Friday, October 29, 2010

CHAYEI SARAH 5771 - On Marriage and How We Read the Bible

CHAYEI SARAH 5771

Sermon delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, 10.29.10

Rabbi Jonathan Blake


Two weeks ago I spoke about Ishmael, the result of a brief relationship between an eighty-six year-old Abraham and his Egyptian maidservant Hagar. Sarah, desperate for a child, permits their union but promptly regrets it when Hagar becomes pregnant. When Abraham is ninety-nine and Ishmael thirteen, Sarah miraculously gives birth to Isaac. She unsympathetically casts Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness, and that, more or less, is the end of that.


Parashat Chayei Sarah begins with Sarah’s death. Isaac, now fully grown, takes a wife and Rebecca moves into his tent. Toward the very end of the portion, the Torah drops one of those great “They never taught me that in Sunday school!” lines, informing us that “Abraham took another wife whose name was Keturah” (Gen. 25:1).


The Rabbis turned cartwheels to make sense of this plot twist. Rashi provides the most famous rationalization, that Keturah was a secret name for none other than Hagar -- thus solving two problems with one imaginative little interpretation.


(1) It mitigates Abraham’s complicity in kicking Hagar out of the tent, showing that although their relationship ended abruptly, Abraham carried a torch for the mother of his first child.


And (2) it portrays Abraham as less of a Don Juan, living out his twilight years with an appropriate companion, who, like Abraham, had become eligible for Social Security benefits.


However, all this is midrash, commentary between the lines. The Torah speaks for itself. Abraham and his young bride immediately got down to business and Keturah ended up giving birth to six children. What’s more, the text further references other children born to Abraham by concubines who are given parting gifts at the time of Abraham’s death, even though he does not include them in his will.


One of the reasons we come back to the Torah week after week is because we see ourselves in Biblical characters, in all their human complexity, their nobility and frailty. The Bible illuminates the human quest for meaning and spiritual connection in lives beset by the ordinary wear-and-tear of raising a family and putting food on a table, as well as the upheaval visited on ordinary lives by death, betrayal, and national catastrophe.


What couple struggling with infertility does not see themselves in Abraham and Sarah? What person with a toxic in-law does not see himself in Jacob? What refugee from Hurricane Katrina would not see herself in the The Flood and what refugee from tyranny would not see himself in The Exodus?


Still, Abraham’s love life startles us a bit. I mean, two full-fledged wives, one openly acknowledged extra-marital affair, and a goodly number of concubines, all bearing children? What to say?


Before we rush to judgment, let’s do what we must always do when reading Torah, which is to consider the text not through the lens of twenty-first century mores but rather in the context of its time: both the time in which it was written, the Iron Age, the first millennium BCE, and the time the writers wished to portray, the Bronze Age, the era of the patriarchs and matriarchs, somewhere between 1,600 and 2,000 BCE.


Through this lens, it quickly becomes clear that no matter how much we identify with the human drama of the Bible, the literature nevertheless conjures up a time and place and culture vastly removed from our own, in which animal sacrifice, slavery, and polygamy were par for the course.


One reason the Torah doesn’t bat an eye at Abraham consorting with concubines and siring a brood with a brand new wife a chapter after burying Sarah is probably because these choices reflect certain norms of Biblical society. So while love and lust may not have changed much over the past 4,000 years, the relationships that polite society deems acceptable have changed, as have the institutions that define and safeguard the norms for those relationships.


The Bible is a wonderful tool for imparting wisdom to people seeking a spiritual dimension to living. I cannot imagine a week without refracting its words upon my life. Biblical wisdom shapes the way I look at the world.


At the same time, we ought not apply, wholesale, Biblical standards of love, fidelity, sex, childrearing, and marriage to today’s debates about the same.


For starters, the Bible knows of no institution called marriage! Rabbis living almost two millennia after the time of Abraham first defined marriage in our religion. Another almost two millennia later and we stand at a crossroads about what constitutes a marriage--specifically, whether or not we shall consider homosexuals eligible to marry.


At the center of this debate, critics of gay marriage have placed our own Bible. Citing the Book of Leviticus which in two places condemns men who would engage in homosexual intercourse (in one of those two places mandating the death penalty), they argue that homosexuality offends so-called “Judeo-Christian values.”


Turning to the story of Adam and Eve, they quote: “The Eternal God said: ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him an ezer k’negdo, a complementary helper.” “...Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife.” I’ve heard this passage reduced to a sound bite: “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” glossing over the larger principle that it is not good for a person to be alone and that having an ezer k’negdo, a complementary helper, is nice, and, well, helpful.


The Jewish case against homosexuality and gay marriage finds widespread acceptance in Orthodoxy. Yet even in Reform circles, where homosexuals can become rabbis and cantors and where rabbis and cantors feel encouraged to officiate at gay commitment ceremonies and weddings (where legal), the matter still attracts controversy.


Dr. Eugene Borowitz is one of the most brilliant and revered rabbis that the Reform Movement has ever produced. Now well into his eighties but still teaching at the Hebrew Union College in New York, Borowitz is often called the leading Reform Jewish theologian and ethicist. He is an award-winning author and once upon a time served as Rabbi Jacobs’ rabbinical thesis advisor.


He has also been an outspoken critic of homosexuality within Judaism and an opponent of gay marriage. Since he began teaching at HUC in 1962, he would not sign the certificates of s’micha, or ordination, of those rabbinical students who self-identified as homosexual. In his essay entitled, “On Homosexuality and the Rabbinate, A Covenantal Response,” he reasoned, “[T]he marital relationship is the one that most closely mirrors a Jew’s sacred, covenantal relationship with God, reinforcing ‘our special devotion to the heterosexual, that is, the procreative family.’” And rabbis, he further reasoned, “‘ought, more than all other Jews, to be exemplars of living by the Covenant.’” (As quoted by Vivien Orbach-Smith, cited on http://rabbisteinman.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/the-sermon-heard-around-the-world/.)


Last spring, a rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College, Molly Kane, did what every student must do before graduating: deliver a “senior sermon” in front of the college community--fellow students, professors, rabbis, cantors, and guests. All of your WRT rabbis have undergone the same rite of passage, in some cases with psychological scars to show for it.


Molly challenged the status quo on the issue of marriage equality.

“Why is it,” Molly asked, “that though 57% of people under the age of 40 are in support of marriage equality we can’t pass this legislation? Are we waiting for our generation to come of age before insisting on equal rights for gays and lesbians? We’re stalling for time. I admit to falling victim to this mindset. It will just take time, I tell myself. We’ll get the rights, eventually. But, then incidents of homophobia snap me out of my complacency.”


Molly went on to name some of those incidents, which, while upsetting, pale in comparison to the tragic case of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers freshman who chose to end his life after his classmates violated his privacy by uploading a video of a homosexual encounter, only the latest example of young people literally bullied to death by a society that still has a long way to go in combatting homophobia, especially against boys and men.


Like Molly, I do believe that change is coming. A majority of my generation, and certainly of the next generation, just don’t get bent out of shape over homosexuality. We have openly gay friends and we love them. We think it’s high time to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and legalize gay marriage.


So, when enough of the people I know in their thirties and twenties and teens muster the initiative to vote the way they feel, it’s only a matter of time before the laws change. But even if Bob Dylan was right (and he was, about so much!) that “the times, they are a-changin’,” well, they’re not a-changin’ fast enough, so why keep silent now?


But back to Molly Kane’s sermon. Molly is a smart student who knows her Bible and somewhere along the way she correctly deduced that the Bible speaks in many voices and that not all voices are given equal weight in Jewish tradition.


Many passages in the Rabbinic literature, to wit, depict Rabbis with opposing views facing off one against another, each trying to trump the other with the sharpest Biblical prooftext. The Talmud even records debates over which principle in the Torah is the most important.


And in those debates, you will never find a Rabbi saying that the Levitical opposition to gay sex is the Torah’s essential teaching; not even close. What’s more, the word used there to categorize homosexuality,to’eivah, usually translated “abomination,” also denotes minor infractions like eating non-kosher food and engaging in heterosexual sex while the woman is having her period.


There is a tacit hierarchy to Biblical law and we all know intuitively that the Ten Commandments rank higher than sha’atnez, the Deuteronomic prohibition against wearing garments that mix linen and wool.

Lots and lots of Rabbis, however, both ancient and modern, lift up one principle in particular, the one Ben Azzai called the greatest principle in the Torah, the one with which Molly concluded her sermon: “...we are all one people created betzelem Elohim, in the image of God.”


The Bible makes its own best argument against itself. Because if we hold fast to our belief that we are all one people created betzelem Elohim, in the image of God, and not only that we believe this but that weelevate this teaching above all other principles in the Torah, then our attitude toward homosexuality and yes, gay marriage, must conform to our belief.


Leviticus condemns homosexual activity, because the ancient Israelite priestly cult thought it a deviant practice. Nowadays we recognize that homosexuality and heterosexuality are innate orientations: not lifestyle choices but facts of life. Vast evidence both scientific and anecdotal confirms that gay people can’t just convert to straight. A person’s sexual orientation should be affirmed no differently than a person’s skin color. About things like this any person has a God-given right to say, “This is who I am. Deal with it.”

Elaborating, our colleague Rabbi Yoel Kahn has written:


“I do not believe that God creates in vain. Deep, heartfelt yearning for companionship and intimacy is not an abomination before God. God does not want us to send the gays and lesbians among us into exile — either cut off from the Jewish community or into internal exile, living a lie for a lifetime. I believe that the time has come: I believe that God summons us to affirm the proper and rightful place of the homosexual Jew and her or his family—in the synagogue and among the Jewish people.


...Let me be clear; I do not propose merely that we politely overlook the historical Jewish teaching condemning homosexual behavior, but that we explicitly affirm its opposite: The movement from Toeivah[abomination] to Kedusha [sanctification].…” (“The Kedusha of Homosexual Relationships,” CCAR Yearbook, 1989).


True sanctification of homosexuality would necessarily include joining gay couples at the chuppah. We have to get past the tired old argument that legalizing gay marriage would somehow undermine the institutions of marriage or family. Gay people don’t want to make society “more gay” and they don’t want to dismantle the family.


Advocates for marriage equality have but one agenda: to secure the same legal recognition, rights, and privileges extended to heterosexual married couples, like tax and insurance benefits and hospital visitation rights. Rabbi Kahn further notes that encouraging commitment, stability, and openness does not undermine the institution of family; it enhances it! (As cited on http://arguingequality.org/chapter7.htm.)


Ah, but I keep getting away from Molly Kane. After concluding her sermon, Molly had to undergo what every student on the New York campus of HUC must, a dreaded “sermon review” in which anyone present may offer comments, questions, and critiques, sometimes bruising ones.


Rabbi Eugene Borowitz had sat in the congregation that morning last spring. At the sermon review downstairs, he stood up and declared her sermon “brilliant” and “compelling.” He spoke from the heart about his own ideological journey over the past two decades, a journey from opposition to affirmation, a journey in which he did what liberal, thoughtful people of faith sometimes do: he changed his mind. And then, last April 22nd, in front of more than 100 witnesses, he followed up his testimony by signing the eleven-year-old certificate of ordination of a practicing rabbi in New York City who had withheld his document in solidarity with his gay classmates.


Reform Judaism says our faith is a work-in-progress, and that our religion must constantly undergo scrutiny in the context of the times in which we live. Borowitz’s spiritual evolution illustrates that the thoughtful Reform Jew must never desist from the sacred journey that a modern, progressive faith demands.


Times change. Beliefs change: sometimes subtly, over the course of centuries; sometimes dramatically, over the course of a single lifetime. Old Biblical words, inextricably rooted in Biblical soil, should stay there. Polygamy and concubines should remain exactly where they are, in Abraham’s tent. The Levitical rejection of homosexuality should remain exactly where it is, in the Book of Leviticus, alongside much other arcana of priestly purity.


Some Biblical wisdom, in contrast, springs eternal, summoning us to our core convictions:


Love another as you love yourself.


It is not good for a person to be alone.


We are all one people created betzelem Elohim, in the image of God.


Shabbat Shalom!

5 comments:

  1. Jonathan,

    With your beginning of this week's Parahsa commentary, I had no idea that you were going to head into Levitical prohibitions on homosexuality.

    I think that, at the heart of your critique, while you sometimes delve back into legalistic arguments about comparative levels of sin, you're really arguing that, at the end of the day, the Tanakh was written by man, and, in particular when you address anything from Leviticus, the priestly caste.

    As we have discussed previously, I agree. There are far too many flaws with the Torah and the Tanakh (everything from outright mistakes, the death of Moses in a document allegedly conveyed to and by Moses, to two creation stories, to the passage about God suddenly wanting to kill Moses about something to do with circumcision, to two Ten Commandments, etc.) to think that the Torah is the inerrent truth that came down from God at Sinai.

    Indeed, the oldest surviving Torah only dates to 100-200 B.C.E., and the scrolls at Qumrun indicate that Jewish holy writings were, in fact, passed in separate scroll forms.

    So having said that, what is it?

    If anything, it is a collection of tribal stories passed by a series of writers, with whatever their biases were. Just like Native American stories,myths, histories, except that our ancestors were also highly literate.

    But just as we often, half-kiddingly refer to ourselves as members of the "Tribe", indeed, these writings were tribal writings of a primitive people who engaged, among other things, in ritualistic slaughter of animals (the reason why I neither bemoan the fall of the Temple, pray for it's rebuilding, or in any manner think that Reform Judaism should acknowledge Tsh B'Av).

    So if the Torah, and indeed, the entire Tanakh, is a tribal document, then we have to understand that the homophobic prohibitions and punishments are those of the writers, possibly taken from an oral tradition of a primitive people that was ultimately written down, where women were possessions (and the laws reflect that fact) and where heterosexual fear and loathing of homosexual conduct found expression in the Torah.

    Now I have heard people try to twist the prohibition against man lying with man to be merely a prohibition against conduct of idolatory cults -- but I don't really buy that explanation. I think that it really reflected a more of the society of the writers. Just as homosexual conduct has always been with us, fear, loathing and disgust of it has been with us as well.

    So if we depart from the anthropological and return to what God would want, how do we, as Reform Jews, even deal with any of this? I have a lot of problems with the Torah worship that I see in synagogue -- I cannot bring myself to touch the Torah with a prayer book, as I see it as a form of idolatry. And yet, when you get past the rituals, past some things that are horrific, there are also the good and true -- love God, love neighbors as yourself, care for the poor, sick, aged -- that you would think that any God would want his people to follow.

    So I guess, in my view, because we as Reform Jews understand that some or all of the Tanakh was written by man, and that the rest likely was passed down orally until finally copied down, we need to be discerning about what a loving God, as opposed to a primitive people, would have really wanted for us.

    And at the end of the day, I've got to believe that the loving God would want us to emulate him by being loving in return.

    So Jonathan, I come out the same way as you do, including feeling that using the Torah to justify homophobic conduct is wrong, but I guess I get there in a slightly different way.

    Regards,

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  2. "Leviticus condemns homosexual activity, because the ancient Israelite priestly cult thought it a deviant practice. Nowadays we recognize that homosexuality and heterosexuality are innate orientations: not lifestyle choices but facts of life."

    First of all - Leviticus does not condemn homosexuality. God condemns it. The priestly cult had nothing to do with it, any more than had any other proscription in Torah - such as desecrating the Shabbat, for example. These are God's ordinances, and only His.

    And of course, if this is how God sees things, it makes perfect sense to realize that homosexuality is forever an abomination - because God - and His Torah - are eternal.

    To say "these days we are innately different" is patently absurd. God delivers instructions for all ages (Torah derives from the root word that means to instruct). It's a manual of life that never needs revision. As for this "innateness" you invoke, who would better know "innateness" than He who created us in the first place. Nor would God ask of us to do something that goes against the innateness He created us with. Because He is a beneficent God.

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  3. Rudolfo,

    You and I (and by definition Rabbi Blake) differ in that you believe that the Torah is literal truth, and we do not. There is far too much evidence that you may want to look into to challenge your belief that the Torah is all from God, rather than a compilation of tales, myths, plus, with any luck, some aspects reflecting divine inspiration. I think we have to use our hearts and heads to try to determine what God really wants from us.

    Like you, I believe that God is a beneficent God. That's exactly why I cannot believe that my friends and colleagues who are gay or lesbian, and cannot in any manner enjoy an intimate relationship with someone of the opposite sex, would be condemned for something that God made them.

    Yes, we have to control certain instincts -- I am not free to steal something that I want, no matter what, nor to simply ravish a woman simply because I find her to be attractive. But it is one thing to say that I cannot steal or rape, and something then again to say that God wants to preclude a person whose every cell attracts him or her to a member of the same sex and cannot enjoy a sexual relationship with someone of the opposite sex is precluded from having a meaningful, shared life with all that entails.

    I just can't believe that a beneficent God would demand that from a gay or lesbian person.

    Do you know any gay or lesbian people? Have any in your family? Your community? I will never forget when a friend "came out of the closet" and told me he was gay. He was so afraid of what my reaction was going to be. When someone you care about, indeed love, like a sibling or a child, tells you that he or she cannot function as a heterosexual, you will understand that, just as you could never stop loving that person, a beneficent God could never condemn gays or lesbians.

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  4. Michael;

    Loving homosexuals and condoning homosexuality are separate issues. The homosexual became one from his learning, either by culture or by friends, etc. No such innateness came congenitally, for G-d would never ask one to abstain from something inherent in the person's nature. G-d tells us in Torah, a few times, it's an abomination, so much so that it is alongside bestiality in severity.

    You are right about what we disagree on. Orthodoxy believes in The Creator and the Torah He gave Moshe Rabbeinu at Sinai. You think differently about the divinity of Torah and perhaps also reject the concept of G-d as Creator and Master.

    We indeed deem Torah as our most significant anchor, and as G-d's manual of instruction for us (Gentiles as well as Jews) with regards to how we should behave.

    While you, in contrast, rely solely on your own mind as how to proceed in life. A recent essay that touches on this topic, if you care to read it, is here:
    http://hezbos.blogspot.com/2010/10/ten-commandments-why-all-pomp.html

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  5. In the Vanguard,

    See my prior postings as to why anyone who looks critically at the Torah instead of acting as a mere apologist would have to conclude that much, if not all of it, came from man and not as a revelation to Moses at Sinai. The most basic error, of many, is that the Torah that allegedly was given to Moses tells of his death.

    And can anyone really believe that God needed man to kill animals so that he could enjoy their fragrance?

    We do differ markedly. You believe, taking the truth of the Torah as a given, and then justify. I question, based on history, anthropology, archeology, linguistics, logic and common sense.

    So when you justify condemning gays and lesbians based on the Torah, that is the end of the discussion for you. For me, that is the starting point.

    I also strongly disagree with you regarding your notion that gays and lesbians became that way because they somehow learned it. Take the time to speak to gays -- especially older ones who had to live some or all of their lives in the closet. Ask them, when times were far more hostile to gays than they are now (and don't fool yourself -- gays still get bullied, beaten and even killed worldwide, including here) -- whether they "learned" to be gay, were influenced by friends to be gay, or whether this was just the way they were. The statement is simply ignorant, and perhaps is your wishful thinking/justification for a prejudice against gays or to justify a Torah condemnation.

    Speak to gays and lesbians. Since you and I both agree that God would never condemn any of his creations, speak to them and find out whether any of them had a choice about their sexuality. If you are open minded, instead of merely looking to justify your Orthodox belief, I think you'll see that there is no choice in sexuality, just as there is none in the color of skin, eyes, etc. It is innate.

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