How can you be gay and Jewish?
Jay Michaelson
I am sometimes asked: "How can you be gay and Jewish? Doesn't the Bible forbid homosexuality?" Here is my attempt at an answer.
At the outset, I am only answering this question as part of a subset of a subset of Jews: religious Jews who feel themselves bound or in some way affected by the Torah and Jewish law. Of course, the majority of Jews do not believe themselves to be bound in any such way. For them, the issue is much simpler: any prohibitions which may exist are historical in nature and far less important than conscience, ethics, culture, and other values. The law evolves, or doesn't matter anyway. So what the questioner really means is: how can one be gay and religiously Jewish, with a religious consciousness that, for whatever reasons, treats what the Bible says with seriousness. That is the question I mean to answer.
The Bible does not forbid homosexuality. 'Homosexuality' is a modern term, a pseudo- scientific category created in 1869. It refers not only to sexual acts, but to a sexual orientation, an identity, and is today used (imprecisely) to describe a range of sexual behaviors, attractions, and ideas about the self. This way of looking at sex acts was unknown both to the Bible and to the Talmud. Where the Torah does speak of sexual acts, as we will see below, it has no conception that these acts relate to personal identity, or to love. It expresses no belief that such acts are indicative of an inborn proclivity, and no conception that acts "make you gay," or even that one type sex act is necessarily related to another. Those who say that the Bible (or Torah, or Talmud, or halacha) forbids homosexuality are simply wrong. There is no such thing as Biblical homosexuality.
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The invention of the term led hucksters and quacks, whether in the religion or patent medicine industries, in the early 1900s, to hawk "cures" just as they are doing today. The FEAR and HATE and divide & conquer strategy goes way, way back. So many "doctors" were created, and though I haven't studied it yet, I'd bet that "religious" degrees in "doctorates" were probably pushed through by bullies and quacks in that same time period.
Divide and conquer, indeed. They're doing it, we keep falling for it.
I hate it when I am compelled to do that.
Happy Pride Month!
