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Same-Sex Attraction and Halakhah

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Same-Sex Attraction and Halakhah Same-Sex Attraction and Halakhah RABBI LEONARD LEVY This paper was approved by the CJLS on December 6, 2006 by a vote of six in favor, 8 opposed and 11 abstaining (6-8-11). Voting in favor: Rabbis Aaron Mackler, David Wise, Loel Weiss, Baruch Frydman-Kohl, Leonard Levy, Joel Roth. Voting in opposition: Rabbis Elliot Dorff, Robert Fine, Daniel Nevins, Alan Lucas, Myron Geller, Gordon Tucker, Avram Reisner, Susan Grossman. Abstaining: Rabbis Kassel Abelson, Joseph Prouser, Adam Kligfeld, Robert Harris, Myron Fenster, Philip Scheim, Mayer Rabinowitz, Paul Plotkin, Pamela Barmash, Vernon Kurtz, Jerome Epstein. How should rabbis and institutions in Conservative Judaism deal with people in :שאלה our communities who are sexually attracted to members of the same sex? In our society and in our communities, people who have been labeled homosexual :תשובה have suffered much pain and injustice. For much of the last half of the twentieth century, those who found themselves feeling sexual attraction toward members of the same sex were given the message that there was something very wrong with them. Many went into psychoanalysis or other forms of psychotherapy seeking a cure, but many did not find a cure, but rather further torment and pronounced feelings of self-loathing. Many have committed suicide. These people felt the need to hide their feelings of same-sex attraction (SSA) from their parents, other close family members and friends in fear that should those feelings be discovered (and even more so, if those feelings found expression in behavior which was discovered or disclosed), they would be rejected and disowned by those who were nearest and dearest to them. Teenagers sometimes ended up on the street when parents kicked them out of the house after discovering their homosexuality. Someone who became known as a homosexual would face severe discrimination. Those who were discovered to be homosexual often lost their jobs and/or their housing, and were subject to harrassment by officers of the law, as well as by others. Some six hundred people have been murdered in the United States for no other reason than that they appeared to be homosexual.1 In order to avoid the risks of rejection, discrimination, and violent ——————————— 1. I am indebted to Mr. Bernard Goldberg of Sacramento, CA for providing me with this figure in sharing his concerns with me regarding this issue. I also gratefully acknowledge the help of a number of people in the research for and editing of this teshuvah. Sarah Weis, Rachel Steinbach, and Shoshana Smolin students at the Solomon Schechter Regional High School in Teaneck, NJ served as research interns in a program established by Rhonda Rosenheck, principal, and supervised by Rebecca Lieberman during the summer of 2004. I thank them for their help in locating sources in the Social Science literature and for finding resources on the web. I thank Bill Siemers, Arthur Goldberg, Elaine Berk and Dr. Neil Whitehead for locating and sending me much material from the scientific and psychological literature, some of it difficult to find. I also thank Bill and Neil for their help with statistical analysis of some of the data. Students, colleagues and teachers too numerous to mention read earlier drafts of this teshuvah and gave helpful comments. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Nicholas Cummings and Dr. Rogers Wright for sharing their time and clinical expertise with me and for reviewing the scientific and counseling sections in the body of the teshuvah for accuracy, to David Benkof for generously sharing his time and knowledge regarding the gay community, its history and literature, and to Dr. Baruch Schwartz for spending much time giving me an overview on research regarding homosexuality in the ancient Near East, for answering my questions regarding the structure of the Holiness code and the place of Leviticus 18:22 in it, and for reading an early draft of the teshuvah and giving helpful comments. The opinions expressed in this _____________________________________________________________________________ SAME SEX ATTRACTION AND HALAKHAH/ Levy 1 attack, most people who felt same-sex attraction or engaged in same-sex acts lived "in the closet," keeping their “deep dark secret” from everyone. Some entered marriages with unsuspecting partners in order to cover up their secret, often causing great pain (and sometimes severe health risk) to the spouse and family upheaval if the secret was discovered. This level of pain was and is intolerable. Nothing can justify the way we have treated homosexuals in our society. While the level of pain inflicted has decreased in recent years due to the increasing acceptance of homosexuals in Western societies and acceptance of the need to respect their civil rights, the level of pain remains great. Recognizing that the pain has been inflicted by people who believed same-gender sexual relationships to be wrong because of the biblical prohibition in Leviticus 18 (and by the pervasive assumptions of a social order organized around that principle), and recognizing that attempts to remove the pain by removing the persistent strong inclination of some people to engage in same-sex sexual activities through pschoanalysis were frequently unsuccessful, often doing more harm than good, many recommend that we remove the pain by removing the prohibition and sanctifying monogamous same-sex relationships as marriages or their equivalent. I am opposed to these proposed steps for two reasons: 1) These steps cannot be halakhically justified; and 2) a careful evaluation of what is currently known about same-sex attraction and behavior leads to the conclusion that, in all foreseeable likelihood, these steps would cause more harm to more people than the good they might do for some people. As Joel Roth has clearly demonstrated in his responsum for this committee in 19922, the legal sources of our tradition3, from the verses in Leviticus through the classical Rabbinic sources and their Medieval commentaries and codifications, prohibit (albeit at various levels of severity) all sexual acts between members of the same sex irrespective of the relational context. These sources are unambiguous and undisputed within the tradition. However, it is not enough to repeat the clear answer to the narrow question regarding the impermissibility of same-sex sexual relations "with a heavy heart and tearful eyes."4 All too often, because we are a Law Committee, we focus on legal solutions to problems exclusively, even when other remedies might be equally or more available, practical and/or effective. This syndrome has had two deleterious effects: a) we often fail to consider solutions to the problems we confront which might address the problem more effectively with fewer undesired consequences because those solutions do not involve adjusting the law; b) When we believe a legal solution is not possible, we often feel that we have done all that we can do and leave the problem inadequately addressed. Certainly as a Committee on Law and Standards, we have the authority (and responsibility) to recommend educating our constituency to change harmful attitudes and their expression in our communities and institutions, including in the way specific policies are formulated, explained and enforced. We can also recommend specific programs to provide support for Conservative Jews who feel same-sex attractions while teshuvah, of course, are my own. 2. Joel Roth, “Homosexuality,” in Responsa 1991–2000: The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement, Kassel Abelson and David J. Fine (New York: The Rabbinical Assembly, 2002), 613–75. The few disagreements I have with Rabbi Roth’s presentation should be apparent in my treatment of the subject below. 3. not to mention the aggadic sources which support this legal evaluation. 4. Roth, “Homosexuality,” p. 671. _____________________________________________________________________________ SAME SEX ATTRACTION AND HALAKHAH/ Levy 2 encouraging them to live up to the highest ideals of Conservative Judaism to the best of their abilities. In previous versions of this teshuvah, I have devoted much space to presenting reasons substantiating the need to maintain the prohibitions against same-sex sexual relations—reasons which even those who do not agree with the positivist approach to halakhah in this case should take seriously. Since this lengthy detailed presentation based on data gleaned from studies in many disciplines detracted from the attention which should be placed on the important practical issues which this responsum addresses, I have removed it from the body of this teshuvah and will submit it separately as an addendum to the teshuvah. The addendum should be seen as an independent exhortation to members of the committee, and eventually to readers at large, to maintain the prohibitions. This responsum starts from the assumption that what has always been prohibited must remain prohibited, upholding the ideal that sexual relations can be sanctified only in the marriage of a man and a woman, and addresses the important issues of identifying and alleviating to the greatest extent possible the pain and injustices which those who feel SSA have suffered in our communities and our movement. As such, it stands independent of any reasoning to substantiate the need to maintain the prohibitions. (A vote for this responsum is a vote for its body only, not for any reasoning presented in the addendum.) Before directly addressing the question posed at the beginning of this teshuvah, it is important to clarify a number of matters which tend to cloud any discussion of issues related to homosexuality. Much of what people tend to believe about homosexuality is based on surface perceptions and assumptions which have assumed the proportions of widely accepted truths in large segments of our society and our community. However, these perceptions and assumptions are at best hypotheses based on little evidence, and in many cases, they are so overwhelmingly contradicted by scientific evidence that they must be considered myths or untruths.
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