California has now become the second American state to affirm that two men or two women can marry. Yet some organizations are planning to challenge this decision by referendum, and most of them cite as an explanation for their hostility verses in Leviticus 18 and 19, condemning a "male lying with a male as with a woman."
Is that the whole story -- or does the Bible look forward to its own transformation? Does
the Bible call on the human race to "grow up" into a new maturity, with a new sexual ethic?
Dear friends,
A few words before we take up the question of same-sex marriage: In the last few weeks, The Shalom Center has sent out action messages --
on solar energy to combat the global climate crisis, and how to draw on an ancient tradition of blessing the sun that arises next April;
"unkosher meat, unkosher politics" in the US government's oppressive treatment of immigrant meatpacking workers;
plans for an action conference in November 23 on "Jews Uniting to End the War & Heal America";
and proposals for interfaith action connecting the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King (whose official birthday is on Monday, January 19) to Presidential Inauguration Day (January 20).
With this message, we take up the question of same-sex marriage.
In all this, we bring a unique creative approach to the synthesis of spiritual depth and reflection, with political vigor and action.
WE NEED YOUR HELP. URGENTLY. Summer is always a dry time in funding non-profit organizations; yet funds are especially crucial in this summer season of spiritually rooted questions facing the American electoral public. We don't endorse candidates, but we do deeply explore the issues that distinguish candidates and face the American people.
PLEASE HELP US DO THIS BY CLICKING TO THE "DONATE NOW" BUTTON ON OUR WEBSITE AT http://www.shalomctr.org, AND MAKING A TAX-DEDUCTIBLE GIFT TO The Shalom Center. (Maybe devote part of your "economic stimulus" check from IRS. Make it an "ethical stimulus" -- America needs one of those as much as the other. Thank you! -
Shalom, salaam, peace - Arthur
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California has now become the second American state to affirm that two men or two women can marry. Yet some organizations are planning to challenge this decision by referendum, and most of them cite as an explanation for their hostility verses in Leviticus 18 and 19, condemning a "male lying with a male as with a woman."
Some have argued that through these passages the Bible prohibits male homosexuality for sure, and perhaps lesbian sexuality as well. Others have argued that "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman" is ambiguous, leaving open to question what the text really means. (Is this physically possible? Was it only about casual or ritual homosexuality, not committed relationships? Was it only about anal sex?)
But I think we need to go beyond these linguistic or midrashic quibbles, to look more deeply into Torah.
Does Torah look forward to its own transformation? If so, under what circumstances?
There is wise and powerful teaching in the passage of Talmud that cautions against raising goats and sheep in the Land of Israel. Since our forebears Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rivkah, did precisely that, how could the Talmud have the chutzpah to oppose it?
The Rabbis know the world had changed. They knew that the numbers of goats and sheep, and of the human population, would denude and ruin the Land if these animals were bred there.
The world had changed, and so did Jewish holy practice.
Biblical Judaism, out of which sprang the Leviticus prohibition on homosexuality, professed three basic rules for proper sexual ethics:
- Have as many children as possible. Gen. 1: 28: "Be fruitful, multiply, fill up the earth, and subdue it."
- Men were to be in charge. Genesis 3: 16, where God says to Eve, "Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."
- Sex was delightful and sacred. (Song of Songs, throughout.) Celibacy was almost unheard of, and almost always strongly discouraged.
How did these affect attitudes toward homosexuality?
"Be fruitful and multiply, fill up the earth and subdue it"" worked against homosexuality, since having children was presumably impossible. But what shall we do today, in a generation when the earth is full, over-full, of human beings and our numbers are helping wreck our planet? --
For today the sheer number of humans is putting impossible burdens on our global ecosystem and plunging into extinction thousands of the species that God commands in the story of the Flood we must not allow to die.
So this biblical injunction has been accomplished.
Today we need to encourage, not forbid, forms of sexuality that avoid biological multiplication. We might now read the command as teaching us to be fruitful and expansive emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually rather than biologically.
What were the effects of "He shall rule over you"? If a man had to be in charge in a sexual relationship, there was no way to deal with a relationship of two men. Neither one could be subordinated -- "as with a woman." Such a relationship would blow out all the circuits. Conversely, a relationship between two "subordinate" women would not even turn the power on -- and so it was ignored in biblical tradition.
Is this statement about the consequences of Eden intended by Torah to persist forever? No more than the twin statement (Gen. 3: 17-19) that human beings (or at least men) shall "toil in the sweat of their brow," wringing a livelihood from a hostile earth. Do we think Torah commands us to eschew the tools and machines that make our labor easier?
Like this statement about toil, and like "Be fruitful and multiply," the overlordship of men applied to a history that should be transcended. The human race entered Eden as young children, reblled and grew like adolescents, took on the sober, toilsome tasks of adulthood as they left Eden. Was that the end of it? Or are we to grow still more as a species, just as we grow still more as individuals - growing to a maturity where toilsome work and child-rearing no longer rule our lives?
Modernity has transformed the world we live in. The Modernity that eases our work and makes women and men equal and brings the human race to fill up and subdue the earth may well be what God intended as a step forward in the maturation of humanity.
Like most maturations, it also brings problems -- like the danger that our continuing to enforce immature rules as we wield adult tools will destroy the planet that nurtures us. It is up to us to discern what rules from our collective youth must be transformed as we grow up.
So then we must ask ourselves: As the Rabbis of the Talmud understood that in their new world they must oppose raising sheep and goats as their forebears did, what must we change in our new world?
In a world filled and subdued by the human race, multiplying our numbers may actually contravene God's intention. In a world where men are not required to be dominant nor women to be subordinate, a relationship of two men or two women need not be either destructive or irrelevant.
So we are evolving past these two rules that underlay the opposition to gay and lesbian relationships and marriages.
The third basic rule -- that sex is delightful and sacred -- still stands. The biblical Song of Songs embodies it, and the Song -- far from being outdated -- may point beyond the Eden of the past, of a childish human race, past our history of toil and hierarchy, toward an Eden of the Future. "Eden for grown-ups," for a grown-up human race and for newly mature individual human beings.
Just as our tradition celebrates sexuality between partners who are past begetting/ bearing age, where procreation is no longer the point and yet the joys of sex are still to be enjoyed and honored -- might that moment have arrived for the human race as a whole?
In the Song, bodies are no longer shameful as they were after the mistake of Eden; the earth is playful, not our enemy; and women and men are equal in desire and in power. And God is never named -- no longer Papa/Mama as in Eden, giving orders, but inherent in the very process of life.
Though the drama of the Song is on its face heterosexual, it describes the kind of sensual pleasure beyond the rules that has characterized some aspects of gay and lesbian desire, especially while gay marriage was forbidden.
So we now have the opportunity to open heterosexual relationships and marriages to the kind of joy the Song embodies, while opening gay and lesbian life to the more planful structure that marriage makes possible.
Love and marriage are present in the Song, suffused with joy and pleasure rather than with rigidity and rules. For millennia, Jews, Christians, Muslims have prided ourselves on the worth of marriage as a carrier of holiness and community. Now we can expand the circles in which marriage -- a new kind of marriage -- is possible.
From a legal standpoint, the secular courts of California, Massachusetts, Canada, and several European countries have begun opening the way to enhancing, not destroying, marriage. They have opened the gates of civil law; spiritual communities may enter joyfully, recognizing that God has new purposes for our species and our planet.
Some may from their own different understanding of Torah refuse to celebrate religious marriages between two men or women. But let them stand aside from opposing the civil authorities' honoring of marriages that uphold the equality of all adults. Let them honor our religious diversity -- for God's Infinite Image is imprinted in the very fabric of our diversity. Let them, and all of us, honor the experiment of those civil and religious communities that have already moved to celebrate the loving union of two men or of two women.
The Shalom Center urges that we step through God's gateways toward a new level of human maturity by supporting the decision of the Supreme Court of California to legalize same-sex marriage.
If you want to help the Human Right Campaign's special PAC to defeat the anti-marriage initiative, please click to :
https://secure.ga3.org/...
And if you want to provide much needed water for the roots of our work in this dry summer, please remember to donate through the blue button at http://www.shalomctr.org.
Thanks! --- and Shalom, Arthur