Gays And God
By Lehman Weichselbaum - Jewish Week Correspondent
Days before the pivotal decision by the Conservative movement to allow rabbinical ordination of gays, speakers representing a range of opinions on homosexuality spoke to an equally diverse audience at the East Midwood Jewish Center.
Young, newlywed and Orthodox, Maurice and Rebeccah Applebaum lauded the panel’s handling of what Maurice called “a tough issue.” Though like her husband of five months, a member of the branch of Judaism with the hardest line on homosexuality, Rebeccah said, “None of us is perfectly observant. It’s not for us to make decisions on who to respect and who not.”
Added Maurice: “What is forbidden is for God to judge.”
The symposium panel, moderated by Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of Congregation Mt. Sinai in Brooklyn Heights, included representatives from all four major branches of Judaism. Sponsored by the Institute for Living Judaism in Brooklyn, the event produced a rough consensus among panelists that, if nothing else, gay Jews deserved some level of acceptance on a person-to-person human scale, questions of halachic legalities aside.
In the interest of gaining such common ground, Rabbi Sarah Lev, professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, invoked the Talmudic precept of darchei shalom, the overriding injunction to pursue communal peace.
If a valid microcosm of sentiment in the larger Jewish world, this large point of seeming agreement, at the very least, marked a conspicuous step forward for gay Jewish activism across denominational lines. But not every member of the audience was buying it.
“It’s a dog-and-pony show,” commented Benjamin Schaeffer, an Orthodox Jew. “You’ve got an Orthodox rabbi preaching tolerance and acceptance and a homophobic Conservative rabbi”-an ironic polarity that to Shaeffer seemed pat and stage-managed toward a pro-gay tilt.
Schaeffer was referring to Rabbi Dov Linzer of Manhattan’s Orthodox Yeshiva Chovevei Torah, on the one hand, who cautioned against letting gays feel they were “rejected” by God, despite “legitimate” halachic prohibitions against specific actions, and to Rabbi Leonard Levy of the Conservative Jewish Center of Forest Hills West (and also a participant in the week’s decisions on gays by the Conservative movement), who aligned with the sexual prohibitions of Leviticus, chapter 18 as torah min hashamayim, or heaven’s law.
Yet Schaeffer, too, placed himself in the hate-the-sin-but-not-the-sinner camp, remarking to The Jewish Week, “How does Jack Abramoff merit an aliya [blessing of the Torah reading] but not a gay Jew?”
Rabbi Lev advocated weighing “ideas informed by their time against ideas informed by our time.” More radically, Rabbi Ayelet Cohen of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in Greenwich Village declared, “We must move beyond tolerance and acceptance to celebration of the glorious diversity that exists in our Jewish world.”
One of the sharpest points of contention was over the need for therapy. Rabbi Levy suggested therapy might be appropriate in select cases where the subject is conflicted over his or her sexuality.
(Rabbi Levy took public issue with a recent report in The Jewish Week which he said ascribed to him a belief that therapy was a panacea for all cases of homosexuality.)
On the other hand, Rabbi Linzer rejected the recourse of reparative therapy as “ineffective and counterproductive” leading to many cases of depression and suicide.
Elsewhere, Rabbi Gordon Tucker of the Temple Israel Center in White Plains replayed the position he has injected into the Conservatives’ gay rights debate, calling for a “normalization” of homosexual conduct within Jewish life.
Rabbi Carie Carter of the Park Slope Jewish Center, sitting in the audience, later talked of her own synagogue as a haven for “sharing strength and love, where gays and lesbians could feel comfortable.”
Audience member Walter Adelstein thought the talk valuable for opening up thinking on “how people handle loneliness and the need for companionship.”
“You have to feel sympathetic to people who are forced to bite the bullet because of their sexual life,” he said. “You’re not looking to make an end run around a sin. At the same time, if a gay couple wants to be better people they should be encouraged.”