Fighting With Tzitzis

B"H

Rabbi Steven Greenberg was brought to the local JCC last month for the annual Jewish Book Festival. Rabbi Greenberg, a gay man with YU s'mikhah (Orthodox), has written a book -- on the ramifications of homosexuality in modern Jewish Orthodoxy, which must make it pioneering stuff, though I can't yet speak from reading it myself -- so he was billed as a Jewish author; but his presentation, which was co-sponsored by the Jewish Family Service Agency, was billed as a "Workshop for Mental Health Professionals, Teen Workers, Clergy and Educators," on the topic: "'Coming Out' Teens: Are We Ready?"

Gay and Lesbian youth face a daunting array of challenges. They typically suffer from isolation, fear, and enormous anxiety. The burden of carrying this secret leads to academic, social and familial problems, health risks, and even substance abuse and suicide. Teens dealing with issues of sexual orientation can turn to educators, religious leaders, youth workers or mental health professionals and when they do the responsibilities are enormous. How can an atmosphere of tolerance and safety be engendered in a school? in a youth group or camp? When teens come out, how should professionals respond?

So it was that this letter appeared last week (11/25/04) in the Jewish Western Bulletin. (A good friend of Aviel's and mine, R' David Mivasair, is mentioned, presumably for an email he distributed to his congregation promoting R' Greenberg's workshop.)

I am commenting on the Workshop for Professionals featuring Steve Greenberg, the first openly homosexual rabbi [sic], sponsored by the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and the Jewish Family Service Agency (JFSA).

I was under the impression that the JFSA stood for family values, among other things. I wonder what the word "family" stands for in their designation. Please read Leviticus 19:22 [sic].

According to Rabbi David Mivasair, I guess I am not part of our community since I do not share in its newly discovered "level of awareness and understanding"; and thanks but no thanks to JCC and JFSA for making this program possible.

This rhetoric pushes a lot of my buttons, and it raises at least two distinct issues that we need to spend some time unpacking if we're going to try building a true home for religious Jewish consciousness. One is the matter of religiosity itself, and, in particular, how we Jews are forever liable to become enslaved to a more populous religious culture's agenda. Obviously, this theme echoes through era after era of overt religious oppression of Jewish communities by Hellenists, Christians, Muslims, etc. The trouble is that we tend not to tell these stories all the way to the end.

The story of Chanukah isn't over when the Maccabees secure military triumph against the Syrians and their supporters. It isn't even over when the Beyt haMiqdash is kashered. The involvement of miracle here should clue us in that the narrative is not yet complete. No Torah narrative is ever complete with a Divine miracle. Our, the Jews', response is still required -- otherwise, the miracle is left empty. The Chanukah oil burns miraculously for just enough time for us to get kosher Temple oil back into regular production. This, in turn, is only a Divine kickstart for the extensive task of kashering the whole people Israel from enslavement to Hellenism-as-opposed-to-Torah, a task which is to this day still incomplete.

Chanukah in our time is the best reminder we could ask for, that Torah miracles and New Testament miracles are fundamentally different animals. Now that we're being saturated with retellings of the essential Christian birth miracle, we owe it to ourselves to review the essential Jewish birth miracle. The story of Chanukah is, after all, one coil in the great Exodus narrative, and the Red Sea birth canal waters didn't part for any virgin birth. The midrash brings that the Sea did not part until Nachshon ben Aminadav, on behalf of Klal Yisrael had entered it (Sotah 37b, Shemot Rabbah 21:10)!

Even then it was still left to Israel to decide that we would cross to the unknown wilderness on the other side. All Torah miracles are like this, invitations to consummate our partnership with G!d. Israel's redemption comes only by us doggedly slogging forward in pursuit of our Truth. It is not born in a manger one day solely by Divine Gift, no mortal input needed. That is the basis for an entirely different Covenant. Our involvement is required to fill our miracle, to defeat slavery by our actively choosing otherwise -- and this requirement is ongoing.

The Jew is, by definition, a chosen minority in the world. Israel is a loner people, forever at risk, by Design, of being enslaved. I say "enslaved" rather than "assimilated," because there is no such thing as an assimilated Jew. "Jew" denotes the experience of radical difference ("chosen"-ness), whereas "assimilation" denotes the opposite. Therefore, a Jew cannot be assimilated. A Jew can be only killed, or enslaved. (In this sense, the Third Reich understood Judaism accurately.) It takes one miracle for us to evade death, and a second miracle for us to birth ourselves by way of overcoming enslavement. The experience of enslavement, just as the taste of death, stays with us long past the miraculous moment. We bring the slave mentality with us into freedom, where we must overcome it in a new, introspective, way. (This is echoed in the Black American experience since emancipation, which is why Black Americans tend to "get" Pesach.) Chanukah, then, winds up being about Jewish assimilation after all, but in our time it is not the struggle against an assimilationist outer culture -- postmodernity can't champion stiff-necked freaks enough -- but instead the struggle with an inner Jewish culture, that has itself assimilated the attitude of enslavement.

In all of our ongoing mythic struggles, we tend to look for Goliath. (Even the deeply perceptive Alan Dershowitz manages to rail against intermarriage as though it represents a threat to Judaism somehow distinct from the familiar cycles of death and birth.) We forget that the greatness of David our King is not wrapped up in defeat of the Other, but in the inner elevation of our Kingdom. We are required neither to defeat the other nations, nor to eradicate them from our midst (or hearts). As David Biale writes in introduction to the excellent Cultures of the Jews, there is no such thing as a complete, self-contained Jewish culture. Our heritage does not consist in one pure language that we can choose, if we're good, over any of the available goyische alternatives. Jewish culture is a distinct attitude, that of Torah consciousness, that Jews bring to any and every culture that we encounter. It is, in short, a way assimilating. Assimilating, in the transitive sense.

Judaism is how the Truthful experiences of G!d's Creation that live among the many villages of the world are assimilated, by Judaism, into the body of Torah.

The tachlis of this holy assimilation involves a tricky distinction: between the elevation of received sensitivities into Torah, and the substitution of received sensitivities for Torah. Our tendency is to do the latter -- because it is always easier and less aggravating to simply accept someone else's notion, than to call attention to yourself by trying to transform it -- and this tendency perpetuates our enslavement to other cultures. To reject one's own work to further someone else's, on account of fear of that someone else, is the definition of slavery itself. We carry it in our hearts, and in every belief or assumption that we don't bother to labor through our unique, chosen Torah consciousness, for the sake of our own comfort and convenience.

Therefore, in the spirit of the season, I wrote this letter to the Bulletin, which was published, much thanks to the editor Baila Lazarus, almost exactly as-is in the 12/02/04 edition:

Regarding last week's letter, which questioned the JFSA's representation of "family values," for bringing a gay rabbi to Vancouver:

I am a Torah-committed Jew. I am also a brother, of a gay man. Homosexuality is an unavoidable reality for many families in our community, and we have hardly begun to accept the challenges seriously, much less compassionately. If promoting dialogue, to help actual families hold together, does not represent "family values," I don't know what does. This was the JFSA's apparent aim, and I applaud their effort.

To advance the cause of Torah, we must learn from our own people, whether straight or queer, and not Evangelical ideologues.

Consider that a fellow Jew is more likely to be excluded from a Pesach seder for being gay than for working on Shabbat. Yet even the most austere interpretation of Torah Law can't support such a double-standard. If we would be uncomfortable to deal harshly with Shabbat violators then we should be equally uncomfortable to deal harshly with gays.

This differs from the Christian Right's message, but they do not speak for Torah values. When we allow them to set our religious agenda, our heritage and our families can only lose.

I had known for some time, at least since meeting R' Daniel Lapin once in shul, that there's something uniquely creepy about hearing James Dobson rhetoric from a beard. I have many friends and acquaintances who express their religious Jewish devotion at least as much by parroting Christian Right talk radio as by pursuing mitzvot, and this has always disconcerted me even more than the Christians who spread that same moralistic propaganda. This one letter in the Bulletin crystallized the reason why for me: in our modern-day clamor to assert either more or less religiosity than the next guy, we have passively ceded the definition of "religiosity" itself to the most hard-line, and powerful, Christian ideologues in our midst. But Christian religiosity is founded in correctness of belief, and such a model is anathema to the calling of Torah, which requires suspension of belief in the pursuit of more complete Revelation.

In other words, the nearly-universal ostracization of gays from religious Jewish community may have a basis in Torah, but that isn't why we do it. We do it because it's what religious people -- read: right-wing Christians -- are supposed to do. The blackest black-hat rabbis in town go to all lengths reaching out to local Jews who are capital offenders by Torah Law. They throw huge complimentary Friday dinners for them and then look the other way when they step outside to make cell calls and light cigarettes on the sidewalk. And they can justify this kiruv halakhically, because it's education and, in our Sanhedrin-less day, thank G!d, the rabbinic batey din don't execute capital offenders. Withholding judgement, it turns out, makes for better religious outreach.

Extending this leniency to gay Jews is not an enormous halakhic difficulty, but it would propel our religious work into terrain that is considered unsavory and alien by the "moral majority" (who couldn't care less about, for example, Shabbat observance), and our religious leadership is loathe to make any such move, for two reasons: (1) the Christian Right's ideological power could turn against Jewish leadership that deviates from their party line; and (2) the Christian Right's ideological power can be turned, by compliant Jewish leadership, against other Jewish leadership that deviates from their party line. So we have become our own taskmasters, happily tossing gay Jewish sons downriver.

This systemic state of denial is, or should be, outrageous, but it is also deeply ironic, in the sense that our Christianly homophobic Orthodoxy is effectively passing off its own share of Jewish post-enslavement to a handful of brave and determined gay Jews. Not having the option, owing to their G!d-made differentness, of remaining comfortably enslaved to a halakhic liberalism that permits efforts toward inclusion only in cases approved by the "moral majority," Jews who know themselves to be both gay and called to Torah are forced to pursue a greater Truth all on their own. They are, in a word, Chosen. Those who submit to this most Jewish struggle will be rewarded with a dimension of Revelation that we, slaves who call ourselves "Torah Jews," are senselessly, cowardly denying ourselves.

Which brings me to that second issue I promised, and to my tzitzis. This morning, in the final b'rakhah before Shema, as I gathered together the tzitzis of my tallit, one evaded me, hidden somewhere in the folds. It was frustrating, and I caught myself getting angry at the rogue tzitzis as I dragged out the final syllables of the b'rakhah and grumped around in the confusion of my shawl. It occurred to me then that mitzvahs are like that sometimes; they hide in shadows, avoid your grasp, and make life, the righteous life you have chosen, difficult and frustrating.

A great ba'al tefilah may gracefully, elegantly lengthen the brakhahs' delivery to buy time; or, one less great such as I may just have to suspend the usual procedure in silence until the mess is sorted out. With patience, these moments can crack open the gates of Heaven. Without patience, they can spoil all the rest of our prayers.

Something strange and unknown is happening in our time: I have a number of good, trusted friends who are committed to same-sex partnerships identical, as far as I can tell, to my marriage but for the sexuality. This may distinguish my experience from that of any posek on the books. At the very least, it leaves me with a number of questions about how we read Vayikra 18, especially the 22nd posuk, that the available rabbinic writings don't answer. For instance, why would the Torah use roundabout poetic language to describe one sex act but no others? If the kavanah of a gay man is never to lie with anyone as one would lie with a woman (as I understand to be the case), then why would G!d, knowing this Himself, describe a sin using language that the sinner wouldn't recognize (but which his enemies might)? And, most important to me, if the posuk actually means to indicate a prohibition other than gay sex, what is it, and what kind of a liability is it for us to go on willfully not knowing?

These issues are not my personal calling. I want to focus on building intentional community, writing music, and raising a family. But I am committed to the Whole Torah, and I want our Mishkan to be a Whole Mishkan. That means making room for the alien, the fringenik, the tzitzit. The Jew. Structurally, how do we do this, especially with explosive issues like sexuality, gender, and interfaith awareness? How do we welcome the possibility of lengthening the b'rakhah, or suspending the usual procedure in silence, for a potential co-dweller to raise a new sensitivity into our Torah, without abandoning the stable foundation of our oral tradition and uncorking a chaotic free-for-all (see: so-called "liberal Judaism"), and without becoming dominated by a single political issue (whether in reality or only in public perception)? And does such welcome come from the community's leadership, rabbi, written protocols, unwritten protocols, dumb luck, something else? Can we make room in learning without making room in ritual, or vice versa? (Would we want to?)

In any case, may we see the building of a Whole Mishkan in our days, where we may bless ourselves with the freedom and strength and patience to seek the fringes of Revelation in peace, and in love.

Chag Orim Sameach!