a Conservative congregation in Reading, Pennsylvania. Then after that, when we made aliyah, my husband and I in 2014, I served as the coordinator of the year Israel programme for Hebrew College rabbinical students.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Fun fact, I am a Monopoly fanatic. My family collects Monopoly games, which is like a very bizarre thing to collect. But my dad started a collection many years ago when he was travelling Europe, and it stuck. And so anytime anyone says any of the railways, I get really excited. So thank you for that.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Absolutely. I usually describe reading as about an hour and several decades from Philadelphia.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
(Laughs) Shout out to Reading.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
It was a wonderful it was a wonderful first was wonderful for his pulpit. I really fell in love with the congregation and the community there.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Wow, that’s great.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Minna, we invited you to chat with us about your organisation, which I’m not even going to attempt to introduce, I’m going to leave it to you to tell us all about what it is, what it’s called. And its goals, I’ll just say it’s a really unique approach to Jewish life and learning and identity. We are just so excited to be talking about it with you.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
So I started Fat Torah at the beginning of the pandemic, basically, just before I guess, and it grew out of a real desire to, and from the, from the personal perspective, a real desire to bring together 30 years of involvement in the fat liberation movement into my rabbinate. So even before I started Fat Torah as an organisation, I had been doing little, the name Fat Torah had been sort of circling around in my head, and I had done little bits of blogging here and there for various, in various places using the term Fat Torah. And for me, just the name itself is a way of, first of all, just encouraging people to start using the word “fat” as a morally neutral descriptor of a certain kind of body in the vast diversity of human bodies. And that’s very much in keeping with the over 50 years of history of fat liberation movement in the US. So that’s certainly not my invention. But what is new is to bring it together with Torah, with what the best of what Jewish tradition has to offer. And the goal of the organisation is really to bring fat liberation to our Jewish communal life, to confront weight stigma in the ways that it shows up in our in our communities, and also to really deploy Torah and Jewish tradition in ways that are liberatory for all bodies. So that’s the that’s the work that we’re doing.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
It’s so incredible. And there’s so many layers, even to what you just said. I imagine our listeners might want to know more about the fat liberation movement, but we’re gonna try to keep focused on the Jewish side and the Torah, the Fat Torah side, but maybe at the end, you can provide us with some resources that we can share with our listeners in the episode information section, so that anyone who wants to learn just sort of more about the background of the fat liberation movement, you can find that there in case we don’t cover all of it in this conversation. And so you say you have this desire to bring, sort of to bridge these two passions of yours, and bring them together. Was there anything in particular that inspired you or that made you feel like this was an important conversation to bring into Jewish spaces and Jewish community, and into the context of Torah?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Well, there’s definitely a catalysing event, I would say, that made me feel like I could no longer, that I was no longer willing to keep as quiet as I had been about this. I think that for, you know, for many years, so the backstory is that I got sort of burnt out on left wing protest politics, I would say in the late 1990s. And, and it took me a while to sort of figure out where, how I wanted to be vocal on social justice after that. And I think then, in terms of my fat activism, though, I felt like well, anytime that I was, you know, in public as a fat woman who didn’t hate her body, that I was being an activist, and that is true, I still believe that that is actually one of the most powerful forms of fat activism is simply showing up as ourselves and not apologising for who we are. And especially since I was, you know, both on the bima as a rabbi, and also when I was performing as a singer, or other ways that I was actually quite public, but the catalysing event that made me realise that I wanted to do even more, was a Hanukkah party that I attended with my then three year old daughter and 50 or so of her preschool classmates at a synagogue. And we were all set to do a lot of dancing and singing, and I’m someone who has a relationship with my body, I’m very grateful to say, where I’m usually pretty comfortable dancing in public, and I’m at I don’t have any problem with people seeing me dance around. I’m a large fat woman. So that’s not that’s not something that everyone always shares. And I’m really grateful that the relationship that I had with my body is a loving one. But I was also 39 weeks pregnant at the time and didn’t really feel like dancing, period. I wanted to, you know, be there for my daughter, and she’s like asking me to jump around and I was like, Oh, honey, I can’t jump. And so I had this whole dialogue going in my head around, you know, feeling like I was worried that people were judging me and then hoping that you know, everyone knew I was pregnant. And so then maybe they wouldn’t judge me if they knew that I was pregnant. And that’s I wasn’t dancing. And then you know realising that that’s actually kind of an ableist sort of a thing to say to yourself, right? That actually every body should be able to show up in any space and move or not move, however, we are able and feel like moving. And then you know, all these other little voices, just this sort of ongoing dialogue around this. And, and one of the voices were saying, you know, don’t worry about it, you know, no one’s judging you. No one’s gonna say anything, come on. And then we took a break from dancing to eat, sufganiot, to eat fried, delicious fried Hanukkah foods. And the song leader brought us back into the activities by saying, All right, let’s all get back to dancing unless you’ve gotten too fat from those sufganiyot. And I was appalled. Right? It was a good reminder that the reason that I have all of this fear about people making judgments about my body is because people actually make judgments both internally and out loud about fat bodies all the time. So there was certainly the aspect of it, that’s just about the personal pain, but certainly, that wasn’t the main piece for me. The main piece for me was that I was outraged that he would say something like that in front of these three, four or five year olds, who we know already are judging their own bodies and other people’s bodies and the foods that they eat around you know, judging judging them morally, right? Judging bodies and foods as good and bad in ways that are really really harmful to to children, and certainly, as they grow into adults. Harmful in terms of not only, you know, certainly in terms of mental health and and also in terms of how that can increase risk for for eating disorders. So I was horrified for that reason. But then the piece of about it for me, that makes it Fat Torah, I was just this also overwhelming sense of doesn’t this guy know that this holiday is actually a celebration of fat? Like that is actually what we are here to do for Hanukkah, is to celebrate oil and fat as a symbol of our people’s endurance in the face of hardship. And so realising that, no, he didn’t know that, and most people don’t know that because I as a person who has that perspective, hadn’t been saying that and so it really that was definitely the catalysing event.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
There’s so much that is relatable in that story and painful, I think, for all of us to hear, resonate with. And I have, yeah, I can think of so many moments in my own life and rabbinate where where people’s insensitivity, you know, well, well meaning, you know, ignorant, whatever, comments, you know, hit in these uncomfortable ways, and and then I think it’s so powerful and amazing that you’ve turned that into the catalyst and the inspiration for how you want to use your rabbinate.

It’s interesting to me in particular, there are so many conversations that happen among women rabbis about the things that people say to us about our bodies. And I wonder if you can speak to that a little bit, in terms of your experience as a, as a rabbi, who is sort of particularly attuned to these kinds of comments. Yeah, maybe we can just sort of share a little bit of that side of the conversation with our listeners, before we talk a little bit more about specifically about Fat Torah.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Yeah, I mean, I think that conversations among women and among women rabbis, have the potential to be quite liberatory, but also, unfortunately, have the quite have the potential to really reinforce oppression. So, you know, I think that women rabbis, like anyone else, certainly can be quite harmed. And we can talk more if you’d like about sort of this specific position that women rabbis are often in. But I think that we as colleagues, I don’t think there’s anything you know, it’s not like women rabbis have received some sort of training and how not to perpetuate fatphobia in our ranks. And so I feel really blessed that part of what being affiliated only with my own only with my own organisation right now means that I have the freedom to tell the truth about this, which is that I think that women rabbis can also be perpetrators of great harm against one another in various sometimes in very subtle ways, right. So when we complement weight loss, we don’t always you, we don’t always realise that what we’re doing is making a judgement about fatness, and perpetuating the idea that fat is bad and thin is good. And we’re also always, especially since weight loss statistically tends to be temporary for most of us, when we’re complementing weight loss, we’re letting the person know that the way they looked before was less acceptable to us. And the way they are 95% likely to look some day again, is also not going to be as acceptable to us. And so. So even that, which we think of as sort of either innocuous or a way of bonding around something positive can have really negative impacts.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Based on people close to me who have battled eating disorders, I’m very, very sensitive to commenting on anybody’s weight. I would never actually comment on anybody’s weight loss. And also, when I battled C-Diff for almost an entire year, and I lost a lot of weight, and people were complimenting me, and I’m saying, I’m not doing this. And in fact, I’m wasting away. I could die from this, this is not a good thing. Please don’t compliment me. And I contrast that with actually a wonderful comment I once got at the congregation I worked at many years ago, where a mother came up to me and said, I love when you dance with pride and joy up on the bima, and the role modelling you’re doing for everyone, about just being in yourself and in your body, and celebrating. And that to me was like, Yay, I I’m in my body. I’m embodying happiness, no matter, you know, what particular body I might have, you know? And that for me was so affirming, and counteracted all the negativity. There are so many lines to be crossed and to be delicate about them, or what were you going to –

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Yeah, I was going to share something similar that, you know, I also am very careful not to comment on other people’s bodies. But I have a much harder time, and I think a lot of times what what women rabbis talk about amongst themselves is how do we navigate the things that people say to us about our bodies. You know, last year, I lost a lot of weight. And it was it was from intentional changing of, of eating habits and shifting to healthier eating habits. I wasn’t, I wasn’t dieting, but I made some lifestyle changes. And I lost a very noticeable amount of weight. And every single woman in my community and many of the men commented on it, and often and in ways that they obviously intended to be complimentary, like, a lot of it was well meaning, and I had worked really hard, so it also was hard for me not to say thank you, you know? Because there is something, you know, the validation of the hard work, even though you know, my, my rabbinic feminist brain is telling me like, these are not okay, and you should be calling them out. I also, like, every single time somebody says something, you don’t always want to make an issue of it. And I think we struggle as women rabbis to figure out what, you know, when do we push back on these kinds of comments? When do we just let them slide? So I sort of made a decision not to make people feel bad when they thought they were giving me compliments, but to try to like redirect the conversation. So if people made a comment about how I looked, I would answer about how I felt. That, you know, that I felt healthier and that I had more energy. And that, you know, like, you know, more importantly, I feel great kind of thing, that was sort of a subtle acknowledgement that it really should have been a conversation about how I feel and not about how I look. But I struggled with whether that was enough of a of a response, and my own discomfort with the compliments and and the way that sometimes it was nice to get the compliments. So I would love to hear Minna, your your responses to what Marci and I just shared. And from your experience.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s always tricky for any of us to figure out to what extent our bodies as part of our rabbinates are meant to you know, to what extent our bodies are part of our rabbinates. And, of course, we don’t have control over how other people perceive us. But we do have at least some control over what our intentions are. On the one – So Marci, you know, the the compliments that you got about dancing, like on the one hand, I feel like that’s so amazing that this person saw you that way. And on the other hand, how much pressure it is on us to sort of be role models for other people in how we use our bodies. And what that means. And so often, for example, when people, so one of my favourite things about Fat Torah is that we have a very vibrant, over 900 member Facebook group where people come for, for advice and empowerment and to share victories that they’ve had. And one of my and one thing that often comes up are, you know, folks encouraging one another to advocate for ourselves in various situations. And I always feel a little bit cautious about that, because on the one hand, I want people who want to advocate for themselves, to feel empowered to do that, and to feel like they have the tools to do that and to feel like they know, you know, in in sort of Jewish traditions, sort of what to how to answer how to answer someone who’s not saying something that’s right by you. And on the other hand, it’s a systemic issue. And so the fact that we are somehow relying on any one of our selves to be self advocates can also sort of gloss over the fact that that anti-fat bias is a systemic issue that’s not up to any one of us to solve either in our relationships with our own bodies or in society as a whole. So I think that I tend to really want to sort of have in mind the the extent to which this is a systemic issues.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Minna, what are some of the more challenging questions you’ve received?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
For example, you know, also I’ll sometimes get when I was first starting that Torah, a couple of people were like, What if you lose weight? Then what will you do with that Torah? I was like A) you know, my weight is none of your business, and by the way, you know, has been the same for the last whatever decades of my life, like I’m not – But B) I would hope that no matter what body size I’m in, I would still believe that people of all sizes are entitled to equal treatment, and an equal sense of belonging in our communities, which is not the case right now. And so, another, so one way of dealing with it internally certainly is just to remind ourselves that, yes, we can certainly advocate and, and be a voice and speak up in all of those ways. And at the same time, when we’re dealing with a systemic issue, we shouldn’t feel like the pressure is on any single one of us to, to make those changes. I’d say the same thing for people when they talk about self advocacy, in doctors offices, that it’s not clear that you sometimes advocate speaking up for oneself and demanding fair treatment in a doctor’s office will get you fair treatment, and sometimes it will get you lack of treatment. So, you know, especially when we’re in a situation where there’s a power dynamic, which I think that’s another piece that I think we don’t talk about a lot as, as certainly as rabbis, and particularly as women rabbis like where is the power dynamic when someone is commenting on my body, at a kiddish? Am I in the more powerful authoritative position there? Or are they I have a story I would love to tell about that. If you if you’d like to hear.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Yes, we would love to hear that story. I think that that power dynamic piece is really important to name and probably a lot of people don’t think about it because they think about rabbis being the authority, in the position of authority. But then, if the person commenting on your weight at the bracha is the shul president, or the head of the sisterhood, or you know, or even just a religious school parent, they have a particular kind of power as well, that isn’t always named. So yeah, please tell us that story.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
When I was relatively new at my, my pulpit, I was asked about my walk to synagogue, so I don’t I don’t drive on Shabbat. And so my whole congregation knew that I walked back and forth to synagogue, and one of my congregants who had a huge amount of informal and a little bit of formal power in the congregation, as a board member, asked me how long my walk was. And so I told her, you know, it’s two miles. To which she replied, wow, that’s going to be so good for you. So what was implied in that? And so first of all, it wasn’t a question, right? It wasn’t like there was something I could say back to her in any natural kind of way. And she was implying, that, first of all, she was assuming that that was somehow a new thing for me to walk four miles a day, she had no idea whether that was true or not. She was making all of these assumptions about my habits and my body and my health, which she had no basis to make. And we do that all the time, right? We assume that fat is unhealthy, and that thin is healthy. That is not borne out by the statistics on a group level necessarily, it depends on you know, what our definition of health is, obviously. And it’s certainly not something that you can tell, and more importantly, it’s not something you can tell about an individual by looking at their body, whether they’re healthy or unhealthy, regardless of their size. So absolutely, in that moment, you know, was I the – who had the power in that moment? You know, this person who had just hired me and just brought me into their community when I you know, didn’t really know, I was still getting to know the place, you know? Or was it me? Because I was the rabbi.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Yeah, yeah. I feel like every guest on our podcast has a story like that, regardless of what their body looks like, where people make these comments. Again, often well meaning. Meant to be supportive, but always coming from a place of real understanding of these sort of deeper issues and complexities that you are so helpfully shining a light on for us today and for probably a lot of our listeners who, who maybe don’t or haven’t had the opportunity to sort of think about how we look at and judge and talk about each other’s bodies in in the ways in which, and with the with the language in which you are modelling for us. Really helpful.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
And if our listeners were to come away with anything today, and Minna, I don’t know, if you would agree with this, I would hope it would be to simply just not comment on other people’s bodies. You know, just just just don’t do that just, you know, just be with the human being who’s in front of you. Like, it doesn’t, you know? there’s the, there’s the embodiment of who they are, great, wonderful, but you don’t know what’s going on inside that can be causing whatever’s happening, you know? And it’s not the, what you see, is not at all a representation of what’s going on inside. And it could be really the human being is a human being.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Yeah, and, and that, I would add to that, right, that that extends, first of all, not just to women, but any, any person, any body, any age, any gender, that, you know, I think sometimes we have these conversations and people come away with like, I shouldn’t comment on women’s bodies, but it’s actually any any body’s body shouldn’t be commented on. And that extends not just to weight, but to any physical – You know, lots of times people meet me, and they’ve seen me online, especially now, in a COVID, post COVID life, they’ve seen me online, and the first thing they say is, WOW, I didn’t realise you were so short. Okay, well, why does that matter? You know? What, what? Yeah, thank you? Well, you know what this one said? Yeah, so I think yeah, absolutely Marci, that, that if nothing else, please, listeners, dear listeners, we love you don’t talk about other people’s bodies, to them or anybody else.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Yeah. Do you want to fine tune that? Fine tune that for us, please?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I think the only way that I would fine tune it is that I think that we are, especially in communities that are meant to be communities where we care about one another, that it’s really for me a question of what true caring means. And I think we often think that sort of starting with a comment is a way of offering care about someone else’s body. And in fact, caring should be more about curiosity and inquiry. And so I don’t think that we don’t, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with being curious about one another’s bodies, I think that bodies are a wonderful thing to have. And I don’t think we need to sort of ignore them in order to be in community with one another. But there are open ways of asking about how someone else is doing, including how their body is doing, in ways that don’t perpetuate harm. So especially, you know, going back to the weight loss example, you know, if you notice that someone’s lost weight that might actually, especially if you are a rabbi or someone else in the community who feels like you are like you have an obligation to care, then you rapid weight loss can actually be a sign that something significant is happening in this person’s life. And so I wouldn’t want people to necessarily ignore it. But I think there are ways of making inquiry, like, how are you doing? Or, Hey, what’s going on for you? Or it’s great to see you are you..You know? There are wonderful, open ways of making inquiry about one another’s well being, including our bodies. So I don’t I don’t know that just sort of having a blanket – I don’t want not commenting on in the other’s bodies to turn into sort of pretending that each other’s bodies don’t exist, which I think is sometimes a direction that it can be taking that what you’re suggesting, but so I think that we can also practice the form of caring that involves actually inquiring into how other people are doing.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Thank you. Even better.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Yeah, that’s such an important point. Thank you.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
So, circling back to Fat Torah, can you tell us, Minna, just a little bit more about the organisation? What do you offer? How do you engage with people around these really important topics and conversations? So what is what does that look like? Where Where do people find Fat Torah? You talked about the Facebook group, but I imagine there are other places. And then maybe you can tell us a little bit about how it’s been received?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Yeah, so we we’ve been offering I’ve been offering for the last little more than year and a half, I’ve been offering workshops primarily to congregations and also to Hillels and other Jewish nonprofits around learning more about the way that weight and weight stigma impacts our ability to be in Jewish community, and also ways that Jewish tradition can be used in liberatory ways. So I’ve been offering workshops, and a, we do also have a good social media presence, just both in our Facebook group, but also on Instagram and on Facebook, just sort of offering kind of public teaching via via social media post about about all of this. I do also do some one on one mentoring with professionals who want to be thinking about how to bring this more into their own lives. And also, a project that I’ve been working on really, since the beginning of Fat Torah, is a book that will hopefully be able to be in people’s hands sometime in 2024. To, that’s called Every Body Beloved, that really sort of unpacks a lot of these issues and, and offers some teachings on, you know, directions that we can go to, to create communities where, that are that are more accepting of bodies of all sizes. So that’s some of the work that we’ve been doing. And I would say that, in general, you know, anytime that you’re raising an issue, where the especially, you know, in a culture where there’s a lot of where there tends to be a lot of consensus around anti fat bias. So I want to be, I want to be careful, I think people sometimes talk about about fat phobia as the quote unquote, last acceptable prejudice, which makes it seem as if we’ve solved all of our other oppressive systems, which we haven’t, so so that I think is not helpful. But but it can be helpful to realise that one of the ways that just as all kinds of systemic oppressions have similarities with each other and differences with each other, that, that fatphobia is a place where we have not only a lot of implicit bias, meaning people treating one another differently without even necessarily noticing that they’re doing that, but also just a lot of explicit bias, right, where we have a lot of people in positions of power, and and all and all through society really denigrating fat people and fatness. So anytime I think that we bring up issues that sort of reveal an aspect of culture to itself, you’re gonna get a mix of reception. So I think, for me, the most gratifying reception that I get is the way again, that this work is, you know, uplifting people who themselves are negatively impacted by weight stigma in Jewish life, you know, the folks in the Facebook group who are sharing, you know, that they are now able to share pictures of themselves enjoying Jewish life with their family in ways that they were never able to before. So that in and of itself is a great success, as far as I’m concerned. And we’ve also had people you know, speaking up in trainings in their organisations around diversity, equity and inclusion where you know, where weight stigma wasn’t mentioned, because it usually isn’t included in those trainings. And, you know, asking, that itbe mentioned, all the way to, you know, very, very, you know, issues of real physical access. So, the largest among us really need accommodations, to be able to be physically accommodated in, in Jewish community. So we need sturdy chairs that actually are places that we can sit, you know, when we talk about, I think, you know, most of our Jewish communities think of themselves as wanting to be inclusive. And I think the the need for a place to sit is a wonderful physical and metaphorical example of how we can be more inclusive that I don’t know anyone who feels like they fully belong in a community, if the only chair that they’re offered, hurts them.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
That’s so important to think about, and I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it in exactly that way. So thank you so much for marking that for us and for our listeners. And also the title of your future book is so beautiful, and I can’t wait to read it. I’m curious about sort of drawing on what you were saying about fatphobia. Do you? Do you find or in the conversations that you’re that you’re having through Fat Torah? Are you finding that fatphobia is different within the Jewish community than it is in other spaces and communities? And if so, how and why do you think that may be?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I think that systemic oppressions of all kinds express themselves differently in different cultural contexts. So yes, I think that fatphobia in a Jewish context sort of expresses itself Jewishly. I don’t think that that Jewish community is necessarily sort of quantitatively more fatphobic than any other space in our culture, but it expresses itself in Jewish ways. So one of my favourite examples of this is at a at a kiddish, you know, before when we still ate together, back in the day, it was this beautiful, you know, getting ready, in honour of someone becoming Bar Mitzvah, and there was just this beautiful, beautiful spread of food. And so certainly, I think the fact that one of the things that we do together and Jewish community is eat, is something that sort of opens a door for for fatphobia and diet culture to sort of come on in. So there’s that piece, but in this particular kiddish, this was expressed by someone turning to my father, actually, I was overhearing this whole conversation, turning to my father and saying, you know, what they say, eat the protein and leave the carbs for the goyim. And I was like, I – what an amazing coming together of Borscht Belt xenophobia with diet culture, I just can’t believe that I just heard that. Right? So they’re this very sort of Jewish expression of a very kind of standard at this point in time, diet culture way of thinking about food, right, as opposed to wow, what an amazing, wonderfully celebratory array of foods that we can all share with one another.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
I have a relative who, in a very Jewish way, is always offering food to eat. You know how we obviously have to be, Can I get you anything? Can you have some soup? Would you like something to drink? Would you like something to eat? Would you like a cracker? Can I get you a banana? You know, but then if you turn down something: Good for you, you know? And it’s like, what? Wait, what? Yay, that I turned down something to eat? I don’t understand.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
That’s so messed up.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
It’s so messed up.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
But I think there are so many subconscious ways in which we, in which we internalise, and then externalise our relationships with food, which, which is so Jewish, I, you know, my, my partner, and I have very, very different eating habits, like I’m a three meals a day, kind of girl. And if I skip a meal, God help everybody because I get hangry. And so because I get hangry, I’m very focused on eating at regular intervals. And because I’m Jewish, I’m focused on like, healing people with food and offering food. I don’t congratulate them, when they turn down the food, like the opposite, I get very stressed out if other people don’t eat. And I never realised that until I was in a relationship with someone who just eats less, and has a very different relationship with with food than I do. And, and then I was like, Oh, I’m like, a bit obsessed with it. And, and, and have judgments about other people’s eating compared to my eating. And I just had no, no idea. And then I think, you know, we bring that to shul and inflict it on each other at the brocha, knowingly or unknowingly, and it gets woven into you know, what do we serve at the brocha? Do we have enough healthy options? And what what what are our different opinions about healthy options? Because for some people, maybe that’s like, having vegan options. And for some people that’s having you carb free options. And for some people that’s having, you know, and then and then you have to, like, meet everybody’s dietary needs, or you just go crazy. And it’s cupcakes, and, you know, and and we bring all of that angst and energy and judgement and joy all around the brocha table. So Mina, what, what advice do you have for communities who are trying to navigate what kinds of foods when we do eat together again, some, our community thank God is eating together again right now. And it’s so lovely. But But, but then, of course, we’re faced with all these questions again. So what advice do you have for communities who are trying to navigate how to offer food in ways which are healthy for everyone? Not not in terms of necessarily like healthy food in quotation marks, but like healthy around this kind of messaging?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
That’s a great question. I think that, you know, my vision is that there will come a day when Jewish communities will be real bastions of an approach to eating that is celebratory in relatively neutral ways. And that offers a wonderful variety of foods from which people can make their own choices, without other people commenting on what those choices are. I think that you know, I as you’re, as you’re speaking, I’m realising like wow, what we should really do is have a programme with a wonderful anti diet dietitian around you know how communities can come together and, and, and eat together in in good and and genuinely healthy ways that don’t moralise around food. Because I think some of it is just that there’s so much moralising around food. And it really feels idolatrous to me in the sense that we’re putting all of this morality on something, which is not where our morality ought to be, right, there are actual causes, and places where there is right happening and wrong happening that we should be addressing. And what someone chooses to eat should not be one of those. So So yeah, so I think programmatically, it’d be great to sort of, you know, get get communities engaged with, you know, people like anti diet, dieticians, who really do know, you know, the latest science on nutrition and are actually evidence based around how we eat not only what we eat, but how we eat and how we offer food to one another. There’s a wonderful book coming out early next year by a favourite food and food and fatness journalist of mine, named Virginia Soul Smith, the book is called Fat Talk. And it’s all about sort of all these questions around how parents interact with food with their children. But I think it would be great to think about so there is wonderful work going on in those areas. And it’d be great to think about how to think of how to do that on a community scale.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
As a parent, that’s a really hard thing, you know, to take all the eat when you’re hungry. Don’t eat when you’re not hungry. And yet, this is meal time. How do we do all that? Oh my gosh, so yay, I want to check out her books. That sounds great. Thank you for the recommendation.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
So Minna, we have a segment in every episode that includes an Ask The Rabbi question. And we have an anonymous question that was submitted. And it seemed especially appropriate for you because our listeners may not know that, as you mentioned very quickly before, you made Aliyah, you live in Jerusalem. And this is a question about the Kotel about the Western Wall. And the question essentially, I’m going to kind of paraphrase it is, does all of the strife surrounding women’s prayer at the Kotel affect your own relationship with prayer there? What is your relationship with the Kotel especially considering all of that the battling that goes on there?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I think it’s it’s such an interesting way of framing the question because women’s prayer happens at the Kotel all the time. And there is no shortage of women’s prayer at the Kotel. You know, you can go any day of the week and see women fervently praying there at the Kotel and of course, the question becomes, you know how to how do we allow for non orthodox prayer gatherings at the Kotel? I think that in some ways, it’s maybe forced me to think about, you know, where I think prayer actually needs to happen, I think, and it’s brought up a lot of thoughts for me around prayer and protest. And when do I believe that? When do I want my prayer to be protest? And when do I want it to just be prayer? So it certainly sort of sharpened some of those ideas for me. I don’t think it’s, I mean, I am sort of spoiled in the sense that, you know, I could if I, if I didn’t have childcare responsibilities, I could, you know, stop talking to you and go off and pray at the Kotel right? And no one would, no one would stop me, as a woman, they might stop me, of course, if I were praying in a way that they deemed to be inappropriate, and that and that is painful to me. But I don’t think that I tend to sort of make a big distinction between between what goes on at the Kotel and what goes on in the rest of Israel around Jewish pluralism. So I think that for me, the problem is that, that we don’t have a protection of the idea that there are many, many ways to be Jewish, even though we have a population that expresses many, many, many ways to be Jewish, and many ways to engage in Jewish prayer. So I don’t think it necessarily makes me sort of less likely to feel connected there. But I do think that it highlights my sadness around and my anger around the fact that that, you know, that this, this country, that you know, that this government certainly has made choices around, who gets to decide who can pray how publicly and at the same time, I feel like, you know, women’s again, just that women’s prayer in Israel is, is flourishing in all kinds of ways publicly and privately and I don’t want to lose sight of that.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
(In Hebrew) Ein yeish yoter miderech echad lihiyot yehudi.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Exactly.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
I have that bumper sticker. “There’s more than one way to be a Jew.”

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
I think I feel very similarly to that, in terms of the sort of general sadness it evokes in me, but I also, I do, I do feel like over the years, my relationship with prayer in that space has changed. When I was a teenager, my aunt made me a tallit that was lace. It was a lace tallit. And it was it was sort of in the like, early days earlier, the earlier end of the days of like, creative talitot and different kinds of tallitot and talitot that didn’t necessarily look like traditional talitot. So it was a lace tallit and it had tzit-tzit, but if you weren’t looking closely, it looked like a lace shawl. And when I went on NFTY Israel, I took it with me and I took it to the Kotel and I put it on and I walked up to the wall and I pulled it over my head and I prayed and it was beautiful. And nobody batted an eyelash because it didn’t look like a tallit. It’s and and I just kind of got away with it. And this was pre- I don’t know, I’m my guess is Women of the Wall existed back then? But they weren’t like what they are now. And I kind of miss those days where you could just kind of sneak up to the wall with a tallit that didn’t look like it a tallit and like have your moment. And and I knew that what I was doing was subversive, like I knew it wasn’t allowed, and I got kind of a little like, teenage kick out of it, you know, but nobody like stoned me for it. You know, now if I want to pray the way that I would want to pray in the women’s section, it would be noticed and possibly dangerous. So it’s hard not to feel a different, different relationship to the space for me, although I don’t know that it’s changed my relationship to prayer, just to that to that space, and to the importance of supporting all kinds of Judaism, being able to be expressed in that space. What about you Marci?

Rabbi Marci Bellows
I’ve always had a really conflicted relationship with the Kotel, specifically. I find it so powerfully spiritual because of all that it represents for 1000s of years. But I find the fact that we’re so not wanted there for so many reasons, and that we get, you know, kind of pushed off to the side to the southern wall, it infuriates me, and that gets in the way of my prayerful experience. And so, you know, there’s prayerful protests, and then there’s like, just forget it, you know, like, I’m gonna go pray elsewhere. And I’m not going to pray here. So like, I love to go and I treasure the experience of feeling that that cold stone against my forehead and feeling like I can, you know, speak to God there. But then, you know, my rational mind says, I can speak to God anywhere, especially here in Jerusalem of all places. What’s magical about this spot? Because I don’t long for a return to you know, the Beit HaMikdash, to the to the Temple. So I do I have a lot of conflict with it there. And, you know, I’ll continue to wrestle. We have our rabbinic convention coming up there in February for CCAR. And Minna, maybe we can get together. I would really love to continue to wrestle. I think it’s one of the things that’s going to continue to just go back and forth within me throughout my life.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
So Minna, we have a Questionnaire Mahair that we take our guests through each in each of our episodes. Feel free to answer with short and sweet responses so that we can keep it Mahair as a questionnaire. (Laughs) So, are you ready Minna?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I’m ready.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Great. Who was your first woman rabbi either in your home synagogue or that you were first aware of?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
In my home synagogue, Amy Perlin. I had a whole, we had student rabbis who had come to our synagogue, and one of those was Amy Perlin.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
That’s amazing. I think we have to go back and start tracking Marci, how many people have said Amy, because she gets a lot of press in the Questionnaire Mahair. And then Minna, tell us about a woman who inspires you, it can be a woman who’s Jewish or otherwise,

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I would have to say that Odetta. Odetta is a woman who inspires me. So Odetta, for those who don’t know, an important black woman, folk singer, who I once had the amazing experience of being backstage with, because we were each going to be going on to the same stage one after the other. I was with a group of like, 40 other people, and she was by herself. Anyway, I went up to her and I was like, Oh, my gosh, what do I say? What do I say? And I said something like, you know, I just want you to know that I think you’re a really amazing and beautiful woman. To which she, my heroine, looked at me and said, takes one to know one.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Oh,

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Whoa, that’s intense. Wow, what a moment that must have been. Okay, so fill in the blank being a woman rabbi is, or women rabbis are –

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Being a woman rabbi is a delight.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
I love that. Thank you. And what do you think would surprise people to learn about women rabbis?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
That if you know one woman Rabbi, You know, one woman Rabbi.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
And not all of them. I love that. We haven’t had that answer yet. That’s great. Thank you. What is your favourite, or do you have a favourite Jewish character from a book movie or TV show?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Am I allowed to use biblical characters? Because if so, I would have to go with Miriam the Prophet. I mean, come on.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
The Torah is a book so I think you’re I think you’re within the bounds of the question.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
She’s been in some movies, too. She’s she’s been in some movies, too. Yeah.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
What is the Jewish text teaching or value that inspires you and or informs your life?

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I’m definitely going to go with the with the big the idea that all human beings are created in the divine image. And my favourite text about that is from Mishna Sanhedrin, which is where the famous teaching comes about how if, if a human king stamps out coins in his image, all the coins look the same. But when God creates each one of us, in God’s own image, every single one of us looks different – this celebration of God’s greatness through the diversity of human bodies.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
Oh I love that thank you for sharing that text with us. That’s beautiful. Minna, what are you thinking about these days? This can be a longer answer.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
I’m the thing that comes most to mind is fundraising I am learning as part of as part of moving into being you know, the continuing to grow and being Fat Torah’s founder, I’m learning all about what it means to get support from from our community, in order to be able to do this amazing work. And I think that the reason that it feels important to me as something to focus on is because I think so often, you know, it’s something that we see as sort of a a necessary evil, and I’m not, I’m not experiencing it that way, at least this time around. I’m really experiencing it as a way to, you know, communicate with people about my desire to have people be able to, you know, use whatever abundance they have to help me and to help us continue to create a world of greater abundance.

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
It’s sort of amazing how when you’re fundraising for something you’re really passionate about, it doesn’t feel like as scary. I’ve had a similar thing lately. So. Yeah, it’s, I relate to that. And, and also, probably a lot of people don’t realise how often rabbis think about fundraising.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
And how little training we get on how to do it –

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
So little.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
– in our training. Yes. So, so many things that we learn on the job, that will be a fascinating segment sometime. What’s something that you didn’t know you were going to have to learn after you were finished with rabbinical school?

Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
We should add that to Questionnaire Mahair for sure. I love that. Thanks, Minna.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Oh, Mina, this has been such an incredible experience speaking with you today. What a joy, a delight and a moving experience. I hope that you do get the support that you need, and that we all continue to learn from you. And that we experience liberation, thanks to you, you’re our Miriam! You’re helping us to dance on the other shore of the sea. Thanks to you. And we are just grateful. So first of all, where can our guests find you if they want to reach out to you? And also if you have recommendations for fat liberation texts, that people who want to learn more about it can research that would be wonderful, too.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Great. So we are @ FatToria.org And you can also find us on Instagram and Facebook, and the oh my goodness, such a wealth of of wonderful texts. There’s a new book coming out from Aubrey Gordon, who’s a wonderful fat liberation communicator. Her book is coming out also, I think the same day as Virginia Soul Smith’s her book is called, You Just Need To Lose Weight And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, I believe. So that’s a great place to start. If you’re interested in more of the nutrition piece that I was talking about, Christie Harrison’s book, The Anti Diet is a great book to start with. One organisation that people should be aware of that celebrated its 50th anniversary a couple of years ago, is NAAFA, the National Association to Advance fat acceptance, which is at naafa.org. They’ve been around since 1969. And they’re doing good things.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Wow, amazing. And any other places. If people want to reach you should they reach out to they go to the website for fattorah.org And they’ll be able to reach out to you.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
Yes! That’s, that’s the easiest. You can email me and find me directly or you can message me on Facebook or Instagram.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for your generosity of spirit and wisdom today. You are truly an amazing neshama. Thank you.

Rabbi Minna Bromberg
You are so welcome. Thanks so much for having me. It’s really good to be with you and to be in conversation with you.

Rabbi Marci Bellows
Thanks. Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Transcribed by https://otter.ai