No Closets, All Windows: Walking In The Light
Every Shabbat, we pray for our b’nei mitzvah: “May your proud parents be blessed to be with you when, in your own time, you stand with your beloved under the wedding canopy.” Why would we say such a thing when getting married is the last thing on a 13-year-old’s mind? Because we know that the greatest blessing of all is the blessing of a sanctified love that lasts through the years.
But what if that son or daughter is gay or lesbian? That is not an academic question. Parents have come into my office, and said: “My son is gay, my daughter is a lesbian. Does this shul accept them for who they are?”
Immediately after the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards approved three teshuvot on the issue of gay and lesbian inclusion, Rabbi Michelle Robinson and I said that we were strong supporters of gay and lesbian inclusion and would perform weddings outside our synagogue because of our own consciences and convictions. As to weddings within the building, I proposed a period of study, reflection, and deliberation for the congregation. In a series of three Sunday mornings open to the entire congregation, we studied papers accepted by the committee.
In his paper, Rabbi Joel Roth says no to allowing the ordination of openly gay and lesbian rabbis and to same-sex commitment ceremonies. He has a strong basis in ancient text for this ruling. The legal precedents – the stricture of Leviticus 18:22 and 2,000 years of rabbinic law that never saw fit to overturn that biblical injunction – support his position. But that ruling does not work for real people in the real world. It does not work for our children.
All the research that I find persuasive suggests two things. One, people do not choose to be gay or lesbian; they simply are gay or lesbian. Whether because of nature, nurture, or some complex interplay of the two, people have a sexual orientation. They do not choose it. They just are what they are. Two, people cannot be “cured” of being gay or lesbian. So-called reparative therapy does not work and only makes gays and lesbians feel bad about themselves.
The people before us – our gay and lesbian children – want to marry and create Jewish homes. Rabbi Roth’s teshuvah may be rooted technically in precedent, but it leaves our children with two untenable choices: Do not have sex, which is both cruel and un-Jewish; or keep your intimacy in the closet, in secret, in shame. That is not the Jewish way. The Jewish approach to our sex drive is not to deny it, and not to drive it into the closet, but to sanctify it – to encourage us to marry and to enjoy intimacy as we grow together through the years.
The second paper, written by Rabbis Elliot Dorff (now chair of the committee) and Danny Nevins (now dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s rabbinical school), rules that gay relationships are permissible under Jewish law with one crucial condition: certain sexual activities are forbidden. For technical reasons having to do with how they read the precedents, that condition is the linchpin of Rabbis Dorff and Nevins’ argument. Without that condition, their paper falls apart.
And yet that linchpin is wholly unrealistic and impractical. Neither Rabbi Robinson nor I ever would speak to a gay couple about such things, nor would they listen to us if we did. The linchpin undermines the teshuvah.
Rabbi Gordon Tucker, the former dean of the JTS rabbinical school and now rabbi of Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York, presented a paper in which he called for the normalization of homosexuality. A gay couple, a lesbian couple, should be accepted without any conditions. The gist of his argument is an exploration of why we make a sacred cow out of this one verse, Leviticus 18:22. The talmudic rabbis in their time, and the Conservative movement in our own, have reinterpreted lots of verses in response to changing times and realities. Deuteronomy 21:21 would have a wayward and defiant son stoned to death in the town square, with the parents initiating the proceedings! The rabbis of the Talmud effectively read that section out of the Torah and said that such a case never was and never will be.
The rabbis’ healthy propensity to reinterpret verses in light of the real world has been the very essence of the Conservative movement. Our mantra is tradition and change. That is why women now count in our minyanim and have equal rights and responsibilities in leading our services. The egalitarian impulse, which is to my mind the crowning success of the Conservative movement, is driven not by ancient text but by our contemporary reality. To exceptionalize Leviticus 18:22 as a sacred cow beyond reinterpretation is to depart from how we do Torah – and it has the perverse effect of denying some of our children the right to a happy marriage and a Jewish home life. I find both Rabbi Tucker’s conclusion and his reasoning totally compelling.
His paper received seven votes in favor, 14 opposed, and four abstentions. Ordinarily a paper only needs six favorable committee votes to pass. Based on the ordinary rules, even with the opposing votes it would have passed, but right before the vote, the committee changed the rules of the game for his paper alone, requiring 13 votes for it to pass. It applied that standard to his paper because it was considered radical, a takkanah in halachic parlance.
His paper is not radical. It is beautiful. It makes me proud to be a Conservative Jew because it allows our prayers to come true for all our children. All of us want home, hearth, warmth, fidelity, monogamy, and trust for our children. That is the blessing to which all our children are heirs. That is why we pray for it when they celebrate becoming bar or bat mitzvah.
This spring, by overwhelming majorities, the executive and ritual committees and the board of directors of my synagogue instructed me to decide this issue as mara d’atra, the authority to decide issues of Jewish law in our community. Based on Rabbi Tucker’s wise and beautiful paper, Rabbi Robinson and I will perform same-sex weddings within the synagogue.
There are no closets in this shul. No closets where people feel bad about themselves because they are not like everyone else. No closets where families cannot accept their children. No closets where people feel that the Jewish community won’t accept them for who they are. Open the windows. Let the sunshine in so that all our children may walk in the light and live in the light, proud and unashamed. May all our sons and daughters be blessed to find somebody to love, someone with whom they can create a Jewish home, and may they walk hand in hand together through the years.
Wesley Gardenswartz has been rabbi of Temple Emanuel of Newton, Massachusetts, for 12 years.
