The Gay Sex Question

It's been a while since I've gone to Shabbat services. That's how summers tend to go for me...I kinda figure I'll pick back up when I get back to school. Except now that I've finished my senior year, I've realized that I have to take the whole going to shul thing in my own hands and can't just saunter into the Bronfman Center every Friday night (I don't wanna be that creepy old grad).

Anyways, I think the laziness and the backward priorities have been wearing on my soul; I felt like getting spiritual, so I decided to look up this week's Torah portion on http://www.torah.org. I read a few interesting things about why Moses wasn't allowed into Israel and how Edom wouldn't let the Jews walk through his land and how snakes attacked the Israelites. Then I realized that there's one huge Biblical questions that's been nagging me for ages--Does the Torah ban gay sex?

Okay, sorta a crude question, but I think we were all disappointed when the speaker from the gay synagogue wouldn't tell us how he reconciles homosexuality with that Leviticus verse we've all heard about a man not lying with another man as he would a woman. You don't have to watch the Colbert Report to know that this is a hot topic right now. It seems like in almost every conversation that takes place on the subject almost everyone assumes that the Bible prohibits homosexuality (whether they personally agree with this point of view or give any credence to anything in the Bible or Torah). This base assumption has bothered me since I first heard about it (which much like the whole intermarriage thing, I somehow managed to not hear until high school). Something about it just didn't feel right. In a great article I found called "How Can You be Gay and Jewish?" Jay Michaelson put this feeling into words, calling the common interpretation an "impossible contradiction: that a loving G-d has asked that 5% of Jews repress their sexual urges and distort their loving souls" (5). It's the same way I feel about blanket statements that the Torah is sexist: I just can't believe that a loving G-d is a misogynist.

So how to attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction? When my sister first read that line one Yom Kippur, she assumed it was talking to straight men. Like "no random sex with other guys if that's not what you're actually into." Which kinda makes sense. One of my Orthodox friends has mentioned a similar interpretation--That it's talking to bisexual men. Basically, "if you could be down with the ladies, then stick to them." But I guess then strictly gay guys would be exempt.

I kinda wanted something more solid than these two opinions, so to the web I went. One interpretation used by many gay Orthodox Jews is that the lines specifically prohibit anal sex, but other stuff is okay. Except the problem I saw with that is that I'm pretty sure some of that "other stuff" is prohibited on its own or between a man and woman, so I'm not really sure why it'd be okay in this third instance. And it's still basically saying that there's something wrong about a homosexual relationship, so it's still unsettling.

Two interpretations I liked much better were in that Michaelson article I mentioned. The first one interprets the Hebrew "v'et zachar lo tishkav mishkevei ishah" as "and at a man you shall not lie the lyings of woman." He goes on to explain that the use of "to" or "at a man" instead of "with a man" implies that it was referring to basically rape, an act of degrading another man. This prohibition wouldn't apply to a consentual, healthy relationship.

The second interpretation takes a textual interpretation of Leviticus 18 and says that it refers to sex acts only in the context of idolatry. It's located in a section that's talking about prohibitions against idolatry. Furthermore, it labels the act a toevah, a word that means "taboo" and isn't used for other sexual prohibitions. Therefore, when sex doesn't have to do with idolatry, the prohibition wouldn't apply. Michaelson goes as far as to propose that it could even mean "making an idol out of sexuality" (4) which brings the cover of many a Maxim magazine to mind.

The article's really interesting (and short!). I suggest you read it or at least skip to page 4 which lists out various interpretations. http://www.zeek.net/jay_0409.shtml