The sound of belonging

If you want to know whether something has changed, listen.

On Saturday, marching through central London in a Jewish bloc at Pride in London, the sound that reached me first was not the one I’d braced for. It was applause. Not polite, not scattered, but sustained, delighted applause, rolling down the route from crowds who had no particular reason to cheer for us except that they were glad we were there. After three years of being told, in a hundred quiet ways, that LGBTQ+ Jews complicated things, the loudest sound on the street was a welcome.

I keep coming back to that, because sound is honest. You can stage a photograph. You cannot fake the noise of thousands of strangers deciding, in the moment, that they are pleased to see you.

The day had every reason to feel like vindication, and it would have been easy to make it about that. But what struck me wasn’t triumph. It was ordinariness, the lovely, hard-won ordinariness of simply being included. Pride in London had done the work: their volunteers trained, our security handled, our place in the parade unquestioned. And so we just… marched. Like anyone else. Like it was normal. For those of us who remember when it was anything but, “normal” was the most moving part of the whole day.

The wider community turned out too, in real numbers, far beyond the queer Jews the day was for. You learn who your people are, not when it’s easy but when it’s slightly awkward, slightly unfamiliar, and they show up anyway. And what struck me was that they weren’t there out of duty. Nobody was performing solidarity. They were just… enjoying it. Dancing, badly and happily. Support you have to work at is one thing. Support that looks like people simply having a brilliant afternoon alongside you, that is the sound of something that has actually changed.

Among them was the Co-Lead of Progressive Judaism, Rabbi Charley Baginsky, a reminder that our tradition can be wide enough to hold all of us, and a small moment of hope for any young Jew lying awake wondering whether they’ll have to choose between their faith and themselves.

Then came the party, and the party is where I wish I could simply hand you the feeling. On Broadwick Street, in the heart of Soho, two identities the world keeps insisting are in tension spent the afternoon dancing in the same room. Strangers drifted in off the street and stayed.

There were a handful of individuals who came to heckle. To try make Jewish LGBT+ people feel ashamed of who they are. And they failed utterly, because we are proud of all elements of our identity, and it is very hard to land a heckle over the sound of a crowd that is genuinely, unshakeably happy. They brought noise. We had joy. Joy won, easily, without even trying.

And that, in the end, is the whole of it. Saturday was proof, public, noisy, impossible-to-argue-with proof, that LGBTQ+ Jews belong. Not conditionally. Not quietly. We belong in the Jewish community and we belong in the queer one, and we do not have to amputate half of ourselves to be admitted to either. We deserve to be happy. We deserve to be proud. We deserve to be celebrated, wholly, all at once. That was the entire spirit of the day, and for once the day lived all the way up to it.

So — thank you. To everyone who marched, and danced, and simply came. To the Hineni Project and Stop The Hate, who built this, and to Sapphic Shabbat, I already can’t wait to do it all again next year. To Pride in London, the Movement for Progressive Judaism and the Board of Deputies, for supporting us. And to Hen, for speaking again, and to Ariel, who flew in from Keshet Europe to be with us, and to Keshet UK, for the quiet, patient work of building this ground long before any of us reached Saturday.

Three years ago, they told us we didn’t belong at Pride.

On Saturday, the street was simply too loud with welcome for anyone to hear them.