“That’s also why the b mitzvah is amazing,” she went on. “You are supposed to be growing up through this ceremony, so having this part of me in there was important.”
Mrs. Cohen, Lion’s mother, had many relatives, especially the older ones, who sent cards with the wrong pronoun. “I don’t think they are being dismissive. They possibly don’t understand it or don’t know the right pronoun,” she said, and added with a laugh: “We still cashed the check.”
More traditional synagogues encounter problems with the Hebrew language. Like Spanish, it is a gendered language, in which every noun has a masculine or feminine ending. For example, you can’t say “child” instead of boy or girl in Hebrew. So every act — blessing the teenager, addressing them, calling them up to the Torah — requires a gender specification.
Some synagogues have approached this problem by only using English, or updating English translations of Hebrew words to make them gender-neutral. But diverging from the text could take away from long and meaningful traditions if done without care, said Rabbi Tamara R. Cohen, chief of innovation at Moving Traditions, a Jewish organization that runs educational programs for teenagers and people who interact with them. (With Moving Traditions, she created a curriculum to help synagogues deal with gender issues that is currently being implemented in synagogues in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Denver.)
There are some groups, like the Nonbinary Hebrew Project, that are working on building a new grammatical system for the Hebrew language, one that doesn’t specify gender.
“There is a lot of work going on, but I don’t know how much people will adopt it,” said Rabbi Cohen. “So many people already don’t know Hebrew as it stands.”
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