Rabbi Jim
Morgan
Sermon for Kol Nidre, 5773
September 25, 2012
Worship and Study Minyan of Harvard Hillel
Sermon for Kol Nidre, 5773
September 25, 2012
Worship and Study Minyan of Harvard Hillel
Shana Tova,
and G’mar Hatimah Tovah. I’m Rabbi Jim
Morgan, and I am so glad to be with the Worship and Study minyan for my first
yamim nora-im.
These are
the Days of Awe, days of terror, days when we look into ourselves and see all
that is wanting. Days on which review
our actions, our decisions, and cannot help but ponder the things we did wrong,
the things we would change if only we could.
And they are days for difficult conversations, both with our selves and
with our loved ones and friends. For our
community, they are days for difficult stories, difficult and challenging texts
in the synagogue.
Torah texts can
always present challenges to our worldview, challenges to our assumptions. Often we disagree intensely with the point of
view Torah presents. At other times,
passages we disagree with intellectually somehow resonate with us emotionally,
so we feel a crisis of ambivalence.
There are, of course, stories that we simply find disturbing, and we
would prefer not to think about it, thank you very much. Then there are those passages that we really
just wish were not in scripture—they are so disturbing, so horrifying, that
really wouldn’t be better simply to excise them?
The texts we
read on the yamim noraim are just such texts—consider: at his wife’s behest, a
father banishes his concubine and their son to the desert and to their likely
death; the same father obeys God’s command to sacrifice his son, who is saved
only at the last minute by that same God withdrawing the command; God then instructs
the Jews in a confusing and disturbing ritual that will effect atonement for
the community’s sins.
On Yom
Kippur afternoon, we are faced with a particular textual challenge: Leviticus
18 rehearses a list of forbidden sexual unions, culminating in a tripartite
condemnation—and you’ll forgive me for quoting the King James Version, which was the basis for the "old" JPS translation:
And thou
shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shall
thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord. Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with
womankind: it is an abomination. Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to
defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie
down thereto: it is confusion. (KJV)
It’s hard to
overestimate the hurt that these words have caused to humankind, both in their
casual linkage of same-sex physical intimacy with child sacrifice and with
bestiality and in the way that our tradition and its sibling traditions of
Christianity and Islam have used them to oppress gay men and women. Why, voices in our community, in our
congregation will ask, should we read these horrible things? Is there not
anything more edifying to read on the most solemn day of the year? Well, indeed there is, and you can find it in
our machzor, and indeed we will read it tomorrow. Instead of Leviticus 18, we’ll skip to the
next parasha and read chapter 19, from Kedoshim—you will be holy.
This
substitution is not a tradition that started in the Conservative movement. Rather, by the early twentieth century the
Reform Movement was reading selections from Leviticus 19 in the Union Prayer
Book. The practice extended to the
Reconstructionist Movement, whose first machzor in the late forties designated Leviticus
19:1-18 with no option to read Chapter 18.
In the current Reconstructionist machzor, Kol Haneshama, the commentary explains that “The forbidden sexual
relationships [in Leviticus 18] strike many contemporary Jews as inappropriate
to the mood of the day, and they are objectionable in a number of their
particulars, perhaps most notably in their condemnation of homosexual
relationships.”[1]
To my ear,
this commentary sounds anachronistic—certainly liberal Jews today are concerned
with gay rights. But in the post-war era,
when the Reconstructionist Movement was editing its first machzor, there was no
such concern. Indeed I would imagine
that by and large, all Jews, from Reform to Orthodox, were not focused on the
ban on same-sex intimacy since it was entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial.
By the
seventies, however, when Conservative movement published its new machzor—the
one you have before you—gender and gay rights had begun to percolate into the
general culture, and today it seems that otherwise traditionally-minded liberal
Jews name this infamous verse as a primary reason to make the shift.
I understand
this decision and I respect the rationale for it. However, I disagree with it, both because it
impoverishes our own conversations about the difficult aspects of our tradition
and because it hampers our capacity to engage in the larger conversation about
important issues, in this case, the religious case for or against the full
inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of our society, our communities, our
congregations.
Let me take
the second concern first, which is less pressing for me tonight. A quick example: among the Republican
presidential candidates was one who had a tendency to claim that if we legalize
marriage between two men, then we would be on the road to legalizing marriage
between a man and a dog. When such talk
was common in the media, I wondered how many people understood that this
seemingly bizarre and clearly non-logical connection stemmed from our sequence
of verses? My guess is that most secular-minded
people had no idea, but that people who read their bibles got the reference
immediately. I imagine it was not a
serious concern, but rather a coded way to refer to the bible, to score points
with this candidate’s bible-reading base while insulting his opponents in an
infuriating and bewildering manner.
This evening
I am more concerned about how our tendency to avoid difficult texts hampers our
own, Jewish conversation, our own growth, both individually and as a
community. By avoiding this text in
synagogues on the days with the highest attendance, we forgo an opportunity to
struggle with some of the most disturbing aspects of our tradition, to wrestle,
to question, to protest, but above all to engage.
Last week,
in responding to a beautiful d’var Torah by Zvi Abusch, our friend Hilary
Putnam mentioned that some liberal Jews of his acquaintance argue that, like
Leviticus 18, the story of Abraham and Isaac, the Akedah, is too terrifying,
too disturbing, and too violent for us to read on Rosh Hashana. Indeed, in the Reform machzor, Gates of
Repentance, congregations have a choice between the Akedah and the Creation
story in Genesis. The story of Hagar and
Ismael, another disturbing text, is not included as an option.
Hilary would
not agree with a decision not to read the Akedah, if I understood correctly—and
Hilary I apologize in advance if I’m misrepresenting you—because God’s test of
Abraham echoes the kinds of tests that we humans face every day. Abraham’s example is not necessarily one to
emulate, but his situation resonates with ours in cases when we face competing
loyalties and unbearable choices.
Indeed, Abraham’s behavior echoes our relationships with our own
children, not in the explicit threat of sacrifice, God forbid, but in the way
we favor the demands of our own heart—our own God, so to speak—over their needs.
But what,
some may ask, if we see the Akedah not descriptive so much as predictive or
even prescriptive? Does the fact that
this congregation not only read the Akedah but engaged in three discussions
about it over the two days of Rosh Hashana mean that we will unconsciously
reenact it? Or, rather, does our act of
reading and discussing give us the tools to recognize Abraham’s dilemma as our
own and to negotiate it without needing to rely on God’s last minute saving
grace?
I found the
inspiration for these questions in another passage by Margaret Atwood, whom I
quoted last week as well. She asks:
Do stories
free the human imagination or tie it up in chains by prescribing “right
behavior”...? Are narratives a means to
enforce social control or a means of escape from it? Is the use of “story” as a
synonym for “lie” justified, and if so, are some lies necessary? Are we the
slaves of our own stories—our family narratives and dramas, for instance—which
compel us to reenact them? Do stories optimistically help us shape our lives
for the better or pessimistically doom us to tragic failure?[2]
By and
large, I tend to side with those who would claim that a person’s reception of
the story she reads determines its effect much more than the story itself. Of course, the kind of Jewish engagement with
our stories that will “help us shape our lives for the better” requires work,
requires questioning, requires attention.
I want to
affirm both our need to read these stories and to challenge them the way that
Abraham challenges God in the midrash: God says “Take your son,” and Abraham
says “which One”, God says “Your only one,” and Abraham says “I have two,” God
says “The one you love,” and Abraham says I love both of them, so God has to
specify “Isaac.”
Challenging
the stories is equivalent to challenging God (and a lot more comfortable for
people who aren’t sure about their belief in God!). - As Alicia Suskin Ostriker writes: “The … God of what Christians
call the Old Testament and Jews call, simply, the Bible or Torah, seems to like
being challenged and called to account, and even rewards those who most boldly
interrogate him [sic].”[3]
So that’s
what I’d like us to do—to challenge and to interrogate these stories, these
laws. I don’t want us to stand idly by,
letting other people determine the shape and the direction of the
conversation. Not reading it allows us
not to think about it, to pretend that although gay men and lesbians continue
to suffer oppression and exclusion, even
here in Massachusetts, we are allowed to overlook the fact that we, our
tradition, our heritage, played a role in enabling that oppression. We must acknowledge and we must challenge.
So: Levticus
18 verse 22: Thou shalt not lie with
man, as with a woman: it is an abomination.
Baruch
Levine, in his JPS commentary to Leviticus, links male on male sex with ancient
Canaanites: the story of Sodom in Genesis and the concubine of Gibeah in Judges
19—truly terrible stories. In both
cases, male on male sex is a violent expression of xenophobia—as Levine
comments: “This extreme fear of strangers induces a community to attack
visitors.”[4] Or, he should say, to sexually assault
visitors. Given the Torah’s emphasis on
protecting the stranger, this extreme form of xenophobia aroused opposition to
what came to be known as sodomy.
Rabbi Steven
Greenberg also foregrounds the connection with Sodom, arguing that Leviticus 18
“prohibits the violent and demeaning ways people can engage in sexual
relations.”[5] In that sense, can we disagree with it? In that sense, does the connection to
bestiality and to Molech seem less unmotivated? He writes about Molech that
“the practice of child sacrifice is the height of violence in the name of
religion.”[6] Indeed for me, the injunction against Molech
resonates with the Akedah; it’s the Torah’s own internal challenge to
Abraham’s—to God’s—impulse to child murder for the sake of obedience. Just so, verse 22 is the Torah’s own
challenge against the people of Sodom.
It is not a call for violence against homosexuals, even though too many
people have invoked it as such.
There are
many different ways to parse the halakhic implications of our verses, but none
of them revokes the commandment incumbent upon us Jews—and upon Jewish
communities—to protect kavod ha-briot:
human dignity.[7] In this particular case, we must to support
gays and lesbians and to welcome them, truly welcome them, into our
communities. By omitting Leviticus 18,
we forgo the chance to grapple with these difficult issues and thus to internalize
the verse from Leviticus 19 that we will
read at minchah tomorrow: “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor…”
Shana tova
and G’mar hatimah tova!
[1] Kol Haneshama: Prayerbook for the Days of
Awe (Elkins Park, PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1999), 1044.
[2]
Joyce Carol Oates, “Where No One Has Ever Gone,” review of Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human
Imagination, New York Review of Books
(March 22, 2012), p. 40.
[3] Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Nakedness
of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers,
1997), xi.
[4]
Baruch Levine, The JPS Torah Commentary:
Leviticus (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 123.
[5]
Steven Greenberg, “Never Stand Idly By,” [in] Text Messages: A Torah Commentary for Teens, ed. Jeffrey K. Salkin
(Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2012), 139.
Greenberg also argues against replacing Leviticus 18 on Yom Kippur: “Out
of deference to gay people, some congregations have stopped reading that verse
on Yom Kippur, but I think that just gives it more power. {Things you deny get
bigger, not smaller.)”
[6]
Greenberg, 140.
[7]
See, for example, Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel S. Nevins, and Avram I. Reisner,
“Homosexuality, Human Dignity & Halakhah: A Combined Responsum For The
Committee On Jewish Law And Standards” (2006): http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/public/halakhah/teshuvot/20052010/dorff_nevins_reisner_dignity.pdf
