"Marriage is not a human institution. It is God's idea. Theologically, historically, spiritually we see that marriage was created by God as an arrangement that was his crowning achievement. It is not our place, nor any civilization's place, to tinker with something that god has so wonderfully made." Thus, the Reverend Canon David Roseberry, of Plano Texas, on NPR's All Things Considered, February 28, 2004.  Asked whether his view that marriage is a theological issue argued against his support for a constitutional anti-marriage amendment, Roseberry said "The goals of the church here and the gals of the state can be equally the same, which is the betterment of societyä Society, families, children are strengthened by male-female marriages. That ought to be what we hold up as the ideal." Roseberry is one of the leaders of the movement that set out to split the Episcopalian Church after the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson. That makes Roseberry a heretic of course ≠ and the punishment prescribed by the Bible for heretics is really something to contemplate.

But that's just a religious opinion. This is a civil society, so we should listen to the voices of civil leaders. On the nationally syndicated Sean Hannity Show, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said,  "I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman." Ok it was just a slip of the tongue. But he also said, more recently,  "In San Francisco, it is license for marriage of same-sex. Maybe the next thing is another city that hands out licenses for assault weapons and someone else hands out licenses for selling drugs. I mean, you can't do that, All of a sudden we see riots and we see protests and we see people clashing. The next thing we know is there's injured or there's dead people."

Now, these are goyim, strangers -- and rather strange as well. What about the Jewish take on the issue? When the Central Conference of American Rabbis, in 2000, voiced acceptance of gay civil unions, Orthodox leaders said recognizing the value of gay and lesbian relationships was "beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish teaching and practice." Reuters reported that Rabbi Kenneth Hain, President of the Rabbinical Council of America, said that his Orthodox organization believes Reform Judaism has made "another tragic assault on ... the sanctity of our people" and undermined the unity of Jews. He said Judaism cannot confer "legitimacy upon relationships which our Torah and tradition specifically prohibit." He said that Judaism "is a timeless faith rooted in divine revelation; Judaism's laws cannot be abrogated by fiat or majority vote or redesigned to fit a current behavior pattern."

So given the dual impetus of their own relatively liberal policies and an attack from the right, Reform rabbis have surely spoken out on the issue of gay and lesbian marriage, right? Well, almost. In 1998 hey were about to endorse Reform rabbis' officiating at "same-sex" commitment ceremonies, it seems, but Reform Rabbi Richard Hirsch, a long-time leader of the effort to help the Reform movement establish itself in Israel, wrote a memo containing a plea to not pass the "same-sex" resolution. Were such a measure to be endorsed by the Reform rabbinical body, Rabbi Hirsch wrote, the Reform "demand for rights" in Israel "would be undermined by allegations that we are not an authentic movement, but a separatist movement engaging in 'aberrations' and 'perversions' of Judaism."

Well, that's probably enough fool-bashing for a while. I may have to return to it to keep the evening lively, though, because in some sense this little talk is over before it begins.  The title was, you may recall, "Humanistic Judaism: why we're friendly to gays, lesbians, interfaith families, and other living things."  The answer is pretty easy, actually.  It is, "because we are."

Perhaps that sounds to you a bit like God's response to Moses' question, What is your name? God answers:

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh

(which might be translated "I am what I am" or "I am becoming what I am becoming" or "I will be what I am becoming").

What does God mean when he says that to Moses? It is, after all a pretty potent name to have.  Let me offer you a little Midrash here.  God's meaning is that, just as Moses will be led away from the pagan religion of his father-in-law Jethro and will become the first prophet and priest of Israel, giving a new religious law to Israel, so will that religion change over the centuries. God wants Moses to understand -- and the sages tell us that Moses' understanding was great -- that the Jewish religion he was to found would adapt to the growth of civilization and to developments in both philosophy and science. Indeed, Moses leaves the Israelites before the crossing of the Jordan because he realizes that the presence of the founding law-giver would forever impede the development of Judaism.

Of course no traditionalist is likely to take such a Midrash seriously. It is not supported by the culture, as well as we know it, that existed some 3000 plus years ago. Neither is it an accepted notion in the touchstone of early modern Judaism, the Talmud. Of course, the Talmud, a product of  Rabbinic Judaism, is the best indicator that change is exactly what God had in mind for the Jewish religion, since it represented such a radical departure from the Priestly religion, which itself was certainly a far cry from whatever preceded it --  most likely a polytheistic nature religion in which one God was slowly assuming prominence. And nearly all of the modern flavors of Judaism differ from all of those, as well as from each other.  

Do we Humanistic Jews fit into this religious matrix? Not really. The reason is, quite simply, that our religion is not Judaism.  Our religion is Humanism, a species of rational thought with its roots in, but not limited to, the European Enlightenment. Is Humanism a religion? Not, of course, if you limit yourself to the historical definitions that involve supernatural beings.  But that's a false and foolish limitation. Roy Wood Sellars, a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Michigan and one of the original signers of the Humanist Manifesto, recognized that the historical role of religion was not entirely dependent on the primitive need for a giant parent in the sky: "Once we have cut the supposed bonds with the supernatural world, we see that religion is, and always has been, a social product."

Religion provides a context for our lives and for our actions.  While we no longer need magical explanations for the conception of babies, the wonders of love or the ravages of disease, our understanding of them does not render them any less magical to us.  Our religious community is one in which we can face the magic in these events -- celebrating the wonderful with others, and receiving support as we experience the terrible. It is the only community -- of the many we moderns participate in on a daily basis -- that exists specifically to provide a context for these events.

Our religion is also the taproot of our morality.  Sellars said, "Morality is primarily a group affair. It is a term for the customs which have grown up through the generations and which are absorbed by each newborn individual in his term, much as he takes in the air he breaths." Our moral actions may take place in secular domains -- labor unions, soup kitchens, housing courts, Project Bread, City Year, classrooms, or a dozen others. We do not need our religion to tell us what to do, but our religious community validates what we do. Its validation is not primarily because of the product of our actions but because of our choosing to take them.

For example, consider intermarriage. From the biblical passage (Deut. 7:3) "neither shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son," the sages inferred that marriage with a non-Jew is forbidden as a negative precept by the Torah. The prohibition against marrying a gentile is also explicitly stated in the period of the return to Zion: "And that we would not give our daughters unto the peoples of the land, nor take their daughters for our sons" (Neh. 10:31). It was also inferred from the passage in Deuteronomy that in a mixed marriage there is "no institution of marriage," i.e., mixed marriages are not legally valid and cause no change in personal status.

As Humanistic Jews we value both Talmud and Torah as the stories and history and recorded deliberations of our ancestors We look to them, as we do to many other sources, to find the basis for our ethical precepts. And there is a certain pleasure if we discover therein something that we can accept as a valid ethical insight, or even as the early beginnings of one.  As a child I was taken with the notion of the cities of refuge; if someone responsible for the accidental death of another person could escape to one of these cities, they would be protected against retaliation and blood feud. I've always been struck by that as a perfect example of what our connection to our ancestors is all about. By our standards it's rather a weak protection, but for the time it was a wonderful innovation. From it and similar principles we can trace the Talmud's strong distaste for capital punishment and many important features of our own common law. There is much that is worthy of remembering in these ancient stories.

But we, as Humanistic Jews, do not make these stories and histories determinative of the way we live our lives. On matters such as intermarriage we may look to see what the sages had to say, because we care deeply about making well-reasoned and emotionally satisfying decisions and wish to gather as much data and analysis as possible, but we don't take anything without evaluation. In this case, let's face it, our Humanist sensibilities reject the whole concept of this prohibition on intermarriage. It's a loser from the git-go. We don't even need to play the game of capping citations -- of noting, for example that Moses married out, as did Boaz, the great-grandfather of King David, as did that wisest of Kings, Solomon -- fifty or sixty times.

We need only note that what is most important to us is the freedom and dignity of our fellow human beings.  If two responsible people make a free choice to marry, then it is not up to society, or any sub-culture, to deny them that choice. It is in fact offensive to us that anyone would consider interfering with that freely chosen act -- or that one of our cousins would reject another of our cousins for choosing a life partner who was slightly further away on the human family tree. Would we mourn if intermarriage resulted in all traces of Jewish history and culture vanishing from the Earth? Yes, I think so. But it is the job of Jewish cultures to make themselves relevant to individuals who choose their partners from outside the clan. That is certainly something we strive to do in this congregation. Our principles affirm the responsibility of all Jews to welcome the non-Jewish partners of Jews into the Jewish family circle and to offer them acceptance and respect. Our congregation, in which perhaps 40% of the families have a non-Jewish partner, testifies that we see the meeting of this responsibility not as a requirement but as an integral part of our nature.

What about the Jewish view, and the Humanistic view, of homosexuality? While it has been obvious forever that there is nothing inherently problematical about intermarriage except its threat to closed societies, the equivalent understanding about homosexuality has only become obvious to a large proportion of our society during the last few decades. Actually, if you think about it, what used to be called Gay Liberation closely followed the revelation that Jews don't have horns. I was born in the year that the film based on Laura Z, Hobson's Gentlemen's Agreement was issued;   growing up I was touched only minimally by Anti-Semitism, but certainly know that there was something about homosexuals that needed to be hidden in the closet.   As science -- primarily through genetics and psychology, but also anthropology and ethology -- has revealed the truths that debunked the old stereotypes and myths about homosexuality, we as Humanists -- and I'm pleased to say a goodly chunk of society -- have grown in our understanding and our willingness to reject our early social conditioning. In fact, our Humanist philosophy makes the whole issue very simple. We welcome gays and lesbians, bisexuals and transvestites, into our communities not because we think they need us, but because they are us.  The only thing about their sexual orientation that we care to take notice of is the fact that it has been a basis for discrimination and oppression, and it is our responsibility both as Humanists and as Jews to help right that wrong. 

I said åas Humanists and as Jews" because one of those Jewish traditions that we continue to hold dear is our strong support for moral right over wrong, for the weak over the strong, for the oppressed over the oppressor, for the enslaved over the slaveholder, for knowledge over propaganda, for reason over superstition. While not all Jews would have our strong commitment to these principles as being infinitely more significant than the text of the Bible, most do subscribe to them as best they can within their belief systems.  This is something from our heritage that we can be proud of.

Of course, there are Jewish laws and traditions regarding homosexuality. As well as acts of adultery and incest, the Bible prohibits sodomy and homosexuality (Lev 18:22), denouncing such acts as "abhorrent" and making them capital offenses (20:13); having carnal relations with any beast is also made a capital offense (18:23; 20:15--16). These offenses were punishable by stoning to death (Sanh. 7:4), and the beast with which the offense had been committed was also destroyed (Lev. 20:15--16).

One Talmudic sage suggested that unmarried men be prohibited from sleeping under the same blanket, but others permitted this, and Maimonides explained that the practice can be allowed because Jews are not prone to homosexuality. It isn't clear how he knew.

Rabbinic sources cite three reasons for the ban on homosexuality:

• It is an unnatural perversion, debasing the dignity of man.
• Moreover, such acts frustrate the procreative purpose of sex, just as do any other forms of "spilling the seed in vain"
• A third objection is seen in the damage to family life, by the homosexual abandoning his wife.

In contrast, the problem of lesbianism is hardly dealt with in Halakhah. It is discussed in two Talmudic passages in which some sages suggest that women engaging in sexual relations with other women are barred from marrying into the priesthood. However, the majority opinion is that "there is no specific negative commandment prohibiting it and no actual intercourse of any kind involved." Therefore, lesbian acts do not disqualify women from marrying into the priesthood. (Whew!) On the other hand, Maimonides admonishes any man whose wife is suspected of lesbian involvement to "prevent women known to indulge in such practices from visiting her and her from visiting them," and suggests that a court ought to administer flogging for rebelliousness  to women actually committing such acts.

It's hard to say much about actual instances of homosexuality in Biblical times. The Bible itself tells only two stories directly: that of Sodom where all the men of the town demanded that Lot yield up two messengers from god to be their playthings, and a similar charming instance in Judges. Talmud contains a midrash about Joseph, that "Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh's bought him[Joseph] [...] for himself; but Gabriel came and castrated him, and then Gabriel came and mutilated him [Potiphar], for originally his name is written Potiphar but afterwards Potiphera." This involves a pun on the Hebrew words for officer and eunuch. Also some people believe that Noah's son Ham has sexual relations with his dad -- others think that Ham merely castrated the old man. And there are many who think that David and Jonathan were more than just good buddies.

We can get some notion of what really went on from historical allusions. Deuteronomy (23:18) prohibits Israelites from serving as temple prostitutes. It seems that male and female prostitution (where the males served other males) were aspects of Canaanite religious practice. This may therefore have been part of the earliest Israelite practice, and seems to have been allowed at various times during the Monarchic period. We also know that male homosexual acts played a fundamental part in Greek culture, and in later Hellenistic culture. It is not hard to imagine that many of the substantial minority of Jews who turned to Greek culture before the Hasmonean revolt experimented with homosexual acts as well. Certainly we do know that the essentially modern form of circumcision is more radical than that practiced before the Hasmoneans, the change having been  instituted to prevent men from trying to pass as uncircumcised, because the Greeks thought that such disfigurement was barbarous.

The Middle Ages saw a flourishing Jewish homoerotic literature in Spain. Here is one such poem; note that "gazelle" was a metaphor for a young man:

The secret of love, how can it be contained

 The heart and the tear are talebearers.

 The heart is restrained from what it seeks,

 Shut up and be passion of him besieged,

 Unable to obtain its desire.

 If it presumes to attain to the stars,

 Its pride is brought down, laid low.

 Beloved like a hart, with heart of a panther,

 If you desire to slay,

 My heart is in your hand as clay.

 But do not summon wanderings upon it.

 For in its midst your name is sheltered.

 Beloved, like a scarlet cord his lips,

 Burning like fire for they are his censer,

 And in them is the work of his signs.

 Live by them, for it waits for them --

 A heart long suffering because of them.

 How my fate has hardened its spirit.

 A while and separation will cause it to be odious

 To my friends who knew its thoughts.

 If wandering has separated us,

 It has increased love.

 I will watch for the gazelle

 To leave in the garden my pleasures,

 Although my rebuker stands to accuse me.

Closer to our own day it does seem, at least from Kinsey and some other historical allusions, that in more modern times homosexuality may have been relatively rare among Jews. But it of course existed. Always has, always will.

Today, the state of Israel has a relatively benign legal and cultural take on homosexuality. It is not forbidden, and gays are allowed to serve in the military. In the Israeli literary scene there is a multiplicity of voices. Poetry, for example,  treats every topic freely, and does not recoil from explicit presentation of subjects considered taboo for Hebrew literature in the past, such as erotic descriptions or experiences of male and of  female homosexual relations.

For a modern liberal religious Jew, homosexuality presents a problem. Many recognize the primitive and repressive nature of the Biblical restraints on homosexuality, but must find a way to act within some interpretation of the traditional literature as representing divine law. They must navigate in waters where one writer, probably not particularly liberal, wrote "Clearly, while Judaism needs no defense or apology in regard to its esteem for neighborly love and compassion for the individual sufferer, it cannot possibly abide a wholesale dismissal of its most basic moral principles on the grounds that those subject to its judgments find them repressive."  For those who attach any sacredness, whether cultural or theological, to the Bible and Talmud, it must be difficult in many ways to come to terms with society's emerging enlightened attitude about gays and lesbians -- let along to try to shed that light into their own synagogues.

But some, even today, are making the attempt.  Reasoning one's way out of theological limitations has been a feature of Jewish thought for centuries -- Talmud is replete with attempts to bend the law to meet the circumstances of life, and the development of the Reform movement gave that approach a new life after the religion had stultified. So we have Rabbis like Arthur Waskow who write "We celebrate the God Who, appearing at the Burning Bush as Liberator, proclaimed the Name 'Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,' 'I Will Be Who I Will Be, I Am Becoming Who I Am Becoming.' That God brings joy and gladness to the chuppah of same-sex couples in our generation. That God is in the process of Becoming once again -- and as S/He did long ago, is beckoning us to a new unfolding of our own sacred potential."

Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff chooses to preach tolerance and acceptance without any need to reinterpret the past so as to make acceptance of homosexuals more tolerable. He wrote, "I was not convinced by [a scholarly] paper that maintained that the traditional bans on homosexuality referred to the only kinds of homosexual sex that the ancient and medieval writers knew, namely cultic, oppressive, or promiscuous sex, and that loving, monogamous homosexual sex was new as of the nineteenth century. The evidence for that historical argument was unclear, and, in any case, that was not the reason why I was convinced that we had to change our stand. That came from the real, live experiences that all of the homosexuals I had met had told me -- namely, that they had known from early on that something about them was different from other children their age; that they had tried desperately to act as a heterosexual, sometimes even to the point of getting married and having children; and that they ultimately came out of the closet because anything else was a lie."

This is the beginning of a great step for Judaism, although these Rabbis are still in a minority among religious Jews. I predict that, as in so many other areas, homosexuality will become another of those issues that could create an unbreachable division in the religious Jewish community, but will not because our theistic comrades seem to have recognized that while they may think of each other as fundamentalists and heretics, they must present a united front.  So acceptance of homosexuality will pervade most of liberal Judaism, and swathes of Conservative and Modern Orthodoxy-- although the latter may in the end be slightly confused about how far they have come.

But, while we welcome such developments, as representing progress for our cousins and for the world at large, we don't need -- or plan -- to wait for them.  We have our arms open to welcome all those who find our Humanistic religion and Jewish traditions to be of interest and of value.  As a movement we always have; as individuals we always will.