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 CHAPTER
FIVE:Those Who don’t Fit the Model: Family Situations and Status
in Judaism and the Jewish World
7A. Challenge Number Five: Gay Jews
The last subject in this chapter is the most controversial and difficult
of all. Yet, in any examination of exceptions to traditional Jewish family
structures, there has to be a place for a discussion of homosexuality
and lesbianism in Judaism and the Jewish community, and the position of
gay Jews.
Unlike all the previous subjects, this really is a very new issue - one
almost without historical resonance within the Jewish story. It is addressed
in the Torah, and then disappeared almost totally for thousands of years,
with minimal discussion in the rabbinic literature, until it suddenly
exploded into the middle of the Jewish world over the last generation.
 The attitude
of the Torah towards homosexuality is very straightforward: in Leviticus
(Vayikra), the act is explicitly condemned.
Do not lie with a woman as you lie with a man. That is detestable.
Vayikra 18:22
And two chapters later, we read the punishment for the crime:
If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them
have done what is detestable. They must be put to death. Their blood
will be on their own heads.
Vayikra 20:13
The narrative
sections of the Bible further furnish two stories which include homosexuality;
both are negative stories of the most reprehensible kind:
- The first is in Bereishit, 19, where the men of Sodom are punished
with destruction for a series of unpleasant actions, the climax of which
is the violent attempt at homosexual rape. For this, Sodom is punished
and the act is immortalised in the English language by the word sodomy,
for homosexual activity.
- A similar scenario appears in Judges, 19, where the violent homosexual
intentions of the Benjaminites are frustrated - although the action
there leads to heterosexual rape and violence, until death.
The silence
of the Mishnah on this subject is instructive. The text that is considered
encyclopaedic, which spans and addresses all the major and minor subjects
of Jewish life, invariably expanding Biblical law considerably, makes
only one incidental reference to the subject, in its prohibition of two
men sharing a blanket for sleeping. The silence of the text indicates
that the topic was actually a complete non-issue.
The voluminous
Talmudic and rabbinic literature makes virtually no reference to homosexuality,
beyond a couple of expansions of the Biblical narrative giving homosexual
versions of Biblical incidents (Joseph and Potiphar, Noah and his son,
Ham).
- Incidentally, they reverse the teaching of the Mishnah regarding
the shared blanket, because of the rarity of the sin.
- Significantly, however, the Talmud does extend the Biblical prohibition
to include lesbianism, but without invoking the Biblical death penalty
mentioned for the act of male homosexuality.
Halachic
literature similarly produces very little discussion:
- Maimonides mentions that there is no incidence of homosexuality in
the Jewish world.
- Joseph Caro, in the Shulchan Aruch, mentions that it exists in his
generation (the sixteenth century), but clearly pays very little attention
to it as a problem.
- A great Polish contemporary of Caro plays the subject right down.
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