A Philadelphia rabbi is feeling threatened by the recent “propaganda blitz” with regard to the “homosexual lifestyle” and has begun a bid to enshrine religious bigotry among fundamentalist Jews. According to the Huffington Post, Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky and friends are circulating a “Torah Declaration, Petition, re: The Torah Stance on Homosexuality” that calls repentance and reparative therapy the only options for homosexuals. He wants rabbis and mental-health professionals to sign it. (Good luck with that last one, Rabbi, since all major mental-health organizations have rejected reparative therapy for homosexuality.)
In the declaration we see the same tired old misinformation and fuzzy thinking, including the confusion of sexual orientation with sexual behavior as well as with gender identity; crocodile-tear calls for compassion; and platitudes.
We emphatically reject the notion that a homosexually inclined person cannot overcome his or her inclination and desire. Behaviors are changeable.
It requires tremendous bravery and fortitude for a person to confront and deal with same-sex attraction. For example a sixteen-year-old who is struggling with this issue may be confused and afraid and not know whom to speak to or what steps to take. We must create an atmosphere where this teenager (or anyone) can speak freely to a parent, rabbi, or mentor and be treated with love and compassion. Authority figures can then guide same-sex strugglers towards a path of healing and overcoming their inclinations.
The key point to remember is that these individuals are primarily innocent victims of childhood emotional wounds.
The only viable course of action that is consistent with the Torah is therapy and teshuvah. The therapy consists of reinforcing the natural gender-identity of the individual by helping him or her understand and repair the emotional wounds that led to its disorientation and weakening, thus enabling the resumption and completion of the individual’s emotional development. Teshuvah is a Torah-mandated, self-motivated process of turning away from any transgression or sin and returning to G-d and one’s spiritual essence. This includes refining and reintegrating the personality and allowing it to grow in a healthy and wholesome manner.
In their fear-based refusal to think outside their rigid interpretation of the Bible, homophobic ultra-Orthodox Jews are in between a rock and a hard place. They want to believe God is good. They want to believe the Torah prohibits homosexuality. So they are literally forced to believe, in the face of all reason and decency, that homosexuality is a choice:
The concept that G-d created a human being who is unable to find happiness in a loving relationship unless he violates a biblical prohibition is neither plausible nor acceptable. G-d is loving and merciful. Struggles, and yes, difficult struggles, along with healing and personal growth are part and parcel of this world. Impossible, life long, Torah prohibited situations with no achievable solutions are not.
Assuming that’s true, Rabbi, I suggest re-examining the “prohibited situations” part of your impasse rather than denying the “impossible” part and calling debunked quackery an “achievable solution.”
…The Torah does not forbid something which is impossible to avoid. Abandoning people to lifelong loneliness and despair by denying all hope of overcoming and healing their same-sex attraction is heartlessly cruel.
Heartlessly cruel, Rabbi? You’re projecting. Look in the mirror.
For those wishing to comment on this declaration, the email address it contains is TorahDec@gmail.com.
Yoni Bock and Ron Kaplan, two Orthodox Jewish men, recently married each other in a ceremony officiated by Stephen Greenberg, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi: it’s an historic first! And God did not strike them down. Instead, two men’s loving union was blessed both by the District of Columbia and by a God they and their courageous rabbi choose to believe smiles upon loving couples.
Sniff! Congratulations, Yoni and Ron, from Truth Wins Out. To those members of the Orthodox community who have given over their consciences entirely to one particular exclusivist interpretation of the Torah (their comments are in painful evidence at The Jewish Week’s mention of the wedding), and who state that Rabbi Greenberg is not an Orthodox rabbi despite having been ordained as one, some words from Martin Luther King, Jr., that seem apropos even though no one is calling for Greenberg’s imprisonment.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
Lest we forget, the theocratic element in Israel–a modern and nominally secular state–is active and powerful. An ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) group living in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood intends to defy a court order by actually banning women from certain streets during celebrations for Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival. These are public streets, mind you, and the ban extends not merely to Haredi women but *all* women.
Large billboards posted throughout the capital’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods this week forbade women to enter Mea She’arim Street during the celebration.
“Women … are requested to use alternative streets on their way home and to synagogues … to help prevent mingling,” the posters say.
Last year community leaders put up tarpaulin partitions along the sidewalks on Strauss and Mea She’arim streets, creating a narrow path on one side for women to walk on. The other sidewalk and the center of the street were reserved for men. A group calling itself “the neighborhood committee” operated “ushers” to make sure the women were keeping to the narrow path.
Notice the separation doesn’t even make a pretense of being equal.
I once attended Orthodox Chabad services in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood and was directed to the “women’s section,” a screened-off area at the back of a large room. The screen was set so closely against the wall that my knees bumped it, and it was opaque, so I had to peer through a hole in the cloth to see the services. It wasn’t until I found myself poking a finger forlornly through one of the holes like a monkey at a zoo that I got up and left.
The Orthodox are big on modesty and on “preventing mingling,” and, as with all religions obsessed with maintaining “purity” at the expense of actually discussing sexuality in an educated way, their fears of impropriety can paradoxically wind up sexualizing everything they do–from handshakes to prayer to conversation. One shudders to contemplate how they spiritually bulldoze their non-straight members. These theocrats have real power in Israel;* it’s up to us to make sure that their like-minded American Christian counterparts don’t gain more in our country.
* For example, their sons and daughters are exempt from the military service that’s incumbent on all other young Israelis, and adult men are bankrolled by the Israeli state in huge numbers because their yeshiva educations don’t prepare them for the modern work force.
An Orthodox Jew, Jayson Littman, writes about his attempt to convert to straight via JONAH, the Jewish pray-away-the-gay wagon. His account of various rabbis’ advice to him is depressing and revealing:
The first rabbi I spoke to at the age of 18 told me it was just a phase and during a call back at the age of 20, insisted I speak to other rabbis. An orthodox rabbi in Queens informed me all I needed was a sexual outlet for my feelings, that as soon as I found the right woman to marry, I would be cured. Still not convinced, I spoke to another rabbi in Brooklyn. After some deep thought he said, “everyone has skeletons in their closets, not just you.” He recommended I not disclose anything to the girls I was dating as it was forbidden to speak loshon hora [evil words] about myself. I tried telling him that it wasn’t actual skeletons that were in my closet, but it was indeed me that was in the closet. I decided to visit with one more rabbi in Staten Island. After an hour of examining all possible solutions of what one might do, and what other rabbis might suggest, he flatly answered, “I don’t know.”
Interestingly, Jayson’s years of “conversion therapy” helped him gain self-confidence and helped him feel more at ease with his inner life–so much so that he credits the experience with giving him the guts to proudly come out. He soon founded a gay Jewish event-promotion group as well, the felicitiously named He’Bro. May more such stories end so happily.
Reform Judaism, by the way, is the most prominent group within the Jewish faith in the United States. This sort of summarily smacks down the Christian Right’s popular lie that their hate movement is “interfaith.”
Despite the fact that he comes from a different faith tradition, Rabbi Yehuda Levin is essentially an Alabama redneck fundamentalist. This is why the Religious Right likes him — he’s, unlike the great majority of American Jews, as big a bigot as they are. I often wonder how he feels about the fact that they trot him out whenever they want to appear interfaith, even though they likely believe he’s going to burn in hell.
Of course, that’s neither here nor there. Levin decided to open his mouth and emanate words about the “link between earthquakes and homosexuality,” and guess what? Even though the epicenter of the other day’s earthquake was far closer to Matt Barber’s grundle than it was to DuPont Circle, it’s our fault again:
Hey moron: earthquakes are caused by fault lines. We’ve known this since the 1700′s, at the very latest. Therefore your weird, infantile argument about “god” using earthquakes to punish people for homosexuality is pathetic and sad. So stop talking, as you are embarrassing your ancestors.
The one bit of good news in this is that, unlike the situation with American fundamentalist Christians, virtually everyone knows that normal Jewish people would laugh their asses off at this man. You moderate and liberal Christians have work to do, loves, to get your religion to the point where everybody knows that Tony Perkins doesn’t represent your faith.
I don’t agree with every one of his constructions here, as he seems to be talking from the standpoint of “what’s a greater sin? Homosexuality or X?”, but his general point is solid and powerful:
When I told a religious friend about being inspired by Rosie [O'Donnell] adopting four children, he said to me, “How sad that these kids are never going to have a father.” Lost on him was the irony that without Rosie they would not have a mother either.
Now, Rosie has a media microphone and can fend for herself. But I think about all the other gay adoptive parents who are under assault as being ill-equipped to adopt. We’ve heard all the arguments. Gay parents who adopt will make their children gay (offensive and stupid). Every child deserves a mother and a father (I addressed this above). Gay is an abomination, to which I would respond that leaving a child to grow up in an orphanage where nobody wants them might be an even greater act of sacrilege.
But to my fellow straight people I offer the following challenge. You have every right to oppose gay marriage. It’s a free country. We don’t suppress opinions. But aren’t you under a moral obligation to adopt the children in their stead? Surely leaving kids to drown without love is deeply immoral. But to stop others from rescuing them is an abomination.
[...]
A few years ago on my radio show I interviewed two gay men who were in court fighting the government of Florida — my home state, where gay adoption is prohibited — to adopt a five-year-old African-American child who was mentally-handicapped. They had been picking the boy up from an orphanage every Sunday for about a year and now wanted to adopt him. One of the men said, “Nobody wants him. But we want him.” I choked up. The show went to dead air. I could not speak or respond. “Nobody wants him. But we want him.” Here was a child whose skin color for some was all wrong and whose intelligence did not always match up. But to these two men the boy was perfect.
[...]
That some would prefer that unwanted children remain in orphanages rather than in warm and welcoming homes is a sad commentary on the self-appointed morality police of our time.
While we were all busy celebrating Hallowe’en this weekend, I somehow managed to hear about this:
One of the mail bombs sent by terrorists in Yemen was addressed to a small, gay-friendly synagogue in Chicago.
Or Chadash leases spaces in Emmanuel Congregation’s lakefront synagogue on the North Side.
“We have a highly visible lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual community and at first we thought that might have attracted attention,” Lilli Kornblum, the Co-President of Or Chadash told FOX Chicago News. “But as we learned that more packages were sent, we now don’t take it personally, Well, we are taking it personally as human beings and as Jews but it seems we were randomly selected from any number of Jewish organizations in Chicago.”
Scary. But we’re not wingnuts, so I assume we’ll all continue checking the mail every day, right? Good.
The other day, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote a grotesque piece about the spate of gay teen suicides we’ve been experiencing, in which he claimed that he was “haunted” by the stories of Tyler Clementi and others, but couldn’t seem to break through the haze of his anti-realistic worldview to see that teachings like those propagated by, ahem, Albert Mohler are a big part of the problem. I responded to his piece here.
Amanda Udis-Kessler has issued a response of her own, published on the liberal Jewish site Tikkun, which reads like nothing less than a smackdown from someone who understands the scripture far better than Mohler. It’s always entertaining to me to read Jewish writers take on fundamentalist Christians, because they absolutely turn the faux-literalist approach of the fundies on its head.
Mark 3:1-6: Again [Jesus] entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they mightaccuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come forward.’ Then he said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
Was Jesus being a bad Jew here? That depends on your definition. If one must adhere scrupulously to the letter of the law, Jesus didn’t. But why didn’t he adhere scrupulously to the letter of the law? Because it was more important to contribute to the man’s well-being than it was to follow laws that could not possibly have been able to predict every single situation to which they would be applied long after they were written. Indeed, Jews know this, which is why there have been commentaries and debates about the interpretation of the commandments for centuries.
The above passage from Mark seems to me entirely relevant to the situation of Tyler Clementi and the hundreds of other lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who have killed themselves because the messages they received from society (and especially from conservative religion) about their sexuality were life-destroying. Jesus rejected the letter of the law because it did not contribute to human flourishing – much like the way some Christians reject the “clobber passages” on homosexuality because they know that, even if those passages are in the Bible, they do only harm in the world, no good. They do not want under any account to be accusable of “hardness of heart.”
[...]
You describe yourself as a “Christian committed to biblical truth.” To prevent the Tyler Clementis of the world from jumping off bridges, you have to become a Christian as committed to human flourishing as you are to biblical truth – to walk the hard path of Jesus, not the easier one that the Pharisees are presented as following. There are many ways to read the Bible, and plenty of Christians who follow contemporary biblical scholarship and are both passionately devoted to Christ and completely and fully inclusive of sexual minorities. The Bible supports human flourishing. Jesus supported human flourishing when he healed the man’s withered hand on the Sabbath, even though it went against some verses in the Torah. You could be a healer, Dr. Mohler, but you would have to go against some biblical verses to do it. Think about it. At the end of the day, would you rather say that you hewed to the Bible or that you saved lives?
Burdened by two scandals, the ex-gay activist group Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality has changed its name.
The change occurred recently without fanfare on the organization’s web site. The new name: “Jews Offering New Alternatives to Healing”
Despite the name change, JONAH’s mission remains largely the same:
Deny the existence of sexual orientation, a predominant state of sexual attraction to a particular gender
Promote the myth that homosexual attraction is caused not by biology or brain chemistry, but by a Freudian deficiency of “masculinity” in men that is caused by bad parenting or abuse
Receive substantial aid from conservative Christian evangelical organizations which teach that faith in Jesus Christ offers the only path out of homosexuality
And its credentials and practices are as scandalous as ever.
Far from “healing” its clients of any sexual confusion or self-doubt, JONAH has a reputation for supplying its clients with Christian evangelical books and subjecting them to unethical abuses that would never be tolerated among true mental-health professionals. And its counselors’ abuses aren’t “new alternatives,” they are century-old snake-oil remedies.
JONAH’s leader, Arthur Abba Goldberg, is a convicted Wall Street con artist who looted millions of dollars from poor communities. Goldberg has no professional credentials in the mental-health sciences
JONAH’s senior trainer, Alan Downing, likewise has no professional credentials and stands accused by two former clients of sexual misconduct
JONAH and its counselors refuse to keep accurate and comprehensive records about their clients, lest such records fall into the hands of objective scientists and be used to measure actual rates of success or failure
