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The Torah is unambiguous on homosexuality. It declares same-sex sex a sin in the strongest language at its disposal ("abomination"). In response to these questions, Jews who wish to declare male-male and female-female sex the Jewish equal of male-female sex offer a number of arguments. One argument holds that we can reject what we consider outdated because we already reject a host of other Torah laws, such as capital punishment for violating the Sabbath or for cursing one's parents. But this argument is not compelling. It is one thing not to put a Torah punishment into practice and quite another to declare that a Torah sin is no longer a sin. I am unaware of any Jewish precedent for declaring that an act that the Torah condemns in its strongest terms is now completely acceptable. Another argument holds that if the Torah knew what we "know" today, e.g., that homosexuality is genetic, the Torah would never have condemned it. This argument is emotionally compelling - how can we oppose a condition that isn't chosen? But it is not logically compelling. First, no one - certainly not the Torah - opposes a condition; it is only behavior that is opposed. To cite a heterosexual example, virtually all people, especially men, are genetically programmed to be adulterers. Monogamy is not nature's plan. Thus, the Torah only bans adultery, not an adulterous nature. Second, we have only scant evidence that homosexuality is genetically inherited, and even that scant evidence is related only to male homosexuals, not to lesbians. Most lesbians acknowledge that their homosexuality is not genetic, and most evidence suggests that most lesbians became homosexual because of psychological conditioning, e.g., poor relations with her parent(s) or abuse by a man. Third, even if homosexuality were genetic, this would have little impact on how we should view it. We have come to believe that there are genetic markers for alcoholism, yet we continue to regard it as a disease. Likewise, as painful as it is to say, the inability of a man to enjoy sex with a woman must be regarded as a flaw in what may otherwise be a superb human being. To understand this, a better analogy may be to deafness. It is better to be born with hearing than to be born deaf, yet no one considers deafness a moral flaw. So, too, heterosexuality is better than homosexuality, but homosexuality is not a moral flaw - a homosexual is as likely to be a kind and decent person as anyone else. The analogy is even more precise because there are many leaders of the deaf community who are offended by any suggestion that hearing is better than deafness - so much so that they oppose the cochlear implant, a surgical procedure that can give hearing to deaf children, on the grounds that it implies that hearing is superior to deafness. We live in a time of radical egalitarianism - everything is equal, nothing may be regarded as superior to anything else. But Judaism is radically non-egalitarian - it constantly declares that some things are better than other things. One such declaration is that it is far better for men and women to sexually bond than for men and men or women and women to do so. Yet, to teach this basic tenet of Judaism - that society should hold opposite-sex love as its ideal - is to be labeled intolerant, bigoted, closed-minded, and homophobic. Fourth, while the data on the genetic bases of homosexuality are minimal and only related to gay men, the historical data suggest that the amount of same-sex sex is related to how much a society accepts homosexual sex. Wherever society has said that male-male love is acceptable, it flourished. ... As to the question of homosexual rabbis, in the words of a leading Reform Rabbi, Eugene Borowitz of the Hebrew Union College, while homosexuals must be guaranteed equal rights, "To be a rabbi is not a Jewish right but a title bestowed as a special Jewish honor. Rabbis ought to set an example of Jewish ideals." The decency of a gay person who aspires to the rabbinate or to be the rabbi of a congregation is not an issue (any Jew being considered to be a congregational rabbi, irrespective of sexual orientation, is presumed to be a decent individual). Nor is the issue his being a homosexual. The sexual orientation of a candidate for rabbinic school or for a congregation's pulpit is none of our business. His known behavior is. A man who announces that he has sex with men or a woman who announces that she has sex with women can be honored with the title of rabbi, the most important public model of Judaism, only if we overthrow Judaism's historic attempt to channel human sexuality - which includes bisexuality, homosexuality, adultery, incest and promiscuity - into monogamous heterosexual sex. .................. In mid-November 1996, Dennis Prager told the editor of the Jewish Journal, Gene Lichtenstein, that he wanted to submit an article on Judaism and homosexuality. Gene said he'd publish it. Two weeks went by and nothing appeared. Prager called Gene and asked what happened. Lichtenstein said that he so disagreed with the piece that he would not publish it without publishing a rebuttal in the same issue. This same need for 'balance," does not apply when the Journal publishes leftist views, notes Prager. Gene sought a rabbi to write a rebuttal, but none of them would, despite their strong disagreement with Prager's ideas. So Lichtenstein wrote a rebuttal which he published with Prager's essay in the Journal's November 22nd issue. Gene writes: It is clear from his essay above that Dennis Prager holds strong feelings about homosexuality in general and the ordination of homosexuals as rabbis in particular. Who am I to quarrel with his (or anyone else's), deeply held feelings? For it needs to be underscored that, by definition, these feelings are intimate and personal, and often highly charged. So no argument from me about them. It is Prager's rationale and logic that I have difficulty with. Often his statements of fact seem questionable, as do some of his major assumptions. Indeed, Prager has dressed upa set of private feelings about homosexuality, which he marches around the parade grounds, in an effort to persuade both himself and us of their objective and compelling Jewish soundness. I am unpersuaded. My first problem is with his halakhic stand. I, like most Jews I know (along with about 80 percent to 85 percent of the Jewish population in America), view the Torah as a profound text, a Torah of truth, a Torah of wisdom, but also the center of a halakhic process that functions as a moral and ethical and, yes, commonsensical guide within this perplexing world we inhabit. It is not for me, or most other Jews, a fixed and immutable document; rather, we - the rabbis and the rest of us - have always been charged with the responsibility to wrestle constantly with it. That is where discourse, conflict, interpretation come in. That is what the Midrash and Talmud are about. Even most Orthodox Jews accept this view. Moreover, such a Jewish discourse is not, as Prager portrays it, a conflict between ego and Torah prescription ("When the Torah and I conflict, my first response is to wonder why I am wrong, not to reject the Torah"), but a religious journey in search of moral ethical resolution. Of course, not everyone accepts this view. For example, it was the Karaites, in the past as well as many of today's fundamentalist Christians, who read the Torah as Prager suggests, not most Jews. And it is also probably true that he most observant, particularly among Orthodox Jews, also take amore literal stand; they are the strict constructionists among us. I am not arguing that the majority prevails, or that the correct approach is merely a matter of numbers. It is just that Prager - from his writings and in his public stance - like most of us, is often not a literalist either in his behavior or in his reading of the Torah. My assumption is that, like many of us, he drives to synagogue on Saturday and violates other Torahtic and Talmudic prohibitions; that he probably has few if any compunctions abou the "abomination" of wearing wool and linen; and that he does not view masturbation as the serious transgression described in the Torah. Nor is it likely that he holds as abomination all that is so deemed in the Torah or performs all that is commanded of him. As he informs us, he is a libertarian at heart. So why does he selectively and wholeheartedly embrace the Torah in regard to homosexuality? The answer seems clear when analyzing the opinions and assumptions (not facts) he articulates in his essay. The fact is he views homosexuality as a disease, a flaw, a form of impairment, whether acquired genetically or through psychological conditioning via one's family. His analogies are with alcholism and deafness. These are, of course, feelings and assumptions, not facts, which may explain why the analogies do not stand up to close scrutiny. Alcoholism leads to serious illness and death; it inhibits work performance; it is against the law to drive when intoxicated and, as such, is dangerous to driver and pedestrians. AIDS is the only comparison that comes to mind here, and that illness is transmitted through unsafe sex, both for heterosexuals and homosexuals. Deafness, too, seems a poor comparison. It is the concrete loss of a sense, hearing. No music, no sound and, in most cases, no speech. Communication becomes severely challenged. It is an impairment. That a man or a woman prefers sexual contact and intimacy with someone from the same sex seems not comparable with the loss of one of our senses. Many homosexuals and lesbians claim that their enjoyment is enhanced when they make love to someone of the same sex. We may not share this view or this experience. We may disapprove of this behavior. We may feel uncomfortable when confronted with it, even find it repugnant. But that is a long way from perceiving, as Prager does, that homosexuals are physically impaired. ("The inability of a man to enjoy sex with a woman must be regarded as a flaw in what may otherwise well be a superb human being.") A better analogy, I think, is race or, more specifically, being black. Most of us would choose heterosexuality rather than homosexuality because we live in a homophobic society. By extension, many of us might have chosen to be Christian rather than Jewish had we lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. And, indeed, in the United States, a number of non-practicing Jews tried to assimilate by changing their names or, in some cases, by denying their Jewish heritage during the first half of this century, when anti-Semitism was a widely held and acceptable sentiment, as well as a legitimized form of behavior. In all cases, the aspersions and the faults were/are attributed to the outsider. The accurate part here is that there is a shared aversion or rejection within society for those outside the norm, but the perceived flaw or impairment is neither physical (as in deafness) nor objective. And, as Prager so persuasively argues: it matters little whether the root cause is genetic or psychological. None of this speaks to Prager's concluding point about homosexuals in the rabbinate… The difficulty arises, however, when we begin to concretize who exactly serves as our role model and who is the representative of our Jewish ideals. Above and beyond erudition, we usually are also looking at character; in some instances, at style as well. And always there are our feelings and preferences. Some of us cannot countenance a woman rabbi; others have difficulty with physical impairment in a rabbi (deafness, for example). When it comes to lifestyle, the swings and feelings are wider and, in some cases, more intense. Some will not accept a rabbi who has committed adultery; poor role model, it is alleged. Others have a difficult time with a rabbi who adopts a patriarchal stance, either toward his family or congregation. (A friend of mine gave up on synagogue and a rabbi when the latter told the congregation what books they could and could not read.) In all of this, personal preference takes hold. Dennis Prager has his - he does not want a homosexual serving as his rabbi - and it seems to me…. I have my own biases, but who am I to decide for others. In this instance, however, with a little understanding and tolerance (and Prager has it wrong here; there is no conflict between his two "deepest values" - tolerance and Judaism. Tolerance is a Jewish value.) Judaism can serve us all. .............. Lichtenstein claims that Prager's essay was only "private feelings about homosexuality, which he marches around the parade grounds, in an effort to persuade both himself and us of their objective and compelling Jewish soundness." Prager notes that, typical of leftists, Gene does not apply this argument to himself. "If I am using Judaism only as a cover for my feelings about homosexuality, how can we know whether Mr. Lichtenstein or any of my opponents are not using Judaism as a cover for their feelings about homosexuality? "…To argue that I believe only in the Torah because all I cited was the Torah is equivalent to saying that someone who only cites the Ten Commandments to show that Judaism opposes adultery "does not accept rabbinic tradition." …The implication of Mr. Lichtenstein, Rabbi Dorff and the letter writers is that if you take the rabbinic tradition seriously, you will come to a different view of homosexual behavior than that of the Torah - but there is no truth to this implication. The rabbis' view of homosexual behavior was identical to that of the Torah." The Jewish Journal then published a series of letters, almost all attacking Dennis. The most significant was signed by sixteen rabbis, four Conservative and 12 Reform. "Apparently," writes Dennis, "Mr. Lichtenstein does not believe that the letters he publishes need engage issues or even approximate respectful dialogue. The letters… were of a level so low, so filled with invective and even hatred toward me that I wonder if Mr. Lichtenstein wonders about the moral level of his ideological allies. I wonder whether he was embarrassed by what he published week after week. Or perhaps, he took the high road in engaging me, while happily publishing all those who took the low road." The 16 rabbis signed this letter: Recently, the Jewish Journal provided coverage to a diatribe by Dennis Prager, who attacked gay and lesbian rabbis. We Los Angeles-area rabbis feel that we can respond more fully and more appropriately within our own constituencies to the specifics of Prager's poorly argued, homophobic, indeed cruel, reading of Jewish values. We are rabbis, male and female. We are rabbis, heterosexual, gay, lesbian and bisexual. We are rabbis, discharging holy tasks that we feel called upon to do. We are rabbis, serving in different movements. We are rabbis, serving various constituencies. We are rabbis, reflecting diverse theologies. We are rabbis, embodying tradition in distinct ways. We are rabbis, committed to teaching and perpetuating our glorious heritage. We rabbis affirm one another in the work that we do. We rabbis support each other in our personal lives. We rabbis glory in the diversity of the rabbinate. We rabbis honor the different talents that we each bring to our ministries. We rabbis recognize that each bring strengths to our people. We rabbis acknowledge that each rabbi is a bearer of Torah. We rabbis celebrate that we include so many who are so qualified and so caring. May every Jew find the rabbi who best suits his/her needs. May every Jew be grateful that other Jews find rabbis who meet their needs. May every rabbi be granted the insight, wisdom and sensitivity to meet the spectrum of religious, educational, cultural, social, intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs of our people, to the best of our capacities. Rabbi Leslie Bergson, Claremont Colleges Rabbi L.B. Sacks-Rosen, Congregation Shaarei Torah Rabbi Elliot Dorff, University of Judaism Rabbi Don Goor, Temple Isaiah Rabbi Moshe Halfon, Temple Ami-Shalom Rabbi Avi Levine, Temple Beth Israel Rabbi Jane Litman, Kol Simchah of Orange County Rabbi Debra Orenstein, Wilstein Institute for Jewish Family Policy Rabbi Arnold Rachlis, University Syngagogue Rabbi Joel Rembaum, Temple Beth Am Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, JCC of Pacific Palisades Rabbi Lisa Edwards, Beth Chayim Chadashim Rabbi Rafael Goldstein, Los Angeles Jewish AIDS Services Rabbi Steve Tucker, Temple Ramat Zion Rabbi Neal Weinberg, University of Judaism Rabbi Bridgit Wynne, Leo Baeck Temple Continue