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October 25, 2024 - October 10, 2025
Inherent in rabbinic “homophobia” is a form of misogyny.15 To leave this homophobia unchallenged is to leave this brand of misogyny firmly rooted in the Jewish tradition. Whether we are liberal American Jews, evangelical Christians, or ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews, our sexual ethics have changed drastically from those of the Talmudic Period, and indeed most of us outright reject many of the rabbis’ sexual ethics. For example, few Jews or Christians would accept that rape is not a crime16 or that an unmarried girl should be married off to her rapist (Deut. 22:28–29). Those looking to the Bible
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Scholars of antiquity ssuch as Ruth Karras and Craig A. Williams remind us that in Biblical times, the threat of gay and lesbian sex was related not to the socially constructed sexual identities as we view them today but, rather, to a concern about who is penetrating and who is penetrated. They build on Michel Foucault’s claim that sexual orientation and its connection to one’s individual identity is a modern phenomenon created by bourgeois capitalism in which the object of one’s desire defines a sexual identity, in contrast to the view in antiquity, which focused on one’s sexual role
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In Ramban’s understanding, if one acknowledges that the world is created, it follows directly and clearly that one would understand that God is the sole owner of the land and that human “ownership” is always temporary.
Thus, the efforts to establish a clearly delineated and bounded community are defeated by other efforts to maintain and promote the very values that the community holds dear—a sacred connection to Divinity and a compassionate connection to one another.
The need for recognition is the need to be accepted in terms of one’s own self-identification.
If recognition is a power that resides only in the hands of the authorities or the normatively privileged, it will become brittle and break under the stress of the antithetical demands of community building.
Their slave mentality, an overwhelmingly arresting sense of insecurity, grossly distorted their sense of being created in the image of the Divine; they felt incapable of creating new identities.
Both stories of “insubordination,” however, can be read as accounts of Israelite practices that were condemned only in later centuries by those who wrote the stories down.
Contrary to the assumption of the prophets, the practices that they condemned were not idolatrous deviations from pristine older rituals; rather, they were older, accepted practices that were being newly condemned.
queer perspective questions whether the pressure to conform to a monolithic norm, developed as a posttraumatic response to the catastrophic Assyrian invasion, need be regarded as the only authentic strand that we inherit from our Judean ancestors.
Without necessarily embracing these ancient beliefs as credible in the 21st century, we can be liberated by their diversity to see that norms were imposed then, just as they are today, by those who seek power and make dubious claims to ancient authority.
All people need comfort, but there are times when we are—sometimes unwillingly—pressed into service. Just by being who we are, we may find that we are leading society in a new and necessary direction.
the queer Promised Land is Jewishness itself, at least an engagement with Jewishness that moves beyond convention.
By successfully arguing for their right to inherit in this situation, the daughters open the door for others to similarly fight for their inclusion and reject the notion that Biblical law is forever fixed and protected from any and all challenges.
In order to receive what is rightfully theirs, they must restrict their choice of a mate or choose to remain unmarried. The unfair choice they faced between their freedom to partner as they wished and their need for economic security is one that countless queer persons of all faiths have faced throughout the generations. This choice has caused great suffering.
Their fear of inequality and their resistance to any collective loss ultimately leads to others’ freedom being restricted.
I realized that by not wanting to rock the boat by drawing attention to our exclusion, I also was not speaking up for the other families that were also excluded—including
In Pirkei Avot 5:7, it is written that one of the characteristics of a hacham, a wise person, is the willingness to concede the truth, as God does in declaring the daughters’ claim just.
history only becomes such when someone takes the fragmented stories of the past and gives them shape and meaning. Moses is only retelling those events of the past that he remembers, that he thinks are important. Is he telling “objective” history, or is he recounting his own selective memory, framing these stories of the struggle in the desert into a cohesive, and therefore coherent, purposeful narrative?
Some historians might say the purpose is simply “to know the facts,” but as we have seen, it can also be about creating community. And this tension between history and memory is precisely what historians today have to wrestle with when they teach and write history.
If schools and families are the primary institutional bearers of history and memory, how are queers supposed to generate a historical consciousness when family members at best usually do not identify as part of the community and at worst create a hostile environment for queer identity, and when schools render queerness invisible? The lack of family, elders, and affirming institutions is one of the key factors that make queers a minority unlike almost any other, lacking in the basic tools for creating a collective consciousness.
Looking at the original text and again at the liturgy of the Passover seder, it is not difficult to see how the biases of the rabbis completely altered a simple question into a boundary of acceptability and inclusion in the Jewish people and its story. The rabbis, in interpreting the text of Deuteronomy, essentially determine (seemingly arbitrarily) lines of communal acceptability that thereby limit and judge the very questions they seem simultaneously to want to encourage in the next generation of Jewish children.
The “wicked son” has come to represent any force that the normative power system wishes to oppose, systematically and publicly. Some Haggadot in Israeli Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) communities depict the “wicked son” as a soldier in the Israeli army;5 many American-edited Haggadot depict the wicked son as an assimilated youngster dressed in that generation’s fashionable clothing.
It is not easy to learn Jewish rituals traditionally reserved for nontrans men. Patriarchy isolates people who do not benefit from Jewish gender privilege—namely, women, trans people, and gender-variant folks who do not have access to teachers who can transmit the how-tos of halakhic observance.
I choose to make the existing mitzvot our own; it is powerful to weave tradition in with our many identities—literally to bind them together and affirm, “this is mine too.”
22As trans and gender-variant people, we are both outsiders and insiders, and we have the capacity to do things differently—to continually transform rituals, squirming and wiggling and creating more space, not only for ourselves but for people of every gender.
The rituals themselves are not problematic, but rather the culture and customs that surround and sustain them are.
For most Jews who approach Judaism liberally (Reform and Reconstructionist, but also Conservative Jews, to a degree), to “obey the commandments” is interpreted a bit differently. Many progressive Jews are deeply committed to Jewish tradition and the Torah but approach the mitzvot and Jewish law with varying degrees of skepticism and modification. In some cases, progressive Jews are comfortable with outright rejection of those precepts that seem to violate competing ethical standards or that do not easily conform to the realities of contemporary society.
For our purposes, does the prohibition of adding or taking away restrain our ability to read queerly, to reinterpret and possibly add some kinds of meanings and take others away?
But Parashat Re’ehs command neither to add nor take away suggests that halacha, and rabbinic textual reasoning more generally, may need to rein itself in and keep to the text. “Hadash asur min-Torah,” said the Chatam Sofer, and “neither add to it nor take away from it,” says Parashat Re’eh, yet no where in the Torah does it say anything about lesbians or homosexuality in general.
Ironically, then, if we follow the Chatam Sofer, we need to move backward from rabbinic prohibitions to the essence of Biblical mitzvot, undoing in some cases that which halacha has erroneously added. In this way, the Chatam Sofer’s call against innovation can actually liberate queers from homophobic legislation that has accreted over time in the Jewish tradition.
Albo would call on us to open our hearts to prophets acting for justice, not for self-interest. And here, Albo throws down a challenge to modern queer interpretation: when is queer interpretation an act of self-interest?
Albo’s point is that we should not reinterpret Torah on our own account.
A rabbi in Jerusalem recounted to us that Sir Jonathan Sacks, England’s chief rabbi, once said, “Judaism never changes, but halacha does.” The rabbi went on to explain that at Sinai, God gave us truth. This is Judaism. The Jewish people seek a world returned to absolute peace through the coming of Moshiach (the Messiah)—pure goodness. Halacha and tradition, then, help us on our journey from truth to goodness, from Sinai to Moshiach, bringing us closer to tikkun olam. Along the way, halacha and our tradition changes as society changes, allowing us to keep and celebrate the core values given at
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Read through a queer lens, this verse calls to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender folk as a tribe within the whole—a tribe bound by spiritual kinship and mythic memory, a tribe with an obligation to honor our own particular history, and a tribe that also carries the responsibility for self-governance, moral stature, and right justice.
Reading again the opening verses of Parashat Shoftim from a queer perspective, we hear a call for our tribe to appoint judges and officers for ourselves.
Our judges are the ones whose discerning righteousness inspires us toward the pursuit of justice. They are the ones who will see us truly, who will speak hard truths and carry high expectations, who will call forth our own decency and goodness.
lord it over us and force us to do their will. Yet Rashi’s distinction between the role of a judge and the role of an officer draws attention to an important difference between imposed authority and authority that an individual accepts for him- or herself.
The real power of the officer lies in his or her ability to transmute an external obligation into an inner yearning—to help people “accept upon themselves” the right justice that the judge embodies.
The Jewish community requires judges from all its tribes, in order to meet its obligation to judge with justice.
