Among those opposing the — shelved for now but sure to return — constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman is an interfaith umbrella organization.
“Clergy for Fairness” includes an assortment of groups, including some affiliated with the Jewish world’s Reform, Reconstructionist and Humanistic movements. It asserts that the proposed “Marriage Protection Amendment” would “infringe on religious liberty.”
Unexplained is how religious liberty managed to persevere for the first 230 years of the republic, or, for that matter, how people thought themselves free since the dawn of creation, when the right to same-sex marriage went unrecognized, indeed unimagined.
More mystifying, though, were the words of one member of the group, Reform Rabbi Craig Axler. He told The New York Times that “to remain silent as a Jew is unconscionable.”
Indeed it is, although not the way he imagines, which is probably that Jews, as a people perennially persecuted, should empathize with others who are marginalized, by society.
But, whether or not such empathy is appropriate, the inability to claim marital status for a relationship that has been rejected by civilized cultures throughout history is hardly akin to being confined to a ghetto or condemned to a concentration camp.
And more to the point, the defining aspect of the Jew is not victimhood, but Judaism.
Thus, what the rabbi should find unconscionable “as a Jew” is misrepresentation of the Jewish religious tradition. What should impel him to break his silence are Jewish truths.
He might start with the book of Leviticus, where sexual relations between men is referred to as “to’eiva”, not inaccurately translated as “an abomination.”
The Jewish oral tradition is replete with similar sentiment. Midrashic literature associates homosexual acts with the Canaanite peoples whose behavior defiled the Holy Land. The rabbis of the Talmud taught that the formal sanctioning of homosexual unions was one of the causes of the world-wide flood in Genesis.
Trenchantly, a statement in the Talmud asserts that one of human society’s redeeming qualities has been its refusal to “write marriage documents for males” — its maintenance, in other words, of marriage’s definition as the union of a man and a woman.
The Torah does not command hatred of homosexuals. It does not label people who engage in homosexual activity, and certainly not those with homosexual tendencies, as inherently evil.
Such people do not forfeit their humanity or, if Jewish, their membership in the Jewish people; nor are they unworthy of others’ care and compassion.
But Judaism forbids homosexual acts and sanctions only the union of a man and a woman in matrimony. Anyone seeking to address the issue “as a Jew” should be proclaiming those facts, not fudging them.
Having contemporary Jewish movements define Judaism down is objectionable enough. But when they seek to swathe political correctness in Jewish garb, it does violence to the integrity of all Jews’ religious heritage.
Abraham, Jewish tradition explains, was called the “Ivri” — the “other sider” — because “the entire world was on one side” of a conceptual river and he “on the other.”
Nothing is more fundamentally Jewish than to stand apart from an unbridled world and affirm timeless truths. That is what one does as a Jew.
Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. This article was provided by Am Echad Resources.
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