Troubling Texts I: The Sexual Prohibitions

This year, I was asked to speak after mincha, the afternoon service, on Yom Kippur. Although it immeditately occurred to me that I should speak about the mincha Torah reading, with its discussion of sexual prohibitions in general and homosexuality in particular, I remained so ambivalent about the subject matter that until the very moment that I stood at the bima, I was seriously considering ad-libbing something about Jonah.

Even after receiving generally positive feedback, I wonder whether I did the right thing by raising such a controversial subject on Yom Kippur, rather than offering a few simple words on teshuva, or a pep-talk for the final service of the day. Maybe you should tell me. (Be honest, but please, no badmouthing.)

Here are a few excerpts:

There has been a great deal of emphasis lately, in the political arena as well as within the leadership of the Conservative movement, on the verse reading “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; it is abhorrence” (Lev. 18:22). But really, the entire framework of the Torah reading is problematic. Many of the regulations in it are based quite explicitly on the idea that women are the sexual property of men. We read, “Do not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is the nakedness of your father” (Lev. 18:8); in other words, you, male reader, may not have sex with your father’s wife, whether she is your biological mother or not, because her nakedness, her sexuality, belongs to your father. Because most of the sexual prohibitions in this chapter are based on this principle, we don’t have any discussion of many of the more pressing issues in contemporary sexual ethics.. . . The premise of the text is that men can have multiple sexual partners and women can have one, and that sexual relations are problematic primarily when they involve a woman who belongs to another man.

The discussion of homosexuality in the Conservative movement has, to a large extent, I think, sidestepped some of the most fundamental questions that this chapter raises. To what extent is the Torah a product of its historical context, and to what extent is it timeless? Conservative leaders generally agree that Judaism allows human beings a good deal of interpretive license with the Torah, but there is much less agreement on the limits of that license, or on whether there even are limits. This is because there is no consensus on the even more fundamental question of the nature of the Torah’s authority. Is it the direct word of God revealed to human beings? Is it God’s word interpreted by human beings through the prism of their own experience? Or is it a noble, but ultimately flawed attempt by humans to figure out what God’s will might be? These are crude articulations of complex theological ideas, but I think that it’s important to articulate them even in this very crude form, to convey some sense of the range of positions held by people who consider themselves Conservative rabbis.

I also think that, however we approach these issues, egalitarian communities such as this one can’t in good conscience take the prohibition against sexual intercourse between men at face value. Both its context and its wording strongly suggest that the prohibition is fundamentally about maintaining the boundary between male and female, and that is a boundary that we routinely transgress in our religious practice. Whatever our perspectives on the fundamental theological issues I mentioned earlier, the fact that we’re here indicates that we all believe, on some level, that although the disparity between the status of male and female was quite conspicuous at earlier stages of the Jewish religion, it is ultimately unjust to perpetuate that disparity. . . .

I’m not going to make a halakhic argument. . . but I would like to discuss what I think is an interesting exegetical and philosophical approach to this prohibition.. . . This interpretation is advanced independently, in different ways, by the Reform feminist theologian, Rachel Adler, in Engendering Judaism and by the gay Orthodox rabbi, Steven Greenberg, in Wrestling With God and Men. Both authors see this law as fundamentally prohibiting men from turning other men into women. It is a reading that actually fits the wording and context of the verse very well, and it explains why the Bible doesn’t prohibit lesbian sex. In a society in which men have a higher status than women, sexual intercourse between men disrupts the social order in a way that sex between women doesn’t. It degrades one of the partners by turning him into a woman.. . . So there is a concern for justice here, a concern that men not “declass” or degrade one another, just as there is a concern fro justice behind the prohibition against sleeping with another man’s sexual property. It isn’t the inclusive justice that we would demand today, but it is a concern for justice nonetheless.

Adler and Greenberg both go a step further in their readings of this verse to suggest that we bring it up to speed with our contemporary sense of justice by employing a rabbinic exegetical principle called ribuy, or “expansion.” Rabbi Greenberg specifically focuses on the word 'et, which can function either as a direct object marker or as a preposition meaning “with.” For the ancient rabbis, 'et was code for a missing element. And from a contemporary perspective, it seems clear what missing element should be read into this verse: not only is one forbidden to degrade a man sexually, but one is also forbidden to degrade a woman sexually. It’s a clever reading; clearly on the original meaning of the verse, but not entirely out of keeping with it, either. In a way, it’s a natural extension. As Adler writes, “what makes the Torah sacred is not that it has one fixed eternal meaning, but that its meanings are inexhaustible" (p. 1256).

I went on a bit after that about the importance of sexual boundaries in the modern world and the relevance of the topic to Yom Kippur, but this post is long enough already, so I'll leave all that out. What I'm chiefly wondering is, did I take "questioning the fundamentals" too far, consdiering the context? Is this an appropriate approach to text and tradition for a traditional egalitarian community? Should I lay off this topic already?

Next in this series: A d'var torah on Qohelet.

On Turning Around

I have several explanations (excuses?) to offer for this long hiatus. One is the start of the academic year. Another is preoccupation with holiday preparations, and the interference of the holidays themselves. A third is my recent activity on Kosher Blog.

Yet another reason for my failure to blog is that I've been trying to write about teshuva (repentence, or more literally, "turning back"), and that isn't easy. Everything I've come up with has either been too personal to post on the internet or too trite to be worth writing at all. Instead of blogging, I've scribbled in my dead -- I mean, paper -- journal, prayed (half-heartedly, as usual), whined, and cried a little. And I'm still not sure where I stand.

In addition to the holidays, a good deal of my energy lately has been focused on a weight-loss program, called, coincidentally, the "Turn-Around" plan. I've had moderate success in spite of this month's feasting and fasting (equally problematic, from a weight-loss perspective), and that has lead me to wonder whether I might be able to apply dieting principles to other areas of life, to overcome the various obstacles to the changes I'd like to make.

As difficult as weight loss can be, however, I've found that it isn't nearly as hard as teshuva, especially for someone who's approach to yiddishkeit isn't purely halakhic. Changes in my body are more easily quantified than changes in my soul (I use the term loosely). How can I measure improvements in my relationship with God and my relationships with others? I know they're not as healthy as they should be, but what can I do to change that? There's no simple formula, like "eat less, exercise more."

According to one tradition, beynonim, those whose actions in the preceding year tip the scales neither on the side of good nor on that of evil, have until Yom Kippur to earn a favorable verdict. Though the beynoni's sentence is "sealed" on Yom Kippur, it is finally "delivered" only on Hoshana Rabba, until which point the Almighty may still render it void. Since I never finish anything on time, I like to think of this tradition as offering me an "extension," a chance to make some of the changes I wanted to make by Yom Kippur but didn't. Most of these changes are somewhat amorphous and therefore difficult to implement, but at least I can spend one more week focusing my energy on making them happen. And, since we don't have a Sukkah in which to entertain guests, this time I won't be preoccupied with pot roast.

As a final note, I'd like offer my apologies to anyone I've hurt or offended, either in person or on the web. May we all earn a favorable verdict.

Yom Kippur Post-Mortem

I wanted to provide an update on our plans for Yom Kippur services before they actually happened, but things got a little bit crazy, and then they kind of stayed that way. On the whole, services went pretty well. Many thanks to those of you who suggested sources for readings. Special thanks to Rachel Barenblat, who provided an original poem entitled "Kol Nidre," which we used. I'd also like to thank Brother-in-Law if he is reading this. He worked very hard to make these services happen.

I led the kol nidre/ ma'ariv service,* which was held in the Moot Court [insert sarcastic comment here]. I could have done better, but I certainly could have done worse. The remaining services took place in the Hillel building. DH lead shacharit and neilah, I lead mussaf, and Brother-in-Law lead mincha, both before kol nidre and before ne'ilah. Pesukei d'zimra was (were?) lead by a local student. Other students read the Torah portion and the haftarah.

Planning the service was actually a lot of fun. We had to use the Birnbaum machzor, an Orthodox prayerbook published in 1951, and we wanted to adjust the service for our community without creating too much confusion. We referred to four other machzors for guidance: the Conservative Silverman machzor, published in the 1948, the Conservative Harlow machzor, published in 1972, the Reform machzor, called Gates of Repentance,** and the infamous Artscroll, the Orthodox machzor du jour. None of these alone would have been quite right for our purposes. For starters, none uses inclusive language or accommodates a female shlichat tsibbur. Gates of Repentance and Harlow preserve too little of the traditional text; Artscroll and Birnbaum preserve too much. Birnbaum and Silverman have positively awful translations. Only Artscroll has a complete set of instructions. Here's a little summary of the various ways in which we attempted to deal with these issues:

Piyyutim: Traditional High Holy Day prayerbooks are full of medieval liturgical poems, or piyyutim. These accumulated gradually over the centuries, and different communities used different selections of poems. Phillip Birnbaum and Rabbis Scherman and Zlotowitz (otherwise known as Rav Scroll) edited their respective machzors with the apparent intention of including every piyyut ever written. I'm all for comprehensiveness, but reciting every piyyut in either Orthodox machzor is a bit silly. Some of the piyyutim are in fairly difficult Hebrew, and even those that aren't are difficult to grasp when you're ripping through them at breakneck speed. Our rule of thumb was to omit piyyutim that don't appear in Silverman and to replace a number of the remaining piyyutim with English readings on similar themes. We used one reading from Gates of Repentance, a few from Harlow, and a few from S. Y. Agnon's Days of Awe.

Slichot: Each of the five Yom Kippur services contains a version of slichot, a set of confessions and prayers for forgiveness. The extended versions recited during ma'ariv, mussaf, and ne'ilah include a string of piyyutim surrounding a refrain centered on the "thirteen attributes" of Divine mercy. Artscroll and Birnbaum repeat the refrain seven times in each set of slichot. Harlow and Silverman have it recited once. We decided to repeat the refrain three times, following the custom in our home community. Some of the piyyutim were replaced by English readings.

Avodah: The mussaf service includes a recitation/ partial reenactment of the Temple service for Yom Kippur. In Ashkenazic tradition, the avodah takes the form of a lengthy and difficult piyyut. (I am told that Sephardim use a piyyut that is considerably easier to understand.) Rabbi Harlow had the brilliant idea of replacing the piyyut with a reading consisting primarily of selections from the mishnah on which the piyyut is based. We used his version, reading most of it in English, but switching to Hebrew for the confessions of the High Priest and the prostrations.

Martyrology: The avodah is traditionally followed by a piyyut relating the (largely apocryphal) tale of the death of ten sages at the hands of a Roman emperor. The practice of reading the martyrology at this point is rooted in the (somewhat disturbing) idea that since the destruction of the Temple, Jews attain atonement through the "blood of the righteous." Naomi Chana suggested reading the midrash on which the piyyut was based instead of the poem itself, and she recommended the translation in Stern and Mirsky's Rabbinic Fantasies. I had never read the midrash before this year, so I am very grateful for the recommendation. It is a fascinating, theologically complex piece that certainly deserves to be read in its entirety, as Naomi Chana suggested. However, the midrash is quite a bit longer than the piyyut, and the martyrology is not supposed to be the centerpiece of the mussaf service. We included the entire midrash in our source packets, but we did not read it all aloud.

Additional Readings: None of us is very good at public speaking (although we were fortunate enough to have a student present who was willing to speak briefly before mincha and ne'ilah). In place of a Kol Nidre sermon, we recited Rachel Barenblat's poem. We included a reading from Harlow on fear of sin to get people into the mood for the u'netane tokef prayer, and we read a story from Days of Awe before ne'ilah.

Egalitarianism: I have a few things to say about this, but not right now.

Okay, folks, it's almost Sukkot. We're going to visit the in-laws in New York, and I have to pack. Chag Sameach.

* Here is some basic information on Yom Kippur and its liturgy. It includes definitions of several of the terms that I use in this post. Others are defined here.
** We also referred to the British version, Gate of Repentance, which is more or less the same.

In Defense of Agnosticism

While browsing Kol Nidrei sermons on the web, I came across this very unusual drash, delivered by Rabbi Ethan Seidel in 2002. 2001 was a difficult year for Rabbi Seigel, as it was for most of us. Aside from the September 11th attack, he endured the death of a friend, and this precipitated what he describes as "theological depression."

I don't mean to make light of clinical depression - that's serious business, and my condition was just not that serious. But for a Rabbi, at least, a theological depression is a problem. I'm paid to believe in God. If I'm suddenly convinced that all is chaos, how is that helpful to my congregation?

Rabbi Seidel relates some of the thoughts that plagued him during this period, thoughts that are very familiar to me. Then he gives us his reason for self-disclosure, and it's one of those simple truths, the kind that is as shocking as it is obvious:

I wonder if you all realize how common such a theological crisis is, even among us Rabbis? Maybe you think that there are some people who have perfect faith, and that you with your imperfect faith are somehow a defective Jew. I'm here to tell you not to think that.

It gets even more outrageous:

I think that there is something pareve, even unhealthy about both the atheist and the fundamentalist. How can they be so sure of themselves? They live in a world where everything is known. But is that 2-dimensional world reality? I ask the atheist: is goodness really just a human invention, just a matter of opinion? And how can the fundamentalist ignore the chaos that seems to permeate the world? Reality is incomprehensible. And I mistrust . . . those who claim to understand life.

There is, admittedly, a certain arrogance to this approach. How can he be so sure of himself? How can he declare something that others claim to know to be fundametally unknowable?

But I understand. I think that way, too.

Anyway, it's a good read. Somewhat comforting, if you're one of those Jews who struggles privately with the fundamentals.

A Call For English Readings

My brother-in-law is running High Holy Day services in Montreal (with a little bit of help from others, including DH and me), and he has apparently had trouble finding English readings that are accessible without being completely vapid. This has left me thinking about why appropriate readings are so difficult to find.

Part of the problem is that our situation is so far from ideal. It would be nice if everyone could read the traditional prayers in their original language. It would be nice if everyone were sufficiently familiar with the liturgy to be able to invest it with meaning on their own. It would be nice if we could count on everyone to be 100% present, ready to be intellectually and emotionally invested in the service. Since none of these is the case, we is stuck trying to find texts in the vernacular that relatively apathetic congregants might find meaningful on their first and only reading.

Another problem is that the readings that exist are found mainly in Reform and Reconstructionist prayer books, and they are generally unsatisfying. Just as liberal Jews seem to have trouble achieving a sense of grief on Tisha B'Av, they seem to have trouble promoting guilt and remorse on the High Holy Days. Liberal spiritual leaders want to make worship a positive experience. They want to emphasize God's mercy and unconditional love for all humankind. They don't like the idea of divine judgment. That's all very well, but in the final analysis, there can be no repentance without remorse, and without repentance, the quest for spirituality is rather vacuous. We have to start by feeling bad about ourselves.

A third problem is the literary quality (or lack thereof) of most contemporary "creative liturgy." The Conservative prayer book is filled with horrid compositions by committees of rabbis, which sound like translations even though they aren't. Stilted language can be distracting.

Now that I've made the task seem completely insurmountable, does anyone know where we might be able to find quality English readings? They don't have to be perfect. The more material we have, the better, even if we don't love all of it. Contemporary poems by actual poets are good (I look to the VR here). Excerpts from works of Jewish philosophy, ancient or modern, are good too. Translations of traditional prayers are great if they're readable. (Does anyone know where we could find a halfway decent translation of the High Holy Day piyyutim?) Midrash, psalms, biblical passages . . . whatever. Variety is the spice of life.

Thanks for your help.