Acharei Mot: Struggling With Difficult Texts

Homosexuality is an "abomination". Homosexuals "shall be cut off from among their people". So states this week's parsha, Acharei Mot, in Leviticus 18, verses 22 and 29.

Is this true? If it is, should we understand it literally? If it's not, what does that say about the Torah – traditionally understood as the word of God dictated to Moses? How should we deal with such challenging components of our heritage?

In modern times at least, there have been three typical responses. The first has been to read the text literally – to shun, reject and demean Jewish homosexuals, and to turn their lives into the kind of living hell that Sandi Simcha Dubowski managed to capture so well in his ground-breaking film, Trembling Before God. The second has been to effectively remove the text from the living tradition – to exclude it from the sections of Torah that are read in the synagogue on the grounds that it is obscurantist and immoral, and simply doesn't square with western liberal sensibilities. The third has been to continue to include it within the tradition, but not to talk about it too much because it's one of those tricky parts of Torah that, frankly, feels slightly unpleasant.

All three responses are problematic. If we always read Jewish texts literally, and blindly follow the letter of the law, Judaism becomes wooden and inflexible, a series of ideas frozen in the past and imposed on the present. Halacha becomes like the actor who rigidly follows stage instructions without putting anything of him or herself into the performance. At its worst, it turns into fundamentalism, rejecting anything other than itself as falsehood. However, if we always reject those Jewish texts that are problematic or foolish to the contemporary heart and mind, Judaism becomes disconnected from reality, a series of moral or intellectual ideals which have no Jewish means of being actualized through regular collective ritual. In this context, bowdlerized Judaism starts to feel perfect, ethereal, and almost other-worldly, and, as it spiritually elevates itself, it loses contact with the complexities, struggles and veracity of day-to-day existence. But then again, if we continue to include difficult texts but try not to talk about them too much, we become dishonest both with ourselves and with Judaism. The metaphorical elephant sits in the centre of our world, and is ignored until it eventually and inevitably stampedes its ways through everything we hold to be important.

There is a fourth option. It is neither to embrace the difficult texts within Judaism as absolute truth, nor to reject them as absolute falsehood, nor to ignore them as absolute taboo. Rather it is to regard them as life-enhancing elements within our rich, complex and challenging living tradition. In the same way that our lives are often beset with difficulties and problems which, confronted constructively, help us to grow and develop as human beings, so the more problematic elements of Judaism can serve to ennoble us too. We needed slavery to understand freedom; we needed exile to understand statehood; we needed dependence to understand independence. Ultimately the challenge of contemporary Judaism may be less about the question of what to include or exclude from our tradition, and more about how we continually grapple with, and respond to what actually exists. Only through that struggle will we grow, both as Jews and as human beings.

(Also published at www.limmud.org)