Halakhah and homosexuality: why language matters

This was previously posted at the Shibboleth blog. Shibboleth, aside from being a great name for a publication, is “an undergraduate journal of Jewish thought at Yale.” We at New Voices had a chance to meet a bit of Shibboleth in person at the National Jewish Student Journalism Conference in May. This post brings to light some important issues that have been largely missing from the conversation surrounding the recent Statement of Principles on the Place of Jewish With a Homosexual Orientation in Our Community, a controversial new statement on homosexuality and Orthodox Judaism.

On July 22, a group of Orthodox rabbis put forth a statement of principles on homosexuality; The statement contains an error of language, one which reveals the way in which traditional Jews now talk about homosexuality.

Eleven of the statement’s twelve points discuss how communities ought to treat gay Orthodox Jews; nestled among them, number four announces, “Halakhic Judaism views all male and female same-sex sexual interactions as prohibited.” This statement seems straightforward; it’s not.

The sentence has two parts, a subject (“Halakhic Judaism”) and a predicate (“views all male and female same-sex sexual interactions as prohibited”). All the words in the subject come from Hebrew; nearly all of those in the predicate come from Latin. That’s not just trivia: there are two languages here, one the Jewish language of halakha, the other an American secular discourse about sexuality.

If halakha refers to a collection of texts running from the Hebrew Bible through the Talmud, on to the later codes, then halakha has nothing to say about “all male and female same-sex sexual interactions.” The phrasing implies two points:

1. Male and female homosexualities form a unified category of halakha. They do not. There is (maybe) a Biblical prohibition for the former, but not (really) for the latter. There is extensive Talmudic discussion of the former, but not of the latter (and what there is quite mild). Sad to say, the Rabbis–I am talking about the Talmud here–thought “sex” involved a penis. Treating them as the same requires a thoroughly un-Rabbinic view of sexuality.

2. Halakha views all gay sexual interactions as the same. The Talmud treats extensively the different sexual acts covered by Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, and the Rabbis take very seriously the idea that some acts are prohibited and some aren’t. They knew about anal sex and of vaginal sex. They don’t seem to have a conception of a “sexual interaction.”

Read the full post here.