History
Myrna Reich's legacy, and what it means to write our own Torah.
When member Myrna Reich died in September, 2007, she left the CBST community an incredible legacy: funds to help us write our own Torah. Your contributions and the work of your hands will enable us to fulfill this mitzvah, to realize Myrna’s dream of a community Torah informed by our own experiences, and to strengthen our relationship with this most foundational of all Jewish texts.
The rabbis of the Talmudic period enumerated 613 mitzvot, 613 obligations which Jews are instructed to make real. The final one, the 613th, is for each of us to write a Torah. This mitzvah derives from a verse found near the end of Moses’ Five Books: “Write for yourselves this poem and teach it to the people of Israel.” (Deuteronomy 31:19)
But the project of writing a Torah seems daunting, to say the least. First, of course, is the technical aspect. How many of us, these days, are really good with a quill? And let us not forget the Torah text itself. For modern Jews what the Torah tells us is inspiring and vexing, both. “Tzedek, Tzedek, Tirdof — Justice, justice shall you pursue,” it instructs. “And, when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field…you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.” We are proud of these verses, emboldened by them. But how should we make sense of the Torah’s troubling treatment of women, or the verses that have been used to demonize and outlaw same-gender sex?
These questions have no simple answers. But one way to address them is to bring to the Torah our own voices, our own perspectives, by participating in its production. CBST’s Torah will contain the same text that has been set down in Torahs throughout the ages. But the intentions we bring to them will be our unique contribution to the Jewish people’s understanding of our central text.
About Myrna - The woman whose legacy will help us write our own Torah.
CBST member Myrna Reich was many things: a retired Director of Operations at the Social Security Administration. A passionate tennis player. A bird-watcher. A beloved friend.
One thing Myrna Reich was not was a regular shul-goer. “Myrna had deep roots in Judaism,” her friend Danielle Korn remembers, “but mostly, she did not attend temple during her adult life.”
Nevertheless, CBST was important to her. “She and I were taken with the unique experience of being gay and Jewish at synagogue,” Korn recalls. “Myrna often told me that one the greatest gifts she ever received was having an aliyah at CBST on Yom Kippur.”
In her last days, Myrna Reich set an example of how individuals can contribute to CBST, even if they don’t visit the synagogue very often. “She felt that she ought to leave money to organizations that fought for the things she believed in,” Korn says. “She believed in CBST and what it does for the gay and Jewish community at large.”
