[Avodah] Clear Thinking About Male Homosexuals

[Jay F Shachter]

A number of significant points have been absent in the numerous,
numerous, recent articles in our sister mailing list Areivim
concerning our attitude toward male Jewish homosexuals.  Otherwise
intelligent people, from whom one expects better, have stated, for
example, that if our attitudes were determined solely by the Torah,
and were free from foreign influences, we would feel no differently
about practicing male Jewish homosexuals than about shellfish eaters
or Sabbath breakers.

Apparently it is necessary to help people think more clearly about
this topic.  Please do not take this article as any form of polemics,
nor as advocacy for any discernible position.  I just want people to
think clearly before they write, for the same reason that I want
people to proofread their writing before they post, and for the same
reason that I want people to present the text to which they are
responding before presenting their response to it -- because it is
painful to read your articles, when you do not do these things.

The most important omission has been in the nature of the apologetics
that argue that male homosexual intercourse is worse than nearly every
other transgression.  People have correctly pointed out that pederasty
is "yehareg v'al ya`avor" (a transgression to be avoided even at the
cost of one's life) for both the pederast and the catamite.  And then
they stop.  But they could go further.  Sa`adya Gaon has ranked the
forbidden sexual relations into degrees of offensiveness, and he
classified pederasty as worse than, e.g., adultery (readers who do not
know Arabic will find this passage rendered into Hebrew by Avraham ibn
Ezra, in his comment on Exodus 20:13; there is a more cursory
reference in his comment on Leviticus 18:21).  So even among
transgressions that are "yehareg v'al ya`avor", pederasty ranks toward
the bottom, and this may explain a tendency to display less tolerance
of practicing male homosexuals than of adulterers.

Still, I believe that this is all beside the point.  The real reason
people are friendlier to Sabbath desecrators (even the ones who take
"pride" in being Sabbath desecrators, in the sense that they do not
conceal their Sabbath desecration, nor feel any reason to) than to
pederasts is that we are sympathetic to the Sabbath desecrators -- in
the sense that we understand them.  We understand how decent people of
good will, who were raised without benefit of a Torah education, may
honestly lack the conviction that Sabbath observance in the sense we
define it is mandatory.  We can picture such people -- misguided,
surely, and wrong -- but holding their convictions with their
integrity intact.  After all, the Midrash asserts that our father
Avraham figured out even `Eruv Tavshilin on his own, but even if you
take this Midrash literally, we do not expect everyone to have the
religious genius of Avraham.  And people do not have this same sense
of male homosexuality.  With respect to male homosexuals, people have
the sense that "they ought to know that this is wrong -- they ought to
know, inside, on their own, without recourse to authority or to
tradition, that this is just wrong".

There is, in Halakha, a doctrine that corresponds to this sense.  It
is the doctrine of the Seven Commandments of the Descendants of Noah.
Judaism believes that there are seven principles of conduct to which
all humans must conform.  This means that God rightly expects certain
behavior even from people who have not had the benefit of God's
revelation.  Some knowledge is built into the human condition.  It is
a consequence of being human that you know -- you just know -- that
murder is wrong.  It doesn't matter if you grew up in Harlem, or
Germany, or Kampuchea.  You are still expected to know that murder is
wrong, and so you will be judged.  Judaism teaches that the
prohibition of pederasty falls within the Seven Noahide Commandments.
In other words, it is an act forbidden not only to Jews, but also to
all human beings, which means that there is something intrinsic to our
nature that knows that it is forbidden.  It is this, and not the fact
that it is "yehareg v'al ya`avor", and certainly not the fact that the
Torah calls it an "abomination", that people are really responding to
when they are less accepting of practicing male homosexuals than of
Sabbath violators.

(We could now get into a side-discussion concerning the proper
motivation for the fulfillment of the Seven Noahide Commandments.
I will grant in advance, since you cannot deny it in the face of the
rabbinic evidence, that the best motivation for observing the Seven
Noahide Commandments is that they are in the Torah.  In other words,
all human beings are supposed to believe that the Torah is true, even
those people to whom the Torah was not primarily addressed.  The
non-Jews are supposed to obey the parts of the Torah that apply to
them for the same reason that we are supposed to obey the parts of the
Torah that apply to us -- because so God commands.  This is the ideal.
Still, even those non-Jews who have never studied Torah, or even heard
of the Torah, are expected to conform to the Seven Noahide
Commandments.  They're just supposed to know, that's all.)

It must also be pointed out that (anticipating a likely reply) the
category of "yehareg v'al ya`avor" is NOT a subset of the Seven
Noahide Commandments.  There are acts which a Jew must die rather than
perform, which are nevertheless perfectly permitted to a descendant of
Noah.  My favorite example (because of its shock value) is sexual
intercourse with your daughter.  A Jew must give up his life rather
than have sexual intercourse with his daughter.  A non-Jew may have
sexual intercourse with his daughter as many times as the two of them
want, just for the fun of it.  We do not possess any innate knowledge
that sexual intercourse with our daughters is forbidden.  We know that
it is forbidden only because the Torah prohibits it (actually, the
Torah doesn't explicitly prohibit it -- another side-discussion).
Non-Jews are not required to act on this knowledge, because it is not
innate.  Non-Jews ARE expected to know, innately, that sexual
intercourse with your mother is wrong -- just not sexual intercourse
with your father.  There are all sorts of things that are "yehareg
v'al ya`avor" for us Jews, and yet permitted to non-Jews.  There is
even an opinion in the Beyth Yosef (fortunately not restated in the
Shulxan `Arukh) that the rabbinic prohibitions keeping you away from
your wife when she is Nidda are "yehareg v'al ya`avor".  (Now, that
would be a great side-discussion: the Beyth Yosef implies that a
Jewish obstetrician may not deliver his own child, even if there is no
one else to assist, even to save the life of his wife, who is dying in
childbirth.  What do you say to that?  I love this stuff.)

Another point.  A few people have stated, and a number of others have
suggested, that homosexual impulses are innate, that they are
genetically determined, and that they cannot be changed.  Presumably
this means that their homosexual impulses are as natural to them as my
heterosexual impulses are to me.  The fact is that I don't even know
for sure that my heterosexual impulses are genetically determined, but
I assume that they are, because of the evolutionary advantage that
they confer (women with shapely breasts are better able to nurse their
young successfully than women with, e.g., shapely toes).  So let us
now assume the existence of people with genes inside of them which
make them grow up into homosexuals.  The Torah essentially says that
these people may not have sexual pleasure, ever, their entire lives.
A number of people, addressing what our attitude should be toward this
condition, have basically said, "well, life is tough".  I agree with
this -- ultimately, the only answer we can give, although I would not
phrase it that way in practice, is "life is tough".  But we should
clarify exactly what it is we are asking of these people.  I assert
that the Torah is asking more of these people sexually than it ever
asks of anyone else.

It has been pointed out that the Torah requires abstinence of
unmarried heterosexual people too.  This is an egregiously poor
analogy, to the point of insensitivity.  Unmarried heterosexual people
can correct their condition.  They can get married, and have sexual
intercourse ten times a night for the rest of their lives, with
relatively few exceptions (remember that in Torah-observant families
the woman is generally either pregnant or nursing for a good
proportion of her childbearing years).  It would make as much sense to
point out that the Torah requires abstinence of married people.  It
does, most of the time, but that isn't the point.  Nearly every
married person reading this article is, I am certain, forbidden to
have sexual intercourse at this moment (else why are you sitting in
front of your computer monitor reading this?), whether because you are
at home and the only person with whom you may legally have sexual
intercourse is at work, or because you are at work and the only person
with whom you may legally have sexual intercourse is at home, or
because there are children in your home who have learned to speak, who
have not yet gone to sleep, and who are not deaf, or because of any
one of a hundred other reasons.  The homosexual is in an entirely
different situation.  The only other places where the Torah comes
remotely close to the situation of the homosexual are a few
pathological instances.

(Some people have spoken about mamzerim.  Don't tell me about
mamzerim, or mamzeroth.  A mamzereth can always find a mamzer, or a
convert.  A mamzer can always find a mamzereth, or a convert.  After
siring one son and one daughter with her, he can leave her and marry a
non-Jewish slavewoman, with whom he may live for the rest of his life,
and with whom he can legally sire other biological children who, upon
manumission, will be Jewish, and will not be mamzerim.)

One of these pathological cases is that of a widow of a High Priest,
who may not have sexual intercourse ever again, for the rest of her
life.  And a widow of a king almost always finds herself in the same
situation, because a king's widow may only marry another king, to whom
she is usually forbidden for reasons of incest.  Those are the only
situations I can think of where the Torah forbids someone to have
sexual intercourse for the rest of his life.  An `agunah might find
her husband, or discover evidence of his death.  Finally, these people
are all women, and women are allowed to masturbate.  Jewish men are
not even allowed to masturbate.  Just keep this in mind, the next time
you are trying to summon sympathy for a male Jewish homosexual, even
one, perhaps, who is not entirely sinless.  It's like being told by
the Torah that you may not have sexual intercourse, nor even
masturbate, ever, for the rest of your life.


                Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
                6424 N Whipple St
                Chicago IL  60645-4111
                        (1-773)7613784
                        jay at m5.chicago.il.us
                        http://m5.chicago.il.us

		"The umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house"