The most important thing is to choose life. That’s much more important than how I live my life. And it’s very problematic that the rabbinic establishment chooses solutions that they haven’t breathed and lived. It’s absurd, they’re supposed to broaden the horizons, not narrow them… . But they tell people you don’t have a space here, and you don’t have a space there. These rabbis speak in ways that not only render people religiously illegitimate; they render them illegitimate vis-à-vis humanity! How can people feel comfortable if they don’t have a space in the world? If you give people a feeling that they’re not religious enough, they’re not good enough, they will leave. Or they will die.
– David, Orthodox Jewish and gay, interviewed in 2017
Conservative religious traditions are often portrayed as obstacles to advancing LGBTQ+ rights (Cobb 2006). This is not surprising, considering that conservative religious traditions promote traditional ideas about gendered bodies, identities, and division of labor; mark homosexuality as sinful or deviant; and view the traditional, heterosexual family as superior to other family forms. Such religious traditions have racked up a long rap sheet of injuries inflicted on LGBTQ+ persons. In the United States, religious groups and figures were partially responsible for federal, state, and local governments’ inadequate responses to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Safer sex education in New York City, for example, was thwarted by Archbishop O’Connor who viewed both homosexuality and the use of condoms as immoral (Petro 2015). In the twenty-first century, conservative religious groups opposed marriage equality. In California, a 2008 ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage (“Prop 8”) succeeded in large part due to a donation from a prominent Mormon millionaire. In the legal battles that followed the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, religious groups, and individuals, many associated with evangelical denominations, obstructed implementation of the ruling and are still trying to limit its reach (Griffith 2017). Religious groups and leaders are also among the most enthusiastic supporters of “conversion therapy” – interventions intended to change sexual orientation that are known to be harmful (APA 2009). It is little wonder that religion is considered to be antithetical to the well-being of LGBTQ+ persons and that many LGBTQ+ persons disaffiliate from conservative religious traditions (Barton 2012).
However, this lens of conflict does not capture the full story of LGBTQ+ persons and religion. Across religious traditions and geographical locations, religion turns out to be a productive force in the lives of LGBTQ+ persons in surprising ways. This chapter explores the dynamic between LGBTQ+ persons of faith and their religious traditions and communities by drawing on the experiences of LGBTQ+ Orthodox Jews in Israel. First, LGBTQ+ persons mine, harness, and mobilize the very language, logic, and sensibility of their religious tradition and their faith – saying, for example, “God has put me on this earth for a reason” – to make sense of themselves and their sexual identities. They also draw on religious language and doctrines – such as “love thy neighbor” – to convince their religious communities to adopt an orientation of acceptance and equality, or, in the words of Orthodox LGBTQ+ persons, to make space for them. The key point is that religious language and ideas help LGBTQ+ persons articulate their demands for acceptance and equality within a religious community that has traditionally rendered them invisible. In doing so, they also invite their communities to reflect on their traditions’ stories about God, human relationships, and Orthodoxy itself. This theological reckoning, in turn, may reshape religious doctrine and the beliefs of their fellow congregants (Moon and Tobin 2018), a potential “queering” of religion (Wilcox 2020) that troubles and challenges a tradition that claims to be timelessly hetero- and cis-normative. The term queering in this chapter refers to the critical study, and subsequent challenging, of categories such as gender and sexuality and the social norms and cultural practices associated with them). In this way, by remaining within their religious tradition and enlisting it to further their demands for acceptance, LGBTQ+ persons of faith render the tradition itself more inviting and hospitable to LGBTQ+ lives. The twist here is that this queering works from within the religious tradition. Religion – that oft-cited villain of LGBTQ+ rights – can at times be a productive ally in advancing the rights of LGBTQ+ persons!
My research with Orthodox LGBTQ+ Jews living in Israel included fieldwork, digital (online) ethnography, and interviews with Orthodox Jewish LGBTQ+ persons, predominantly same-sex attracted, as well as Orthodox allies, educators, therapists, and rabbis (interviewees’ names and identities have been changed to ensure anonymity). Participants were recruited through Orthodox LGBTQ+ organizations’ newsletters and websites, social media, and public message boards but mostly through word of mouth. Divergent histories, politics, and theologies meant that I could not do justice to all the categories under the LGBTQ+ umbrella in my research, and given their heightened public visibility, I focused on the experiences of same-sex attracted Orthodox Jews. However, my interviewees do not necessarily identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. In Israel many Orthodox same-sex attracted men identify as homosexual, or hommo in Hebrew. A pejorative in English, the context in which I discuss hommo is subversive: mainstream Orthodoxy refers to homosexuality as “inverse tendency” that can be “cured,” whereas “gay” is associated with secular culture. Identifying as hommo is an act of defiance of traditional orthodoxy that signals religious and sexual self-affirmation. Due to the term’s fraught cross-cultural resonance, I use the term gay in this chapter. In addition, although LGBTQ+ activists and scholars caution against extrapolating from the lives of gays and lesbians to other populations (Compton et al. 2018), when my interviewees spoke of the larger communities with which they were affiliated, they often spoke of the LGBT community. It is worth noting cross-cultural differences here as well: my interviewees predominantly used a Hebrew acronym that does not include queer, though a shift is underway among the youngest Orthodox LGBT persons, some of whom are beginning to identify as queer. This chapter thus uses “LGBT” when quoting and extrapolating from my interviews and in discussions of the Orthodox Jewish context in Israel, but “LGBTQ+” to refer to gender and sexual variance in other contexts to reflect scholarly linguistic norms.
Something unprecedented is happening in Jewish Orthodoxy. Twenty years ago, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a leading voice within conservative Orthodox Jewish circles in Israel, announced that “there is no such thing as a religious homosexual.” In many ways he was right: few gay and lesbian Orthodox-identified persons were publicly out. But more than that, few admitted to themselves that they might be attracted to members of their own sex. Rachel, a lesbian who was in her early twenties in the early 2000s, said that although she was familiar with the term lesbian at the time, she thought it could not possibly apply to her. The only LGBT characters she knew were from television, and they were completely detached from her reality. She had never met a lesbian who was religious like her and living as a lesbian in an Orthodox Jewish community seemed unrealistic.
Fast forward to October 2020: Dr. Rabbi Benni Lau, a leading Rabbi associated with the progressive wing of Orthodoxy, issued guidelines intended to help observant same-sex attracted Jews manage their family lives within religious communities – a groundbreaking public acceptance of same-sex unions and families. Rabbi Lau is, for now, almost a lone voice, but his support is unprecedented and yet years in the making. His intervention was a product of decades-long conversations with Orthodox LGBTQ+ persons and activists who shared with religious leaders and Orthodox communities the details about their lives and pressed them to change their perspective on same-sex attraction. The guidelines are a natural expansion of Rabbi Lau’s deceivingly simplistic stance: Judaism teaches that “you should choose life.” Remaining in the closet, being barred from a family life, Rabbi Lau has insisted, is death.
Yael, who had come alarmingly close to suicidal ideation (like many others I talked to), said that hearing Rabbi Benni Lau talk about Judaism’s emphasis on life as a central tenet helped her: “The minute I decided I was just going to live – I started to live.” Her conflict and angst did not go away, but she said, “religious people just have conflicts. That’s just the way it is… . That’s how I get over the conflict. I want a lesbian religious life.”
The “conflict” is one that many LGBTQ+ persons of faith would recognize. In my research (Avishai 2020), I learned that many same-sex attracted Orthodox Jews pass through a period where they are convinced that their sexuality, romantic desires, practices, attachments, and realities are incompatible with Jewish teachings and way of life. This is especially true for men, who cite as a source of conflict Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” In interviews I conducted with several dozen same-sex attracted Orthodox Jewish persons, many echoed the pain of a young anonymous writer who wrote about it on a popular Facebook “Confessions Page” that serves as a meeting point for Orthodox LGBT persons: “No matter how hard I try to convince myself that it is pure love and that there’s nothing wrong with it, I still feel blemished, degenerate, uncouth.”
But in the same interviews I learned that the religious tradition also serves as an important source that helps same-sex attracted Orthodox Jews make sense of themselves. Ilana drew on what she had learned about the nature of belief to navigate her sexuality. Ilana had attended a prestigious, progressive seminary for women after high school, where she had the opportunity to delve into Jewish thought, philosophy, and texts. She had learned that
some people have never had doubts about their belief, they just knew. There’s something enviable about it but also a little naïve. Because how do you just know? I used that analogy to think about my sexual identity. It was a process of discovery.
Tamar rejected the expectation that one would even need to come to terms with oneself. Ambivalence, ambiguity, and debating one’s way was not only part of the human condition – it was also precisely where the Jewish tradition was at its best, guiding humans through chaos and tough decisions. How is dealing with one’s sexuality, she wondered, any different from dealing with any other life challenge?
Others made sense of themselves by drawing on the fact that they were God’s creation and God supports his creations (note that my interviewees had no qualms about God’s gender as masculine). Shlomo said to God, “This is who I am. You made me this way. I love you. And I want to observe your mitzvahs (commandants). But you need to be patient with me, and help me out a little, to not be tortured.” Ilana traced her journey toward self-acceptance to a well-known Jewish parable about Rabbi Nachman and the rooster, a tale of a prince who begins to act like a rooster, sitting naked under the table and pecking for food. A wise man offered a curious cure: he also claimed to be a rooster, and joined the prince naked under the table. Once the wise man gained the prince’s trust, he convinced the prince that roosters, too, can wear clothes, dine at the table, and so on. What began as a seeming mental illness is read as a parable about forgetting one’s true self – which can be cured through a spiritual connection to God. This was certainly Ilana’s read. She told me that after denying her sexual orientation for years and pleading with God to change her, this story helped her accept her lesbianism because she learned from it that “God accepts me as I am. My lesbianism became real once I stopped denying it, when I accepted it.”
Tamar said that her religious training helped her not only come to terms with herself, but also to restore and even deepen her relationship with God. She said that she used be angry at God, but her religious training helped her talk to God through her anger. Her lesbianism forced her to look inward and do the hard work of developing a religious language and a connection to God. Not only were her sexual and religious identities not in conflict; they were inseparable, having developed in tandem. “What I learned in the process is that God is part of my life. I am in conversation with him all the time. God’s existence is not metaphysical, its real. I am constantly asking: what does he want from me?” What he wanted from her, she concluded, was to live her life as an observant Jew, regardless of her sexual orientation. Shlomo recommitted to God after he met his husband. After years of disaffiliation he developed a:
real love for the almighty and for the religion. It was almost thankfulness to God about our relationship, that I met him, saying thanks for being able to live a full life. To be content with myself … I didn’t want to be tortured. And I think that a happy and content person can contribute much more to others. Others around us choose to be tortured, and put themselves in a corner, alone. They don’t live to their full potential. I chose God.
If David’s opening excerpt captured the anger and pain that many LGBTQ+ persons of faith experience, these examples suggest that the Jewish tradition is not only a source of anguish. It is also a source of solace, support, and tools to make sense of oneself and one’s place in the world. This makes sense. Religion is a discipline. Years of religious training provide one with a language, a frame of mind, and a way of thinking. Religious messages, Benjamin told me, “are deeply entrenched. You are bad, sinful, deviant. There’s no place for you. So the question is, how do you rewrite that narrative?” For many, rewriting the narrative came from within the tradition which gave them permission, methods, and tools to make sense of and come to fully embrace themselves. This involved making several theological moves that have the potential of pushing the tradition to make sweeping changes – such as Rabbi Lau’s groundbreaking indication that the Jewish tradition can accommodate same-sex families.
Leah thought of her predicament not so much as a conflict but as a tension with Jewish philosophy and values. She thought that heterosexual marriage would suffocate her, but knew that she could experience joy in a relationship with a woman. In her reading, the Jewish sources do not explicitly ban such relationships (an ironic byproduct of Judaism’s patriarchy is a lack of attention to women’s sexuality, including same-sex relationships). But a lack of an outright ban did not imply permission. The sticking point was an amorphous Jewish value system that had taught her that, “there are things that are bigger than me, it matters less whether I fulfill my dreams, whether I am happy … the goal of intimate relationships is not happiness, finding joy in not being alone, but in starting a family.” Partnering with a woman negated all that because it amounted to putting her own needs and happiness first:
making an egoistic choice in myself. I’m choosing me… . There’s my parents. They won’t be able to leave the house because of the shame I’ll bring upon them if I come out. And there are these kids of two moms who arrive at an Orthodox world but don’t really belong to it. So, do you choose your own happiness over everyone around you? I was taught: don’t be egoistic, choose other people’s happiness over your own.
Leah chose her own happiness but she was not sure whether she could reconcile it with Orthodoxy – doing so would require embracing a new vision of Orthodoxy, one that prioritized the well-being, needs, and fulfillment of the faithful. That was not the religion in which she was raised. But others were making this leap, and in the process not only mobilizing Jewish concepts and values but also transforming, or, shall we say queering them?
David had been tortured by his sexual orientation since early adolescence. He told me that “knowing that I’m gay didn’t weaken my religiosity but it did impact my right to be in this world. I thought, ok, I’m gay and I’m just going to suffer.” For David, the source of suffering was the knowledge that he would not be able to live up to a central tenet of Judaism: world repair. Many Jews fulfill this expectation by starting a family, but David reasoned when he came out, in the early 2000s, that he likely was not going to have children. Though this is no longer the case, at the time the idea of two Orthodox men raising children seemed preposterous. The angst was nothing short of existential: world repair is a central mitzvah, a reason for being, really. If he would not be able to fulfill one of Judaism’s key mitzvahs – having children – did Orthodoxy even have a place for him?
Over the years David had attempted to change. He met with rabbis and therapists until he slowly came to terms with the fact that his sexual orientation was not going to change. Sometime in his mid-twenties, he had an epiphany: “I realized I DON’T HAVE TO SUFFER! Maybe there are other ways.” To find these “other ways,” David made three theological moves that were grounded in his experiences as a gay Orthodox Jewish man. First, he developed an understanding of God as “loving and good,” a God who understood that his love for a man “ruins nothing in the world” and “has your best interest in mind and doesn’t want to screw you over. He created you in a way that you cannot change.” His was a caring God who gave him a challenge but did not mean for him to suffer.
The second theological move defied a long tradition in Judaism that equates religious commitment with sublimation, holding that observant Jews agree to subordinate themselves to a higher normative order. Per this logic, people who submit to God’s will sublimate individual desires, needs, and values, and same-sex attraction is not a special challenge: doing as God instructed simply means that one will at times endure trials and make sacrifices. At first, David accepted this: “I had in my mind that this is just what you do. I didn’t even feel sorry for myself. I said ok, I’ll deal with the hardship, I’ll get through it.” But then he realized that he did not need to suffer because the challenge he was given – being different – was not intended to force him to “deal” with it. Rather, God’s intention in creating this difference was to “force society to deal with you. It’s not easy and it’s not fun. But if you choose faith, you choose this job. You do not need to suffer. No! This is how you can repair the world.”
In other words, David reframed the language of spiritual trial; the trial is not to “deal” with the challenge of same-sex attraction but rather “to be how God made me, to find my way in the world through God.” For David this means aligning himself fully with Jewish values, specifically the notion of repairing the world. His world repair would be through activism. Going to the Pride Parade with his yarmulke was a calling. Coming out was a calling:
so that both Orthodox and secular Jews will see that Orthodox gays existed … once I come out, and people start talking with me about coming out of the closet, the circles will broaden. Because if I can impact my family, and they accept me, maybe they’ll impact their friends.
The takeaway is this: Orthodox same-sex attracted Jews are intervening in the Jewish world order, and they are doing so from within the system of thought and from the bottom up, drawing on lived experience. Again, religion is not the just the villain but also a source of solutions.
In July 2017 Zehorit Sorek, a prominent Orthodox LGBTQ+ activist, attended a women’s conference in Jerusalem. Titled “And Thou Shall Be Holy,” the conference sought to provide educators and spiritual leaders tools to deal with LGBT issues within the Orthodox community – by which they meant therapeutic interventions intended to “help” “confused” young persons. Zeorit was frustrated by the day’s homophobic tone. She was particularly dismayed by Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, a central figure in conservative Orthodox circles. The rabbi, she reported to her Facebook followers, “spoke in almost messianic passion” condemning homosexuality as a phenomenon and reviled lifestyle and boasting success in helping men and women change their orientation.
By the afternoon, Zehorit had had enough, and she stood up to confront the rabbi. Drawing on the language, imagery, and rhetoric of the Jewish tradition, she challenged the rabbi’s characterization of same-sex attraction as a sin and his support for conversion therapy. She said: Rabbi, in the [Jewish sources] there is a story about a rabbi who studied a lot of Torah (Bible) and was very satisfied with his studies. The rabbi met an ugly man and said to him ‘what an ugly man you are.’ The ugly man responded: ‘go to the artist who made me and tell him what an ugly vessel you created.’
Zehorit indicted the audience and speakers: “I have been sitting here all day and heard you calling me ugly, ugly, ugly.”
Zehorit’s point should have been clear to this audience: people are God’s creation, and therefore sexual orientation is divinely ordained. Attacking same-sex-attracted persons for who they are challenges God’s (handi)work. However, the rabbi objected: “We said that we love each and every one. We did not call you ugly. We said that the phenomenon is ugly. Don’t put words in our mouths.” Zehorit did not relent, arguing that “this is a paraphrase on how I live my life.” A woman in the audience then asked: “Why an ugly vessel?” “If it is not ugly,” Zehorit retorted, “why do you want to change me?” The rabbi lost his patience and yelled: “You will not silence us. We are saying that the phenomenon is ugly. And it remains so even after your words. Thank you very much.” With clapping in the background Zehorit got the last word: “love thy neighbor is an important principle in the Torah.”
The next day, the Rabbi’s son – a conservative rabbi in his own right – published an op-ed in which he claimed his camp’s exclusive claim to Orthodoxy. He vowed not to back down in the face of activists who “speak lies” and attempt to silence the Torah. He also denied the plausibility of Orthodox LGBT existence, ending with a sense of urgency: “We are committed to supporting normal family life. We cannot let these people confuse the youth and tell him that life with members of his sex is normal.”
There is a lot to explore in this episode but what I want to point out is this: Zehorit’s language and sensibility was that of Orthodoxy. She was using Judaism’s rhetoric, sensibility, and language and her goal was not to tear down the tradition but rather to expand it: to claim that, yes, building a life with a member of one’s own sex was possible indeed. Moreover, it was already happening; Zehorit herself had married her wife almost a decade earlier, at a time when Rabbi Lau’s guidelines were a distant dream.
This chapter provided snippets from the lives of a particular group of LGBTQ+ persons of faith, Orthodox LGBT persons in Israel, to show how religion can be at once an oppressive and productive force in the lives of LGBTQ+ persons. It argued that religion can be an ally in the struggle for LGBTQ+ acceptance and equality. On the one hand, this is the story of those whom religious conservatives attempt to write out of existence. Until the past couple of decades, it was widely assumed that LGBTQ+ persons had no business remaining within the folds of conservative religious traditions such as Orthodox Judaism. But the people I interviewed decided not to disaffiliate but rather to rethink, challenge, and reorder Jewish values, cosmologies, concepts, values, theologies, and its authority structures.
Thus, this is also a story of how LGBTQ+ persons of faith mobilize the tradition that excluded them to make sense of themselves and what it means to be a same-sex attracted Orthodox person, and in the process, transforming (or threatening to transform) the religious tradition itself. They are not alone; Catholic, Evangelical, Mormon, and Muslim LGBTQ+ persons of faith are engaging with their religious traditions in similar ways (Vines 2015) and religious leaders across faith traditions are heeding calls for reinterpreting their traditions (Gushee 2014; Martin 2017). Undoubtedly, there are limitations when working from within the system. For example, religious leaders who have voiced support for same-sex unions, like Rabbi Lau in the Orthodox Jewish context and pastor David Gushee in the Evangelical context, have narrowly construed their support to long-term, monogamous same-sex attracted (but not bisexual) persons. Nevertheless, the larger point remains that rather than just being a destructive force in the lives of religious persons, religion can be a productive force for making sense and paving a way forward. World repair, love thy neighbor, and choose life are core Jewish values. What is more, this productive force works from the bottom up, charting new theological directions from people’s experiences. “To be an Orthodox gay” one anonymous post on the Facebook Confessions Page claims, “is to understand that you don’t need some rabbi who will approve of you; that to be Orthodox is your own decision.”
As marginalized persons claim that they belong and demand that their communities make space for them, they inevitably change these communities. As Nizan put it – with a wink and a nod – his own journey led him to conclude that he is a queer Orthodox – “queer” referring not to gender or sexual categories but rather to Orthodoxy. In other words, the story here is of how religious traditions, practices, sensibilities, and authority structures emerge at the murky intersection between “religious tradition” and the realities of LGBTQ+ persons’ everyday lives. No wonder Orthodox conservatives cry foul – a queered Orthodoxy threatens (and exposes) foundational categories, mythology, and authority structures, including how religion can be both a negative and positive force in shaping people’s realities (Wilcox 2018).
Orit Avishai is Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University, USA. Her ethnographies examine how ideology and culture, very broadly defined, shape social institutions, political dialogue, cultural practices, and academic discourse. In recent years her scholarship and teaching have centered on the intersections of religion, gender, and sexuality, and her work has been published, among other venues, in Gender & Society, Contexts, Sociology of Religion, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Qualitative Sociology. She is the author of Queering Orthodoxy: The Battle over Judaism’s (Straight) Soul in Israel (New York University Press, forthcoming).