I mentioned I was working on the poems used to call honorees on Simchat Torah. The poems assume that the honorees are male and the Torah female. I was tempted to offer versions with switched genders but finally decided there’s little point changing the Hebrew poems. Here’s the note I’m putting in the book to explain why, and I invite your comments, in case you actually read this.

The Chatan Torah oversees the final reading from the entire Torah, and the Chatan Bereshit oversees the beginning of the next year’s cycle (for congregations with an annual cycle). As you can see from the poems used (in whole or on part) to call them up, these honors are a big deal. Some will say the honors go to leaders in the congregation, role models in virtue and scholarship, dedicated to Jewish practice and to Jewish ideals and to their congregation. Others will say the honors go to anyone willing to sponsor a fancy Kiddush.

Some communities want to share the honor of Chatan Torah and Bereshit, Bridegrooms of the Last and First Torah Readings, equally among men and women. Torah is part of every healthy Jewish life and relationship, so Jewish singles and couples are all in a sense “wedded” to the Torah.

However, some will point out that these honors are about faking a marriage to Torah, and the Torah is feminine—the Hebrew word Torah is of the feminine gender, the Torah is feminine in traditionally male-dominated religious fantasy and certainly in these poems. (That’s not why she has those cute velvety dresses and the fancy silver deely-boppers to wear; in olden times, guys used to wear skirts, like the High Priest on Yom Kippur with bells and pomegranates a-jangling.) But Torah is often a she, and many people will understand if some shuls hesitate to celebrate a relationship between two females or a threesome. Please stop sniggering.

That’s why we didn’t provide versions of these poems for calling up a lady or a couple. If you think we’re marrying off a girl-scroll, you’ll insist on calling up a guy. Otherwise, this could be a good time to ignore the gender of the pronouns in these poems and use them for whoever gets the honor, a guy, a gal, a couple, a family, or whatever you please.