To some people, my queerness can be distilled to just one verse in the Bible — Leviticus 18:22 — and the discussion ends there.
A little over five years ago, a community member of the synagogue in which I’d grown up stood up at the podium of my teen minyan, and talked about that verse in Acharei Mot, that week’s Torah portion — a verse that’s served as the basis for discrimination against queer Jews for decades. I had just come out to my parents.
Even if many Jewish communities have taken important and concrete steps to welcome queer Jews into religious spaces, and made the necessary changes to our traditions to allow queer Jews to participate as their full selves in the Jewish community, the hurt that I and other queer Jews have experienced because of Leviticus 18:22 remains. Even though I left my childhood community, that portion remains a difficult one for me when it comes around ever year — not because of the verse itself, but because of the fact that it remains the rationale for both the rejection and the acceptance of queer people in Jewish religious spaces.
The first thing that many Jews when they think of when they think of queer Jews is that biblical verse. The first step toward the acceptance of queer Jews, no matter their religious affiliation, has always been working around this verse and one other, two chapters later. However far we might have come as a Jewish community, we are still dealing with the exclusion of queer Jews — especially queer Jewish men — born of this one verse.
When we limit the experience of Jewish queerness to just one verse, which discusses just one small fraction of the queer Jewish experience, we delegitimize the entire experience of being a queer Jew.
Queerness, for me, has never been just about a biblical verse. It has been, at different times, a political identity; a community; a way of describing the people to whom I am attracted; and a critique of the world as I experience it. By reducing queerness as an experience to just this one verse, all other aspects of my queer identity are completely erased.
Feeling forced to respond, time and time again, to this one verse — to remind myself and others that there is so much more to being queer than a verse in Leviticus — is a painful reminder of the fact that, to so many today, queerness can still be distilled, as it was for the person giving that D’var Torah so many years ago, to just one verse, and just one act. This is not just a problem that Orthodox Jews face. Non-Orthodox Jewish communities must respond to this verse as well, and will continue to as long as it is used as a legitimate point of contention regarding Jewish inclusion in religious life.
The message is that my experience as a person navigating through a world that was not originally built to accommodate or even acknowledge my existence is secondary to the fragility of a Bible verse. The exclusion that results is not born of a need to preserve the tradition that was handed down to us, but rather out of fear that the tradition might not otherwise endure if we put any part of it up to the challenges of the world in which we live.
When the Jewish community closes itself off to the experiences of queer Jews by limiting us to just a verse in the Bible, the message that is that we care more about the supposed fragility of a tradition which has endured for thousands of years — not despite change, but because of it.
I hope that this will be the last thing anyone writes about that verse. If we want to incorporate queer Jews fully into our communal spaces, the time has come to stop responding entirely to Leviticus 18:22. If we continue to use it as the point of departure to discuss queer Jews, we will never see queer Jews fully accepted within Jewish religious spaces.
Amram Altzman is a student at List College, the joint program of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University. This piece originally appeared in New Voices, the national Jewish student magazine.