Thoughts on a “Gayness and God” lecture

Did anybody else eat uncooked packs of ramen noodles as a kid? Or was this just a thing at my elementary school? You’d crush the noodles without opening the package. Once they were in tiny pieces, you’d open it and fish out the now-very-powdery packet of soup mix. Then you’d dump said mix into the bag, shake it to distribute – and, voila, a snack generous enough to make you and all your grade-six friends sick on yummy, yummy salt and MSG.

So, the other night (um… over a month ago, I just didn’t blog about it until now… don’t judge me), I went to a lecture called “Gayness and God”, given by Rabbi Steve Greenberg, who, on the promotional material, is referred to as “the world’s first openly gay Orthodox rabbi”. And I have to admit, I went knowing that the talk probably wasn’t designed to give me what I secretly hoped I might get from it*. Rabbi Greenberg’s goal is to allow the community of Orthodox Jews a) to see God’s relationship with LGBT Orthodox Jews as positive, not wrathful or disappointed; and b) to embrace LGBT Orthodox Jews into the overall community without the looming threat of humiliation or hatred. The two are very worthwhile aims, and something a lot of people (myself included) support, whether or not they’re LGBT. And I did like Rabbi Greenberg’s reinterpretation of the prohibition on male-male sex in Leviticus: the commandment, he suggests, was given in the context of a culture where gender equality was non-existent and homosexual rape was a common punishment or act of aggression, designed to humiliate and emasculate the victim.

However, it still didn’t clear up my main problem: why would an all-knowing, all-good God not frame such a commandment more clearly? Would it have been that difficult for God to say, “A man shall not lie with a man as he lies with a woman unless both men are willing”? I mean, if God is omniscient, then God must know that the ambiguous phrasing would instigate hatred and violence thousands of years in the future.

Now, don’t get me wrong – the Leviticus prohibition on male-male sex isn’t my only problem with the laws of the Torah. But it’s one of the ones that bothers me the most, because, let’s face it: none of my friends faces institutionalized and personal discrimination because they plough their fields with a donkey and an ox in tandem. No one has been preventing from visiting her dying partner because she failed to pierce the ear of a slave who decided to remain in her service after seven years; no one lacks the legal right to custody of his kids because he didn’t stone a sinner for working on the Sabbath.

And, as Rabbi Greenberg pointed out, homophobia and discrimination based on sexual preference go hand-in-hand with discrimination based on gender. Whether we like it or not, sex and gender are tied together in our culture; anything that challenges the normative gender roles, like non-heterosexual intimate relationships, threatens the status quo and the conventional hierarchy of power. And vice versa: prescribed gender roles lead to the characterization of non-heterosexuality as unnatural. Religious prohibition of homosexuality is the tip of an ugly, ugly iceberg of engrained superstition and suppression.

So how do you deal with being born into a religion – and a culture – that upholds such values? It’s tempting to walk away and say, “No, I have nothing to do with this. I am not part of this culture”, but saying it doesn’t make it true. And where do you walk to?

Personally, I cannot believe in a God who condemns people for their nature rather than their choices. I cannot believe in a God who condemns people for choosing a healthy, loving, sexual relationship between informed, consenting adults over a lifetime of repression and suffering. And “cannot” isn’t a word I use lightly: excluding situations of duress, there are circumstances** under which I can see myself believing in some omnipotent, supernatural being who hates homosexuality. There are no circumstances under which I can imagine myself conceiving of such a being as anything close to what I feel is meant by the term “God”.

To be honest, I’m not struggling to stay a proponent of gay marriage or antidiscrimination laws. I’m struggling to stay a proponent of being Jewish. Because, really, the rewritten history and outright lies don’t make it any easier; neither do the frankly hateful words embedded in the liturgy***. I recognize that Judaism can bring families together and promote charity, compassion, and love: of course, yes, absolutely. Among the bigoted and outdated morals in the Torah are many others that I consider admirable: don’t place a stumbling block before the blind. Thou shalt not kill. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And those rightfully deserve a place in our pantheon of ethics. But I would no more consider that reason to hold it up as an exclusive guide for living a good life than I would consider bestowing the same status on the Harry Potter series; while I grant that there are good lessons to be learned from both, I also argue that both are horribly fallible, and, more to the point, that they are neither sufficient nor necessary for moral behaviour or thought.

To quote Pierre-Simon Laplace somewhat out of context: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”

But at what point is abandoning a hypothesis merely avoiding having to take responsibility for the actions of those who still believe in it? And are there any other hypotheses that don’t fall into its traps one way or another?

Oy vey.

* Sadly, yes, I have come to realize in recent years that the world doesn’t revolve around me and my wants. I don’t mean to say Rabbi Greenberg should have addressed my questions, just that those happen to be questions in which I’m interested.

** Circumstances involving very, very specific and very, very unlikely empirical evidence.

*** In what other context is it acceptable for men to publicly thank God for not making them women while women thank God for making them the way they are? In what situation other than the end of a Passover seder is it deemed acceptable to open your door and proclaim your desire for God to destroy the wicked nations of the world?