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Parashat Aḥarei Mot-Qədoshim: תּוֹעֵבָה | to’eivah

There is a story I read somewhere ages ago, the origin of which I can no longer track down, about a feminist philosopher presenting a paper at some academic conference or other. When it came time for the Q&A, some smarmy asshat in the audience piped up to demand, “OK, but what does this have to do with Heidegger?”. The presenter walked to the front of the stage and sat on the lip, to get as close as possible to this guy’s face, and then, with all her force, yelled, “WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH HEIDEGGER? FUCK HEIDEGGER!”. She then stood up, walked back to the lectern, and calmly explained the relationship of her work to Heidegger’s in appropriately academic terms. I think about this story all the time, and feel it especially acutely when it comes to this verse and others like it.

OK, let’s do this.

We read — famously, we read: וְאֶת־זָכָר לֹא תִשְׁכַּב מִשְׁכְּבֵי אִשָּׁה תּוֹעֵבָה הִוא׃ | Və’et zakhar lo tishkav mishkəvei ishah to’eivah hi. | And with a man don’t lie a woman’s lyings, it’s icky (Vayiqra 18:22).

You may have, in the past, encountered that last term translated as “abominable” or “abhorrent” or some such. Those translations may get points for fanciness, but don’t let the extra syllables and Latin pedigree trick you into thinking they’re any more precise. To’eivah is not the technical name for a rite or cultic jargon for a narrowly construed category of this that or the other. It’s a term of naked moral condemnation, a way of saying you find something weird, gross, wrong.

There is a story I read somewhere ages ago, the origin of which I can no longer track down, about a feminist philosopher presenting a paper at some academic conference or other. When it came time for the Q&A, some smarmy asshat in the audience piped up to demand, “OK, but what does this have to do with Heidegger?”. The presenter walked to the front of the stage and sat on the lip, to get as close as possible to this guy’s face, and then, with all her force, yelled, “WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH HEIDEGGER? FUCK HEIDEGGER!”. She then stood up, walked back to the lectern, and calmly explained the relationship of her work to Heidegger’s in appropriately academic terms.

I think about this story all the time, and feel it especially acutely when it comes to this verse and others like it.

On the one hand, I have a strong desire to root around in the text and reinterpret it, rework it, fashion it into something other than a homophobic cudgel.

There are various ways of doing this. Some read the verse as prohibiting rape and having nothing to do with consensual relationships [a]. I confess that I don’t find the textual support for this reading particularly strong, but, then again, neither is the textual support for prohibiting using an umbrella on Shabbat. Jewish history is overflowing with halakhic positions that are ecstatically disconnected from the actual text of Tanakh. So, you know, so what. It’s a time-honored approach.

[a] I don’t have a tidy citation for the origin of this view. I can say that it crops up repeatedly in literature about this verse I’ve read from the 1990s (especially in various təshuvot from the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards), and in casual conversation with friends, people mention it regularly. It’s clearly been in the air for a while now.

Some also leave the traditional surface reading of the text intact, but snips away all the accrued rabbinic interpretations and additions to render the text a ban on anal sex between men [b], with everything else (including all kinds of sex between women) 100% licit. The 2006 təshuvah written by Rabbis Elliot N Dorff, Daniel Nevins, and Avram Reisner may be the highest-profile expression of this view [c]. It’s still de jure the position of the Conservative Movement [d], tho de facto I know many Conservative Jews who go well beyond what the actual text of the təshuvah would authorize [e].

[b] There is, needless to say, a tremendous amount of cis- and intersexist oblivion to the full diversity of human genders and bodies clouding these discussions. In order to even make this into a ban on anal sex, the rabbis need “a woman’s lyings” to have a fairly narrow definition (which subsequent halakhic trends undermine with their general permissiveness for allowed acts between straight couples) that can then be used in a counterfactual that, in turn, depends on a fairly narrow understanding of what male bodies can do, sexually. As with so many rules about gender and sex, the whole thing rapidly starts falling apart the minute you stop forcibly excluding the full exuberance of human diversity. [c] You can find the full text of this təshuvah on the CJLS website at rabbinicalassembly.org. [d] Or one of them, anyway. [e] And not only in the realm of sex: The təshuvah is explicit and emphatic that bi Jews may only enter heterosexual relationships, a notion that many would find so offensive as to be beneath consideration.

Another approach is to follow a suggestion by Rabbi Jacob Milgrom [f] and read the verse in the context of the whole chapter as prohibiting gay sex only to the same degree that straight sex is prohibited in the preceding verses: Just as a man is prohibited from having sex with his sister-in-law, so is he prohibited from having sex with his brother-in-law. A really emphatic version of this argument would go so far as to say that this was the original intent of the text, with all subsequent interpretation as a general ban being erroneous distortion [g].

[f] In the second volume of his monumental commentary on Leviticus for the Yale Anchor Bible series. [g] It’s not clear to me that Milgrom himself would go this far, tho it’s possible he might. In general, I find Milgrom a difficult source. Perhaps because he imagined people would dip in and out to read his thoughts on one verse here and there without checking out the full context, his commentary circles around and returns to the same subject again and again, and there are sometimes nagging differences between his analysis in one comment and his analysis in another. It feels sometimes like he’s spliced various earlier writings together into one massive whole without taking a careful pass to account for how his thinking has shifted over time. Anyway, his remark that Vayiqra 18:22 and 20:13 might only prohibit gay incest feels, to me at least, tossed off as a casual suggestion more than argued for in any sustained way. I do think I would put him on the side of arguing for gay rights in his context, but I certainly wouldn’t put him in with the radicals.

Those are fairly serious approaches. You can also get silly with it. With less logic chopping than the Talmudic rabbis, you can read this verse as an actual exhortation to have anal sex. I have argued elsewhere that we can’t be certain as to exactly who in the present cultural context counts as a Biblical zakhar; taken rigorously, this would transform Vayiqra 18:22 and 20:13 into bans on anyone having sex with anyone else under any circumstances. I’m not saying I would seriously argue that as a halakhic position, but I do love to commit to the bit, so maybe don’t tempt me too much.

Which, of course, leads into the other hand of this giant dichotomy: Who cares? Let’s say we come up with a beautiful, ironclad queer-liberatory reading of these verses. So what? Does that erase the history of harm these words have supported? Even today, even in the city I call home, there are people wielding these lines as a cudgel for the explicit purpose of eradicating queerness from public life. You can’t really say this text doesn’t mean anything homophobic when it clearly and explicitly has meant and still means something definitionally homophobic to so many people. There is a way that saying this language isn’t harmful can imply not only that people are wrong to use it for harm, but also that people are wrong to be harmed by it. I don’t think it’s ceding ground to bigots to acknowledge the surface homophobia of the text and the ongoing violence it contributes to.

In truth, I’m tired of coming up with apologia for this verse. Yes, sure, fine, meaning is built in a collaborative dance not found like a gemstone in the earth, but what if we just accept that our sacred texts are not actually constantly perfectly in line with our own contemporary values? As much as I appreciate radical readings of Torah in the service of emphatic leftist politics, there are times that these readings read false to me, or at least misleading — the constant barrage of “everything in the Torah is Good, Actually, and aligns neatly with my view of the world” feels like a flattening of the text, an infantilization, almost. It also feels like it leaves a structural weakness, where undermining these readings could undermine the project of progressive Judaism tout court. Sometimes the project of rescuing a text risks ceding the premise that having a bigoted passage in the Torah would require us to be bigoted in turn. Sometimes it’s important to really explicitly reject that outright. So there’s bigotry in the Torah, so what? Fuck Heidegger.

I feel both of these approaches, and I don’t want to give either of them up. The reparative readings are vital and necessary, but so is rejecting the premise outright. I think we have to do both.

As part of his commentary on these passages, Milgrom [h] declares, “I am not for homosexuality, but I am for homosexuals”. I want to be clear: I am for both. I am for queerness, for the joyous exploration of sexual pleasures sneaking in, around, between, and gloriously outside of the rigid, life-denying boundaries of straightness. I am for queer love, queer intimacy, queer ecstasy. If G-d is against that, then I am against G-d. That is where I stand. I don’t trust anyone who would align themselves otherwise.

[h] On page 1789 of Volume II of his commentary (in the 2000 printing, at least), for those following along at home.

One could object that this is not exactly a halakhic stance, but frankly I think the vast majority of halakhists have been too cowardly when it comes to rendering halakhic decisions involving this verse. I come back, eternally, to the stubborn and rebellious son. When the Talmudic rabbis interpreted this mitzvah out of existence, they weren’t doing a careful reading of the sources before them, they were very clearly starting from the moral conclusion that the law as written was unacceptable and then developing whatever textual supports they could to retroactively justify that conclusion. This kind of transparently motivated reasoning, this fantastical distortion of texts to fit predetermined ends, is all over the place in our halakhic tradition, and I wish more contemporary halakhists would bring it to bear in their work. To bizarrely logic-chop the text until its bigotry is obviated out of the law is not to despise Torah, but to love it.

I can imagine a day when homophobia is a strange and distant memory. We aren’t there yet. I doubt we will be in my lifetime, but I live in hope. In that world, we will have new readings of these verses, and they will carry different weight. I feel caught, so often, between writing for that world and writing for this one. Part of building that world, I think, is imagining it, living towards it, trying to inhabit it so vividly in your mind that it becomes a little bit more real around you. It means, I think, setting aside the past of these verses so they can have a different future, letting them become strange and unexpected, severed from what they have been before. And also, the world as it is is still here, all around us. The presence is shaped — constrained, even — by the past, and that past doesn’t go anywhere just because we don’t like it. Utopia lacks certain needs for healing; so what? Here those needs are real. I am for homosexuality in all its abstract, expansive, ideality. And I am also for homosexuals, all of us here, real people, right now, with everything we are and have been thru. We have to carry both. We have to carry everything. One way or another, we’ll see each other thru.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]