|
I WAS TUTORING
two girls in preparation for their b’not mitzvah when one
of their mothers interrupted, explaining that the Supreme Court
had just ruled in the Lawrence v. State of Texas case (June
26th) in favor of abolishing all sodomy laws. “I think I’m going
to cry!” she said.
I was not able to process my feelings about the
magnitude of this decision because the two twelve-year-old girls
looked at me and asked, “What is sodomy?” There, in front of a parent,
I chose careful words to explain what sodomy is, and I explained
the decision as meaning that being in a gay or lesbian relationship
was no longer a crime anywhere in the United States.
The full impact hit me later, at a celebration
held by Lamda Legal, the gay civil rights organization. Listening
to the speakers, I realized that Georgia, the state in which I had
grown up and still live, was the American cradle of sodomy laws
— and that Judaism was their universal cradle. At the Hebrew Academy
of Atlanta, my Orthodox day school, the topic of the evils of sodomy
had come up more than once. I recall studying Leviticus in the seventh
grade and being lectured about the forbidden sexual acts. Skipping
from incest to homosexuality, we arrived at bestiality, which our
teacher explained was an unspeakable averah (sin). I raised
my hand and, in what I’m sure was a case of misplaced anxiety, asked
her with a smirk, “Even goldfish?” She began to reprimand me, but
after only two words she giggled and the entire class burst into
uproarious laughter. Despite my successful joke, however, I knew
deep inside that the true joke was on me: This good Jewish boy was
a religious criminal.
The negative impact of sodomy laws has been immense,
even beyond the thirteen states that still had them on the books
as of this year. Cases involving gay adoption, child custody, divorce,
employment discrimination, civil rights and hate crime legislation
have all been argued against gay and lesbian interests based on
the fact that sodomy was illegal and that the Supreme Court, in
Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), had declined to extend Constitutional
privacy protections to same-sex sexuality. Beyond their octopus-like
legal impact, sodomy laws encouraged hatred directed towards gays
and lesbians — and fueled self-hatred for many of us. The very notion
of “sodomy” became a significant piece of evidence that the very
being of gay folks was innately flawed and repugnant. The law said
we were criminals — and Judaism said we were abominations.
How was I able to bridge these gaps and become
a rabbi? How can any gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered
Jew make peace with Judaism?
My journey towards the rabbinate began with a call
to my Hillel rabbi, shortly after I graduated from Northwestern
University, to ask his opinion about whether I was suited for rabbinical
school. He was Orthodox, and I was a nondenominational Jew who had
struggled with Jewish education in an Orthodox setting. Without
my telling him that I was considering applying to the Reconstructionist
Rabbinical College, he told me that the RRC was the only place for
me. Then he posed an unexpected question: “Are you gay?”
I was stunned into silence. “Never mind, that was
inappropriate,” he said. “Let me make a statement, since I don’t
really need to know. It is better for you if you are straight; I
hear that RRC is overrun by gay men.”
Hanging up the phone, I was excited: Had I ever
found the right place for me! I was going to apply to the Provincetown
of rabbinical schools!
My Hillel rabbi was not the only one with this
perception. My parents told my cousins, to whom I was not yet out,
that I was applying to RRC. Their response: “We didn’t know Josh
was gay.” In Atlanta, the assumption was that because the gay-founded
synagogue, Congregation Bet Haverim, was affiliated with the Reconstructionist
movement, Reconstructionism was “gay Judaism.” This is still a common
misunderstanding today, because the Reconstructionist movement has
aligned itself with the desire to fully recognize gay and lesbian
Jews as essential members of our community.
The foundation for inclusion was set a few years
before I arrived at RRC. In 1990, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical
Association (RRA) and the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation (JRF,
then called the Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and
Havurot) formed a Commission on Homosexuality, which embarked on
a long process of study of broad issues related to Judaism and homosexuality.
The result was the adoption of a Jewishly rooted policy of acceptance
in our congregations of gay and lesbian Jews as members and leaders.
A workshop series had been created, and I was impressed with the
integration into its curriculum of many important issues relating
to gay and lesbian Jews.
“The Reconstructionist movement is among the
Jewish movements seeking a contemporary approach to homosexuality
that is just and authentically Jewish,” the Commission wrote
in its report. “In 1984, the RRC established a policy of non-discrimination
on the basis of sexual orientation in admissions for candidates
desiring to enter the rabbinate. The RRA has, from its founding
in 1975, welcomed all graduates of the College for membership. At
its 1990 convention, the RRA established a formal policy of non-discrimination
in membership and recommended that the movement establish a similar
policy in rabbinic placement. The following year, a movement-wide
policy was enacted prohibiting discrimination in the referral of
resumés of candidates for positions with congregations.”
Despite this history, when I arrived for my school
interview, I was shocked by how wrong my Hillel rabbi had been.
The group of gay men at RRC when I applied was a group of one. It
amazed me that the rumor that RRC was crawling with gay men could
exist when there was only a solitary gay individual.
To be fair, there was a thriving lesbian community,
and one of them passed to me a piece of advice: that I should choose
anything but the congregational rabbinate track at RRC if I was
planning to be out. Many of our colleagues, they said, were closeted
in their pulpits, and the mindset that caused this was not being
significantly challenged in the movement. Thus I began exploring
other paths of rabbinic service in which I could avoid the closet
and avoid compromising my integrity too significantly. My disappointment
was heightened by the fact that the rabbis and lay leaders who had
comprised the Commission clearly had worked hard to put out an ethical
vision, which I had hoped would have brought about the changes needed.
The RRC was a decade ahead of the movement
in its treatment of gay folks on a day-to-day basis. There were
some straight allies working with Reconstructionist communities
that wanted to become kehillot mekabelet,welcoming communities
[see Roberta Israeloff’s “Becoming a Kehillah Mekabelet: The Struggles
of Transformation” in RT, Summer, 1998], but, on the whole, there
was simply a recognition of the gulf between the RRC and the rest
of the movement on these issues. Among the rabbinic students, there
was a small but growing concern that all of us, straight or gay,
might be labeled as gay. At times, it seemed as if our presence
and our politics were “contaminating” the movement, taking away
from the impact that Reconstructionism might have had on Jewish
life had we not taken such initial bold strides to recognize gay
and lesbian Jews.
While this feeling may still emerge, it is now
rare. During the six years that I spent at RRC, and my subsequent
four as a rabbi, I have seen both the College and the movement shift
in immeasurably positive ways. We now have a number of openly gay
or lesbian rabbis serving JRF congregations, many of our congregations
strive to welcome gays and lesbians, and our rabbis are trained
to meet the emotional, spiritual and life-cycle needs of gay and
lesbian congregants. Our movement has created new liturgy and rituals
for lifecycle events never before recognized, has struggled earnestly
to welcome gay and lesbian Jews, and has recognized that the entire
movement is strengthened by these acts and by the knowledge, insights
and spirituality of gay and lesbian Jews.
Many people draw parallels between Brown v.
Board of Education, which abolished segregation in education,
and the Lawrence case. Brown helped to eliminate second-class
citizenship based on race and allowed much more access for African-Americans
to the fruits of American society. Still, racism has not vanished.
I have no doubt that the Supreme Court’s reversal of Bowers v.
Hardwick will have a major, positive impact on the ability of
gays and lesbians to raise children, claim children of whom they
are rightful parents, participate in the institution of marriage
and shift some fundamental societal views about sexual orientation.
How much such views have already changed was evidenced by the line-up
of groups that advocated for an end to oppressive sodomy laws: They
included the American Bar Association, the Cato Institute, the Religious
Action Center for Reform Judaism, and an abundance of prestigious
law firms, mental health organizations and public health institutions.
Even the Bush-Ashcroft Justice Department, which plays a rightwing
advocacy role in many Supreme Court cases, did not write a brief
regarding Lawrence v. Texas — a very meaningful silence.
To draw another apt analogy, this Supreme Court
decision is the legal equivalent of the American Psychiatric Association’s
1973 determination to drop homosexuality from its nomenclature of
mental disorders. That change removed the stigma of mental illness
from homosexuality and opened doors for much social change.
On a religious level, the values-based approach
of the Reconstructionist movement has given rise to an understanding
that whereas the halakha has recognized homosexuality simply
as a sexual act, we recognize it as a fundamental aspect of identity
that deserves to be treated with the Jewish value of b’tzelem
elohim (respect for human beings as made in God’s image). As
Justice Kennedy wrote in the Lawrence case: “when sexuality
finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person,
the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more
enduring.” Most Reconstructionist rabbis today perform same-sex
Jewish weddings (rituals are including in our Rabbi’s Manual).
Our movement has been in the forefront on these issues and has made
great strides in eliminating religious second-class citizenship
for gay and lesbian Jews.
Yet perhaps we are resting on our laurels. While
we are doing many right things in our communities, the hurt that
gay and lesbian Jews have endured is not righted overnight. Today,
our Commission report of 1992 today sounds stilted and stale. The
workshop series created to address inclusion issues in our synagogues
does not reflect current definitions and new understandings of gay
and lesbian (and bisexual and transgendered) identity and sexuality.
The Reform movement’s Kulanu sourcebook, and their resource page
on their rabbinic website, are superior to our materials. Our approach
and practice remain the best, but this does not alleviate our responsibility
to renew our materials to support Reconstructionist communities
in their continued efforts towards inclusion.
Our next step, I believe, should be to create a
timetable for all Reconstructionist communities to be inclusive
and welcoming to gay and lesbian members and staff. One model for
this would be the process that our movement created when we had
a few synagogues that still prayed with a mehitza (a wall
or curtain dividing men from women) or did not permit women to read
from the Torah. We gave these communities generous time in which
to progress towards egalitarianism, but we made it clear that gender
egalitarianism was a definitive Reconstructionist value and standard
of affiliation.
Similarly, we could mandate that all affiliates
fully welcome gay and lesbian Jews and grant them access to the
same lifecycle and membership privileges enjoyed by heterosexual
Jews. We could reaffirm standards of inclusiveness and a deadline
to meet those standards. At the very least, we could redefine the
process and hope for and work towards a hundred percent buy-in.
It is our duty as a movement to set an example
for all religious movements by reaching for inclusion based on our
spiritual values. To back off from this duty is to back off
from our fundamental vision. .
|
