Responses to "The Homosexual Question"
November 19, 2009
by Sivan Kerem
Thank you so much for sharing this piece with all of us. I appreciate your taking the time to open the Jewish community's eyes to this problem which needed to be addressed. I found your article to be extremely heart-rending and a tough one to read; the struggle that you deal with day-in and day-out is one that I cannot fathom, and can only imagine that you are living with such confusion and difficulty.
Part of what our community fails to recognize is the inner struggle that comes hand-in-hand with being gay and being a halakha-abiding Orthodox Jew. In a community that preaches the importance of unity and treating one's fellow Jew as one would like to be treated, I find it hypocritical that we have not stepped up to the plate to help our fellow Jew regardless of his or her sexual orientation. This inner struggle should be an outer struggle; one that isn't being dealt with on a personal level, but one that is being dealt with on a communal level. The Jewish community should be standing up to do anything we can to help the individual rather than even possibly allowing the individual to keep this bottled-up inside. Why aren't there support groups? Why is this still a topic that people won't discuss?
A friend of mine who happens to be gay once walked over to me in the library to ask me a quick question. After he left, another friend walked over to me and asked, "You know he's gay, right?", to which I responded, "What's your point?" and walked away. This story has boggled my mind ever since it happened, specifically because I don't think this is an abnormal comment for one friend to make to another friend. But so what if my friend is gay? Why is that a defining characteristic of someone and why did my friend feel the need to even mention it? Until we stop focusing on a person's sexual orientation and start focusing on the person him/herself, we are never going to make any progress in beginning to make a gay Orthodox Jew's inner struggle into an outer struggle that is dealt with by the entire Jewish community.
by Jo Jo Feundel
While Modern Orthodoxy, as its name suggests, prides itself on living both in and in harmony with the modern world, Jewish morality will not yield to the claims and pressures of the contemporary world. When the two become diametrically opposed, a Halakhic standard must win out. We are now in the time of year that characterizes this: the holiday of Hannukah, which many historians now believe began as a civil war between the Pharisaic Jews, who upheld the moral values of the Torah, and the Hellenized Jews, who tried to introduce the Greek morals of “beauty above all else,” celebrates the victory of the Torah’s value system over a contradictory moral code.
With that in mind, I have several comments on “The Gay Question,” published in the latest edition of The Commentator. The first is a minor one. The author assumes early on that sexuality is not a matter of choice. This is certainly not cut-and-dry. It is a highly disputed claim, with “proof” to support both sides usually coming from biased sources. What I strongly suspect is that a person’s sexuality is like any other mental tendency: some cases are inborn (which would be the hardest to change), while others arise from a motley of other factors.
However, even if we accept the author’s claim, it plays no part in a Jewish consideration of homosexuality. The Torah is explicit on this issue. The act is forbidden on a Torah level; the pasuk forbidding it in Leviticus 18:22 is now well known. What is less well known is that the pasuk presents a clear reason for the prohibition. Homosexuality runs counter to Jewish morality; there is no way around it. Recent attempts made by some Orthodox groups to mitigate the ban on homosexuality by presenting it as a chok, a law that we must follow despite its reason being unknown, indicate either a poor reading of the text or a deliberate attempt to subvert the Jewish moral system. Either of these poses major methodological problems.
Which brings me to the article. The author poignantly describes a deep struggle, experienced by many people, for which I extend my deepest sympathies. The ontological battle that stems from having these tendencies in a moral system that rejects it completely is understandably difficult. This struggle is only worsened with the fear that their rabbis and family members, the people who are supposed to support them and offer guidance, will cast them off as a religious perversion when they learn of this person’s predisposition. I agree with the author that there is a need to remove the stigma surrounding such a person. Rabbis and religious leaders need to be trained to counsel families in this situation. Each person should feel that he or she (if we assume the same statistics among Orthodox women) can comfortably approach his or her rabbi, teacher, or counselor with this, in the same way they would with any issue related to their Judaism. For the religious leadership to respond any other way is both inappropriate and immoral.
In offering guidance, however, it must be clearly stated and understood that Judaism does not accept these actions, and they run counter to Jewish beliefs. For that reason, I strongly believe the author is incorrect in trying to take the social situation present in the modern secular world and superimpose it on the Jewish world. Defining those people with certain sexual tendencies as their own social class only validates their actions, which is something Judaism can’t do. It would create a situation in which people were defining themselves as gay in a religious context. This would both muddle people’s understanding of the Jewish perspective and create major divisions when the impossible Halakhic argument inevitably arose. The validation would only be strengthened if a Gay-Straight Alliance were formed at YU. There is significant issue in Judaism, both social and Halakhic, with joining a national network that supports such popular initiatives as National Coming Out Day and the Gay Pride Parade. There should be a support network set up that mirrors others that are already established in the Orthodox community, but it needs to be one that supports the person while letting him know the action is unacceptable.
Our communal response to this issue should be defined by the Halakhic one, which has been clearly explained by rabbis in the last thirty years. (The website for the organization Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality, www.jonahweb.org, has links to many of the most important Halakhic articles.) In short: with regard to homosexuality, Halakha defines the action, not the person. The fact that someone is Jewish should be their defining status. Someone who has a predisposition to homosexuality, and even one who acts on it, is still considered a Jew. They are still required to follow the mitzvoth of Shabbat and kashrut, as well as every other mitzvah, including the prohibition on homosexuality. They are still a part of the Jewish community. There is an important distinction to be made here. Jewish Law makes no allowance for acting on homosexuality, but provides us with a way to cope and to understand the challenges. Those who leave the fold, one of two outcomes the author mentions, are not driven away by a failure of religion but by some other circumstance. It may be the failure of the community to offer the support structure necessary to come to grips with this issue, or an already existing aversion to a Jewish lifestyle, but religion does not abandon people; people abandon religion. To return to what the author said, if we follow his suggestion we will create a “gay-Jewish” group which will only further divide them and could encourage more people disappointed with an inability to follow alternate sexual mores to abandon a religious lifestyle.
To end, I, like the author, think this topic needs to come out of the closet and into open and honest discussion among Jewish leaders. I hope I illustrated that by writing this letter. The author would like to see a Jewish world where he is accepted as he is into the community. I would like to see a world where his profound struggle can be overcome and people confronting the same issues can find the strength to do so within the Orthodox community. I think we can reach both of these goals, but it cannot come at the expense of our Halakha and its underlying values, which are the binding fibers of our religion.
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