Thankfully, no violence occurred at the 2007 parade, though hundreds of anti-gay activists lined the route shouting imprecations and holding hateful signs. “Go to a shrink,” one particularly blunt poster read. “Go Away. Your sickness should be healed, not flaunted,” declared another. Over 7,000 police and army officers protected the marchers, and snipers were placed on the rooftops of nearby buildings.

As the ugly reactions to the parade revealed, the vast array of rights that gay people enjoy in the Jewish state—which include serving openly in the military, adoption, domestic partnerships, and the recognition of marriages performed abroad—did not emerge from nowhere. These rights are the fruit of hard work on the part of many activists, gay and straight, who had to push for them against politically powerful, socially conservative elements. This ongoing fight for inclusion was manifested most recently in the creation of an LGBT faction within the Labor Party, supported by all the party’s Knesset members except for Arab-Israeli MK Raleb Majadele.

But the struggles of Israeli activists and the progress they’ve achieved are meaningless to some, including Sarah Schulman, professor, novelist, and self-described “active participant citizen.” In a New York Times op-ed published last week, Schulman argued that these advances in gay rights are merely a “potent tool” in the Jewish state’s “pinkwashing,” by which she means Israel’s “deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.” As evidence of this so-called pinkwashing, Schulman cited the fact that the Tel Aviv tourism board is spending $90 million on a campaign to market the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” For Schulman, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reference to the Middle East as a region “where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted” in his May speech to Congress is yet another example of the sinister pinkwashing trend, also known in many quarters as diplomacy.

Schulman, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, isn’t the first person to employ the phrase. In May, a writer for Time magazine alleged that Israel and Israelis’ participation in a series of international gay events was part of a coordinated campaign undertaken “in the hopes of redirecting [Israel’s] global image away from politics, terrorism and the occupied territories.” Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab politics at Columbia University, told Time that Israel launched this effort “to fend off international condemnation of its violations of the rights of the Palestinian people.” (Massad has written a book, Desiring Arabs, which alleges the existence of a nefarious “Queer International,” with supporters of Israel at its core, whose “discourse … produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist” so as to paint Arab cultures as barbaric.)

The first fallacy of the pinkwashing meme is that it’s a non sequitur. No one is saying that Israel ought to be immune from criticism because it treats gay people humanely. Israel’s stellar record on gay rights does not prevent anyone from condemning the country’s settlement policies, its proposed ban on foreign funding of NGOs, or its lackluster effort to integrate Arab Israelis—issues that Israeli gay activists, many of them leftists, would gladly join Schulman in denouncing. But none of these failings renders Israel’s record on gay rights any less impressive, nor does touting that record constitute a covert method of justifying the occupation or racism against Arab citizens.

Schulman seems incapable of such discernment. “Increasing gay rights have caused some people of good will to mistakenly judge how advanced a country is by how it responds to homosexuality,” she wrote in the op-ed. While it would be foolish to judge a country’s “advancement” solely on the rights of gays, it is a telling standard. The protection of minorities is a bedrock principle of any liberal society, and it is an indisputable fact that sexual, racial, and religious minorities are better off in Israel than they are anywhere else in the region.

Though Schulman claims that, “pinkwashing … manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community” it is Schulman who renders these gains meaningless. According to her, the victories of gay-rights advocates in Israel do not exist in and of themselves, but are cogs in a grand propaganda machine to legitimize occupation and oppression. The effort to create a more open and inclusive Israeli society is merely part of a broader PR campaign—undertaken, ironically enough, by the same right-wing forces who recommended I see a psychiatrist to cure me of my homosexuality—to fool credulous Western liberals into believing that Israel is something it’s not.

While accusing the government of Israel and pro-Israel activists of deceiving well-intentioned progressives, Schulman and her ilk are in fact using the issue of gay rights to forward an ulterior agenda. So consumed are they by hatred of Israel that they are willing to distort the truth about the horrible repression of homosexuals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. If there’s any cleaning of dirty laundry going on here, it is Schulman’s whitewashing the plight of Palestinian gays.

Schulman’s assertion that homosexuality has been effectively “decriminalized” in the Palestinian territories since the 1950s when Jordan revoked colonial-era sodomy laws, will come as cold comfort to the countless gay Palestinians who have fled to Israel after being tortured or receiving death threats by Hamas or Fatah agents. Schulman’s claim would certainly come as news to Maen Rashid Areikat, the PLO’s ambassador to Washington. When asked earlier this year if homosexuality would be tolerated in a future Palestinian state, Areikat replied, “This is an issue that’s beyond my [authority].” Hamas strategist Mahmoud Al-Zahar was blunter. In comments directed toward Westerners, Al-Zahar told Reuters last year that “You do not live like human beings. You do not (even) live like animals. You accept homosexuality. And now you criticize us?” And whatever law might be on the Palestinian Authority books has yet to persuade the leaders of Aswat, a Palestinian lesbian organization, to relocate their headquarters to Ramallah from Haifa. By making the absurd claim that the issue of gay rights is being “manipulated” by the Israeli government, Schulman ends up making excuses for people who kill homosexuals.

Recognizing the enormous gap between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on their respective gay-rights records, critics of the Jewish state have gone to tremendous lengths to propagate a massive lie in order to win over Western progressives. This cognitive dissonance has driven ostensible intellectuals like Columbia University’s Massad to justify the oppression of gay Arabs, as he did in the aftermath of the 2001 “Queen Boat” incident in Egypt, when police raided a gay disco and 52 men were arrested, tortured, and put through a humiliating show trial. “It is not the same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian police,” Massad wrote in Desiring Arabs, “but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the Western identity of gayness and the publicness [sic] that these gay-identified men seek.” In a 2006 interview with the Advocate, Aswat co-founder Raudo Morcos complained about people who portray Palestinian culture as “backward” regarding its treatment of homosexuals. “What is backward? Backward to whom? Are we comparing the Middle East, the Arab community, to the Western world? This is not a fair comparison,” she said. But if Morcos and other advocates of the Palestinian cause genuinely believed in human rights then they would, without hesitation, acknowledge the suffering of Palestinian gays. It’s not mutually exclusive to criticize both Palestinians and Israelis.

Introducing the term “pinkwashing” into the mainstream debate about the Arab-Israeli conflict is edifying in at least one respect: It lays bare the delusion, paranoia, and cynicism of the Jewish state’s most earnest detractors. In their minds, any positive statement made about the country is necessarily part of a propaganda campaign in the service of a far-right agenda. For an increasingly large swath of the international left, there really is no good Israel can do, short of disappear.

“I said it would be my honor,” Herzfeld told me about the invitation offered by Bellin, who is gay and attends Ohev Sholom. Herzfeld turned what would have been a somber commemoration of a tragedy into an inspiring, even newsworthy, event. In his brief speech, he called upon Orthodox congregations to take a “communal pledge declaring that we will not create a climate of gay-bashing,” wowing his mostly gay, Dupont Circle audience.

In his five years in the nation’s capital, the 34-year-old Herzfeld has earned himself a reputation as a rabbi to the powerful. I first met him at the home of David Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, where he was escorting the Chief Rabbi of Venezuela (one event on a multi-stop tour to educate policymakers about the anti-Semitic nature of the Chavista regime). A few weeks later, I dined at his Shabbat table across from Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. Every week, Herzfeld teaches a Torah study class at the Hudson Institute, which attracts not a small number of prominent neoconservative figures like former Defense Department official Doug Feith and human rights activist Michael Horowitz. He also helps lead a weekly class for senators, congressmen and congressional staffers. “He has a lot of energy, and he combines intensity with approachability,” Feith tells me.

Though he rubs shoulders with the prominent, Herzfeld claims to have no interest in what he calls “the cocktail party aspect of politics.” Indeed, his attitude couldn’t be more different from the typical, Type-A Washington, D.C. personality. Frum told of how, leading up to the High Holy Days each year, Herzfeld borrows a taxi from a congregant who owns a cab company and drives it around downtown Washington asking passengers if they’re Jewish. If they reply “no,” the prize is a free ride, if “yes,” then they receive information about Ohev Sholom’s services. “He’s one of the great evangelists of our time,” Frum said. This hunger for forging religious connections with people regardless of their station in life is demonstrative of the unpretentious spirit that guides Herzfeld, and goes a long way towards explaining his more progressive views about homosexuality.

“Homosexuality is an ‘abomination?’” he asks rhetorically. “We don’t use that language for eating pork, yet it’s described in the same way as homosexuality.” Just as Herzfeld opens his synagogue to non-kosher Jews, he welcomes Jews who may practice non-kosher sex. “We should not assume that the totality of a person’s existence can be summed up in one lifestyle choice,” he says.

Established in 1886, Ohev Sholom is Washington’s oldest Orthodox synagogue (Al Jolson’s father once served as cantor), but over the years its congregation dwindled. When Herzfeld was contacted about assuming the position of rabbi, members could barely scrape together a minyan. Herzfeld leapt at the opportunity to build a community and moved his family—his wife is a neurologist and they have six children together— down to Washington. Ohev Sholom’s first Shabbat service under his leadership had 12 people, and Herzfeld immediately began performing outreach. Not long after he moved here in 2004, he aired television ads for High Holy Day services, as the Washington Post reported. He would find random people in the phone book with Jewish-sounding last names and invite them to his shul. Now Ohev Sholom boasts 300 families.

Unlike most Orthodox synagogues, some of those congregants at Ohev Sholom are gay and don’t feel pressured into keeping that fact a secret with their rabbi or fellow worshipers. This is of course in large part attributable to Herzfeld. Whatever the cause of same-sex attraction (and Herzfeld’s use of the phrase “lifestyle choice” to describe it suggests that he believes it reasonable to expect gay people to remain celibate), Herzfeld is obviously not repulsed by it in the way that many clerics are; his easygoing nature at the vigil is evidence of that. “I want to focus on what we can do together,” he says about Jews who are not as observant as he might like them to be, “not on what we can’t do.” This welcoming approach has provided nearby congregations with unexpected competition. According to Frum, “the knock on” Herzfeld from some disgruntled area rabbis “is that he takes the most committed people from other congregations.”

“It might be a law that has no reason,” Herzfeld speculated, comparing the injunction against homosexuality in the Torah to the proscription against wearing garments made of both linen and wool, something that, unlike murder or theft, does not harm other people. Why, then, does he still believe that homosexual activity is wrong? In an essay he wrote nine years ago, Herzfeld cited the rabbinical scholar Rashi about how to confront just such questions: “When Satan and other nations will throw arguments at you and say what is the meaning of this law and what reason is there for it, we should respond, ‘It is a chok,’ it is a decree before me, and I have no permission to think evil thoughts about it.” In other words, the Torah says it, and therefore it is so. Herzfeld likens his attitude towards the legal recognition of gay marriage with that of his involvement in the lives of gentiles seeking state sanction of their unions: it’s none of his business. “If a Christian wants to get married,” he says, “it has nothing to do with me.”

Homosexuality isn’t the only issue where Herzfeld has stirred controversy. Last August he penned an op-ed for The New York Times in which he criticized the Rabbinical Council of America, the main umbrella group for modern Orthodox rabbis, and the Orthodox Union, which represents some 1,000 Orthodox congregations, for what he considered to be their inadequate reactions to revelations of physical abuse, underage employment, and otherwise horrible labor standards at Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher food plant. Some in the Orthodox community saw Herzfeld’s printing such criticisms in the pages of the nation’s paper of record as a shanda fur die goyim. The leaders of the Rabbinical Council of America responded in a letter that it is “unethical to rush to judgment and deny due process to Agriprocessors. Jewish law—and the norms of American justice—requires no less than that.”

While it’s too much to say that Herzfeld will be at the forefront of a quiet revolution to overturn Orthodox Judaism’s reactionary teachings about homosexuality, he is quite clearly a positive force who is already playing a constructive role in the lives of Orthodox gays struggling to reconcile their love of Torah Judaism with their selves. Bellin is grateful that he’s been able to find a synagogue that doesn’t sacrifice spiritual rigor in the pursuit of welcoming people who normally feel excluded from Orthodox Judaism. “I’m very aware that [Herzfeld] coming to speak at the vigil doesn’t mean that he’s ready to change Orthodox law and Orthodox opinion,” he admits. “He’s willing to wrestle internally with that contradiction. Even if it’s a contradiction that won’t be resolved for him, he’s willing to wrestle with the fact that gay people are people and gay Jews are Jews and they also need a spiritual home and a place to explore religion.”

James Kirchick is an assistant editor at The New Republic.

I knew they’d enjoy their first march with their two-year-old cousin Shirley. It would be my mother’s first march too. My brother Andy, his husband Neal, my husband Jonathan, and I are all parade vets, but we’d never marched as a family. And our inaugural outing would be at the perfect time—the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. We’d be marching with Congregation Beth Simhat Torah (CBST), where Andy and Neal are members.

Then I got word from Camp Ramah, which Josie would be attending for the first time, that orientation for new families would take place the same day as New York’s gay pride parade. This would be our only chance to check out the camp grounds and staff before Josie attended the camp an hour from home the very next day

We chose camp over Pride.

As I ate my Popsicle and checked out the swimming pool, I felt a periodic pang thinking of the parade route not taken. More specifically, I wondered if Shirley was having fun. How did she do with the Moment of Silence, when marchers hold up ribbons with names written on them of loved one who’ve died? Did she enjoy waving at the onlookers? (She’s an expert waver.)

On the way back from camp, we had dinner with Andy, Neal, and Shirley in a Salvadoran dive in their Washington Heights neighborhood. Shirley was exhausted and kept exploding in toddler hysterics. Between bouts of whisking her outside to protect other diners from her deafening shrieks, Andy told me, “It was really nice to have Mom marching with us. I kept looking over at her and thinking ‘Hey! It’s Mom!’”

Shirley had indeed loved waving to spectators—she’s like a little Queen Elizabeth—and seeing everyone wave back. She adored the flags. Someone gave her a beach ball—bliss. She reveled in the cheering that always greets the religious organizations. My family marched behind the Episcopalians and in front of the Armenians, Andy told me. “Mom bonded with one of the Armenian moms. She said afterward, ‘We share a history of genocide and hairy eyebrows!’”

Between bites of pupusa con queso, Neal chimed in that Shirley was thrilled to march with her idol, CBST’s cantor. She carried a sign that read “Civil Rights for All Gods [sic] Children.” Over the course of the day, my mother became increasingly annoyed by that missing apostrophe. Finally she grabbed the sign from Shirley, pulled a black pen from her commodious purse, and corrected it. My mom: loves gays, hates bad punctuation.

Later that night at home, I looked online at Andy’s pictures from the day while chatting on the phone. “It all seemed so apple pie!” my mother said. She was moved by the marchers from Jewish Queer Youth (“a social/support group made up of frum/formerly frum gay, lesbian, bi and trans Jews age 17-30,” according to the group’s website) looking impossibly young, wearing tzitzit and classic Haredi garb—white shirts and black pants. They carried signs that said, ‘We’re in Every Yeshiva.”

CBST’s contingent had featured Mamacita Rita, an 80-something straight woman who is AIDS Walk New York’s single biggest fundraiser. She winters in Florida and sends Shirley postcards. Andy had a picture of her posing with Michael Lucas, a Russian-Jewish gay porn star. (He has never sent Shirley anything. That’s fine. Really.) Worlds collide at Pride.

There clearly isn’t just one LGBT community.

But families headed by LGBT adults are a formidable segment of society and growing, according to the group Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE). Even the 2000 census finally recognized this demographic, asking for the first time questions about gay couples having children. According to that census, 33% of female same-sex couple households and 22% of male same-sex couple households reported at least one child under the age of 18 living at home. Those numbers don’t account for single lesbians and gay men who have children or for LGBT parents who don’t have primary custody.

On a micro-level, you can see the demographic changes at CBST. Who knew, when it was founded in 1973, that the synagogue would wind up having wildly popular Tot Shabbat services? A Sunday School?

In a recent issue of New York magazine, Mark Harris wrote about the generation gap between older and younger gay men, comparing the perspectives of grizzled 50-something activists and 20-something party boys. Entirely absent were stories of gay men with children.

Children can be a uniting force—bridging generational and cultural gaps—as well as a divisive one. I’ve seen older men at CBST roll their eyes at the chaos children bring to the building. But I’ve also seen how children help forge connections among different communities. Andy and Neal’s social circle has broadened as they meet more families, gay and straight, with kids.

I predict that one day Andy and Neal will have to miss the parade because they’ll have to take Shirley to camp. By then, my own children will both be veteran campers. And that year, I hope, we will march in my brother’s family’s stead.

While this surprised me for a moment, it didn’t affect my impression of Laura at all: it was just one more aspect of a very unusual person. Over time, I came to know another aspect; the way in which her dark and ironic sense of humor was coupled with a completely uncynical approach to spirituality. True to form, she had worked out her own way to pray.

Laura grew up in Rockland County, New York, one of four sons of a furrier father and teacher mother. She has been a musician and composer and an exhibiting art photographer, and is now a graduate student in social work at NYU.

I’ve long wondered how Laura’s thoughts on gender connect to her thoughts on faith. Also, as someone who once wrote a gentle satire of transgender narratives, I’ve wondered how someone with a nuanced and flexible view of spirituality came to make such a literal and irreversible decision to alter her body. Recently I had a chance to ask when I visited Laura at her home on a winding road outside of Nyack.

You’ve mentioned to me that your mother thought you might turn out to be a rabbi.

She always thought I had this teacherly quality. And when I was in my middle teens, post-bar mitzvah, I went on to get a confirmation—something most of my peers didn’t do. I think I was turning to religion because I had so much angst inside me, and it seemed like a path to meaning. I became active in the synagogue. I was involved in the Jewish youth group, I was volunteering to do various things. There were times when, for instance, the rabbi might be away for a week, and I would be the one who led the service in his place.

As a teenager?

Yeah, he would call me and say, “I’m going to be away for this weekend, and here’s the service,” and he would leave me some latitude within the traditional structure of Jewish worship. I was dating a girl who was a singer, and she used to sometimes be the cantor at the service. It was sort of sweet.

I think a lot of why I did all of that was because I was struggling with my coming of age—and issues like my gender, my sexuality, my relationship to other people, my feeling like there was something more to life than a lot of the paths that I saw.

What was your family like when you were growing up?

My parents are very traditional Jewish people—not in a deeply religious way, but in the guilt-and-Chinese-food kind of way. My mother is the only child of parents who made it out of Europe in the early part of the Holocaust. They were never in the camps, but the rest of my grandparents’ family was. My name came from a great aunt, Lore, who didn’t make it out; she was taken away and probably died in Auschwitz. Following Jewish custom my parents called me Lawrence after her.

As you grew up you didn’t remain as observant as when you were a teenager. What changed?

I think part of what ultimately soured me from organized religion is having gone to synagogue a lot, and seeing people say the prayers and know the prayers, but it didn’t seem like it was touching them in their heart. None of them understood Hebrew, and I never learned Hebrew. And yet I knew prayers in Hebrew. I felt like I was being more spiritual when I was sitting playing the piano than when I was in a synagogue saying words that I didn’t understand.

What do you think motivates people to recite prayers they don’t understand? Do you think that the thinking is: Well, if there is a God, and he is as scary and big and strong as he seems to be, I’d better say this prayer?

I think some of it is that whole paternal thing: We’re afraid that God, the Father, is going to punish us for not doing the chores, not taking out the trash. I think some of it is that—especially in Judaism, especially with Reform Jews, especially in the Northeast of the United States—there’s this fear of letting the traditions die, especially after the Holocaust. How can we go through something so traumatic to our people and then let the traditions die?

I would hope people would be able to be introspective and sort of find their own inner peace. But that’s not really encouraged in our culture. And I think that’s kind of sad.

How did you arrive at your personal inner peace?

I was working at a corporate job that I couldn’t stand, doing market research. On the day of the winter solstice in 1998 I came home from work late. I was standing in the backyard, and I was desperate and miserable and depressed. And there was this huge full moon. So I just thought, “What the hell, might as well pray to the moon.” I did, I started calling to it for some kind of sign or some kind of message. Of course nothing happened. I mean, nothing was written in fire across the sky. So then I went to bed. I got up during the night, and on the way back from the bathroom I remember feeling all of the energy drain from my body. I passed out. I think of it as a near-death experience. I remember having a sort of vision and seeing the moon and the earth as if they were on a string, a continuum between the two. And between the moon and the earth were my physical body and my spiritual body, for lack of a better way to put it. And I really felt like I was seeing who I was.

For the couple months leading up to my surgery, I used to go outside, and I would light a candle, and I would sit there and I would just pray to the moon. I would meditate, and ask for good luck and protection and guidance, hoping that this was the right thing for me. Because this was surgery, this was the big shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment. Sometimes I’d say a Jewish prayer, sometimes I’d say a nonverbal prayer. The surgery happened in Montreal; the place where I stayed leading up to it and during recovery was this little island in the middle of the river. And on the island there were two houses and then some woods. I used to do walking meditation on the grounds. Also afterwards, although I wasn’t walking quite so well. Trust me, after that surgery it takes a while before you start walking comfortably.

I’m sure. Ow. Do you see a relationship between your teenage yearnings for meaning through Judaism and your decision to change your gender?

There was this Hindu mystic named Ramakrishna who lived in the mid-1800s. For a time he put aside his Hinduism totally and lived in each of the other major religions. His ultimate realization was that no matter what tradition he followed, he came to the same place of enlightenment; he felt he contacted the same spirit, the same God, the same whatever, regardless of what path he was following. Since no matter which path he followed they all led to the same enlightenment, he said that it didn’t really matter what path you followed. We tend to follow what path we’re born into. I had this epiphany one day where I sort of applied that to gender, and it’s like—living as a man or living as a woman, neither one has any more right or ability to find happiness. They’re just different ways of living.

Another thing that Ramakrishna says is that if you feel drawn to a different path, if it sort of suits your temperament, then why not change, because all the paths are heading in the same place anyway? Then I started thinking about that part of it in the context of gender, and for whatever reason I felt drawn to changing. There was no meant-to-be-ness about it. I saw a lot of different alternatives for my future, and this just seemed to be the one that fit the most.

“Why not change” is a very strong statement when it comes to having surgery to change your sex. I feel that gender is a spectrum, and sometimes I wonder why someone would do something as literal as take hormones and have surgery.

Laura Jacobs in 2004

I never know quite how to say this; I always struggle to find the words. You know, I was born male, I lived as a boy and then a man for most of my life, and in my late 20s I started to explore outside of just living as a man. Over the course of a couple years (or who knows how long, because where do you mark the beginning, and where do you mark the end?), I changed. Now I live as a woman, I am a woman; I’ve gone through the process of changing my gender.

I don’t so much like the words transgender and transsexual. And I don’t like the standard way people think about those words. I think a lot of people who use those words, and the way most people understand those who change their gender is, “I was always meant to be the other, I was born in the wrong body, some sort of mistake happened along the way, and I need to be fixed to make myself right.” In some ways my story fits that. I had questions about my gender going back to being five years old. I can remember even praying to God that I would wake up one day having been magically changed into a girl overnight. But in some ways my story doesn’t fit that. I made a choice about where to live on the spectrum. Even today I feel connected to both my masculinity and femininity, and that’s heresy to some trans people. I still feel I am both, as we all are.

How did your very traditional parents deal with the change you made?

Initially they really struggled. They didn’t understand. It was a shock to them. But one of the things that they said on the day that I told them was that they didn’t want to lose me as their child, that I was still their child. That impressed me. I brought them to my therapist a few times, and that helped a little bit, but didn’t really. Then I referred them to another therapist who specializes in LGBT stuff, and they sort of clicked with her a little bit, but then sort of didn’t. And so I turned to their rabbi, who I hadn’t had contact with in a million years—the same rabbi I used to sub for when I was a teenager. I said to him, here’s some of what I’m going through, and can you help us? He was kind of shocked, but he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

My parents were more comfortable talking to their rabbi. After one of the conversations we all had, he got on to some Reform rabbi Internet news group, Rabbi-Net or something, and sent an email around saying, “I have this person in my congregation who’s going through this change, and is there anybody out there who can help me?” A female rabbi from San Francisco responded. She had a trans son, meaning a daughter who became a man. The child was around my age, and went from Laura to Larry. Our rabbi put my mother in touch with her. Here was a woman who was a rabbi, so it was an authority figure, and was about my mother’s age, had a child who was about my age, who went from Laura to Larry, and it was a little too much for my mother to turn away from. The woman rabbi said, I had a daughter, now I have a son, and I love my son. Yeah, it was hard losing my daughter, but I’ve gained this wonderful son, and we’re closer than ever. After that it all just shifted.

You told me in an email you’d been hesitant to have this conversation because you’d recently been in the throes of an existential crisis. You said you were wondering what the meaning of it all was.

All the hopes and the dreams that I had when I was young, so many of them didn’t come true. Some of them did. I just kept coming back to the futility of life. It’s kind of ironic: Here I am working as a therapist trying to help people find meaning in life, and I still struggle with finding meaning in my own. What I’ve been thinking lately is that sometimes what it comes down to is that maybe the meaning is what we make of life. Maybe life is about the exploration of life.

Do you think that’s why you’ve wound up becoming a therapist and not a rabbi? The two are related, but when you’re a therapist and you’re confronted with these existential questions all the time, you’re not really expected to provide theological answers.

I’m more of a guide, which I think was what clergy used to be. In spite of the fact that my mother thought I might become one, part of the reason I never wanted to be a rabbi is that I find a lot of organized religions to be very limiting. I think it’s also that in some ways living in the angst is kind of a healthy place to be, as much as it’s not always the easiest place to be.