Judaism and Homosexuality

Some time ago I read a wonderful opinion by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in the Jewish Week. In it, he described how he balances his tolerance of homosexuals with his strict adherence to Halacha, Jewish Law. Basically, he said, he treats everyone equally. Just as he has friends that don’t observe the Sabbath or don’t eat strictly kosher, he has gay friends. While he may not subscribe to their lifestyle or choices, they are nonetheless his friends, whom he embraces and loves as any others.

The following week, in the letters section, a prominent Orthodox Rabbi, son in law to one of the most revered Halachic authorities of the twentieth century, quoted the verse in Leviticus, which describes a specific sexual act as “an abomination.” He used this verse to say that there can be no tolerance of homosexuality in Judaism, period. While I cannot argue against his academic or rabbinic credentials, I couldn’t help but laugh, actually, guffaw. This Rabbi has two sons, let me repeat, two sons, who were thrown out of their positions as communal Rabbis, for taking sexual advantage of vulnerable women in their respective communities. This Torah giant, stalwart defender of G-d’s laws found the time to criticize a Rabbi whose only sin appears to be tolerance and love for people no matter what. This was so important to him, that he shed any sense of humility, to humiliate others in the name of his perceived sense of right.

Recently, a brave group of Orthodox Rabbis signed a letter calling for tolerance towards homosexuals; one of those audacious souls was rewarded with the resignation from his congregation of a professor of Talmud, a scion of a prominent rabbinic family. The Yeshiva of Flatbush holds a 20^th reunion and disinvites one of the attendees who plans on bringing his partner. And the list goes on.

What is it about this particularly vague biblical verse that gets so many people’s passions tied up in knots? Why not focus on something much more prevalent, say like stealing, which figures prominently in the Ten Commandments. Yeah, we’ve got plenty of thieves amongst us, but their sins don’t seem to receive the same scorn, in fact some of them get a rally to protest the harshness of their prison sentence.

We live in a time when the color of your Friday night table cloth is more important for a shidduch (marital match) than whether or not one of the prospective in laws went to jail for embezzlement. An out of closet homosexual in a family can render the siblings unmarriageable but a father serving time for welfare fraud makes the children not only perfectly acceptable, but sometimes more desirable. Reporting child abuse by a rabbi to the police, that is mesira, the sin of giving a Jew up to secular authorities, right up there with the transgression of loving your gay neighbor.

Our priorities have gotten so skewed that we don’t see intolerance to gays for what it is; outright discrimination, intolerance and ignorance. We focus our scorn at the most vulnerable to project strength, but what we are doing is showing our weakness and blindness to our own vulnerabilities. I am not a scholar but I’m pretty sure G-d destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of rape, not because the population of those towns wore Ferregamo or were Bette Midler fans. 

We have volumes of scholarship on how to fuse modern technology to the minutia of Jewish Law but have little sympathy to science that proves that homosexuality is genetic and not learned. It’s high time we realized that intolerance towards gays is just a precursor to intolerance towards the rest of us. We are not G-d’s policemen, he can do just fine by Himself. We need to focus on ourselves, look inward and stop worrying about what happens in other people’s bedrooms. As the un venerable Kinky Friedman once said, “of course we should allow gays to marry, they have just as much right to be miserable as the rest of us.”