Hakirah, Metzitzah, and More

Hakirah, Metzitzah, and More Hakirah, Metzitzah, and More Marc B. Shapiro Hakirah has performed a valuable service in dealing forthrightly with the matter of homosexuality. Issue no. 13 (2012) contains R. Chaim Rapoport’s “Judaism and Homosexuality: An Alternative Rabbinic View,” which I think is an outstanding presentation of the alternative to what has seemingly become the “official” haredi position in this matter. This “official” position is, in my opinion, so misguided that I would like to say a few words on the topic, since R. Rapoport did not go far enough in his criticism. To remind readers, Hakirah no. 12 had a discussion on homosexuality with R. Shmuel Kamenetsky. This was followed by the publication of a document signed by many rabbis which follows R. Kamenetsky’s approach. It is available here. (The document is also signed by an assortment of mental health professionals, rebbitzens and “community organizers”.) There are so many problems with the approach found in this document (called a “Torah Declaration”), some already noted by R. Rapoport in his response to R. Kamenetsky, that it would take a lengthy piece to go through them all. Let me just call attention to a few points that I don’t think have been made yet. To begin with, while many rabbis have signed this document, including a number that I know personally, I have yet to speak to someone who actually believes what the document says, and this includes the people who have signed it! Many will regard what I have just said as pretty shocking, in that I have declared that people who signed the document do not believe what it says. Yet I know this to be true, at least with regard to some of the signatories (those that I know personally), and I suspect that other than R. Kamenetsky, it might be that no one who signed the document really believes what it says (and it wouldn’t be the first time that people sign declarations that they really don’t believe in). Let me explain what I mean. According to the document, Same-Sex Attractions Can Be Modified And Healed. From a Torah perspective, the question whether homosexual inclinations and behaviors are changeable is extremely relevant. We emphatically reject the notion that a homosexually inclined person cannot overcome his or her inclination and desire. The only viable course of action that is consistent with the Torah is therapy and teshuvah. The therapy consists of reinforcing the natural gender-identity of the individual by helping him or her understand and repair the emotional wounds that led to its disorientation and weakening, thus enabling the resumption and completion of the individual’s emotional development. The ideas just quoted are the very foundation of the Torah Declaration, and as we see in hisHakirah interview, R. Kamenetsky has been convinced by the dubious proposition that homosexuals can change their sexual orientation. He goes so far as to say that “no one is born gay with an inability to change” (p. 34 [emphasis added]. Not long after the appearance of the interview and the Torah Declaration, the man most prominently identified with the notion that gays can change publicly rejected his earlier viewpoint.) Whether people can change their sexual orientation is a scientific or psychological issue, no more and no less. The first objectionable point of R. Kamenetsky’s approach is turning this into a matter of theology. Indeed, R. Kamenetsky has created a new dogma in Orthodoxy. According to him, believing that a homosexual can change his orientation is a basic Torah value. The reason for this is stated in the document: “The Torah does not forbid something which is impossible to avoid. Abandoning people to lifelong loneliness and despair by denying all hope of overcoming and healing their same-sex attraction is heartlessly cruel. Such an attitude also violates the biblical prohibition in Vayikra (Leviticus) 19:14 “and you shall not place a stumbling block before the blind.”[1] There you have it. Human beings are deciding what God can and cannot do and declaring that it is impossible for someone to be created with an inalterable homosexual nature. That this is completely incorrect is acknowledged by none other than the most extreme advocates of reparative therapy. They themselves acknowledge that there is a significant percentage of people who cannot change their orientation. They have never claimed that everyone can change. What the document gives us, therefore, is a theological statement that is rejected by all scientists and psychologists, including the ones who provide the very basis for reparative therapy. That itself should be reason enough to reject it. (On Nov. 29, 2012 the RCA acknowledged “the lack of scientifically rigorous studies that support the effectiveness of therapies to change sexual orientation.” See here.) This relates to my point above that no one really believes what they signed. To those who doubt what I say, do the following experiment and report back if your results differ. Ask someone who signed the document if he really believes that every homosexual can change his sexual orientation. The answer you will get will be “Of course not everyone. You can never speak about everyone. But many (or most) can change.” In other words, the signatories will acknowledge that they diverge from the document on a basic point. You will have to ask them why they signed a document if they don’t accept everything it says, and the response will probably be that there is much about the document that they do accept, and that is why they signed it. But I repeat my point that this is an unusual document in that I don’t think that there is any signatory, with the possible exception of R. Kamenetsky, who accepts the Torah Declaration on Homosexuality in its entirety. Furthermore, it is not a “liberal” idea to say that people can’t change their sexual inclinations. By looking at another example we can see that it is indeed nonsense to say that everyone can change their sexual orientation and recreate themselves as typical heterosexuals. There are some men who have strong urges for pedophilia. No matter what they do, and how much therapy they get, they can’t get rid of these urges. (I am obviously not comparing homosexuals with pedophiles, or implying that there is any connection between the two. I am only using the example of pedophiles to make a point.[2] ) If we adopt the theology of the Torah Declaration, it means that even hardened pedophiles, who have abused lots of children, can change, because God wouldn’t create someone without a possibility for a healthy sex life. Yet we know that this isn’t the case, and some people simply can’t change. They might be able to control their urges, but as they have told us again and again, the urges don’t go away. It is hardwired into them. (Is it perhaps the false theological notion expressed in the Torah Declaration that explains why yeshivot continued to allow known pedophiles to work? That is, did the rabbis assume that just because someone sexually abused children last week, there is no reason to think he can’t repent and cease to be a danger this week?) And what about the people who are created with uncontrollable urges to kill? We know about these people, as they usually become murderers. And what about the people who are created with diseases that kill them before they are able to marry and have children, or the ones created without arms so they can’t wear arm tefillin[3]? In other words, sometimes people are created a certain way and they are not what we regard as normal. That is the world, and we simply can’t understand why things are the way they are. But one thing I would hope that we can agree on is if people can keep their faith in a good God even while knowing that some children are born with terrible illnesses that will cause their death, it certainly should not shake their faith to believe that some people are born with inalterable homosexual urges. A homosexual who can’t be changed hardly presents a challenge to theodicy the way a child with cancer does, so I can only wonder why the Torah Declaration feels that only the former is theologically untenable. All traditional sources cited in support of the Torah Declaration’s assumption that people can change their orientation only refer to behavior. That is, it is an accepted belief that all people have the ability to control their behavior. Without this belief, the notion of a mitzvah doesn’t make sense. This distinction between orientation and behavior is so obvious that I don’t know how so many learned rabbis overlooked the document’s collapsing the two categories. The more problematic element of the document, which I have already mentioned and which verges on the blasphemous, is that the Torah Declaration presumes to tell God what he can and cannot do. Based on the human intellects of the authors of the document, they establish as dogma that God would never create someone whose only sexual attraction is to his own gender. This is all very nice, but since when can humans dictate to God what he can and cannot do? If God “wants” to create a person who only has same-sex attraction, He can, and the proper response is silence, since we can’t understand why God would do that. Humans don’t have all the answers, and the Torah Declaration should stop pretending that we do.

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