How can we find meaning and connection between two events that seem to be almost polar opposites? This is a question that many LGBTQ+ Jews may wrestle with this October 11.  Yom Kippur, our day of atonement, which can feel so serious, happens to fall upon the same day as National Coming Out Day, an important — and joyful — day on the queer calendar. As someone whose Jewish and queer identities have always been extremely important in their life, I thought it interesting and important to find the significance and similarities of this coincidental intersection amid their differences. 

During Yom Kippur we practice teshuvah, which translates to repentance, or returning. The process of our personal repentance, and of returning to our truest and purest selves is certainly not always easy.  But it is done in the context of community, and ideally, communities support one another in their own internal processes. This is not dissimilar to the action of coming out: it is deeply personal and different for everyone — who we come out to, how we do it, which parts feel most challenging. Though one thing is consistent — the hope that we will have the support of our community. 

National Coming Out Day is hailed as a day to be unapologetically you, a time to be loud and proud in the LGBTQ+ community. Coming out is the quintessential action of being your true self or, in the terms of Yom Kippur, returning to yourself. These two important holidays are drastically different in tone but they aren’t so different in practice. National Coming Out Day is a time to respect the courage it takes to come out. We can use that same framework to respect ourselves and our community for the work and courage that it takes to be introspective, to acknowledge how we can grow, and to improve in the process of returning to ourselves. 

Yom Kippur is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, marking the time when the high priest would enter the innermost part of the Temple of Jerusalem. When I wrote my d’var torah for my B Mitzvah at twelve years old, I read a commentary that has stuck with me to this day. It interpreted the word kadosh (be holy), a term used over and over in reference to the Temple, as parash (to be separate). I took these words to mean uniqueness. As a queer and Jewish seventh-grader who had felt different and unique my entire life, this interpretation made me feel as holy as can be.

I won’t pretend that I took it much farther than that as a twelve-year-old still trying to perfect leyning without a voice crack, but, as I think about it now, I realize just how holy National Coming Out Day really is. Coming into your true authentic self — accepting and proclaiming to the world that you are different, separate, unique — is one of the holiest things a person can do. Returning to ourselves, being true and accepting our pure selves at face value, isn’t always easy. But when we push past nervousness and step into ourselves, we perform one of the holiest acts possible as LGBTQ+ Jews. 

I will leave you with a traditional verse that Keshet has shared for years on National Coming Out Day that I think truly embodies the spirit of returning to ourselves and who we are. This Yom Kippur/National Coming Out Day I challenge us to think like Reb Zusha, who said, “When I get to heaven, God is not going to ask me ‘Why weren’t you more like Moses?’ or ‘Why weren’t you more like King David?’ God will ask, ‘Zusha, why weren’t you more like Zusha?”

Keshet intern Nuriel Kaleb Gutman is a junior at Boston Latin Academy.