ISRAEL: ALTERNATIVE RELIGIOUS WEDDINGS ALLOWED TO CONTINUE: Jewish Telegraph Agency

reports:

An organization of Modern Orthodox rabbis that performs alternative religious wedding ceremonies for non-religious couples can continue to register the couples.

The Tzohar organization can register the married couples in the community of Shoham, where the head of the organization serves as chief rabbi, while a new bill proposed to loosen restrictions on where marriages can be registered works its way through the system, the organization said Thursday.

Weddings currently must be registered with the municipal rabbinate where one member of the couple lives. Tzohar had been registering couples with one of two municipal rabbinates headed by members of the organization, in Shoham and Gush Etzion, in contravention of the law. Under Thursday's agreement, the organization can continue to register the couples.

A Jewish couple must have a religious ceremony in Israel in order to be recognized as married. Many travel abroad to marry in secular ceremonies.

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Labels: Israel, Judaism, Marriage, Orthodox Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 11:03 PM VOTE

A NEW DAWN FOR "SUNRISE, SUNSET" AT SAME-SEX WEDDINGS: Playbill

reports:

One of the most common things in the world happened on Oct. 1 in Tappan, NY. "Sunrise, Sunset" was performed at a wedding.

Only this time it was a little different. The song — which has accompanied thousands of nuptials since its debut on Sept. 22, 1964, in Fiddler on the Roof — graced the wedding celebration of two men, entertainer Richard Skipper and landscape architect Daniel Sherman, and the melancholy-happy tune's story of a "little girl I carried" and a "little boy at play," now told of two boys.

"I've been doing same-sex weddings since New York law permitted it in July," said Rev. Joshua Ellis, whose new career as a New York-based Interspiritual minister was preceded by many years as a theatrical press agent in New York City. "And something was missing. Nobody was singing 'Sunrise, Sunset.' It's sung all the time in weddings of mixed couples. I guessed it was because they talk about a little boy and a little girl. So I contacted [lyricist] Sheldon Harnick."

Ellis continued, "Within a few days, he wrote a note back. He'd contacted Richard Ticktin, who was best friend of Jerry Bock and his representative. Attached to that email were revised lyrics of the song." Ellis then gently asked Harnick if he could also write a set of lyrics for a female couple. Those arrived soon after.

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Labels: culture, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 6:43 PM VOTE

Conservative Rabbis Disagree on Same-Sex Marriage: New York Times

reports:

Though he approves of New York State’s new law allowing same-sex marriage, Rabbi Allan Schranz of the Sutton Place Synagogue, a Conservative congregation in Manhattan, will not officiate at a wedding ceremony for same-sex couples, pointing out that his reasons, though partly rooted in Jewish traditions, are mostly rooted in his personal traditions.

“I won’t participate because I’ve never done it and don’t want to start at this stage of my career,” said Rabbi Schranz, 64, who has been a rabbi for almost 40 years. “I’m not going to change, but if somebody else wants to do it, I’ll support that.”

But at another Conservative congregation, Temple Israel Center in White Plains, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, 60, the synagogue’s leader, performed a Jewish ceremony a year ago for two young gay men who had been civilly married in Connecticut. On Saturday, the first anniversary of the wedding, the men were called up for an aliyah, a blessing they said over the Torah, and their parents sponsored the celebratory kiddush, the postworship meal for congregants.

“It’s not controversial in the congregation,” said Rabbi Tucker, a former dean of the rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the movement’s fountainhead. “Over a period of years we have reached a consensus and people supported my position.”

The two rabbis’ contrasting viewpoints are reflective of the wide disagreement within Conservative Judaism on an issue that continues to roil many of its synagogues even after passage of laws in New York and five other states that legalize same-sex marriage. ...

Those rabbis who do perform same-sex ceremonies improvise the language. When Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, 45, the leader of Temple Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, performed a wedding for two men several years ago, he eliminated some phrases from the traditional Jewish service, using “loving companion” instead of terms like bride and groom. He sees such changes as a “creative betrayal of tradition” by “finding ways to sanctify love and commitment.” But he insisted that some elements from the traditional ceremony remain ironclad, like commitments to sexual exclusivity and mutual care.

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Labels: Conservative Judaism, culture, gay marriage, Judaism, Marriage, New York, religion

posted by Imapp Staff at 9:03 PM VOTE

KIRYAS JOEL, NY, LANDS DISTINCTION AS NATION'S POOREST PLACE: NYTimes

feature:

The poorest place in the United States is not a dusty Texas border town, a hollow in Appalachia, a remote Indian reservation or a blighted urban neighborhood. It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.

And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.

Women marry young, remain in the village to raise their families and, according to religious strictures, do not use birth control. As a result, the median age (under 12) is the lowest in the country and the household size (nearly six) is the highest. Mothers rarely work outside the home while their children are young. ...

Still, poverty is largely invisible in the village. Parking lots are full, but strollers and tricycles seem to outnumber cars. A jeweler shares a storefront with a check-cashing office. To avoid stigmatizing poorer young couples or instilling guilt in parents, the chief rabbi recently decreed that diamond rings were not acceptable as engagement gifts and that one-man bands would suffice at weddings. Many residents who were approached by a reporter said they did not want to talk about their finances.

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Labels: class, culture, economics, family size, Hasidic Judaism, Judaism, New York, Orthodox Judaism, poverty, religion, weddings

posted by Eve at 11:40 PM VOTE

Protesters Seek Woman's Religious Divorce: NYTimes

reports:

This should have been a good New Year’s for Aharon Friedman, a 34-year-old tax counsel for the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spent time with his 3-year-old daughter, and could have been thinking about the influence he will have starting Wednesday, when his boss, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, becomes chairman of the powerful tax-writing committee.

Instead, Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video showing about 200 people protesting outside his Silver Spring, Md., apartment on Dec. 19. They were angered by Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get.

The Friedman case has become emblematic of a torturous issue in which only a husband can “give” a get. While Jewish communities have historically pressured obstinate husbands to give gets, this was a very rare case of seeking to shame the husband in the secular world. ...

Mr. Friedman and Ms. Epstein have been civilly divorced since April and share custody of their daughter, but they are still married according to Jewish law. And without a get neither he nor Ms. Epstein can remarry within the faith. She is considered an agunah, or chained woman.

Although the majority of men in Jewish divorces grant their wives a get with little fuss, the husbands who refuse — it is estimated there are several hundred agunot in the United States today — can provoke a clash between religious folkways and secular divorce law. ...

And the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington issued a statement saying that the parties had not yet exhausted the rabbinical courts, suggesting it was premature to blame Mr. Friedman for withholding the get.

But other rabbis have argued that it is Jewish custom to give a get once divorce terms have been settled, and with no possibility of reconciliation.

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Labels: custody, divorce, Judaism, men, religion, remarriage, women

posted by Eve at 7:05 PM VOTE

INTERNATIONAL ADOPTIONS CHANGING FACE, IDENTITY OF AMERICAN JUDAISM: Religion News Service

reports:

Like so many Jewish women, Anne Suissa pursued her education and career with gusto, earning degrees from Cornell and MIT and going on to manage 27 people at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Suissa always knew she wanted marriage and family, but by the time she had found her husband and began trying to have a child, she was in her late 30s. Doctors told her the fertility treatments she had begun would not likely succeed.

Today, the Suissas are parents of two children from Guatemala, both of whom they converted to Judaism. Though their lives are full and rewarding, Suissa still wishes someone had encouraged her to start a family earlier.

In Jewish families, it’s “education, education, education,” she said. “But nobody told me that college might be a good time to meet a nice Jewish boy.”

The general track of Suissa’s life is not unusual among Jewish American women. As a group, they’re highly educated—a fact demographers say contributes to their relatively low fertility rates.

Still longing to be mothers, they often adopt, and frequently, their children are of Latino, Asian or African descent. And that, in turn, is slowly changing the face of American Judaism. ...

The number of childless Jewish women in their early 30s is 54 percent, compared to 28 percent for American women in general, according to the most recent National Jewish Population Survey.

The survey also shows about 5 percent of American Jewish households with children include adopted children, compared to the national rate of 3.7 percent. But unlike Americans in general, the survey notes, Jewish Americans are not having enough children to replace themselves.

more (see also here)

Labels: adoption, culture, demographics, feminism, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 1:21 PM VOTE

IS IT CONSTITUTIONAL FOR NEW YORK TO CRIMINALIZE CLERGY'S PERFORMING WEDDING WITH NO CIVIL LICENSE FOR COUPLES?: Howard Friedman

at the Religion Clause blog:

A Forward article published last week raises the question of the constitutionality of New York's Domestic Relations Law, Sec. 17, which makes it a misdemeanor for any clergy member to "solemnize or presume to solemnize any marriage between any parties without a license being presented ... or with knowledge that either party is legally incompetent to contract matrimony." The article reports on the case of Yehuda Semel, who obtained a Jewish religious divorce from his wife. However their civil divorce proceedings are still pending in the courts. Nevertheless, Semel has married another woman in a religious ceremony without obtaining a civil marriage license. Most rabbis oppose performing a religious marriage ceremony where there has not been a civil divorce. Commentators argue, however, that it is a violation of the 1st Amendment for the state to make it illegal for a rabbi to perform a purely religious ceremony. It was not unusual before a 1983 change in the Social Security Law that preserved benefits for widows who remarry, for rabbis to perform a religious ceremony for a couple otherwise eligible to marry but who did not obtain a civil marriage license to avoid the woman's loss of her Social Security benefits. There was a Yiddish phrase for that type of marriage-- stile chupa (a "quiet marriage").

link

Labels: family policy, Judaism, law, Marriage, religion, religious liberty

posted by Eve at 2:18 PM VOTE

GUILTY PLEASURES: RELIGION AND SEX AMONG AMERICAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: Roger Friedland with Paolo Gardinali

at the Huffington Post:

... In 2008 and 2009 we asked close to a thousand students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to tell us about their sex lives. In this anonymous web-based survey we also asked them to which religious denomination they belonged. Almost everybody who claims to belong to a religion also believes in God. A lot of students -- just shy of a third -- don't identify with any religion. But just because somebody doesn't belong does not mean they don't believe. About a quarter of those unaffiliated nonetheless believe in God. Most commonly, they believe in a higher, ordering power or cosmic force, but not God, not the big Who. True atheists are a tiny minority in the sample -- about eight percent.

With all these God-believers, it is striking that most students -- nearly 60 percent -- don't think sexual intercourse before marriage is wrong, at all. If you look at the table below, you can see that very small proportions -- even among the conservative Christians -- think it is absolutely wrong. Eighteen percent of the Evangelical students think such sex is absolutely wrong. That's less than the 25 percent of those students who took a virginity pledge. ...

If, within a particular religious community, the percentage who think sex it is not at all wrong is less than the percentage who have had sexual intercourse, you have a kind of "guilt gap," a rough relative likelihood that young people in that community will have had sex but think there is something shameful in what they have done. For the Protestants, unlike the Catholics and the Jews, the "guilt gap" is huge: 21 percent more mainline Protestants have had sex than think there is nothing morally wrong about it; for Evangelicals the gap is 29 percent. That is a lot of guilty sex. For Catholics and Jews, the gap is 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively. For those who don't belong to any religion, there is a guilt deficit.

The problem with guilty sex is that it is sex students don't expect to have, for which they are not prepared, executed in the heat of passion, often -- if students came out of an abstinence-only sex education -- without much knowledge. (In this respect, these religious differences are even more striking because the State of California stood by its comprehensive sex education approach and opted out of Federal abstinence funding. That means that most of these students had some school-based sexual education.) Although the numbers are small, the pregnancy rate is also much higher for Protestant girls. Catholic and Jewish girls hardly ever get pregnant. Half of those Protestant pregnancies, mainline and Evangelical alike, ended in abortion. Protestant guilt is killing the unborn.

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Labels: abortion, Catholic Church, Christianity, contraception, culture, Judaism, premarital sex, religion, sex, universities

posted by Eve at 5:24 PM VOTE

INTERFAITH MARRIAGES ARE RISING FAST, BUT THEY'RE FAILING FAST TOO: Naomi Shaefer Riley

in the Washington Post:

...The Reyes-Shapiro divorce is about as ugly as the end of a marriage can get. Some of the sparring is an example of the bad ways people act when a union unravels. But the fight over Ela's religion illustrates the particular hardships and poor track record of interfaith marriages: They fail at higher rates than same-faith marriages. But couples don't want to hear that, and no one really wants to tell them.

Figuring out how to raise the kids in a mixed-faith household is difficult. Religions, if taken seriously, are often mutually exclusive (not withstanding the argument of Reyes's lawyer, who told me that taking Ela to church was not a violation of the court order because Jesus was a rabbi and "there is no sharp line between Judaism and Christianity").

Most families work things out, peacefully deciding on one religion, both or neither. But the fact is that conflicts such as the one between Reyes and Shapiro will probably become more common.

According to the General Social Survey, 15 percent of U.S. households were mixed-faith in 1988. That number rose to 25 percent by 2006, and the increase shows no signs of slowing. The American Religious Identification Survey of 2001 reported that 27 percent of Jews, 23 percent of Catholics, 39 percent of Buddhists, 18 percent of Baptists, 21 percent of Muslims and 12 percent of Mormons were then married to a spouse with a different religious identification. If you want to see what the future holds, note this: Less than a quarter of the 18- to 23-year-old respondents in the National Study of Youth and Religion think it's important to marry someone of the same faith.

In some ways, more interfaith marriage is good for civic life. Such unions bring extended families from diverse backgrounds into close contact. There is nothing like marriage between different groups to make society more integrated and more tolerant. As recent research by Harvard professor Robert Putnam has shown, the more Americans get to know people of other faiths, the more they seem to like them.

But the effects on the marriages themselves can be tragic -- it is an open secret among academics that tsk-tsking grandmothers may be right. According to calculations based on the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001, people who had been in mixed-religion marriages were three times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-religion marriages.

In a paper published in 1993, Evelyn Lehrer, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that if members of two mainline Christian denominations marry, they have a one in five chance of being divorced in five years. A Catholic and a member of an evangelical denomination have a one in three chance. And a Jew and a Christian who marry have a greater than 40 percent chance of being divorced in five years.

More recent research concludes that even differing degrees of religious belief and observance can cause trouble. For instance, in a 2009 paper, scholars Margaret Vaaler, Christopher Ellison and Daniel Powers of the University of Texas at Austin found higher rates of divorce when a husband attends religious services more frequently than his wife, as well as when a wife is more theologically conservative than her husband.

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Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, culture, divorce, Judaism, Marriage, religion

posted by Eve at 2:31 PM VOTE

THE MEANING OF (GESTATING) LIFE: Book review

in Books and Culture:

"What's the book about?"

It was a question I heard frequently over the holidays this past December, as I went to pre-Christmas rehearsals, parties, and church services carrying Tsipy Ivry's Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel.

"It's about pregnancy," I'd say. "In Japan and Israel."
The inevitable response: "Why there?"

The gestation of Embodying Culture began when anthropologist Tsipy Ivry was concluding a research program as a graduate student in Tokyo, and became pregnant. A native Israeli, Ivry was surprised by what she describes as "an overwhelming and all-encompassing sense of becoming 'different,'" a sensation she attributes not only to the experience of pregnancy itself but also to the reality of being pregnant as an Israeli woman in Japan. This impression in turn led to a developing interest in the lived experience of pregnancy and how it is socially and culturally constructed in different societies. ...

Although both Israeli and Japanese women experience pregnancy as a highly medicalized event, much as in the United States, the forms that medicalization take differ greatly. And these differences, Ivry argues, are deeply rooted in distinctive cultural contexts: in Israel, a struggle to stay alive amidst constant military conflict; in Japan, an emphasis on the betterment of society through the long-term maternal efforts of child-raising.

If we think of each culture's implicit understanding of pregnancy as a narrative, Ivry contends, we'll find that the "protagonist" of the Japanese narrative differs sharply from the protagonist of the Israeli narrative:

In the Japanese arena the protagonist of pregnancy is the interconnected entity of the mother-baby, whereas in the Israeli case the protagonists are the pregnant woman and her suspect fetus. Pregnancy is conceptualized as an early stage of parenting in Japan and is all about the interdependence of mother and baby and their ongoing relationships. The Israeli model defines pregnancy as a state "in limbo" that involves two separate individuals (of whom only one is a person).

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Labels: abortion, culture, Israel, Japan, Judaism, motherhood, pregnancy

posted by Eve at 3:58 PM VOTE

BATTLE OF THE BABIES: Caspar Melville

in the New Humanist:

Whenever demography is the subject a panicky headline usually follows. Generally these take the form of anxieties about overpopulation. “Are there just too many people in the world?” asks Johann Hari in the Independent. “The World’s population is still exploding,” confirms the Optimum Population Trust (patron David Attenborough). Though equally they could be about the opposite. “Is Europe Dying?” queries Catholic apologist George Weigel (before answering his own question: “The brute fact is that Europe is depopulating itself”). “Falling birth rate is killing Europe says Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks” is the Guardian’s offering. To these hysterical headlines let’s add another, especially for you secular folk: with birth rates of seven babies per women fundamentalists will take over the world. And here is the kicker: it’s all secularism’s fault.

Cover image by Martin RowsonThis grim prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books. If, like me, you skip the six dense chapters of politico-demographic analysis, in the very last line of the book you can find his answer: “The religious shall inherit the earth.” There is, of course, an “unless” and we’ll get to that later, but let’s just let the idea sink in first.

What Kaufmann is arguing is that the secularisation thesis, the assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a lessening of religious belief and a day when we are all rational humanists, is wrong – at one point Kaufmann approvingly quotes Rodney Stark and Roger Finke’s view that this is “a failed prophecy”. Further he is saying that there is something about our current form of liberal secularism that contains (here’s another headline) the seeds of its own destruction. Since the birth rate of individualistic secular people the world over is way below replacement level (2.1 in the West), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists is way above (between 5 and 7.5 depending on sect), then through the sheer force of demography religious fundamentalism is going to become a much bigger force in the world and gain considerable political muscle. Literalist religious conservatism is being reborn and we secular liberals are the midwives.

So there’s the challenge.

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Labels: Amish/Mennonites, culture, demographics, Europe, Israel, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 8:24 PM VOTE

MASS MEDIA: Dahlia Lithwick

in Slate:

Joseph Reyes, an Afghanistan war veteran and second-year law student, converted to Judaism when he married Rebecca Shapiro in 2004. When they split up in 2008, Rebecca won primary custody of their daughter, and Joseph got regular visitation. The couple had allegedly agreed to raise their child Jewish, but Joseph, seeking to expose his 3-year-old to his Catholic faith, had her baptized last November. When she learned that her daughter had been baptized without her consent, Rebecca obtained a temporary restraining order in December 2009, forbidding Joseph from "exposing Ela Reyes to another religion other than the Jewish religion during his visitation." In January of this year, Reyes again took Ela to Mass at Holy Name Cathedral, with a local TV news crew in tow. His ex-wife's lawyers demanded he be held in criminal contempt—with a maximum punishment of six months in prison.

Can a court really tell a parent what religion his child will be? And can a judge possibly back up such an order with the threat of jail time?

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Labels: Catholic Church, children, custody, divorce, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 1:31 AM VOTE

ISRAELI LAWMAKERS DEFEAT CIVIL MARRIAGE BILL: JTA

reports:

A bill that allows civil marriage in Israel to couples who could not be married by the rabbinate failed by a large margin in its initial reading.

The Civil Union bill, introduced Wednesday by the Kadima Party's Meir Sheetrit, was defeated 58-22. One-third of the Kadima lawmakers did not participate in the vote, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The bill allows a civil marriage where at least one member of a couple is not recognized as Jewish. It creates a marriage registrar in the Justice Ministry authorized to legalize civil marriages for those who are not eligible to marry by current law as well as divorces.

The bill does not contravene Jewish law since it does not allow civil marriages for those who may marry by Jewish law, according to Sheetrit's office.

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Labels: Israel, Judaism, Marriage, religion

posted by Eve at 12:01 AM VOTE

GOD SAID MULTIPLY, AND DID SHE EVER: NY Times

obituary:

WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis. ...

Like many Hasidim, Mrs. Schwartz considered bearing children as her tribute to God. A son-in-law, Rabbi Menashe Mayer, a lushly bearded scholar, said she took literally the scriptural command that “You should not forget what you saw and heard at Mount Sinai and tell it to your grandchildren.”

“And she wanted to do that,” he said, without needing to add her belief that the more grandchildren, the more the commandment is fulfilled. Mrs. Schwartz gave birth 18 times, but lost two children in the Holocaust and one in a summer camp accident here.

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Labels: children, family size, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 5:36 PM VOTE

Two National Rabbinic Groups Issue Religious Ban on Voting for Pro-Homosexual Agenda Politicians: Press release

states:

In light of recent developments in the ongoing push to legislate a Federal Hate Crimes Bill in Congress and same gender marriage legislation in New York and other states, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, spokesman for the 65 year old Orthodox Jewish national Rabbinic organization Rabbinical Alliance of America, surrounded by Rabbis, issued a religious ban on voting for any politician or office holder who supports any aspect of the homosexual political agenda.

Go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8VkYFAGR9I to see the actual video of the statement.

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Labels: gay marriage, homosexuality, Judaism, religion

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:21 PM VOTE

Don't vote your conscience on marriage

By David Benkof
DavidBenkof@aol.com

I've been corresponding with a liberal Jewish supporter of same-sex marriage. He recently wrote me that he expects me and all other Orthodox Jews to support "equal civil rights for all citizens" with regard to marriage, even if our religious beliefs cause us not to extend those rights in our religious communities.

First off, I do support equal civil rights for all citizens. Gay men and lesbians can and do get married - to members of the opposite sex. I was once gay-identified, and I hope to marry someday. But marriage is by definition a union of a man and a woman. A gay person cannot marry a same-sex person, just as he cannot marry a tomato. Both kinds of unions are completely alien to the longstanding understanding of what marriage is.

Furthermore, my religion teaches me that same-sex marriage is immoral, and calls upon me to fight it. But because my correspondent disagrees, he can demand that I vote against my conscience? I thought this was a democracy.

Liberal Jews have often expressed the opinion that prayer has no place in public schools. Well, what if I told one of them that I expect him to support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing "equal civil rights for all citizens" to pray in school if they so desire - even if his personal beliefs cause him not to choose to pray in school himself?

The two situations are precisely parallel.

Labels: Judaism, Marriage

posted by David Benkof at 4:30 AM VOTE

What's morally wrong with "What's morally wrong with homosexuality?"

By David Benkof
DavidBenkof@aol.com

Dr. John Corvino's talk, "What's Morally Wrong with Homosexuality," has been canceled by Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan (a Catholic school) and the same talk has been rescheduled for tomorrow night at the Fountain Street Church.

Corvino has been giving versions of this talk in many venues over the last decade, challenging his listeners to articulate exactly what - if anything - is morally wrong with gay sex and gay relationships. He has quick, thoughtful comebacks to many of the standard answers ("It's harmful," for example, and "It's unnatural.") I've read some of Corvino's arguments at the Independent Gay Forum Web site, and I admire the fact that Corvino acknowledges that decent, intelligent people can disagree on moral issues relating to homosexuality. However, I must say that Corvino's approach could never convince an Orthodox Jew like me.

First off, I should make it clear that Orthodox Judaism does not believe that homosexuality (as a set of attractions or an orientation) is itself immoral. Gay sex and gay marriages, however, are considered immoral.

Corvino's approach to morality is similar to Descartes' approach to reality - one can sit alone in a room and think hard about morality and figure out what's moral and what isn't. Judaism rejects this approach. Instead, we believe that morality comes from G-d - as revealed in His written Torah (the five books of Moses) and oral Torah (codified in the Talmud and elaborated in other rabbinic texts).

Exactly which kinds of intimacy are moral and immoral - and between whom - are spelled out in this legal corpus. Virtually all sexual contact between males, and much sexual contact betwen females is forbidden, and same-sex marriages are rejected for both Jews and non-Jews.

Now, Corvino could probably sit in his room and come up with lots of reasons that aspects of Judaism are "immoral" while things Judaism rejects are actually "moral." He could claim that it is never OK to perform elective surgery without the patient's consent - and infant circumcision, the very sign of G-d's covenant, would be out. He could rail against G-d's commandment that the Jewish people annihilate the Amalekites (a people we no longer can identify) and claim that genocide is "always immoral." He could claim that even though Jewish methods of slaughtering are clearly humane, newer methods actually cause less pain and therefore kosher slaughter is immoral. And he could argue (as he has) that gay sex makes certain people happy, and it therefore must be moral.

The problem is, Corvino is not divine. We may think we've figured out why certain behaviors are moral or immoral, and even find some of G-d's moral calculus to be frankly troubling. But we are moral dwarves compared to the infinite wisdom and goodness of the creator of the universe. One rabbi has compared the situation to a young child who is perplexed as to why his mother would allow the doctor to inject him with painful needles. But parents know that inoculations, while painful, are essential to a child's well-being. Similarly, we may feel that for us, avoiding gay sex is painful and it may even seem "immoral," but G-d knows better than we do what is best for us.

I doubt that anything written above will change the mind of anyone who isn't an Orthodox Jew. And I have no idea to what extent the argument I'm making applies to religious Catholics, Protestants, or Muslims. It's even possible that Dr. Corvino doesn't really have a beef with Orthodox Jews, since none of his arguments seem to address people like me. But I think it's important to point out that for some of us who believe that gay sex is immoral, Corvino's clever ripostes and well-rehearsed arguments are pretty much beside the point.

Labels: homosexuality, Judaism, morality

posted by David Benkof at 8:24 PM VOTE

What's Next - Jews for Meat Equality?

By David Benkof
DavidBenkof@aol.com

A California organization known as Jews for Marriage Equality has been getting some attention lately, including this article (which does not bother to interview a single Jewish opponent of same-sex marriage) in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.

Jews for Marriage Equality makes about as much as sense as Jews for Meat Equality pushing for equal treatment of pork alongside beef, chicken, and lamb as foods approved for Jewish consumption.

The evidence from Jewish texts is overwhelming that Judaism opposes - and G-d opposes - same-sex marriage, both between Jews but also in the wider society. (See below.)

Nonetheless, Jewish proponents of same-sex marriage tend to reject the notion that a Jew can legitimately oppose same-sex marriage - and they certainly never acknowledge that theirs is a revolutionary position with little precedent in Jewish history and thought. When they do discuss traditional Jewish perspectives on sexuality and marriage, their comments are generally misrepresentations - if not outright lies.

For example, the Jews For Marriage Equality brochure states that only "the most liberal" Orthodox Jews will "concede" that gay Jews are, in fact, Jews. This ludicrous statement has no basis in fact. All Orthodox Jews agree that anyone of any sexuality who has a Jewish mother or who has converted to Judaism according to Jewish law is Jewish.

Two years ago, a coalition of eight Bay Area groups sponsored an event at a gay temple in San Francisco called "Smashing the Glass: Jewish Perspectives on Marriage Equality." There were nine speakers, not a single one of whom favors Judaism's longstanding position that marriage is by definition a union of a man and a woman. The event displayed as much chutzpah as an event called "Jewish Perspectives on Circumcision" with speakers who all argue that circumcision is immoral and therefore un-Jewish because it involves the genital mutilation of a child without his consent.

Another example is the Web site Gay Marriage: Civil Right or Civil Wrong which wanted someone to explain Orthodox opposition to same-sex marriage. So whom did they ask - a local Chabad rabbi? A representative of some major Orthodox institution? An openly LGBT person like me who believes in and practices Orthodox Judaism?

No. They asked Cantor David Berger, the openly gay Reform cantor of New York's main gay synagogue. And virtually everything he said about Orthodoxy was incorrect.

It's like asking a radical feminist to explain why the Catholic Church opposes abortion. Or inviting Jesse Jackson to justify why the Republican Party opposes racial preferences.

Berger makes five mistakes about Orthodox Judaism in just three paragraphs:

1) He claims that the Torah's prohibition of a specific type of gay sex has "been expanded in traditional Jewish law" into "a general prohibition on homosexuality." Nonsense. I know of no Jewish source or recognized authority who considers not just acts but also same-sex attractions or gay/lesbian orientations to be prohibited. There are many Jews with such attractions and orientations who follow Jewish law and are welcomed and cherished members of the Orthodox community.

2) He claims that the Torah's prohibition on gay relations "applies only to Jews.... Non Jews are neither obligated by this law nor may they be punished for violating it." False. The prohibitions against the act sometimes called "buggery" and against same-sex marriage are "Noahide" commandments. Those are laws that apply to every human being, whether Jewish or not.

3) Berger claims that state-sanctioned marriage "is not a Jewish legal category." Wrong. One of the Noahide laws prohibits adultery. If Judaism considered non-Jews in civil marriages to not really be married, then how could they commit adultery? Of course Orthodox Judaism considers non-Jews married by the state to be actually married.

4) He claims, with no evidence, that Orthodox Jewish families and schools teach "rampant homophobia" to Jewish children. Huh? In the vast majority of Orthodox homes and schools, homosexuality is not discussed at all - positively or negatively. Orthodox children are nowhere systematically taught to fear or hate gay people. True, Orthodox Jews instill the importance of channeling sexuality into the marital (male-female) bond. That is a longstanding Jewish value. But homophobia? No.

5) He rejects the "easy" notion that Orthodox Jews are against same-sex marriage because of the Torah, and writes that "the real answer" relates to "the nature of Orthodox Jewish culture, community, and education." In other words, there can be no genuine Jewish objections to same-sex marriage, only ignorant opinions based on fear or hate. So when we point to verses in the Torah (especially Genesis and Leviticus) and sections of the Talmud (especially Chullin and Kiddushin) that uphold traditional Jewish bedroom and family life, those are only smokescreens for the real reason we don't support Berger's radical stance - our irrational prejudices.

One of the many problems with this last argument is that Orthodox Jews who are not homophobic still reject same-sex marriage. I'm one example. Another is the well-known iconoclastic Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who has many pro-gay stances. Rabbi Boteach is nonetheless firm in his opposition to both Jewish and civil same-sex marriages. Or take Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who usually votes with the Democrats. He has sponsored gay-rights bills and adopted many gay causes. But as an Orthodox Jew, he opposes same-sex marriage. Does Berger believe Boteach, Lieberman, and me are all homophobic?

The fact is, the Talmud criticizes Babylonian society for violating nearly all the Noahide commandments - yet praises it for at least observing three such strictures, one of which forbids same-sex marriages.

Orthodox Jews believe that the Talmud, as part of the Oral Law, ultimately comes from G-d. Thus Judaism's position - and G-d's position, we believe - is that same-sex marriages are wrong even for non-Jews.

Now, I realize that non-Orthodox people have the right in a free society to disagree. But when they pretend theirs is the only Jewish position, and when they lie about Orthodox Jewish beliefs regarding family and bedroom life, they're not playing fair.

Many liberal Jews have decried the "Abortion Counseling Centers" run by pro-life people who discuss all options with pregnant women - except abortion. An evening spotlighting "Jewish Perspectives on Marriage Equality" that includes only voices that are hostile to the centuries-long Jewish position on marriage is just as deceptive.

The Web sites, publications, and organizations described above, and similar ones, should include at least one Orthodox person whenever they want honest discussions on Jewish views on sexuality and the family. My E-mail address is above, and there are many other Orthodox people - clergy and lay, straight and gay - who would be qualified to join in.

Labels: Judaism, Marriage

posted by David Benkof at 11:22 PM VOTE