The Shabbat Walk That Changed My Life
Ariel Katz is the associate general counsel for Hillel International. In celebration of Pride Month, Ariel shared her story about how she met her wife and learned to integrate her queer and Jewish identities.
On a rainy night in late April 2022, nine years into living in Chicago, I took the bus to a Shabbat dinner in nearby Andersonville that would change my life. Uncharacteristically, I was a few minutes late, and there was only one seat left, next to a woman who had also arrived late. We started talking, and I learned that she was smart, and really funny, and easy to talk to. I am shomer Shabbat, so I asked her to walk me home (a mile and a half away) after dinner. She agreed, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It’s maybe a bit of a cliche to have met my wife at a Shabbat dinner, and perhaps even more so that we met at an LGTBQ Shabbat dinner sponsored by Base Hillel.
I grew up in an observant household and attended Jewish day school and Jewish summer camp. I learned to read Hebrew while learning English, and wrote my college essay about the connection I felt to Judaism when I read out loud from the Torah. I never questioned my Jewish identity, and while my relationship with Judaism has changed over the course of my life, it has always remained a core part of who I am.
When I came out as gay at the end of college, I didn’t doubt my Jewishness — but I did wonder whether Jewish spaces would still feel like home. I feared being seen as “other” in communities that had once nurtured me. Could I walk into a synagogue holding a woman’s hand and still be embraced the same way? Who was a gay Ariel Katz in comparison to a straight Ariel Katz? (Spoiler alert: The same person! Just a more whole version of myself.) And how did this new identity fit in with my Jewish identity, if it even fit at all?
I posed these questions to a straight friend who had been living in Chicago for several years. I had just moved to the city, and was dealing with my own sense of my place in the broader world on top of coming out publicly. “How do I add this new identity to my already strong Jewish identity?” I asked her. “Is there room for both?” She went on to share that she felt there was room for both identities, and that most of the Jewish spaces in her life were, in fact, queer spaces, either by design (like the queer Yeshiva where she studied) or by virtue of community (like the synagogue she attended with many queer families). By the time I met my wife nine years later, both my identities were so intertwined that attending a Base Hillel LGBTQ dinner was as commonplace as any other Jewish event I might attend.
That’s why working at Hillel now feels so meaningful — not just because I get to be my full self, but because I get to help make sure others can do the same. Co-leading our LGBTQ Employee Resource Group is more than a side responsibility; it’s a reflection of everything I once needed and now get to help provide. At one of our Employee Resource Group meetings in April, everyone shared different Pride Shabbatot happening on their campuses, or other ways they were collaborating with queer groups on campus or uplifting their own queer students. Some Hillels were so intersected with the queer community that their Shabbat celebrations were marketed as “Gayer than Usual Pride Shabbat.”
Whenever I visit a local campus, it is commonplace to see a Pride flag hanging in a window. To today’s students, this ubiquity may seem like a given. Working for Hillel, I have never had to question my acceptance as a queer Jew, nor questioned the acceptance of queer Jewish students at campus Hillels. After all, it’s easy to take for granted the acceptance of queer Jews in Jewish spaces today, as reflected at Hillel and many progressive synagogues across America. But this wasn’t always the case.
There was a time not long ago when queer Jews had to choose between authenticity and belonging. Hillel is helping change that. I’m proud to work for an organization that creates spaces where Jews can show up fully as themselves — where being queer and Jewish isn’t a contradiction but a celebration. And I’m especially grateful for that rainy night in April, when Hillel made space for me to meet my beshert.