Engaging Difficult Jewish Stories - Sermon for Yom Kippur 5773

Rabbi Jim Morgan
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