Rough Draft

It seems to me there are two parameters -- one has to do with
the nature of halacha, and how mutable it is, how mutable our understanding of it can be.

Another is what it means for the level of halacha -- whatever it is, kashrut, shabbat observance, niddah/mikvah -- to be "accepted" in the community. Obviously, at some level, each individual either decides to follow some particular point, ignore it, or follow it to some personal degree. But there are clearly degrees of cimmunal observance, ranging from one in which everyone more or less follows it, to one in which some people do and some people [privately] don't, but the general assumption is that everyone more or less does, to ones that the "rabbis" are expected to follow, but most everyone else doesn't. Maybe I'm naive, but I assume
it doesn't work this way in Orthodox communities!

And maybe it's worst in Conservative communities -- after all, in Reform communities, the halacha isn't considered binding even on the Rabbis. (I don't mean to be rude -- in fact, I'm trying to more or less paraphrase what Rabbi Bennett said tonight.) Conservative has the mixture of still considerable adherence to halacha, at least in principle, yet considerable avoidance of it by many laypeople, in practice (again, I don't mean to be rude and I am NOT excluding myself!). But we do seem to have the awkward situation in which Conservative Rabbis are generally fairly observant but most of the rest of us are not.

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side point: by not having to UPHOLD them, it leaves us free, in some ways, to want the rules to stay strict!

side point: this is why the single biggest issue with the current position of the law committee is the don't ask/don't tell ordination of gay rabbis thing. [there's also the issue of same-sex commitment ceremonies, but even that can be resolved differently at some congregations.]

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Anyway, that's one issue. The other issue is generally how much freedom we feel to review, revise, or reinterpret biblical commandments in creating halacha. Again, For the Reform, at least as Rabbi Bennett expressed it, this is not an issue at all -- for the orthodox, there is similarly less of an issue. But the Conservative movement is in an awkward middle ground.
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there's more to flesh out there, can I work in a link to this?

here are sentences that don't fit anywhere yet

Rabbi Bennett, in effect, questioned the premise of the class in studying these teshuvot. The people in Trembling Before G-d would question it, too.

Rabbi Greenberg, in his book,
only mentions the Conservative movement in passing, describing its position on homosexuality as one of "characteristic ambivalence" ...


Rabbi Bennett mentioned that he didn't think the people in Trembling Before G-d were particularly good models for gay Judaism, calling them "troubled" souls. That may well be, but I couldn't help thinking that, unlike those Orthodox who thought the movie's characters needed psychological treatment for their homosexuality, Bennett might think that they need treatment for their commitment, despite everything, to Orthodoxy.


Another unrelated thing that troubled me about so much of this is the focus on the upshot, the outcome, the end-product (ok that one breaks the meter).
Bennett praised Greenberg's book, not because he cares about the halachic arguments or thinks of them as particularly persuasive -- he's persuaded already! The teshuvot were classified only as more pro-gay or less so -- even Dorff's, which seemed pretty liberal to me, and only hesitated to overturn the status quo without some evidence of movement-wide support, went into the anti-gay pile, simply because it DID maintain the status quo.

And today we actually had the last class

I still think I was in a different seminar than everyone else. When I read the supposedly hidebound tshuva of Rabbi Roth, I found it to be sensitive and compassionate, hardly fire-and-brimstone. For that matter, when I read the supposedly outrageously radical article of Rabbi Artson, I found it not so dramatically different in its view of homosexuality than Roth's paper -- though the two certainly different in their view of halacha, they don't so much differ in how they judge people.

I wish we had looked at a more recent paper -- though not much is there -- maybe Rabbi Handler's?

But this week, we didn't do any of that, anyway, we had a visit from
Rabbi Bennett -- it was moving, too, but in a rather different way -- and, in an interesting sense, it paralleled the first week, in which we saw Trembling Before G-d -- not just in putting aside teshuvot for personal experiences, but in what it said -- partly by omission -- about the Conservative movements approach to halacha, quite apart from the specific issue of homosexuality.

I want to expand in this, but I have to work it out in my mind a bit first. Or maybe I should just dump it all on paper, while the muddiness is at least fresh.

Well, I'm not going to finish this post

this was from two weeks ago:

Today, in our weekly seminar on Homosexuality within Conservative Judaism at
my shul, we discussed the teshuva of Rabbi Joel Roth, which was, I think the principal statement behind the ultimate consensus
statement of policy . It's long (63 pages), we only had about 75 minutes, not everyone had read it beforehand, and -- well, it's a discussion group so we often got sidetracked.

Trembling Before G-d at Conservative shul

Last night, I went to the first of four once-per-week meetings on Homosexuality within the Conservative movement at my shul.

For this, the first meeting, we watched the movie Trembling Before G-d, and discussed
it briefly. (We didn't start until 8:15, or so, after Maariv, and had to be done by
10, so there wasn't much time for discussion).

I had seen the movie once before, but I definitely got something out of watching it again. It's a very managed presentation -- what documentary about an emotional subject isn't? -- and one can't help wondering whether some people interviewed weren't used in the documentary, or about the scenes not included.

But it's still quite a powerful movie and I certainly have profound sympathy for the gays and lesbian characters shown.

I asked one minor question in the discussion, but afterward, I thought about a few things -- let me just list two for now, maybe I'll add more later.

(1) I'd really like to know more about the orthodox gay study group they mention at the very end -- the fact that this group exists at all seems give some possibilities to the characters whose isolation was so well described in the movie.

(2) For us, as Conservative Jews, it should be striking that none of the people in the movie thought of Conservative or Reconstructionist (or Reform) shuls as any sort of solution to their need. Some of them were trying to still live within some orthodox community; others were living in isolation, but still felt drawn by orthodox standards and lifestyles; a few were apparently no longer practicing jews, but still felt drawn by the faith they had left behind. Again, I don't know if this is solely because of the selection process for participants and choice of scenes to be shown, but it sure seemed that way. The contradiction they were trying to resolve was between "Judaism" and their gay/lesbian being -- and those branches of Judaism that were more accepting and could resolve the contradiction didn't seem like resolutions at all.