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“Let Us Bless the Twilight”: Intersectionality of Traditional Jewish Ritual and Queer Pride in a Reform Congregation in Israel

ABSTRACT Kabbalat Shabbat (Welcoming the Sabbath) is a traditional Jewish ritual marking the transition between the profane weekday and the holy Shabbat. Reform Jewish communities maintain this practice with certain ritualistic and textual revisions, in order to include gender and sexual categories previously excluded from mainstream traditional Jewish texts and rituals. This ethnographic article analyzes the particular LGBTQ Kabbalat Shabbat. By creating unique rituals to mark phenomena of both oppression and exclusion, on the one hand, and of love and acceptance, on the other, the Reform congregation emerges as a religious safe space. I argue that those rituals dedicated to and constructed by the LGBTQ community function as a performance of affirmation and empower of gender and sexual identities. This egalitarian performance fosters a shared political discourse for promoting the struggle for equal rights, through a new religious practice.