(Clicky for piccy!)Arthur WaskowRabbi, founder and director of The Shalom Center.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow has been one of the creators and leaders of Jewish renewal since writing the original Freedom Seder in 1969. In 1983, he founded and has since been director of The Shalom Center (www.shalomctr.org). In 2007, Newsweek named him one of America's fifty most influential rabbis. He is a co-author of "The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, & Muslims" (Beacon, 2006). He is a pioneer in the shaping of Eco-Judaism, both through his books ("Down-to-Earth Judaism"; editor, "Torah of the Earth" (2 vols); co-editor, "Trees, Earth, & Torah: A Tu B'Shvat Anthology") and religiously rooted social action (e.g. The Shalom Center’s Green Menorah Covenant campaign). He taught at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College from 1982 till 1989 and has taught as a Visiting Professor at the Hebrew Union College -Jewish Institute of Religion and in the departments of religion at Swarthmore, Vassar, Temple University, and Drew University. Same-Sex Marriage: The Emerging Torah
The Biblical prohibition of same-sex sexual relationships is rooted in three basic rules the Hebrew Bible prescribes for proper sexual ethics:
(1) Have as many children as possible. (Gen. 1:28: "Be fruitful, multiply, fill up the earth, and subdue it.");
(2) Men were to rule over women (Genesis 3:16, where God says to Eve, "Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you") ; and
(3) Sex was delightful and sacred (Song of Songs, throughout). Celibacy was strongly discouraged.
But these rules were not set in stone forever. Indeed, the Torah itself encourages and implores us to transcend and transform the first two of these "rules" -- and thereby sets the stage for an emerging Torah that celebrates same-sex marriage for those whose sexual orientation makes that the joyful and sacred alternative.
This path of understanding Torah is unfolded below.
Twice in the Torah we are told, "You shall not lie with a man as in lying with a woman." (Lev. 18: 22 and 20: 13). Today this has become perhaps the world's most contentious Torah teaching, far beyond the boundaries of the Jewish people.
Some have argued it prohibits all male-male sexuality. Others have argued that the verse must mean something else, for this "lying with" seems anatomically impossible. Is it only about casual or ritual homosexuality, not committed relationships? How did some of the greatest rabbis of the "Golden Age" in Spain write glowing erotic poems about male-male sex?
But let us go beyond these historical or midrashic questions, to look more deeply into Torah. Does Torah anticipate ˆ even intend -- its own transformation? If so, under what circumstances?
Let us learn from a passage of Talmud (Baba Kama 79b) that cautions against raising goats and sheep in the Land of Israel. Since our forebears did precisely that, how could the Talmud have the chutzpah to oppose it? The Rabbis knew that since great and growing numbers of humans were raising goats and sheep there, these flocks would denude and ruin the Land. The world had changed, and so did Jewish holy practice.
Biblical Judaism professed three basic rules for proper sexual ethics:
(1) Have as many children as possible. (Gen. 1:28: "Be fruitful, multiply, fill up the earth, and subdue it.");
(2) Men were to rule over women (Genesis 3:16, where God says to Eve, "Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you";
(3) Sex was delightful and sacred (Song of Songs, throughout). Celibacy was strongly discouraged.
"Be fruitful and multiply" worked against homosexuality, but what shall we do today, when the Earth is so "filled" with human beings that the whole web of life is at risk, and so "subdued" by human technology that the world-wide climate is in crisis? Like the rabbis who wisely warned against raising goats, today should we be encouraging, not forbidding, sexuality that avoids biological multiplication? We might read the precept to be fruitful and expansive emotionally, intellectually and spiritually rather than arithmetically.
The rule that a man must rule over a woman left no room for a relationship of two men. Which should rule over the other "as with a woman"? Two "dominant" men trying to have an intimate relationship would overload the computer circuits and shatter the relationship. Two "subordinate" women, however, wouldnot even turn on the computer -- and indeed, the Hebrw Bible is uninterested in what we would call lesbian relationships.
Is the rule of male dominance intended by Torah to persist forever? No more than the twin statement (Gen. 3: 17-19) that men shall "toil in the sweat of their brow," wringing a livelihood from a hostile earth. We do not act as if Torah commands us to eschew the tools that ease our labor. Instead, we seek to shape a world in which work is far less toilsome.
These statements about toil, fruitfulness, and male dominance are not edicts to be obeyed but a map of post-Edenic history, to be transcended and transformed.
Through the deeds of human history, God has shaped the modernity that eases our work, makes women and men more nearly equal, and brings the human race to fill up and subdue the earth. So now we must ask ourselves, as the Talmud asked, what must we change in our new world?
In a world already filled and subdued by the human race, Rule 1, that we must multiply our numbers, may actually contravene God's intention.
In a world where Rule 2, that men must dominate women, has been transcended so that men and women can be equal, one man can lie with another "as with a woman" without disaster.
The third basic rule -- that sex is delightful and sacred -- still stands. The Song of Songs embodies it. The Song points both beyond the childish Eden of the past and beyond the sad history that followed Eden; it points to "Eden for grown-ups." In the Song, bodies are no longer shameful, as they became after the mistake of Eden; the earth is playful, not our enemy; and women and men are equal in desire and in power. God is no longer Father/Mother as in Eden, giving orders, but -- unnamed -- is inherent in the very process of life, as our parents become when we are fully adult.
God's name never appears in the Song of Songs -- because the entire Song is the name of God.
Though the Song is on its face heterosexual in the love it speaks of, it describes the kind of sensual pleasure beyond the rules of marriage and family that has characterized some aspects of gay and lesbian desire. Today we can dissolve the walls that have separated sensually pleasurable homosexual relationships from rule-bound heterosexual marriage. We can instead encourage playful marriages suffused with joy and pleasure -- for a man and woman, for two men, for two women.
At the Burning Bush, confronting the narrow-minded rules of the Pharaoh of "Mitzrayyim" (the Henrew word for Egypt actually means "the strait and narrow"), God took on the name "I Will Be Who I Will Be." Instead of rigidly defending marriage as it used to be, we can honor the God Who Becomes by expanding the circles in which marriage -- a new kind of marriage -- becomes possible.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Topic: Torah's Case for Gay Marriage