John Lennon, Jewish Values, and Shades of Gay

Lennon also created a scandal in the Southeastern United States in 1965 by commenting that he believed that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus." Many conservative Christians encouraged teenagers to boycott the Beatles' records or even to burn their copies.

However, Lennon did not consider himself "anti-religious." He rejected organized religion, preferring to consider "God" as a spiritual force, which he sometimes called magic. Lennon viewed the force as genderless and indescribable and thought that people could connect to it to further good or further evil:

Yes. I believe that God is like a powerhouse, like where you keep electricity, like a power station. And that he's a supreme power, and that he's neither good nor bad, left , right, black or white. He just is. And we tap that source of power and make of it what we will. Just as electricity can kill people in a chair, or you can light the room with it."

How Jewish is this belief? It's hard to say. Certainly mainstream Judaism believes in a monotheistic G-d. However, Jewish mystics study the Kabbalah, a branch of Jewish philosophy that involves the balance of spiritual energy forces, among other things.

Long before I learned about John Lennon's tendency towards mysticism, I began practicing Jewitchery, a blend of Judaism and mystical practices based on the Kabbalah. Unlike Lennon, I think that positive and negative (or good and evil) are two separate but equal forces. I try to spread Light, or positive energy, through everything I do, in the hopes of making the world slightly better.

A Kabbalistic story explains why Jews engage in Tikkun Olam, the process of healing, or repairing, the world. According to this story, G-d created the universe by absorbing so much energy that He exploded, rather like a spiritual version of the Big Bang Theory. When He did so, He shattered Himself. Thus, little pieces of G-d scattered all over the universe. As Jews, we are supposed to find and reunite these lost pieces to make the world more whole. We do this by performing good deeds--helping others, working for social justice, and acting to make the world more like G-d envisioned it to be. A famous Jewish proverb explains, "He who saves one life, saves the world entire."

John Lennon may or may not have been aware of Tikkun Olam, but he certainly followed its principles. He wrote songs encouraging world peace such as Imagine and Give Peace a Chance. The latter song was written as part of a bed-in rally in 1969. Lennon and his wife, artist-musician Yoko Ono, lay in bed for 8 days and talked to reporters about peace. Many people dismissed him as a kook or the bed-in as a publicity stunt; however, Lennon thought it would spotlight his cause and make good use of media hounds who wanted to get footage of his honeymoon with Ono. On the last day of the bed-in, Lennon recorded "Give Peace a Chance" with celebrities and reporters who attended the bed-in event.

Lennon advises the boy:

Whatever you do, just do it for peace.

This quote sticks with me almost as much as Harvey Milk's famous exhortation to "give them hope." I believe Lennon was asking all of us to carry on his message and to work for a better world.

I didn't consciously set out to become part of his legacy any more than I set out to write a gay rights manifesto. I just wanted to make the world a little better, in a way that was very important to me because of Gavi's struggles. (You can read more about the reasons I wrote Shades of Gay in my lens Shades of Gay Comes Out for LGBTQ Suicide Prevention.) However, I believe strongly that I am part of that legacy. I never knew John Lennon--he died when I was 2, and I don't know that I would have ever met him if he had lived--but I want to spread peace...in my case, inner peace among LGBTQ youth, which will hopefully spread to peace between LGBTQ youth and heterosexual youth in schools and other public places.