Two progressive Rabbis on Same-Sex Sexuality and the Torah

"Kedoshim," the portion of the Torah that we read this week, contains one of
the two places in Torah that condemns a "male lying with a male as with a
woman," adding in this passage that they are subject to the death penalty
(Lev. 19: 13).

How might we think about this, which has become one of the most
controversial aspects of Torah in our society?

The Supreme Courts of the United States and Massachusetts have drawn on
secular concepts of liberty, privacy, and human rights to strike down laws
against (respectively) same-sex sexual relationships, at the US level; and
same-sex marriages, at the Massachusetts level.

But these decisions have been attacked as anti-religious, Godless, by
certain religious groups in the USA.

So -- how do we examine these questions from the standpoint of Torah?

Some have argued that Torah prohibits male homosexuality for sure, and
perhaps lesbian sexuality as well. The Rabbis suggested that it also calls
for privacy: that what Balaam found "Mah tovu," "So good!" in the tents of
the
House of Jacob was precisely that they were pitched at angles to each other
so
that each household preserved its privacy - probably especially its sexual
privacy.

Others have argued that "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman" is
ambiguous, leaving open to question what the text really means. (Is this
physically possible? Was it only about casual or ritual homosexuality, not
committed relationships?) But I think we need to go beyond these historical
or
midrashic quibbles, to look more deeply into Torah.

Does Torah look forward to its own transformation? If so, under what
circumstances?

There is wise and powerful teaching in the passage of Talmud that cautions
against raising goats and sheep in the Land of Israel. Since our forebears
Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rivkah, did precisely that, how could the
Talmud have the chutzpah to oppose it?

The Rabbis know the world had changed. They knew that the numbers of goats
and sheep, and of the human population, would denude and ruin the Land if
these animals were bred there.

The world had changed, and so did Jewish holy practice.

Biblical Judaism, out of which sprang the Leviticus prohibition on
homosexuality, professed three basic rules for proper sexual ethics:

1. Have as many children as possible. Gen. I: 28: "Be fruitful, multiply,
fill up the earth, and subdue it."

2. Men were to be in charge. Genesis 3: 16, where God says to Eve, "Your
desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."

3. Sex was delightful and sacred. (Song of Songs, throughout.) Celibacy was
almost unheard of, and almost always strongly discouraged.

How did these affect attitudes toward homosexuality?

"Be fruitful and multiply, fill up the earth and subdue it"" worked against
homosexuality, since having children was presumably impossible. But what
shall we do today, in a generation when the injunction has been
accomplished? Having put
on t'fillin in the morning, must we do so in the afternoon?

Today the sheer number of humans is putting impossible burdens on our global
ecosystem and plunging into extinction thousands of the species that God
commands in the story of the Flood we must not allow to die.

Today we need to encourage, not forbid, forms of sexuality that avoid
biological multiplication. We might now read the command as teaching us to
be fruitful and expansive emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually
rather
than biologically.

What were the effects of "He shall rule over you"? If a man had to be in
charge in a sexual relationship, there was no way to deal with a
relationship of two men. Neither one could be subordinated - "as with a
woman." Such a relationship would blow out all the circuits. Conversely, a
relationship between two "subordinate" women would not even turn the power
on - and so it was ignored in biblical tradition.

Is this statement in Eden intended by Torah to persist forever? No more than
the twin statement (Gen. 3: 17-19) that human beings (or at least men) shall
"toil in the sweat of their brow," wringing a livelihood from a hostile
earth. Do we think Torah commands us to eschew the machines that make our
labor
easier?

Like this statement about toil, and like "Be fruitful and multiply," the
overlordship of men applied to a history that should be transcended. It was
not an edict to be obeyed.

Modernity has transformed the world we live in. The Modernity that eases
our work and makes women and men equal and brings the human race to fill up
and subdue the earth may even be what God intended.

So then we must ask ourselves, as the Rabbis of the Talmud understood that
in their new world they must oppose raising sheep and goats as their
forebears
did, what must we change in our new world?

In a world filled and subdued by the human race, multiplying our numbers may
actually contravene God's intention. In a world where men are not required
to be dominant nor women to be subordinate, a relationship of two men or two
women need not be either destructive or irrelevant.

So we are evolving past these two rules that underlay the opposition to gay
and lesbian relationships and marriages.

The third basic rule - that sex is delightful and sacred - still stands. The
biblical Song of Songs embodies it, and the Song - far from being outdated -
may point beyond the Eden of the past, of a childish human race, past our
history of toil and hierarchy, toward an Eden of the Future. "Eden for
grown-ups," for a grown-up human race and for newly mature individual human
beings.

In the Song, bodies are no longer shameful as they were after the mistake of
Eden; the earth is playful, not our enemy; and women and men are equal in
desire and in power. And God is never named - no longer Papa/Mama as in
Eden, giving orders, but inherent in the very process of life.

Though the drama of the Song is on its face heterosexual, it describes the
kind of sensual pleasure beyond the rules that has characterized some
aspects of gay and lesbian desire, especially since marriage was forbidden.

So we now have the opportunity to open heterosexual relationships and
marriages to the kind of joy the Song embodies, while opening gay and
lesbian life to the more planful structure that marriage makes possible.

Love and marriage are present in the Song, suffused with joy and pleasure
rather than with rigidity and rules. For millennia, Jews have prided
ourselves on the worth of marriage as a carrier of holiness and community.
Now we can expand the circles in which marriage - a new kind of marriage -
is
possible.

From a spiritual as well as a legal standpoint, the Supreme Courts of the
United States and Massachusetts have opened the way to enhancing,
notdestroying, marriage. They have opened the gates; but only spiritual
communities can enter. Let the tents of Jacob and the shrines of Israel
rejoice, "Mah tovu! How wonderful!"

___________________________
* Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center <www.shalomctr.org >,
author of Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, & the Rest of Life, and
co-author of A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven: The Jewish Life-Spiral
as a Spiritual Path.


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Compare to:

RABBI GERSHON'S HOUSE OF STUDY
HOMOSEXUALITY & THE HEBREW BIBLE

"You shall be holy for I, the LORD (YHVH), your God am holy. You shall not insult the deaf, or put a stumbling block before the blind. You shall not render an unjust decision; do not be partial to the poor or show deference to the rich; judge your neighbor fairly. Do not stand by doing nothing while your neighbor is being injured. You shall not hate your brother in your heart. Love your neighbor so you can love yourself; I AM the LORD (YHVH)!
-Leviticus 19, passim, from the prayerbook, Siddur Sim Shalom, Daily Morning Service.

Hareini mikabel(et) alai et mitzvat HaBorei: Ve-ahavtah le-reiakha kamokha (I am taking upon myself the command of the Creator to "Love your neighbor as you love yourself).

A HETEROSEXUAL JEWISH RABBI'S VIEWPOINT

RABBI GERSHON CAUDILL RECLAIMS LEVITICUS FROM THE BIGOTS WHO HAVE WRONGLY USED THE ANCIENT HEBREW TEXTS TO PERSECUTE AND CONTROL GAYS AND LESBIANS.

HEALING THE TEXTS OF TERROR - THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE PROHIBITION ON HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES


AS THERE IS NO REASON, BIBLICAL, ETHICAL NOR MORAL, TO CONTINUE TO DENY ANY CIVIL RIGHTS TO GAYS AND LESBIANS, ESPECIALLY IN TODAY'S WORLD, ALL HONORABLE PEOPLE SHOULD STAND IN SUPPORT OF GRANTING EQUALITY OF ALL RIGHTS TO GAYS AND LESBIANS.

For the past decade, Rabbi Caudill has been seriously involved in a compassionate study of the so-called "anti-homosexual texts of Leviticus" in the original Hebrew versions still extant, and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Talmuds, and, in historical writings. With the aid of Catholic Priest Greek and Latin linguists (and also a Protestant Biblical Languages student at Emory University), Rabbi Caudill has also studied original translations of the Greek and Latin texts.

This serious study has also involved reviewing the various Biblical manuscripts, Talmudic texts and other materials of a collateral nature to the subject matter being studied; i. e. history, anthropology, archaeology, philology, and etymology, to name but a few.

As a result of this research, Rabbi Caudill is totally convinced that THE ORIGINAL HEBREW TEXTS OF THE TORAH (the Hebrew Five Books of Moses) HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH HOMOSEXUALITY! ESPECIALLY AS WE KNOW HOMOSEXUALITY TODAY!

Sadly, the reality is that the texts of Leviticus (and Deuteronomy) were utilized by the teachers and rabbis of the Jewish religious tradition to condemn homosexuality under direct and constant THREAT from the dominant and controlling Christian governmental and ecclesiastical authorities. This condemnation took place in the 4th to 6th centuries of the common era (CE), and AT A MUCH later date after the original text was codified, about 1500 years later, in fact.

More:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ecorebbe/id18.html

and the bible accepts that we evolve.