But, as everywhere else, change is coming. The big story over the weekend is that the president of the Phoenix Suns basketball team, Rick Welts, came out. The whole story is insanely worth your time, but if I may cherry-pick from it, longtime NBA Commissioner David Stern—who was also Welts’s longtime boss, and was the subject of a recent Tablet Magazine profile—has been hugely supportive of Welts, not just now, as he has decided to come out, but during particularly dark days, when Welts’s (secret) partner died of AIDS-related illness. “Around 7:30 on the morning after Arnie’s death,” writes the Times’s Dan Barry, “Mr. Welts’s home telephone rang. ‘It was Stern,’ he recalled. ‘And I totally lost it on the phone. You know. Uncle Dave. Comforting.’” Stern and his wife quietly donated $10,000 in Welt’s partner’s memory to the University of Washington. “In thanking Mr. Stern, Mr. Welts said they ‘did the guy thing,’ communicating only through asides and silent stipulations.”

Meanwhile, the Times also profiled Ben Cohen, a just-retired rugby star, as well as a former top college wrestler who are two straight men dedicated to fighting homophobia in sports. “It brings me to bloody tears,” says Cohen, who helped England win a World Cup, of emails documenting hardships suffered by gay athletes. (Cohen is straight—a husband and father, too—but even before his activism had a large gay fanbase, presumably because of his looks. The article also implies, perhaps, that Cohen’s father, who was killed in an attack outside a nightclub he owned, was gay.) UPDATE: Er, Cohen is not Jewish (though is descended from Jews). Um, my bad. David Stern definitely is, though.

“I think there’s a good chance the world will find this unremarkable,” Stern remarked of Welts’s brave act. “I don’t know if I was confusing my thoughts with my hopes.” Here is hoping he wasn’t. Some day, probably not too far off, an active professional male athlete will come out; and some day after that—if it’s not that day—a superstar will. Until then, though, Welts will be the chief hero on this front, secure in the knowledge that folks like Stern and Cohen will have his back.

A Sports Executive Leaves the Safety of His Shadow Life [NYT]
Two Straight Athletes Combat Homophobia [NYT]
Related: King David [Tablet Magazine]

The truth, alas, was less piquant: agents were finally able to ascertain that Teitel was driving a pregnant neighbor to the hospital at the time of the community center shootings. Nevertheless, Teitel expressed his support for the horrific act, and told investigators that he had selected his nom de guerre, the Black Bear, as a clear message to Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Nethanyahu to act against Israel’s gay citizens.

Yaakov Teitel’s Investigation: The Confession, the Strange Alibi, and the Plans for the Next Murder [Haaretz, in Hebrew]

We were supposed to wake up at 6 a.m. and travel to Ramallah. That was almost a condition of Poppy coming here: to see the other side. But we slept in, didn’t make it to Jerusalem, and missed the organized tour I had booked. I was relieved, I admit. I can—and do—engage with ‘Israel the occupier’ from London—there’s no other option. Here, I just want to live for one month—as a young, gay, Jewish woman, far from the sense of otherness that I grew up with. I didn’t want to go to Ramallah. I didn’t want to be pushed out of the bubble. Being in the bubble is what I came here for.

Instead, we spent the day cycling around the city, drinking coffee in the hip southern neighborhood of Florentine and in Jaffa, playing matkot on the beach, going for sushi. The plan was either to meet some Israeli friends later in a gay bar, or to go to a “queer party.” There’s always something going on in Tel Aviv, but gay life has become so much a part of the city’s cultural fabric that it doesn’t feel like going out “on the scene.” The whole city is the “scene.”

In the end, we decided to just walk home. As usual, I was trying to find the most scenic route—we walked up Montefiore Street, then onto Ahad Ha’am, a quiet, shady street dotted with some of the city’s most beautiful Bauhaus buildings. Then at Nachmani Street, we stumbled into a crowd—of gawkers, of journalists, of ambulances.

By now, we all know what happened. Someone came into a gay community center, shot indiscriminately around the basement where a group of teenagers was meeting, and then walked out. Two people are dead: Nir Katz, a 26-year-old man who volunteered at the center, and Liz Trobishi, a 16-year-old girl. Trobishi’s aunt commented in Haaretz that she was “a passing visitor” who had “no connection to that place.” More people were injured, some seriously. The shooter is still on the loose.

I called a friend to tell her what had happened, but she already knew—police had closed all the gay bars, cafés and clubs in Tel Aviv. She was trapped in the bar where we had planned to meet her, not allowed to leave in case the attacker pressed on to other locations around the city. When they were released, they came to Nachmani Street, where an impromptu vigil took place.

It was a tragic bookend to a week that began with Poppy and I meeting Haggai Agmon-Snir, of the Jerusalem Inter-Cultural Centre, who told us that his organization had spent a year mediating negotiations between gay community leaders and ultra-Orthodox leaders, to allow World Pride Day to take place in Jerusalem. The negotiations were successful—the day happened. But that’s Jerusalem. Of course it was tricky. But here? In Tel Aviv? How could something like this happen in Tel Aviv?

The next day, the city felt like a changed place. Thousands gathered at a solidarity rally that evening on Rothschild, the café-lined boulevard that runs through the heart of the city—most people’s favorite street in Tel Aviv. No one seemed afraid—not of being shot, anyway. Still, a boldness was gone, the boldness I had experienced earlier in my visit, the boldness of the Pride Parade in Tel Aviv in June. People had recycled their Pride banners and were holding them aloft, but the atmosphere couldn’t have been more different to the exuberant one of a few months earlier, when over 10,000 people set out to march from Rabin Square.

I was taking pictures of the crowd. A girl asked me if I had photographed her girlfriend who was in the army and “not allowed to be there.” I said I didn’t think so. I let her check my photos. We looked at each other. I could tell she was ashamed at having asked. And I felt guilty for having made someone feel more vulnerable than they already felt.

Speakers spoke—politicians, activists, lawmakers—and people cheered. The biggest cheer of the day rose up in response to a comment by a community activist. I asked someone next to me to translate. She said that a country that allows the blood of Palestinians to flow should expect something like this to happen. I thought about our Ramallah trip that never happened, and wanted to talk to Poppy, but I couldn’t. She was already on the plane home.

After the rally, I sat in a café and watched people disperse. Next to me was a French news crew. I listened to the French journalist doing his piece to camera. He was talking of Tel Aviv as the youthful center of Israel, the most free, the most liberal place in the Middle East. All the news I hear at home about Israel has a single narrative—the victim turned victimizer. Today’s was a different narrative—a loss of innocence. It was even the top story on the BBC website for a while, before being replaced by reports of Palestinian homes being raided in East Jerusalem.

The bubble has burst. Of course it has. This attack could have happened anywhere—I remember when a nail bomber hit London’s Soho in 1999, killing two and injuring scores of others. But it didn’t. It happened here.

Meanwhile, as I do what Diaspora Jews do—ruminate on their relationship with Israel—two families buried their children. Whoever is responsible still hasn’t been found, and people are starting to talk about what it could mean for life in the city if that person is never found.

On Saturday, as a huge rally takes place in Rabin Square, I will be flying back to London, the end of my month here. When I get back, I think I can have a better, more productive, more honest conversation with Poppy about the possibility of living or spending more time here. I can’t engage with Tel Aviv as a curative to my own experience, growing up gay in a small homogeneous Jewish community, or as an antidote to the tide of anti-Israel feeling I find so difficult in London. I think a lot of Diaspora Jews treat Israel as a kind of playground, willfully naïve. I hadn’t realized that I was one of them.

Nicole Taylor is a screenwriter based in London.

Sha’ar Zahav, the siddur named for the San Francisco congregation that published it, and Siddur B’chol L’vavcha (“With All Your Heart”) from New York City’s Congregation Beth Simchat Torah were released this month, after 10 years of work on each, and are intended for Jews from all denominational backgrounds. What sets the two apart from each other can crudely be signified by their coastal affiliations; Sha’ar Zahav, hailing from California, has a more all-embracing hippie philosophy, while the CBST siddur is more efficient and academic in approach.

Siddur Sha’ar Zahav begins with new prayers, written by Rabbi Camille Shira Angel and her congregants, marking milestones absent from traditional prayer books. There are meditations “For the Partner of Someone in Gender Transition,” “For Letting Go of Having a Biological Child,” “For Taking an HIV Test,” and “For Questioning Sexuality.” Traditional prayers are edited to include both “masculine” and “feminine” language, and a few offer “feminist” language (referring to God as the “Well of life,” rather than “Ruler of the Universe,” which some see as patriarchal). It provides refreshingly metaphorical interpretations of prayers with controversial literal meanings, such as the Shema, which, the siddur notes, “articulates a theology of divine reward and punishment that many Jews do not accept,” and which the siddur suggests might be an ecological warning.

Sha’ar Zahav’s prayer for those who don’t believe in a traditional idea of God declares, “I invent my own religion”—a religion that honors “bones of calcium phosphate,” Albert Einstein, and composting. “I’m a believer, but the ‘Contemplation for the Nonbeliever’ is gorgeous,” Rabbi Angel said in an interview. “If someone can access these words because it says ‘this is for you,’ it doesn’t profane the religion as we’ve inherited it.” The siddur’s “Queer Amidah,” which remarks to God, “How queer of You to have created anything at all,” is intended more as a preparatory group reading, rather than a replacement for the traditional silent meditation, Angel said.

For the blessing recited before aliyot (when individuals are called up to sanctify the chanting of a portion of the Torah reading) , Sha’ar Zahav offers both masculine, plural, and non-gendered language for the honorees. (Because the CBST siddur offers only a Friday night service, it does not include any of the prayers surrounding the Torah reading, which takes place on Saturday mornings.)

Sha’ar also focuses on sexuality in its prayers, a result, Rabbi Angel said, of feminism’s embrace of the physical. “Whoever was the original male editorial board missed the opportunity to lift up bodies and different shapes and different abilities,” she said. “To only refer to the body [in ways like] ‘the blind shall not stumble,’ it’s like, lets honor the ripening of our bodies,” she says, referring to a prayer for the onset of puberty in Sha’ar Zahav. Angel sees the creation of the siddur in terms of childbirth. “Whatever the struggles were during pregnancy and delivery,” she says, “I’m like, lets start working on a machzor [high holiday prayer book].”

CBST’s B’chol L’vavcha, on the other hand is peppered with poems by Tony Kushner, Muriel Rukeyser, and Adrienne Rich, few of which directly address gay issues. The prayers switch between masculine and feminine language for God, aiming for balance. Its margins offer interesting factoids and notes—the KKK forbade members from singing “God Bless America” because it was written by the Jewish Irving Berlin and there’s a connection between the gay-pride flag, the Stonewall Riots, and the story of Noah, for whom God created a rainbow as a way to say “I will never destroy you again, and it’s now up to you to create a universe you can be proud of,” according to the siddur.

Where Sha’ar Zahav offers a separate women’s Amidah, CBST has made a subtler change, adding to the list of matriarchs the names of Bilhah and Zilpah, concubines of Jacob who gave birth to several of the men that would go on to form the tribes of Israel. “In our community there are so many parents who don’t have legal protections, but are loving parents of children,” explained Ayelet Cohen, the congregation’s associate rabbi.

CBST has modified “Lecha Dodi,” a traditional song comparing God’s love to the love of a groom for his bride, to say instead “as a heart rejoices in love.” “It was very important to us that it fits the music,” said Cohen. Their siddur also modifies the prayer “Ma Tovu,” which celebrates the coming together of a community and traditionally only mentions brothers. “We already see versions that include women, but even that assumes a binary concept of gender,” Cohen said. “So we include a third line, that we are all gathered together.”

In addition to the Friday night service, B’chol L’vavcha also includes liturgy for the holiday cycle. There are also prayers for events like comings out, baby namings, and the formation of committed relationships. But the siddur is “conscious not to suggest a particular order that these things should happen in life,” Cohen said.

While both siddurim focus on inclusiveness, Sha’ar Zahav does so by including prayers to suit every variety of gender identity and every aspect of the gay experience. By contrast, B’chol L’vavcha by and large contains one version of each prayer, designed to suit as many people as possible. They both include sections honoring World AIDS Day and the Transgender Day of Remembrance, but while CBST marks these days with poems and readings by celebrated authors, Sha’ar Zahav creates traditionally formatted liturgy for the occasions.

Rabbis from both congregations reject the idea that there is anything divisive about having more than one gay-friendly siddur. “I don’t think that reflects anything new,” said Sharon Kleinbaum, the senior rabbi at CBST. “Synagogues throughout Jewish history have created siddurim that reflect their communities.”