One of the most formative experiences of my cantorial training took place during my final year as a student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, when I became the first cantorial intern in the history of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah.

CBST, New York’s LGBTQ synagogue, had not yet moved into the permanent home it occupies today. What made the internship especially meaningful was that although I was a student at HUC-JIR, I was serving alongside diverse rabbinical students and clergy from across the Jewish world. Some came from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Others came from the Reconstructionist movement and other seminaries. For the first time in my life, I found myself immersed in a Jewish community composed of people whose backgrounds, identities, and life experiences were often very different from my own.

Under the leadership of Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, now retired, and Rabbi Ayelet Cohen, then the congregation’s associate rabbi and now the Dean of the Rabbinical School at JTS, I learned lessons about Jewish community that have stayed with me ever since.

Many members of CBST knew what it felt like to be excluded from Jewish life. Some had spent years wondering whether there was a place for them in the Jewish communities they loved. Yet what I encountered was not a community defined by grievance. It was a community determined to build something better, and music was a large part of that experience.

Joyce Rosenzweig, longtime faculty member at HUC-JIR and CBST’s music director, pianist, and choir director, created one of the most extraordinary musical communities I have ever encountered. Week after week, she brought together people with different identities, backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs and somehow transformed them into a unified choir. People who may have disagreed about any number of things found themselves breathing together, harmonizing together, and praying together.

As a young cantor, I found it impossible not to be inspired by what Joyce had built. In many ways, it became a model for the kind of community I later hoped to help create in my own congregation. She taught me that unity does not require uniformity.

Among my fellow interns was Rabbi Reuben Zellman, one of the pioneering transgender rabbis of the Reform movement. Reuben is........

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