Responsum on Latkes

This post first appeared in the 100 Centre Street Journal in December, 2017

Q: I know that Hanukkah is already over, but I’ve been wondering why Jews eat latkes on Hanukkah? How long has that been the tradition and how widespread is it? And what about those jelly donuts?

A: As with many cultural practices, we often assume that since we (or perhaps our parents, or perhaps our friends’ parents) grew up with a particular custom (such as latkes on Hanukkah), that custom must date from time immemorial. In Judaism, we have a term for such a thing: mi-sinai (pronounced mee-see-nigh), which means “from Sinai,” which is to say that Moses received it from God along with the 10 Commandments, so who so we we think we are to suggest that we do something different!?

There are significant problems with declaring latke-eating a “mi-sinai” tradition, however, not least of all the fact that Hanukkah was not declared an official Jewish holiday until very late in Jewish history, so it’s not mentioned at all in the Torah (or anywhere else in the Bible). Perhaps an even bigger problem, however, is that even if we wanted to claim that Judah Maccabee fried the first latke, we would have to figure out where he came up with potatoes during the second century BCE (before the common era): potatoes are a New World crop, and did not arrive in Europe until the 16th century, when Basque sailors brought them from Peru to Northern Spain. Presumably, they arrived in the land of Israel even later than that.

To get to the story of latkes, however, we need to address another mi-sinai tradition in Judaism, namely the practice of eating special foods on Shabbat and Holidays, most universally matzo for Passover. The vast majority of other holiday culinary traditions, however, are specific to particular groups of Jews and are usually based on the local and seasonal foods available where they lived. So, when Hanukkah began to develop as a holiday, there were all kinds of questions about what it meant and how one should light the candles; the famous question in the Talmud is “Mai Hanukkah?”: what is this Hanukkah business? Among the questions (although I’m not sure it’s in the text of the Talmud itself) was: well, what are we going to eat?!

According to scholars, among the first answers to that particular (and crucial!) question was list that appeared in a14th century liturgical poem by Rabbi Kalonymus ben Kalonymus ben Meir (b.1286 – died after 1328), which, among other foods, talks about levivot, pancakes fried in a pan, presumably in olive oil. These pancakes tended to be made of cheese and/or flour, and indeed, throughout the Jewish world, people tended to eat sweet cheese treats at Hanukkah time, including cheese blintzes in Ashkenazi traditions and cassola (ricotta pancakes) in Italy.

The olive oil makes sense, given that the Talmud’s Hanukkah story emphasizes the miracle of the oil. But cheese? A bit later in the 14th century, in a gloss to the Talmudic discussion of Hanukkah in Tractate Shabbat, a Spanish authority, Rabbi Nissim of Gerona (ca. 1310-1375), writes: “it says in a midrash that the daughter of Yohanan [the High Priest] fed the enemy leader cheese to get him drunk and cut off his head and they all fled, and therefore it is customary to eat cheese on Hanukkah.” 

Here Nissim is conflating two traditions: the Maccabean revolt (thus Yochanan) in 165 BCE and the legend of Judith, whose story was first written down some sixty years earlier (115 BCE). Judith was the heroic widow who lured Holofernes, the Assyrian general whose forces were besieging her town, into her tent with the promise of food and drink. In medieval versions of the story, Judith gave the general levivot, pancakes, studded with salty cheese and plied him with wine (the more cheese, the more wine). When he was completely drunk, she cut off his head with his own sword, which so frightened his troops that they all ran away. A miracle indeed!

In the European context, however, where olive oil was scarce outside of Spain and Italy, fried cheese presented a challenge, however, since the primary cooking oil came from animals. Non-Jews used lard, of course, derived from pigs, but Jews tended to use chicken and especially goose fat for cooking. Therefore, dairy foods gave way first to buckwheat and grains. The final step was the shift from grain to potatoes as the primary food crop in Eastern Europe during the in 17th  and 18th centuries. So the Ashkenazi ancestors of the majority of American Jews would have had access to potatoes (and a few onions and maybe a little flour or matzo meal for binding) to make latkes. Given that they were fried in schmaltz, however, I doubt that sour cream was a common condiment--I assume that was a non-Jewish custom that caught on among Jews when vegetable oil took pride of place from animal fats.

As a final note, you may be wondering about sufganiyot, the ubiquitous (in Israel) Hanukkah jelly donut that is seen as the usual alternative to latkes. Although fritters of various descriptions populate the Hanukkah table in many traditions, the specific forbearer of sufganiyot hails from much the same place as the latke: the Polish ponchik, which travelled to Palestine in the early 20th century with Eastern European Zionists and quickly monopolized the Hanukkah season.

So indeed, the tradition of eating latkes (or sufganiyot) for Hanukkah is both temporally and culturally specific, which is wonderfully liberating, since we can feel free to enjoy them (or not!) as well as to experiment with other traditional Hanukkah foods, such as cassola and blintzes. Happy New Year!!

Poetry and the Blessings of Misunderstanding

Published on Hebrew College's "70 Faces of Torah Blog" on November 2, 2016

There are utterances — their meaning
Is obscure or negligible, 
But to attend to them
Without agitation is impossible.

                - Mikhail Lermontov, 1840

As we come to the close of a bitter election season, in which the use and misuse of language has loomed so large, this week’s Torah portion, Noach, gives us an opportunity to ponder both the importance and the challenges of linguistic diversity.

Parts of this campaign have effectively channeled the fear and resentments of a large portion of the electorate through what gets characterized as “plain speech,” unadulterated by “political correctness.” Whether a given instance of so-called “plain speech” is meaningful or meaningless, factually correct or plain wrong, it can foster an extreme emotional response. Such speech also fosters divisiveness, across regional, ethnic, gender, religious, and class differences, among others—in a way that makes it difficult for people with different views or positions to communicate with one another.

From this perspective, it might be tempting to suggest that we have reached a Tower of Babel moment— we can’t even talk with one another anymore, so we lament the loss of the unity and clear communication that we had until… well, when? Isn’t linguistic diversity (even if we’re all speaking the same language) simply a fact of life?

This question lurks behind the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), in which God confounds the generation after the Flood by confusing their language and scattering them across the earth. Traditional commentators see this loss of linguistic and geographic unity as a punishment for some sort of rebellion, though the text never specifies any hostile motive—only a desire to make a name (shem, most likely a monument, as in “yad vashem” from Isaiah 56:5) and to avoid dispersal.

But the biggest objection to this reading is the fact that Genesis 10:5 reports that “[f]rom these [descendents of Japheth] the maritime nations branched out by their lands—each with its language—their clans and their nations.” Migration and linguistic diversity here appear to be uncontroversial facts of human life, so it seems unlikely that they would become punishments a mere chapter later. To understand what is at play here, it’s worth noting that the Hebrew text of the story is unusually rich in verbal play: the similarity of sounds—for instance of nivleh (let’s confuse) and bavel (Babylon); and word repetition—safah (language) and kol ha-aretz (all the earth) each appear five times. This word play is explicitly poetic, carrying an emotional resonance beyond the words’ plain meaning.

The story also carries verbal and thematic echoes of the story of Creation and the expulsion from Eden. When God says, “Let us go down there and confound their speech…” (hava nerda, in 11:7), the phrase echoes another instance of surprisingly plural divine language in Genesis 1:26—“let us make a person in our likeness and image”—as well as God’s “going down” into Eden to confront Adam and Eve after they realize their nakedness in Genesis 3:8. These verbal echoes—God’s use of the first-person plural (to whom is God speaking?) and God’s descent to both confront and confound—connect the story of the Tower of Babel to the blessing of creation and the trauma of expulsion, carrying an emotional resonance beyond the plain meaning of the text.

That resonance is what Lermontov identifies as the surplus content of otherwise obscure utterances, which Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (in citing Lermontov’s poem) characterizes as poetic language, “language of pure transcendence without correlative.” For Levinas, poetry transforms words into signs without any objective meaning, undoing any simple correlation between a word and what it is supposed to mean. “No novel, no poem… has thus perhaps done anything else [but] undo the structure of language. Without this, the world would know only the meanings which inspire official records or the minutes of…board meetings…” Poetic language may at times be difficult to understand, but its meaning is ultimately far greater than what we can fully express in our usual, every-day language. In Genesis, such poetic resonance in the narrative contrasts with the apparent uniformity of the language used by the Tower Builders themselves: “All the earth had the same language and the same words.” This sameness suggests not only that everyone spoke the same language, but that everyone was in agreement about the meaning of words. In the Garden of Eden, the absence of death also meant the absence of growth and development; here, the absence of misunderstanding, which allows for the construction of towers, means the absence of poetry, of the struggle to understand another person that lends meaning to our existence.

In this reading, the confounding of languages is not a punishment, but a corrective; and what prompts this corrective is not the building of the tower, but the triumph of linguistic uniformity in the face of diversity. Although diversity is necessary and even desirable, the challenges it poses are real—and can lead to conflict. One midrash imagines the murderous rage that will result from that loss of mutual understanding: “Thus one said to his colleague, ‘Bring me water,’ whereupon he would give him earth, at which he struck him and split his skull.” Such violence, however, results not so much from the initial misunderstanding as from the failure of the interlocutors to strive for understanding across the linguistic divide. They decided, or at least one of them did, to forgo communication in favor of violence.

For Levinas, poetic speech carries an ethical dimension: our fundamental responsibility to go beyond ourself towards the Other and to recognize the irreducible diversity of individuals. In this ethical imperative, we see the contrast with demagogic speech. The demagogue not only denies this responsibility to the Other; their language also imagines and longs for a pre-Babel world devoid of diversity with its challenges and blessings.

Diversity, like poetry, can be difficult—but it is far superior to the alternatives: a fantasy of “plain speech,” or a uniformity enforced by violence.

Second Day of Festivals at the Worship and Study Minyan - Part 1

Recently, there was an exchange on our Discussion list about the Second Day of Yom Tov in the Diaspora—in Hebrew: yom tov sheni shel galuyot. The posts offered thoughtful reflections on our current practice, which has developed over time in response to Rabbi Gold’s decision, many years ago, that the minyan, like congregations in Israel and in the Reform movement, would observe a single day of festivals. (As with Israeli and many Reform congregations, we would continue to celebrate a second day of Rosh Hashanah.) This issue may seem somewhat rarified, but it raises significant practical and ideological questions.

In practical terms, when the eighth day of Pesach falls on a Shabbat, Israel and the Reform movement continue on with the Torah-reading cycle and are thus “out of sync” with the rest of the Jewish world for several weeks or, as will happen in 2016, for several months. A lesser challenge is the need to combine the rituals of Sh’mini Atzeret and Simchat Torah into a single, lengthy, and tonally-disjointed service.

Turning to ideology, I have attempted to reconstruct Rabbi Gold’s original decision on the basis of various conversations and the posts on the list serve. If other members have recollections of conversations with Rabbi Gold or, even better, access to a written record of his thoughts on these questions, I would very much like to hear from them. As far as I understand, his decision stemmed primarily from a rejection of any notion of the inferiority of “diaspora” Judaism. If Israeli Jews were no longer in galut (exile--a loaded term in Israel-diaspora relations to be sure!), neither were diaspora Jews who had built glorious Jewish civilizations across the world. Therefore, there should be consistent practice across all Jewish communities, and since the second day of the festivals had been characterized in some rabbinic responsa as an extra burden on diaspora Jews to encourage them to yearn for Zion (or, after the establishment of the State of Israel, to encourage Aliyah), that consistent practice should be to observe a single day of the festivals.

Moving from this admittedly thin reconstruction of Rabbi Gold’s reasoning to our own exploration of the issue, several questions arise:

1. If our goal, like Rabbi Gold’s apparently was, is at least in part to assert the dignity of diaspora Jewry, why wouldn’t we also want to assert the dignity of diaspora practice, which from the earliest periods of rabbinic Judaism—itself largely the product of diaspora—was to observe two days?

2. Given that the second day of the festivals places an extra burden on diaspora Jews, how does the principle of “tircha al hatzibur” (avoiding an undue burden on the community) factor into our thinking?

3. Finally, if the Israeli practice meant being “out of sync” with the diaspora Torah-reading cycle for weeks or months after Pesach in certain years, why do we (unlike our Reform brothers and sisters) immediately revert to the diaspora cycle?

Before addressing these questions directly in the context of our minyan and its practice, however, I think it makes sense to review the concept of yom tov sheni in general.

According to the Babylonian Talmud (Beitzah, 4b), yom tov sheni emerged from the potential confusion that might arise if far flung communities of Jews were not to receive word of the proper day of a festival in time for the celebration. To address this doubt (s’feika deyoma), the custom (minhag) was to observe two days of festivals. In practical terms, these included the first and final days of Pesach, the first and final days of Sukkot (the latter being Sh’mini Atzeret), Shavuot, and Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur was not doubled, given that a fast day would be too much of a burden. In the land of Israel, by contrast, Jews maintained the biblical practice of celebrating holidays for one day. The exception would prove to be Rosh Hashanah, in theory because there might reasonably be doubt about the first day of Tishrei even in the Land of Israel, although scholars suggest that the practice become widespread in Palestine only after the migration of a population of Jews from Provence in the 11th century.

One might immediately point out the slight absurdity of fixing Yom Kippur without concern for doubt five days before reasserting doubt about the beginning (and ending) of Sukkot. Indeed, for the Rabbis named in Beitzah, this custom was no longer technically necessary, since the rabbis had determined a system for calculating the calendar without reference to the physical movement of the moon. The reason for persisting in celebrating the second day was formulated as follows:

Because they sent [word] from there [Palestine]: Give heed to the customs of your ancestors which have come down to you; for it might happen that the government might issue a decree and it will cause confusion [in ritual].

This answer is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it comes from Palestine, suggesting that the rabbis there had an interest in maintaining distinct customs for communities inside and outside of the Land. Of course, we find this dictum in the Babylonian Talmud, which suggests that the authorities who compiled the gemara shared this interest in maintaining the distinction. Second, it clearly locates the practice in the realm of minhag (custom)—although functionally, the distinction between custom and law can be vanishingly small. Third, it justifies a conservative practice by reference to governmental persecution, which was much more of a given in Roman-controlled Palestine than in Babylonia.

Another justification for maintaining the practice comes a few lines earlier, when the gemara asks if R. Assi regards the two days of the festival as “one continuous holiness.” This concept of continuous holiness appears quite often in explanations about the festivals (at least from a diaspora perspective!!). If the second day of a festival is truly as holy as the first, who are we to cancel it, thus destroying moments of holiness? Indeed, for those Jews who can manage it (and in this country, many of those people work in the Jewish community!), the second day of festivals truly increases joy and celebration, even as it increases the burdens on individual Jews who feel compelled to choose between their Jewish practice and their livelihood and on congregations who often struggle to make a minyan on the second day of festivals.

Regardless, until the establishment of the State of Israel, the preponderance of Jewish life qualified as diaspora—galut. (As I’ve already noted, galut can also be translated as “exile”; which translation you choose can affect your opinion of yom tov sheni, a topic I’ll have more to say about in another post!) As such, there were very few communities who did not follow the diaspora calendar, at least officially. Even today, when both the Reform movement worldwide and essentially all Israeli congregations follow the biblical calendar, the diaspora calendar remains the default. I have tried and failed to find an Israeli luach (schedule of religious observances) online. In general, books and websites about Jewish holidays (at least those aimed beyond a Reform audience) mention the Israeli and Reform practice, but assume yom tov sheni as a default. Although there is a fair amount of dissatisfaction with yom tov sheni shel galuyot in this and other (small c) conservative congregations, the reality is that most of them will, at least officially, continue to maintain the holiness of the second day.

In future posts on this topic, I plan to have a look at the legal codes and other texts relevant to this discussion, including responsa from the Reform and Conservative movements. I will also explore, through the prism of the three questions I outlined above, the dilemmas we face in our current practice and some others we would face if our practice were to change.

However, since I am writing during the season of Sh’mini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, I want to raise it as an example as to the complexity of this issue. Simchat Torah itself (as a festival distinct from Sh’mini Atzeret rather than a repetition of it) arose only in the Middle Ages when the annual Torah-reading cycle become predominant over its rival triennial system (which ended every third Pesach and was quite distinct from our triennial system, which simply divides each of the annual system’s weekly sidras into three). Since Judaism was at that time by default a diaspora phenomenon, so too was Simchat Torah. Therefore, the process of integrating Simchat Torah into Sh’mini Atzeret was not a return to biblical or pre-exilic practice but an attempt to adapt the principle of a single day of the festival in the Land of Israel to practices that emerged in the diaspora. I mention this not to valorize one practice over another but rather to point out the complex—and ongoing—interplay between diaspora and center in the life of the Jewish people.

In this context, I’ll share a paragraph from a Chabad website:

Following the custom of the holy Arizal, many in Israel participate in hakafot sh'niyot ("second hakafot") on the night following the one-day holiday—thus joining their Diaspora brothers and sisters in their celebration of the Torah. These second hakafot have an advantage: since it is no longer a holiday, the singing can be accompanied by live music. If you are in Israel for the holiday, you might want to make your way on this night to the Western Wall, where the singing and dancing lasts well into the night.

(http://www.chabad.org/holidays/JewishNewYear/template_cdo/aid/1288162/jewish/A-Deeper-Look-at-Shemini-Atzeret-Simchat-Torah.htm)

May your fall be filled with the blessings of joy, peace, and dancing!

Rabbi Jim

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