Orthodox gay rabbi speaks out

TORONTO — Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, was in Toronto last week to discuss the conflict between homosexuality and Judaism and to offer a “poetic” way to interpret the biblical texts that are understood to condemn same-sex relationships.

Before delving into the different ways the verse in Leviticus – which states: “a man shall not lie with another man as with a woman; it is an abomination” – can be interpreted, Rabbi Greenberg shared his story about his introduction to Orthodoxy.

While in school, he found himself attracted to a fellow yeshiva student. Struggling internally with his feelings, he sought the advice of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, a posek in Jerusalem, one of the most respected arbiters of Jewish law in Israel.

Rabbi Greenberg, who hadn’t had any physical relationships with women at that point, said to him, “I’m attracted to both men and women. What should I do?”

Rabbi Eliashiv responded, “You have twice the power of love. Use it carefully.”

He said in the 10th year, he was out of tears and decided that he wanted to get an aliyah to the Torah during the reading of that verse. When he was called to the Torah and the verse was read, a calm came over him that was completely unexpected.

“It is totally out of the blue, and it dawns on me that my willingness to be vulnerable to the text requires it to be vulnerable to me and to everybody else… Whoever reads that text – if they haven’t heard my story, our stories, the thousands upon thousands of stories, the people who live every day with that verse around their neck, crushing their spirits and their thoughts, and their hearts – then they don’t know what the verse means… How could they know what it means?”

“You still have the obligation of reproduction, but the sex act of itself does not need to be reproductive. It needs to be relational, connected… So to claim that the Torah prohibits sex between men because it isn’t reproductive, can’t make a great deal of sense.”

“Homosexuality is a problem because married men wander from their marital bed to fool around with men… The reason is because we force everyone to marry. When you have a rule that every one marries, somebody is going to marry a kid who is gay or lesbian and their lives are going to be really hard. And then people will either suffer, cheat on their spouses… So the solution to that problem is… don’t force gay people into marriages.”

Rabbi Greenberg also argued that the verse is more misogynistic than homophobic.

He said that in biblical times, to punish and humiliate a man was to “penetrate him like a woman.”

Women were beneath men in value and power and so sex is associated as an act of humiliation, he said.

“The best way to humiliate a man is to insinuate that he was taken by another man… That is how the verse in Leviticus can be framed – do not have sex with another man if it humiliates and debases him.”

He said that by viewing homosexual sex within a different frame “it opens up the imagination that sex between men is loving, committed, generous, and just has nothing to do with that abomination.”

“I am not against a person deciding that celibacy is the most appropriate way to go. I just don’t think it can be demanded on someone. The rabbis understand that a man who isn’t married is poverty stricken. He is considered an ani. Why? Because to be without a partner for love, intimacy and companionship is to really be poor… Given the Jewish understanding of what it means to be partnered and in a relationship and how central that is for Jews, I don’t think that it would be something the tradition could reasonably demand.”

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