SOULFULLY GAY
By Joe Perez
“Wrestling feels a lot like making love. It also feels a lot like making war,” wrote rabbi Arthur Waskow, Ph.D. in a noteworthy poem. In recent decades, the Jewish tradition of which Waskow is a part has given a variety of new expressions to the struggle that has moved people for centuries: wrestling with God and with each other.
In the Bible, Jacob and his brother Esau began to wrestle with each other even before they were born. Their combat in the womb was so fierce that their mother, Rebekah, screamed to God, and at God, in agony.
As an adult, Jacob had an experience of profound transformation. He struggled mightily with a mysterious foe. The details are sketchy, but we learn that he spent a full night fighting with “a man” who then told him he has wrestled “with God and with men” and won. He is renamed Israel, the God-wrestler.
In the book Godwrestling, Waskow says he wrote his poem about wrestling as a young man grappling with sibling rivalry. And as an adult (who I believe is heterosexual), he began to see new dimensions to the wrestling match described in the Bible.
He says that a friend of his heard his poem and called it “the first gay Jewish poem – or at least the first that says God is gay.” The implication is that Jacob discovered a profound truth that night in an unexpected grip or toss, pinned to the muscular body of another man: there is both love and war in the pressing of flesh.
Waskow acknowledges the homoerotic reading but says that he was intending to say that within each person are all the polarities that have been conveniently assigned to men or to women, Same and Other.
To wrestle with God is to unify opposites in the same way that God unifies. We all contain love and anger, gentleness and toughness, and fear and guilt, the rabbi suggests. God is the force of reconciliation in the world. It’s not really that God is gay; rather, it’s that God is both gay and non-gay, and the force that moves us beyond seeing the world through duality.
Waskow is part of a non-denominational religious reform movement called Jewish Renewal. It is grounded in Judaism’s prophetic and mystical traditions and incorporates insights from a variety of 20th-century influences, especially those with a progressive political vision.
Many in this religious reform movement are also involved in social change movements such as gay rights and feminism. And yet, they believe that such movements have tended to downplay or even deny the spiritual dimension of life.
The reformers do not simply accept Jewish traditions uncritically, but they do not reject them either. They wrestle with them.
When gays fight with the Bible, we often get pinned under some mighty heavy burdens. For example, Leviticus 18 says, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it is to’evah [abomination].” And Leviticus 20 commands the death penalty for men who lie with men (as well as for a wide variety of persons, including those who curse their father or mother).
The Jewish Renewal perspective advocates creating the greatest possible amount of inclusion for gays and lesbians among different Jewish denominations, grounded upon divergent rationales. Orthodox Jews have a conservative, literalistic way of reading the Bible. However, even Orthodox communities can take significant steps toward welcoming gays based on their own principles.
Steve Greenberg, writing in Tikkun magazine (tikkun.org), notes that Orthodox Jewish rabbis have articulated two main arguments for changing traditional beliefs around homosexuality based on the principles of o’ness and tinok shenishbah.
The first argument basically says that homosexuality is an involuntary condition that creates psychological duress for which sexually active gays shouldn’t be harshly condemned. The second argument says that homosexuals have been seduced by Western permissive values and should therefore be treated with leniency.
Greenberg says these strategies may be able to slowly nudge Orthodox communities into offering greater hospitality for gay members. He also notes that gay people “cannot reasonably be required to internalize the claims that we are either mentally ill or victims of a debased social milieu.” Most gays must wrestle more deeply with the Bible than the Orthodox traditions are ready to allow.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Ph.D. offers a radically inclusive vision for gays in Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation. For Lerner, God is not a big daddy or grand puppet master in the sky. For him, God is the force of healing and transformation in history.
Lerner does not assume, as the Orthodox do, that every word of Leviticus is the word of God. What demented, wrathful sort of God would not only condemn homosexuals, but demand that they be stoned to death? What sort of God would sanction treating women and children as chattle or tolerate slavery?
Lerner’s vision of Jewish Renewal holds that some of what is recorded in the Bible as the voice of God is actually the voice of human cruelty mistakenly attributed to God. Ultimately, people today are obligated to wrestle with the texts and separate the voice of healing and transformation from the voice of pain and distortion.
As rabbi Waskow says about God-wrestling, reading the Bible must be a synthesis of love making and war making. We must not merely try to understand what the book “really says” about homosexuality, but actively engage in a challenging process pointing all people toward God, the force that unifies all polarities.
When gays approach the Bible or other sacred books, we should do so the way wrestlers grapple with their foes. Becoming like the God that reconciles all opposites, we must turn a legacy of fear and hatred into the freedom of love.
Joe Perez is a Seattle-based writer who pens “Soulfully Gay,” a bi-weekly column that explores spirituality and religion from a gay man’s perspective. Contact him by e-mail at joe@writingwolf.com, and read more at joe-perez.com.
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