Still Being Shaped

Content warning: This piece explores death and the specific loss of life associated with the HIV/AIDS crisis.

I don’t know how else to say this, but I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. I started this year with a simple intention: read more books. Somehow, the five books I’ve already finished in 2026 are all about death. Sudden death. Drawn-out death. Death at home, death abroad, death in bed, death beneath trees, death upon hills, death by the ocean. One of these books, a novel, depicts an older man who finds meaning in attending shul after his wife’s death. He immerses himself in Torah and, towards the end of the book, he cites the Talmudic guidance that if a funeral procession and a wedding procession should cross paths, the wedding procession goes first. Why? “Because living is more important than death,” he says. It’s an inspiring sentiment, one that I probably agree with, but I don’t actually think the two are distinct experiences. Life and death are inextricably linked, dependent on each other, and perhaps a top-tier example of a false binary.

When the mere mention of death arrives, living changes. A diagnosis, an accident, an injury—or even a book—can collapse the boundary we imagine between living and dying, reminding us of our mortality and the preciousness of life. Gratitude can deepen, fear can sharpen, and new questions begin to surface. Among those questions is one we’ve mythologized: how am I going to die? Fairy tales and parables imagine people granted the answer ahead of time, as if knowing could bring comfort. Usually, this “how” is logistical—How will it happen? How old will I be? Will I feel any pain? But lately, the “how” I’m wondering about feels different, more relational than practical: Will there be time for people to sit by my bedside? Who will they be? Where will my body go, and who will carry my stories forward? In the end, death doesn’t only illuminate the life of the person who is dying—it casts a bright light on the people around them, and the trust we place in others to hold us to and through death itself.

What happens when the people who surround our dying are not the ones we expected would be there?

This is where Rabbi Lisa Edwards’ story comes to mind. Rabbi Lisa, one of two enormously inspiring leaders SVARA is honoring later this month at Shaping Tradition, is Rabbi Emerita of Congregation Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC)—the first LGBTQ synagogue and a long-standing spiritual home in Los Angeles. She came into her rabbinate in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and in an interview housed at the Jewish Women’s Archive, Rabbi Lisa recalls what that meant for her as a congregational leader. Being placed at the nexus of life and death is not out of the ordinary for a rabbi, but many of the BCC congregants who were dying of AIDS had been abandoned by every institution that could have and should have been with them through the end. “It was still at a time when many people were being cut off from their families, and they were ill, and they were dying, and their families weren’t connecting with them. It was left to the congregation to take care of lots of people.”¹ It fell to Rabbi Lisa and her congregants to sit at bedsides, to organize funerals, to accompany one another through unimaginable grief. “I think that coming into a place in a community when fear and grief were driving was both challenging and moving, and it was some place that I, for whatever reason, felt quite comfortable.” She stepped directly into a space defined by fear, loss, and the abandonment of queer and trans Jews—and helped transform it into a place of presence, ritual, and care. 

Judaism has so much to offer us in navigating dying and death. Our tradition is filled with wisdom and frameworks for holding people at the edge of life and guiding their loved ones through grief. As the AIDS crisis revealed so much about how perhaps the only thing harder than living as a queer person was dying as a queer person, Rabbi Lisa insisted that Judaism expand to meet those people in their entirety. And, I think, this is what we mean when we talk about shaping tradition. It is the sacred, necessary work of bringing our fullest selves to Judaism and building it more whole than we found it. It is working with the very tools our tradition gives us to ensure that the fullness of who we are will be honored, celebrated, and accompanied—from birth, into life, and back to death. By insisting on care, dignity, and companionship for people others were afraid to touch, Rabbi Lisa helped shape not only our Jewish tradition, but our broader human traditions. Time and again, she honored a moral commitment to sit with those the world was demanding she step back from.

In two weeks, we’ll gather for Shaping Tradition, our annual celebration and fundraiser, where we’ll honor Rabbi Lisa alongside the extraordinary Shira Kline. I expect the evening to be immensely sweet and special, full of music and community. But I also hope we hold space for a deeper truth: that shaping tradition is not always joyful work. It is also heartbreaking, demanding, and sometimes born in moments of profound loss. It asks us to keep stretching Judaism so it can hold the full reality of our lives as well as our deaths. SVARA has pushed Judaism so far since we first began, through our insistence on building spaces like our earliest Chicago-based batei midrash, the gorgeous immersion of Queer Talmud Camp, and now the rigorous study within the Gemirna Kollel. When I think about what SVARA has done for Judaism, I imagine galaxies upon galaxies of spacious, sacred, and still-being-shaped Jewish tradition. I’m in awe of the bigger, brighter, better worlds being built by Rabbi Lisa, and Shira, and so very many of you, and I can’t wait to come together to celebrate our shared commitment to making living in this tradition (and dying within it, too) more whole for everyone.

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