Horizons 2000 Conference
July 29, 2000, Woodcliff Lake Hilton, New Jersey

 Rabbi Alexander Schindler — Shabbat Keynote Speech

 It is good to be here, of course, and to join you as you celebrate the 20th anniversary of your collectivity, the World Congress of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Jewish Organizations.  I share your communal simcha with all my heart.  Your joy is my joy, your attainments, my gladness, for yours is a cause which I have made my own for those self same 20 years and even longer.

 But more than the longevity of your collective being allows us to rejoice.  American attitudes about homosexuality are evolving, slowly but surely moving from the fringe to the mainstream of American Culture.  Polls how an increased acceptance of gays nationwide, and that is true in many other lands as well.  Movies and television programs are portraying more gay characters not as objects of ridicule, but in an egalitarian manner. Advertisers have begun openly appealing to gay customers, and in this political season, Democratic candidates are actively courting the gay vote even while some leading Republicans have tried to temper their party's anti-gay image.

 Spurred by these cultural and political changes across the country, gay rights has become a flourishing areas of the law, although progress here is only by fits and starts.   The Dale v. Boy Scouts decision of the Supreme Court was a bitter disappointment.  And ENDA, The Employment Non-Discrimination Act is hopelessly bottled up in House and Senate Committees thus permitting continuing workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 39 States of this Union, homosexuals can be fired no matter how effective they are at their workplace.

 Yet who among use would have predicted 20 years ago that in response to a ruling of its Supreme Court, the Vermont House and Senate would establish a "civil union" for same-sex marriage thus extending to gay and lesbian couples the same protection and benefits given to heterosexual couples.  This is indeed an unprecedented victory for gay rights whose achievement fully justifies our jubilant celebration. 

Now all this is not to say that the war is over, only that significant battles have been won, though many others, too many others, remain to be fought.  Let us face the fact that anti-gay bigotry remains an upright fencepost throughout the American landscape.  Not is it only a much-scarred whipping post of the Christian right, even "enlightened" Americans who claim racial and religious tolerance as an ideal they prize above all else, nonetheless have not bested the demons of homophobia in the soul.

 The majority of them, as pointed out in a recent New York Times Newsmagazine piece will nevertheless describe homosexual life as immoral, shameful, perverted and somehow wrong.  Homophobia, it seems, is the only prejudice that remains respectable, that has not been de-legetimized, which has not been cut off from its wellsprings.  It is the "last frontier" as it were, of inveterate, unreasonable, hatred.  Not so marginally noted, Presidential aspirant George Bush the younger, sensing this continuing wide-spread antipathy to gays and lesbians, justified his Bob Jones University meeting with racists and anti-Catholic bigots by asserting that he deems it "important to bring his message to people...I don't agree with."  But then he dilly-dallied for months on end before he met with the Log Cabin Republicans and preceded that meeting by having his operatives call key conservative supports reassuring them that this was but a political move and that his fundamental anti-gay commitments have not diminished one iota.

 Homophobia continues to afflict the American Jewish community too, alas.  It is a community, mind you, which prides itself to be the most rational and enlightened segment of American society.  Yet how many genuine initiatives have we seen from our Jewish defense agencies against gay and lesbian bashing and hate crimes, and in support of gay and lesbian rights?

 How many of our communal organizations approach their hiring decisions without regard to the sexual orientation of candidates?  How many discussions of sexual orientation in Jewish life still founder on the hard rocks of Halachic prohibition -- even while that self same Halachah is reinterpreted, or minimized, or ignored in so many other respects by most of America's Jews.

 Yet, and I regret to say it, even in our Reform Jewish community you will often encounter more lip service than action against the blight of homophobia.  I am loath to admit it, but must.  Our resolutions on this subject have been infinitely more forthright than our deportment.  In spite of past declarations urging the contrary, the singling out of homosexuality from the whole human constellation, as a loathsome affliction, remains a widespread sentiment in our midst.  

 True enough, 25 years ago we admitted the first congregation with an outreach to gay and lesbian Jews into our official family of congregations, and we have added several since.   Our congregational and Rabbinic bodies consistently sought to secure all liberties and rights to gay men and lesbian, and that includes the right to civil marriage.  They persuaded our seminary to shatter all ceilings to the religious aspirations of gays and lesbians, and that included the right to s'micha, to serve as rabbis and teaches of our people. 

 And all of this culminated just a few months ago when North America's Reform rabbinate passed a resolution to give sanction and support to those of our colleagues who choose to officiate at same gender ceremonies.  But, unfortunately, much of this was achieved on a leadership level and has not permeated the grassroots.  If the truth be told, in too many of our mainstream congregations, we have not extended our embrace to include gays and lesbian Jews.  We have not acknowledged their presence in the midst of our synagogues.  We have not dispelled the myth of the "corrupting" homosexual -- of the rabbi, teacher, or youth leader who would fashion children in his or her sexual image.  And our balabatim who voted for this very resolution of which I just spoke a while ago nonetheless cannot overcome their own aversion to same sex unions refusing to accept the irrefutable reality that gay and lesbian couples are prepared to pledge their lives to one another and to establish stable and loving Jewish homes.

 To be sure, many feel pity for gays and lesbians, and agree, intellectually, that it is a grievous wrong to stigmatize them, to ostracize them to hold them in disdain.  But something more than a grasp of the mind is required.   There is a need for a grasp of the heart.   Something different from pity is called for.   We need, as a community, to cross those boundaries of otherness where compassion give way to identification.  Too many of us have not affirmed that we all are family.  We speak of "them" and "us" as gay men and women were descended from a distant planet.  If those who have studied these matters are correct, one half million of our American fellow Jews are gay.  They are our fellow congregants, our friends and committee members -- and yes, our leaders, both professional and lay.  Whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, some of these are our sisters and brothers, our daughters and our sons.

 Oh how painful this distancing, this rejection is for those who suffer it ... you know this better than I do.  I was made to feel it most intensely when I read a letter sent to one of my Conservative colleagues Harold Schulweis, that great spiritual leader of our generation.  It was penned by a young man who had just revealed his homosexual bent to his parents and was rejected by them.  He wrote:

"My parents don't look at me the same way now that they know.   I have disappointed them, destroyed their dreams.  But I am the same son with the whom they played as a child, whom they fed and clothed and in whom they rejoiced.  I am the same son who brought home good grades, participated in plays in religious school, in regular school.  I am the same son with whom they rejoiced at my Bar Mitzvah.  I look at the faces of my dejected mother and father and I feel like saying to them: 'Papa, have you no blessing for me?  Mama, do you see nothing in me except my sexual orientation.  Am I not the same loving, caring sensitive son to you?'   Nothing is so terrible than to feel so distant...."

 In our denial, in our failure to see one another as one family -- indeed as one holy body -- we forget Jewish history, we opt for amnesia.

 We who were beaten in the streets of Berlin cannot turn away from the plague of gay bashing.  We who were Marranos in Madrid, who clung to the closet of assimilation and conversion in order to live without molestation, we cannot deny the demand for gay and lesbian visibility.

 Now it is manifestly true that Reform's stance on homosexuality clearly flies in the face of Judaism's literal tradition.  The torah, Rabbinic literature, contemporary Orthodox responsa -- all are unquestionably at odds with our more liberal approach.  Yet built within the literal tradition there is the possibility of chance once advancing knowledge enlarges our understanding.  Thus there was a time when deaf-mutes were considered mentally incompetent, and hence denied the right to participate in the religious life.  But no less an authority than Maimonides was prepared to lift this restriction after he visited a school for deaf-mutes and saw that they gave evidence of a capacity to learn.

 Similarly, the Bible enjoins us to exclude lepers, to sequester them, never to get near them, "not nearer than a hundred cubits".  It they do come closer, the great Talmudic master Resh Lakish ruled, we ought to pelt them with stones.  Not unlike AIDS patients today, lepers were not only shunned but told that they suffer only because they sinned, for your see, their leprosy was seen as a sign of inner, moral decay.  But then a medical researcher by the name of Hanson came along and established that leprosy is a disease of tropical and subtropical regions cause by bacteria indigenous to those areas.  Indeed, leprosy is now known as Hanson's disease.  In light of all this, shall we still enforce the Biblical ostracism of lepers, or should we not rather allow this never knowledge to instruct us and to redirect our conduct?

 The newer knowledge concerning homosexuality indicates the inborn character of some, if not all, sexual orientation.  The Biblical authors assumed that homosexuality is a matter of free and unrestricted choice.  But ask most homosexuals whether their life styles are volitional and the answer is the same: "Rabbi, do you think that I would willingly choose my fate...that I would voluntarily choose a life that ostracizes me from my friends and family, that makes me a pariah, that affects my career, my job, my house, my employment?  If I confront a choice today, it is not whether to be what I am, but rather whether to come out with my orientation or to bury it and recite Kaddish."

 The failure of reparative therapy coupled with the high suicide rate among homosexuals further validates the scientific consensus that sexual orientation is not volitional but rather a state of being.  And this is why virtually all deciders of Reform Judaism have set aside the Halachic despisals of homosexuality in order to reflect the new gained knowledge.

 As Reform Jews we affirm the sanctity of the Bible.  But we deem it to be a human document, composed by human beings who strove to know God and sought to discern what God demands of us.  But human beings, however devout and devoted, are still only human beings and hence limited and fallible.  Thus it is that the Torah reflects not only lofty ethical ideals, but also human ignorance, human fears, and human bigotry.

 As our colleague Janet Marder pointed out in her testimony before the CCAR Executive supporting Rabbinic officiation at same sex marriage:               

"If every word of Scripture were the literal word of God, then we'd have to deny religious rites to those with disabilities, reaffirm the second-class status of women, and claim that slavery, because it is sanctioned in the Torah, is God' will.  We'd still be calling Hebrew priests to treat leprosy.  We'd require girls who are raped to marry their rapists.  And we'd put rebellious children to death."

 Oh yes, and we would have to stone women -- not men mind you -- who are found guilty of committing adultery.  Yes, we Liberal Jews deem the Torah to be sacred, divinely inspired.  But it is a Torah which is revealed not by focusing narrowly on this or that passage, but which perceives what permeates the whole -- and that is compassion.  Even so we read in the tractate Sanhedrin: "torah b'hatchila v'sofa gemilut chassadim...the beginning and the end of Torah are deeds of loving kindness."

 Yes, the Torah has many strands, but seen singly, they do not reveal the whole.   The tapestry is the single text, but there are others. But beyond them, there is their interpretation which is never fixed but ever in flux.  Indeed, the Torah has many faces, but the most authentic is the one that reflects its heart.

 In the Talmud, again in tractate Sanhedrin, in a midrash which is familiar to many of you, it is written that our sages wondered:  "Where shall we look for the Messiah?  Will he come to us on clouds of glory robed in majesty and crowned with light?"  Rabbi Joshua ben Levi put this question to no less an authority than  the prophet Elijah himself.  "Where shall I find the Messiah?" he asked, and the prophet replied: "At the gates of the city."  "But how shall I recognize him?"  "He sits among the lepers."  Rabbi Joshua was startled and exclaimed: "Among the lepers?  What is he doing there?"  "He changes their bandages," Elijah replied, "he changes their bandages one by one."

 This, then, is how we Liberal Jews read and reverse the Torah -- not by parsing every single paragraph and verse, but my perceiving what permeated the whole and that is healing of body and soul, compassion, love.  Let us remember that God's image is reflected in each and every face.  And let us therefore not suffer even a single Jewish soul to be sequestered from our communities and people.

 Thank you.