A Blessing on Your House, Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov 5775

The blessings of our home do not resemble a Norman Rockwell scene. Life, family, and love are ---messy. We’re noisy, dynamic, and sometimes volatile, subject to mood swings, health swings, and employment swings. There are slammed doors, overly dramatic reactions, shrill shrying gevault, silent treatments, verbose grandstanding, shocking selfishness, inspiring heroism, callousness, tenderness, bitterness, sweetness, flights of fancy, and the dullness of routine. And still we sing, “Our house, is a very very very fine house.” Indeed!

Regardless of the messiness of our family dynamics, we share the hope that all of our loved ones will feel that they are wanted, needed, and most certainly welcome in our home. One of the greatest fears and concerns expressed by parents and grandparents is the estrangement of our children, grandchildren, and extended family. Of course, the number one concern is the health of our loved ones. But after that, we simply want them in our lives. We want them healthy, happy, well-adjusted, successful ---sure, all that is true, but we also want to share in their lives. Unfortunately, as so many of us have discovered, that’s not always easy to achieve, it’s not easy to maintain, and it’s not in our power to control.

Well, we can control a part of it: we can control our actions, attitudes, judgments, and pronouncements. We can control our anger and frustration when those we say we love

1 Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service do not live up to the standards and ideals that we created -- created, mind you, without very much discussion or negotiation. We tell them that we love them, but God help them if they cross that line, disobey our rules, or show no interest in fulfilling our expectations.

Ah, how the many seeds of dysfunction are sown. And, oh how they grow. And we’ve seen far too many examples recently of how frustrations and anger from that dysfunction quickly and disastrously can escalate into abusive behavior. The truth is, we cannot control the behavior, decisions and realities of those we say we love, and to try to do so leads to awful consequences.

Family conflicts escalate exponentially as the kids age. Battles over cleaning their rooms, brushing their teeth, and completing homework soon morph into their use of coarse language, watching endless hours of television, texting and gaming, and questionable tastes in friends and fashion. But soon enough the stakes get higher: where they will go to school, how they will pay for school, what they will study in school, how well they are doing in school ---and you can thank God that you really never know what they’re doing with all of their free time at school.

Okay, even surviving that (and in truth, how many of us really come out of that unscathed), there is another issue, perhaps it is the ultimate issue. No, I’m not talking about the months or even years they spend back home as they go from job to job. That can actually be a very healing and productive period; just don’t ask too many questions or snoop through their stuff.

2 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service No, the ultimate issue comes up when it becomes clear that they have a significant other in their lives. Hopefully, the new love will be everything we could ever have hoped for our child: someone smart, caring, sweet, respectful, and of good values. Oh, and

Jewish!

But here’s the rub. We don’t get a vote or a veto. Once the kids are adults they will judge who is right for them. Yes, we can voice our opinion, but we had better do so gently and sensitively because who our kids fall in love with is beyond our control, so at some point, hopefully sooner than later, we should get over it.

Mind you, “getting over it” does NOT mean giving up. It means keeping our perspective on what truly matters. It means that once our child has fallen in love and is beginning to plan for a life with that person, we have to be supportive and embracing. Note that I did not say “accepting” because mere acceptance is a sort of shrugging defeat.

Mere acceptance is nothing more than a passive-aggressive growl of disapproval. This won’t work. At least it won’t work if the goal is to have our kids, their spouses, and the future grandchildren a part of our lives. Rather, we have to be supportive, embracing, and inclusive ---and we need to do so regardless of their spouse’s religious background or gender.

This morning we read from the that the covenant we have with God is blessedly inclusive:

3 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service You stand this day, all of you, before Adonai your God -- your tribal heads, your elders and your

officials, all the men of Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from

woodchopper to waterdrawer -- to enter into the covenant of Adonai your God…”

(Deuteronomy 29:9-11)

This remarkably inclusive proclamation may sound quite startling to some ears. What does it mean that the covenant of God with Israel includes the “strangers in our camp – geirkha asher bekerev machanekha”?

Certainly, in our modern context, it should mean that all of our loved ones, including those who are not Jewish, share with us in the sacred covenant of God with Israel.

One of the hallmarks of the Reform movement is that we are welcoming and embracing to all families. As well we should!

The vast majority of our families have loved ones who are not Jewish and it is an especially important , an ethical and moral imperative, for us to lovingly and sensitively reach out to them and help them feel at home. We have to recognize that, at first, many or even most of our non-Jewish loved ones may feel awkward or uncomfortable here. It takes time before one can become familiar with Jewish rituals, our time-honored traditions and culture. We have to help them feel comfortable, wanted, and valued.

Of course, we are greatly honored and rejoice when some of our non-Jewish loved ones choose to become Jewish. I consider it one of my greatest privileges to teach and to

4 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service help guide people through the conversion process. Temple Sinai member Betsy Epel is the head of Denver’s Introduction to course, and with her superb leadership several hundred people in Denver have become Jewish. Some of the most recent converts were honored this morning with an Aliyah to the Torah. But conversion is a very personal decision and our welcoming embrace of our non-Jewish loved ones should never come with pressure to convert.

It has been my privilege to work with interfaith couples as they begin planning their lives together and, when invited, I attend their weddings in order to offer a blessing from the

Jewish community and Temple Sinai. Most importantly, and I certainly hope that our interfaith families know this and feel this, I and the Temple Sinai community are fully committed to helping their marriages succeed and their families thrive and to ensuring that they feel respected, appreciated, welcomed and blessed at Temple Sinai. Your family is our family and here we are at home.

I spoke earlier of the imperative to be supportive, embracing, and inclusive regardless of our loved one’s religious background or gender. While we have made tremendous strides in achieving this in regard to our non-Jewish loved ones, we have not always done so with our friends and family who are gay, lesbian, and transgender. Many of us of a certain age, grew up in an era when homosexuality was illegal. Prior to 1962, homosexuality, which was banned under arcane sodomy laws, was a felony in every state, punishable by lengthy prison sentences. As late as 1986, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of those laws. It was not until 2003 with the important

5 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service Lawrence vs. Texas case that the Supreme Court reversed those decisions. When one looks at the process from a wide perspective, the progress that has been made in granting equal civil rights and protections to gays and lesbians has been phenomenal over the past 20 years.

Polls have shown a tremendous shift in public opinion concerning homosexuals and the transgender. A clear majority of Americans are in favor of legalizing marriage for same- gender couples. However, in the absence of Federal laws, civil rights for gays and lesbians have come painfully slow. The fight for equal protection and legal rights has been fought state by state, court case by court case. To date, 19 states have legalized gay marriage: 8 by court decisions, 8 by State Legislatures, and 3 by popular vote. As you know, Colorado still has a state constitutional ban against same gender marriage.

We did pass a Same-Sex Unions bill which took effect last year, but it offers few rights and privileges to gay or lesbian couples. In June of this year, the 10th Circuit Court of

Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes Colorado, struck down Utah’s gay marriage ban and signaled the inevitable reversal of Colorado’s ban.

I have been a proud and vocal supporter of equal civil rights for gay and lesbians from the beginning of my Rabbinate over 25 years ago. But I too have had an uneven evolution on this issue. As a young man growing up in Ohio and Indiana in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, gay rights was not on the horizon. In that era, as we were very cognizant of civil rights for people regardless of color, faith, and gender, gay rights never occurred to us. In that era of federally mandated busing to integrate schools, barriers that divided

6 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service people by race came down and friendships grew. In that era of a growing awareness of the glass ceilings that hindered women and denied them equal pay, legal rights and opportunities, we cheered with every advance, including the ordination of the first women as . But in that era of civil rights advances, holding hands in symbolic multi-cultural unity, of Coke commercials that joyfully sang about teaching all the world to sing in perfect harmony, there was little thought to the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

Notwithstanding the considerable distance still needed before true equal rights are achieved, society has come so far in the past few decades. But beyond the secular battles for civil rights, religious traditions have posed another hurdle for gays and lesbians. While Jewish leaders and the Jewish community generally have avoided the kind of hysterical anti-gay rhetoric and violence that has been perpetrated by certain fundamentalist Christians and , our Jewish ritual traditions have excluded gays and lesbians.

Some twenty years ago, as a member of the Reform movement’s

Committee, I was a part of an intense review and debate about the appropriateness of a

Rabbi officiating at the marriage of two Jews who were gay or lesbian. The Responsa

Committee has always served the Reform movement as the voice of progressive

Halakhah, modern Jewish law, custom, and values. Those who serve on it are almost always Rabbis who are steeped in Jewish law and tradition; we take the Torah, the

Talmud, and the two-thousand year body of very seriously for they

7 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service are the sacred record of our exploration of the ethical, moral, and ritual ideals of our people in covenant with God. This is not a group prone to permissiveness or whatever feels right must be right.

In dealing with the issue of homosexuality and Jewish ritual, we had to examine closely the Torah’s teaching in Leviticus 18:23 that “a man should not lie with another male as one lies with a woman.” The Torah defines such behavior as to’evah, which is often translated as an “abhorrence.” We also had to wrestle with the traditional concept of marriage as kiddushin, which was exclusively used to refer to the sacred marriage of a man and a woman.

In 1996, the responsum that resulted from that review was published. It was a long, detailed, and often brilliant piece that took pains to record faithfully the dissenting opinions along with the majority view. The responsum, skillfully composed by Rabbi Dr.

Mark Washofsky, my teacher and mentor who remains the preeminent halakhic authority for the Reform movement, issued some extraordinarily important conclusions.

First, we all agreed that it was no longer appropriate to use the term to’evah, abhorrence, in reference to homosexual relations. We pointed out that those prohibitions that were defined as to’evah were almost exclusively in reference to forbidden Canaanite rituals. In fact, the only times the term to’evah is used in the Torah is in reference to idolatry, the eating of forbidden animals, and certain sexual

8 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service prohibitions, all in relationship to Canaanite practices. Obviously, these are no longer germane and have not been germane for thousands of years.

Second, the Committee strongly voiced its support of civil marriage for gays and lesbians. This was in keeping with the overwhelming expression of Reform Judaism by the UAHC in 1993 in support of gay and lesbian marriage.

And yet for reasons having more to do with the readiness of our congregants and the still negative sense of social norms toward gay and lesbian marriage, the Responsa

Committee voted against approval or Rabbinic officiation.

As I mentioned, when the responsum was published we faithfully gave voice to the minority on the Committee who were in favor of a Rabbi officiating at a wedding for two

Jews who were gay or lesbian. In time, it is their perspective which has come to represent how most of us feel.

Over the past 15 years, both the Union for Reform Judaism and the Central Conference of American Rabbis have strongly endorsed civil marriage for gays and lesbians and, additionally, have voiced support for Reform Rabbis who choose to officiate at their weddings. In light of the continuing evolution of our understanding of homosexuality, the

Responsa Committee, to which I remain a corresponding member, this past year issued a new decision on same-gender marriage:

9 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service Our tradition understands such a partnership contracted between two Jews as kiddushin. What are the salient and defining values of this institution? We hold that they include three essential commitments: 1. The commitment of two Jews to establish a Jewish home together. 2. Their commitment to support and nurture one another physically, financially, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. 3. Their commitment, should their union be blessed with children, to raise those children together as Jews. The union of a same-sex Jewish couple, no less than that of an opposite-sex couple, can be defined by these commitments. It therefore qualifies, in our view, as kiddushin. For this reason, we are not persuaded by the suggestion raised by some that same-sex marriages be designed by a different term. On the contrary: kiddushin is the term that designates Jewish marriage.

Same-sex Jewish couples who forge a loving and devoted union and who commit themselves to establishing a Jewish home and raising a Jewish family should not be denied the rites that define marital status in the Jewish tradition. In all that we do and consider, we must operate by the halakhic principle [that is prominent throughout the Talmud] Gadol k’vod ha-briot she-docheh lo ta’aseh she-ba-torah, “So great is the requirement of human dignity that it supersedes a negative commandment of Torah” (TB.Berakhot 19b, et al). Human dignity requires that same-sex couples be afforded the same opportunities as heterosexual couples to sanctify their marriages with kiddushin and the presence of their rabbi. These aspects of Reform Jewish marriage underscore a critical point. We are not now suddenly “changing” the traditional definition of kiddushin in order to accommodate same-sex marriage. Reform Judaism departed from that definition at least a century and a half ago when it restructured and reimagined kiddushin in accordance with our movement’s fundamental commitment to justice, equity, and egalitarianism.

10 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service What has changed since 1869 – and 1990, and 1996 - is our recognition that same-sex unions, no less than opposite-sex unions, are a form of marriage. Given this recognition, it is clear to us that the same commitment to justice, equity, and egalitarianism applies in this case. Same-sex marriages therefore meet the long- standing Reform definition of kiddushin as a mutual and egalitarian marital covenant between two Jews.

That important decision by the Reform movement’s Responsa Committee is a form of takkanah, a decree that recognizes a changing reality and the necessity to preserve our people and our exalted ideals of ethical and compassionate justice. This evolution is now an expression of my Rabbinate.

When asked by two Jews who are homosexual and have acquired the civil union documentation, I will proudly officiate at their celebration. In time, and I hope that it will be soon, when Colorado officially grants gays and lesbians the right of marriage, I will proudly officiate at their marriage. I certainly understand that there will be good people, good friends who will disagree with me. I ask them to recognize that I live my life with

Judaism, Israel, and God at my very core.

All of halakhah, Jewish tradition, is centered on the welfare of the Jewish people and our sacred bond with God. And, throughout history, when a tradition became a hindrance to our welfare and to our sense of morality, our ancestors found the courage to change, to evolve, and to do the right thing. Now is such a time!

11 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service On this, the holiest day of the Jewish year, our ancestors decreed that we should read from Deuteronomy 29:9, “Atem nitzavim, You stand this day, all of you, before Adonai your God.” Indeed, today, we stand together. No one is excluded. Every family is valued. Every person is held as precious. And together we acknowledge that, yes, we do change, we do evolve, we do grow. May our change and growth always be for greater inclusiveness, greater sensitivity, and a greater sense of the sacredness of every member of our family.

12 Rabbi Rick Rheins, Temple Sinai. Yom Kippur 5775 morning service