Rav Shua is creating the queer community of his dreams

I first heard about Rabbi Shua Brick from my colleague, Lena, who said his name so quickly that I thought it was one word—RavShua. When Rav Shua, as he’s commonly known, and I first connected for a call to get to know each other, I was infected by his enthusiasm for storytelling, Jewish learning, and creating a canon of queer Jewish stories that he wished he had growing up.

Since then, we see each other at Jewish communal events—and sometimes multiple events per week! After a few more of those run-ins, I knew we had to capture some of his fascinating story. Read on for a glimpse into the Talmud-related memes his students made, what he does on three hours of public transit, and how Judaism can give structure to our lives.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rav Shua! What brought you to the Bay?

About four years ago, I came to the Bay first as a rabbinic intern at Beth Jacob [a synagogue in Oakland], which was a fluke—the senior rabbi has a twin brother who lives across the street from my brother in Fairlawn, New Jersey. I was too late to apply to [rabbinic] internships, so I applied to places that didn’t have an intern.

Basically, I just wanted a free flight to California [laughs], because I had never been. For 

the internship, I flew out here a few times, right before covid hit, and then officially moved here in August 2020. I also teach modern Jewish ethics and Talmud at Jewish Community High School of the Bay.

How did your teaching go this past year? 

It was a dream year of teaching. There were three students in my Talmud class, and they’d been together since they were in kindergarten. Almost anything they learned was something that most of the other students were not learning.

They had a lot of pride in learning Talmud—they made an Instagram account where they shared memes about what we learned. They would wear jerseys every day for Talmud class that they kept in the classroom, and go for strolls wearing them, in the middle of the day. At the end of the year, they actually finished the entire tractate of Megillah that they were assigned. 

This was something I had always hoped to do as a teacher—it was absolutely amazing.

For folks who may not be aware, can you share a bit about Beth Jacob?

I love the community—it’s an incredibly special place. It is an Orthodox synagogue but I would say 95% or 100% of its constituents are people who never thought they would ever belong to an Orthodox synagogue. They either grew up elsewhere and and somehow found their way through our doors, or they maybe they were in an Orthodox community—maybe in Oakland or maybe elsewhere—and then came to Oakland to perhaps even get away from [where they grew up], and then found the place that was both comfortable and accepting in Beth Jacob.

It’s very much an opt-in community in that everyone chooses to be there. Everyone wants to make it work. Beth Jacob is also much more of a learning community than a prayer community—people want to be learning together, which is very different from what I’m used to. 

Fascinating! I had no idea that was the background of folks at Beth Jacob. What do you think is behind that interest in Jewish learning?

I think there’s so much in the world that is distracting. There are so many great values out there but in the global era, it’s so distracting to know what is the right thing. How do you prioritize all the things that you care about? 

What these Jewish texts often have to offer is just how to prioritize, how to give a structure to the things that you care about—they give us that guidance. If people are familiar with the second season of Fleabag—an important work of theology—[there’s a scene where] the main character is describing how she feels lost. She wishes someone could tell her what to do. 

If you think there’s a benevolent system that can help guide us to what would be helpful, I think that can be attractive to people.

You and I both think a lot about building community…and you’re working on a project called Queerkeit Incubators. Can you tell us more?

I wanted to create a network of Jewish queer writing groups, to create a positive, traditional queer Jewish community that I think does not fully exist yet. Often, I describe this as the writing group for non-writers, but the reason why I feel the need for this, especially when it comes to religious queer spaces, certainly in the Orthodox world, is that everything is a support group.

Eshel is there to really help you on your first steps, and there’s JQY (Jewish Queer Youth), which will help you until you’re 23—but if you’re 24 and queer and happy, you don’t know what’s next. There are ways in which you either assimilate into straight communities or are in exclusively queer communities…but I’m creating a place that really brings that all together. 

I refer to it as queerkeit, which is like Yiddishkeit (Jewishness), and queerness. I want to create that community and bring people in on the shared project of creating the content that we wish we had when we grew up. 

What inspired you to start this?

The way I describe it sometimes is I feel like we all hiked to the top of a mountain and thought, there’s no trail. Then we get up there, and there are dozens of other people who are up there. But why did no one leave a map or some breadcrumbs or something to help us get there? 

Partly the issue is that there’s this huge chasm from when you come out to yourself and when you come out to the world.

There are so many steps between those two points, and so the people who are on the other side of that coming-out process often forget all the steps in between. A big part of my dream is to recreate each of the baby steps I took and try to bring people along for those steps that I took, and to see if that could be helpful to anyone else.

What are you working on in particular, or what do you think needs to be written?

My writing is a great deal more specifically halachic [relating to Jewish law] or theological, and a lot more about Jewish law than it is about wonderful experiences of self-acceptance. It’s kind of half op-ed, half-argumentative essay—a bit about being gentle, responding to classic questions that people have.

Then, there are so many different stories that I want to be told that can give hope to people. For instance, I know many couples who are trying to figure out what it looks like to bring a child into this world. Each one maybe knows of two or three other queer couples doing the same thing, but they don’t realize that there are dozens and dozens of them across the country who are also figuring that out, navigating their local Jewish community, worrying about what their kids’ acceptance will be.

The thing is, there have been people doing it for decades. We just don’t have those stories recorded anywhere, and we want to see ourselves out there, or know that our children will be okay, or know, what is my family going to look like? 

What’s the dream for Queerkeit Incubators?
The dream is to have about nine groups across the country, each one acting as a central hub for the queer community in its city, as well as having national programming in a summer that would bring these groups together to create a national movement to connect all these different hubs. 

My goal is to run it for hopefully three iterations. By the end of that, there’ll be 150 new writers with 150 new pieces. That’s a huge groundswell that would actually just be the launching point for the community that would grow from that.

So when you’re not learning and immersing in Jewish education, what do you get up to for fun?

Like a lot of Americans, I’m trying to get into pickleball. That’s a thing. There’s a weekly game night that I try to attend with friends of mine in Berkeley. And I just started reading again. Basically six months ago, I started taking public transit to school instead of driving. I was like, have you guys heard about public transportation? It’s so cool. It opened up three hours of my day to be time for learning and reading.

I’ve read more books this year than the last five years combined, probably. I’ve been reading fantasy and nonfiction, and I started doing Daf Yomi [a page of Talmud daily]. I recommend both buses and books!

Onto our in-house Proust Questionnaire. Tell me a poem, book, movie, play, piece of art, or media that you love!

There’s a sci-fi trilogy called Three-Body Problem [by Liu Cixin]—now there’s a Netflix series about it. I haven’t seen it, but the book, especially the second one but really the whole trilogy, has such a scope. It theorizes about just the future of humanity in a way that is so breathtaking. 

What’s a best-kept secret of the Bay Area?

There are some amazing chefs in the area, in terms of people doing their own home cooking. There’s a lot more self-reliance in cooking at home than it is about going out to eat—at least that I was familiar with. I won’t tell you which people to make sure you should make sure to get an invite to, but they’re walking among us.

Last question! When was a recent time that you felt some kind of spiritual connection? 

I just went home, and I was able to finish a tractate of Talmud with my mother, who’s also doing Daf Yomi. When she was growing up, she was not given access to Talmud study at all—she had come to it later in life. 

She’s the person who made sure that I had Talmud access my entire life, and so it’s been incredibly meaningful to study with my mother. 

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GatherBay Profiles is our interview series spotlighting the vast array of community members doing rad things! Released twice per month, the series aspires to celebrate GatherBay’s greatest treasure—the people around us. Want to be profiled? Email info@gatherbay.org.