Many advocates of an international gay parade in Jerusalem — another step toward legal recognition of homosexual marriage — tout gay advances as avant-garde. Actually, they are regressive — taking us back several thousand years to antediluvian times.
One of the litigants in a recent Israeli High Court of Justice victory giving two lesbian women adoption rights hailed the decision as “a sign that society has progressed.” However, it turns out that legalizing such unions was a practice of the generation of Noah. A midrash on Genesis points out that even though forbidden same-sex unions were widespread, “the generation of the Flood was not blotted out from the world until they wrote marriage deeds for males and males, and males and beasts, thus fully legalizing such practices. ‘The Lord God is long-suffering for everything except for such behavior.'”
It is a severe violation to engage in these practices, but it was the legalization of these unions that caused it to rain on that parade, bringing the flood in its wake.
Because of the pivotal importance of the sanctity of the family, we read Leviticus 18 out loud in synagogue on Yom Kippur. Among other prohibitions, it contains the interdiction against engaging in homosexual acts. These practices are forbidden even if they have become hukim – legalized norms in the surrounding nations, whether in ancient Canaan or modern New Canaan, Conn. We are not forbidden to learn from the positive aspects of other cultures. But we must reject their to’evot, or abominations, even if these practices and relationships have become legally sanctioned in the laws of other nations.
A midrash on Leviticus differentiates conceptually between non-normative behavior and the more severe step of legalizing the non-normative behavior. In the Sifra, the sages over a millennium ago commented incisively on that chapter we read on Yom Kippur, explaining as follows the verse, “You shall not follow their legalized norms” (18:3).
This does not signify a prohibition against copying the construction or agricultural practices of the surrounding non-Jewish nations, but only signifies a rejection of the legalization of norms, such as a male marrying a male, a female marrying a female, etc. This is the meaning of b’hukotehem lo telekhu — “You shall not follow their legalized norms.”
Regarding homosexual and other forbidden unions, the Creator would not make a prohibition humans cannot abide by, though for some people this takes a supreme and heroic effort.
The series of Supreme Court decisions on same-sex couples is so incongruent with the Jewish-Israeli claim that Israel wants to coexist with its neighbors. It is primarily Jews who brought to this region a secular culture that focused on autonomy, enshrined the rights of individuals and popularized Western permissiveness in dress and in social and family relationships.
These trends have evolved into a threat to the sanctity of the family.
It is a predominantly secular Jewish Supreme Court that is today legalizing aberrant family structures, to the dismay of most Muslims and Orthodox Jews, making Israeli Jews here even more persona non grata. One step toward lessening friction in this region would be Israel’s legalizing as the norm the traditional heterosexual family structure rather than publicly legitimizing same-sex relationships through parades and court cases.
One can sympathize with individuals who cannot form heterosexual relationships, whose life might be lonely without a partner. Loneliness is a cosmic tragedy, as reflected in the verse from Creation: “It is not good for man to be alone.” But the way the Creator intended to assuage this existential alienation is in the ensuing verse: “Therefore, I shall make a helpmate — ke-negdo — opposite him” (Gen. 2:18). Compassion is needed for those whose proclivities or decisions prevent them from redemption in heterosexual relationships, who forfeit the richness of traditional Jewish marriage. But we must also feel compassion for children who are raised in same-sex parental relationships that are quintessentially flawed. I say this knowing full well the remarkable intellectual and spiritual qualities with which many homosexual individuals are gifted.
It is chilling to think of the consequences ensuing from bestowing a mantle of legality on a family structure that negates firm concepts of masculinity and femininity. In an Israeli Supreme Court case five years ago that granted some recognition to a lesbian couple, the only one who dissented from the majority opinion was Arab Justice Abd al-Rahman Zouabi. He had the probity to eschew political correctness and say that the decision created an “abnormal family unit.”
Perhaps he, and not the Jewish justices, intuitively understood what Rabbi Soloveitchik meant when he wrote, “Only in sharing with the opposite sex-personality may one hope to extricate himself from the predicament of loneliness.”
Shira Leibowitz Schmidt is a Netanya-based translator.
TWO VIEWS:
Gay pride festival in Israel — sacrilege or celebration?
Jerusalem should honor its tradition of tolerance