Gay and Ger – Hiding At The Seminary
There have been times in my life when I have felt like the prophet Jonah, pushed by life, or by God, to embrace the destiny from which I had run away.
In 1996, after three years working as student-rabbi for the Orthodox Jewish community of Naples, Italy, I quit my position. I had loved every moment of those years. The interactions with the various members of the community, the closeness that the position allowed me to have with them, the intellectual challenges, the spiritual high, had given new meaning to my life.
But I did feel a subtle, increasing pressure from the rabbinical establishment that I should get both an Orthodox smichah – ordination – and a wife. While I would have agreed to the smichah in a heartbeat (after all, it was my dream) I could not deal with the idea of a wife. I was a closeted gay man.
The Orthodox rabbis in Rome who converted me five years earlier had no idea of my sexuality; I had not yet made peace with it myself. I actually believed that through shmirat mitzvot – strict observance of religious law – I could overcome it. When I left Naples, though, I told myself never again. Working for the congregation was great, but being a rabbi is not a job for a gay man.
The only Judaism I knew in Italy was Orthodox, and though I loved it and had embraced it through my conversion, I did not feel that there was room for me in it. When I arrived in New York City in 1998, a completely new Jewish world opened up. I ruled out Conservative Judaism almost immediately. It looked too close to the Italian Judaism I wanted to leave. Moreover, I was deterred by the Conservative movement’s 1992 rulings about homosexuality. I very much wanted to be a rabbi, so I applied to the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, but I walked out during one of the placement tests. Luckily I was honest with myself, and acknowledged that I had applied there only because the Reform movement accepted gay and lesbian rabbis. So I resolved to give up the idea of becoming a rabbi and be just a Jew. The labels defining me, gay and ger, convert, were enough. There were some benefits to not belonging to a movement. I could attend services across the Jewish world and feel at home in all of them.
It was only in 2000, when I began to teach at the Solomon Schechter High School of Manhattan, that I developed a full appreciation of the Conservative movement and began to explore it. Slowly the movement’s merits overshadowed the one thing that bothered me. I found myself considering the idea of becoming a Conservative rabbi, despite the 1992 Law Committee documents.
Was it recklessness? Was it foolishness? Was it idealism? I don’t know. I decided I had to apply because I knew civil disobedience in this case was the right behavior to adopt. There is halachah and there is policy and I chose not to respect a policy that struck me as morally wrong and discriminatory. So I filed the application, had my interview, and was accepted at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
I decided to capitalize on the fatalistic Sicilian attitude I grew up with, so my mantra became “If I am meant to be a Conservative rabbi, I will make it through school.” I had two more mantras during those seminary years: “There are so many things that define me that I can be back in the closet for a while and still be who I am,” and “Gam zeh ya’avor – this too shall pass.” Deep down I was sure that eventually the ban would be overthrown but it would be pointless for me to wait for that to happen. As a colleague at Schechter told me, “Five years will go by anyway, whether you go to rabbinical school or wait and see how things evolve.” I chose to follow his advice.
It was easy to convince myself that I could endure five years denying part of myself, and that I should do it because the reward at the end was greater than any possible pain. Dealing with my gay friends’ reactions, though, was harder than I had anticipated. I was expecting some support, but quite a few of them expressed anger. “You’re siding with the enemy.” “You’re a traitor.” “JTS has to be boycotted.” “You will be isolated in the midst of a bunch of bigots and homophobes, alone, miserable, and depressed.” “You should walk into the dean’s office and tell him, ‘You want me, but I don’t want you because I’m gay and I don’t need your school.’” My answer was that the situation would change, and if it didn’t while I was in school then after my ordination I would work from within to right the wrong.
I started school having shed a few friends, ready to make new ones. Moving into the JTS dorms I asked myself, “Antonio, what did you get yourself into?” but luckily it was too late. I had given up my job and my apartment, and JTS had given me a five-year fellowship and a chance to write a new, exciting, and frightening chapter in my life. Soon it became clear that the majority of people with whom I was interacting, students and teachers, were against the ban. A couple of months after school started I decided to come out to my chevrutah, my study partner. One day he suggested that I go on a date with his girlfriend’s roommate, and I thought that was the perfect time to inform him about my sexuality. His reaction startled me. “Antonio, her roommate’s name is Steven,” he said. We laughed so loudly we disturbed everyone around us.
I was lucky. JTS’s rabbinical school was not the dark place populated by homophobes my friends had warned me to expect. Yes, there were a few, but I surrounded myself with open-minded people who made me feel safe. In one of the group-building activities we did during orientation week, I was blindfolded and led by a fellow incoming student. Those five minutes were a foreshadowing of the next five years, of the supportive net made up of amazing people whom I found at JTS. I found sympathetic teachers, classmates, older students, and employees who kept my secret and gave me safe places to vent and laugh away the occasional anxiety I felt over the risk I was taking.
Occasionally the cloud of fear cast its shadow on my overall optimism. I knew that had anyone in the administration known the truth I would have been expelled and my dream would have been shattered. Occasionally, after particularly meaningful interactions with classmates or teachers, I would feel all the weight of the secret, sadness for not sharing more of myself with them, and guilt for passing for what I was not. In general, I felt safe and I entrusted my secret to many, but I also felt that not everyone could be burdened with the dilemma of choosing between loyalty to a friend or transgressing a policy. So I kept quiet and withheld that piece of information from them.
There were times when I would have told Rabbi William Lebeau, our dean, “Don’t be so nice to me. I’m not telling you all the truth,” especially one day during my second year when we sat down in his office and read a page of Talmud together. There were rumors that he was sympathetic to our plight but we all knew, from his own words, that he would uphold the school policy.
There were times when I felt like a thief, not only for receiving the Neubauer Fellowship – which in my mind was meant for a straight student – but also for getting undeserved friendship and affection from Joe and Jeanette Neubauer. How could I do this? How could I keep accepting this money? Would they care about me as much if they knew? And then I learned they did know, and they found a way to tell me they were okay with my sexuality.
There were times when I felt particularly vulnerable and exposed, and even though I could always count on my chevrutah and his wife for support, it would have benefited me to walk into the dean’s office to ask for help. There were times in class when I wanted to shout that I was gay and tell the teachers they had no idea what they were talking about; just because they were Torah scholars that didn’t mean that they knew anything about our lives or our struggles; that nobody chooses to be gay; that no therapy will fix me, because I am not broken; that they are responsible to check with any one of us before they made public statements. But I bit my tongue and kept quiet.
And then in March 2007, two months before my ordination, a few months after the Law Committee’s teshuvot, JTS opened its doors. Rabbi Lebeau sent out a note to the student body: “We will join in welcoming new students without regard to sexual orientation, and embrace students already in our school without regard to sexual orientation.” I felt that it just wasn’t fair. Everyone who knew reached out to me. There were phone calls, emails, hugs and kisses in the halls, and many loud shouts of mazal tov everywhere I went. But I was not happy. I was petrified. I was angry that now, almost at the last minute, the rules of the game were changed on me! Could they not have waited two more months? This was uncharted territory. How could I be myself in this building after almost five years? How could I face my classmates who did not know? Those who had proposed shiddukhs? The women I had turned down with a thousand excuses? The members of the Lakeland Hills Jewish Center, where I had served while in school, who had treated me as family? My teachers, who formed me as a rabbi? I met them one by one, sat, talked, cried, hugged, joked, dealt with a couple of rejections. The hiding was over.
Today I serve as rabbi at the South Baldwin Jewish Center on Long Island. I came to interview here not because I really was looking for a pulpit (I was planning to go for a Ph.D. in Bible) but because I wanted to practice coming out in front of a congregational board. I wanted to know the kind of reactions and objections they’d have, and I wanted to study my responses to them. Instead we liked each other and here I am, a congregational rabbi, with the help of the congregants who have welcomed both me and now my partner, Daniel, who joins us frequently at services and events. Daniel and I are thinking about having a civil wedding and a commitment ceremony in the near future.
Would I do this again? Who knows? I’m nutty enough. Was it worth it? Surely it was. And if I had any doubts, the words of the gay son of a congregant would dispel them. The son told me that since I became the rabbi, his father’s attitude toward him has changed. His father, who is a great fan of mine, finally has been able to ask about his life and his partner, and proudly say that his son is a gay man.
And this is also part of tikkun olam.
Antonio DiGesu, a native of Sicily, was ordained at JTS in 2007 and holds an MA in Bible and Semitics from the University of Rome. He has translated several literary works from Hebrew to Italian and is now working on an Italian edition of Midrash Vayikra Rabba.
