After death, holiness

[liv]

Which is not a very profound title, it's just that the assigned Torah reading for last week was two sections back to back, and the sections are named after the first word (significant word, that is, otherwise half of them would be called "it came to pass" or "[God] spoke" or "the"). But anyway, this particular Torah reading includes the Holiness code of Leviticus, which is a somewhat miscellaneous collection of laws that must be kept in order to be holy, because God is holy. Which in turn includes that infamous verse about a man lying with a male, the one that some fundamentalist Protestants seem to want to try to base their whole religion on: And a man that sexually uses a male, with the sexual habits of a woman, they have both done an abomination, they must certainly be put to death, they are blood-guilty [Leviticus 20:13]

So I read that out, Ezra-style, which is to say reading a verse at a time with a running translation, as I learned from my teacher R' Hadassah Davies. And I prepared a somewhat milquetoast sermon saying that I could preach my whole sermon about a single verse, an uplifting one like You shall the love the stranger as yourself or a controversial one like putting men to death for sexual acts with other men, but instead I would talk about the whole context of the Holiness code and what holiness means and the concepts of "just laws" which seem to fit with ethical instincts and "statutes" which seem to be entirely arbitrary. In fact my lovely lovely community didn't let me get through more than half a sentence before they started arguing with me. Well, not so much arguing with me as arguing with the Torah I'd just read.

Somebody declared indignantly that she didn't particularly fancy stoning Graham Norton to death (I didn't know who he was but I assumed he was an out gay celebrity and later confirmed this on the internet.) Another member of the congregation, who has quite debilitating social anxiety and would find it pure torture to speak up in a lively debate, came up to me afterwards and confirmed, making an obvious effort to speak beyond social pleasantries, that we wouldn't need to execute Graham Norton because whatever he did with his boyfriend would be in private and there would not be the two kosher witnesses required for the death penalty. This is in fact the correct rabbinic answer and one of the ways that Judaism has historically dealt with the Torah mandating the death penalty for sexual behaviours. But it's not really satisfactory if you're looking for a proper gay rights perspective, having a theoretical death penalty which is absolutely never going to be enforced as part of your religious teaching is still extremely hurtful.

I had been reluctant to speak too critically about the man-with-a-male verse, basically because I didn't want to offend my community's Orthodox sensibilities. But by failing to challenge it directly rather than being wishy-washy about it, I offended their basic human values, which is far worse. And when they delighted me by being outraged at finding that verse in their beloved Torah, I continued equivocating, I didn't say: of course I don't want to execute Graham Norton or any of my gay brothers or my own bi self. I'm not closeted within the community, but I'm not exactly out either, I've only made the kinds of comments that other Queer people would correctly interpret to mean that I'm one of them, not the kind that straight people pay attention to.

A couple of days later, Keshet tweeted this really amazing article, where a gay man imagines the speech he could have given at his bar mitzvah when he was assigned this week's Torah portion. Mutatis mutandis, I could have given that sermon on Saturday, and I didn't.

Today I was at a mini-conference, and one of the talks was an absolutely brilliant presentation of a PhD on the experience of elderly LGB people with nursing care. (It wasn't about GSM people in general, it was specifically about gay men, lesbians and bi women, because that is the scope of the research. No, I don't know why no bi-identified men were included, but anyway.) Basically as LGB people age they are being pushed back into the closet and forced to pass as heterosexual in order to not have completely miserable lives when receiving home care or in sheltered housing or nursing homes. And they tend to need this kind of care at younger ages than their heterosexual counterparts because fewer of them have spouses, children or birth families who can carry out informal care tasks in the early stages of age-related decline. For the same reason older LGB people are less likely to have relatives to advocate for them and make sure they get the best possible care if they're too frail to deal with the system themselves. Many of the interviewed subjects said they didn't want to be in a "happy rainbow" home for all kinds of people with GSM identities, they wanted provision specifically for gay men or lesbian and bi women respectively. Gay men didn't want to be in homes where the majority of residents would be women, even lesbian and bi women, because of the differences in life-expectancy. Lesbians particularly, coming from the older generation, had often had very little close contact with men for most of their lives, and didn't want to be stuck with "dirty old men" who might have lost their inhibitions about inappropriate sexual behaviour.

I talked to the speaker afterwards, asking a question about whether she thought the problem would diminish over the next decades as LGB people become much more integrated / assimilated into mainstream society. We had a happy bonding session when she answered that she thought the problem would continue, because some people are just visibly gender non-conforming and are never going to fit the marriage-and-kids heteronormative not too threatening model. And because the relatively accepting (at least accepting of assimilated not too visibly Queer gay people) social milieu is limited; there are intersectional issues notably including class. But even people who have spent their working lives in nice fluffy liberal middle-class bubbles, when they start needing care are having their lives governed by low skilled care workers who are often immigrants from countries with very different attitudes to gender and sexuality, and may end up depending on services provided by religious groups, and thus may find a much less accepting environment.

In some way I feel like the problems this researcher was outlining are partly my fault. Because I kind of give a pass to older people and more conservative religious people and people who aren't academics and professionals if they're at least somewhat homophobic, so in lots of ways I'm helping to perpetuate a heteronormative environment. Same at work, I'm really not particularly visible or particularly willing to stick my neck out and make a fuss about places where the curriculum isn't really inclusive. I'm not doing anything active to prevent my doctorlings from growing up to assume all their patients are going to be straight, which will contribute to the kind of difficulties described when people from GSM backgrounds are trying to access care.

I do welcome comments on this, but please do understand that it's fairly sensitive stuff. And if there were an easy answer I'd have found it some time in the past 20 years.

Comments

[hatam_soferet]

I think if it was me I'd talk about how there are a LOT of bits of Torah we straight out ignore, and bring some suitable sources, and how we don't have a problem with straight out ignoring a lot of bits and mostly Torah is a sort of rallying-point thing for HOLYFEELS, so ignoring the holiness code is just one more thing in that line.

The aging stuff is scary. I had not thought about that.

[liv]

I think maybe the ~holyfeels~ thing is somewhat incompatible with people in positions of authority actually saying from the bimah "this isn't important, we can just ignore it". In order to use Torah as a rallying point we have to do some amount of pretending to take it really seriously, even when in practice we don't actually follow it. Also, this particular community, they are Orthodox-identified but not extremely knowledgeable, I think if I challenge their identity of being on some level "Torah-observant" Jews they'll just completely not listen to me through all the cognitive dissonance.

I also don't want to ignore the holiness code because it has some of the best mishpatim, using good weights and measures, loving the stranger, not cursing the deaf, honouring the elderly.

I don't think people are concerned with the literal practicalities of having to execute gay men, everybody understands that we don't do that, we don't even try to get into a position where we would have the means to do that. It's more like, if we are going to use the Torah as a source of ~holyfeels~, it's a problem that that same Torah says that sex acts between men are an abomination.

[kaberett]

[I am wondering if there are volunteering company-for-people-in-residential-care schemes specifically aimed at GSM populations. I shall investigate. IN THE MORNING.]

[liv]

See, this is why you are awesome, I go to a talk about GSM people in care homes and write angsty posts about it, you actually look out for practical things you can do! If it exists anywhere it'll probably be Cambridge, though if the researcher is right and most older LGB people are going back into the closet in order to survive in mainstream care systems, I'm not entirely optimistic. Do let me know what you find, anyway.

[kaberett]

But I wouldn't have thought of it if you hadn't written about the situation :-)

I haven't managed to get research done, but I am mulling over the possibility of folding it into the work I'm hoping to do with the Big Sibling Project. I think it fits really nicely with the idea of community-building; and there are ways in which I think even e.g. having a weekly Scrabble date with Someone With Similar Experience, even if you never talk about it, can be helpful? So. Yes. Ponder ponder ponder.

[liv]

I think that's a really good way to approach it. It's a big issue, even a seasoned, engaged activist like you isn't going to Fix All The Things here. But yes, just spending some social time with someone and not having to play the pronoun game, that sounds like it could well be worthwhile. Or sometimes even having someone to visit at all, if you're an older gay man or lesbian there's a good probability you have no children to visit you and no religious community supporting you.

From a community-building perspective, I really strongly believe that having a shared project with the aim of helping others is much better for building community than just trying to get together for the sake of being a community or mutually supportive group. If you can get a scheme up and running I imagine it could go quite a way to helping the volunteers feel like a cohesive community too. There's also the eldering thing, the lack of cross-generational continuity and access to history that people always talk about in GSM contexts, I only have vague fuzzy concepts in this direction but something like that.

[khalinche]

I was wondering this exact thing.

[nicki]

*theoretical exercise that has little to do with the historical interpretation of that passage* Technically speaking, one could take that passage and interpret it in a kind of Kantian manner in which the passage, rather than instructing men not to lie with men at all, is simply instructing them not to treat other men as means to sexual gratification, as an object for sexual use or an owned thing, because they are men and therefore they should be treated as self-directing self-owned persons, as ends in and of themselves, and that neither should men allow themselves to be treated as less than self-directing self-owned persons. Kind of like the Athenians where the male friend you slept with was an honorable partner and the wife you slept with was a state-of-the-art appliance- house cleaner, cook, and babymaker that you purchased from a colleague (not literally, but more in the kind of self-story they told themselves and others).

Of course that depends on ignoring pretty much ALL the historical baggage invested in that particular passage AND comes with it's very own problematic themes for women.

[liv]

Yeah, completely, that's how R' Greenberg reads the passage in question, and I do accept that interpretation, preferring the sexist / patriarchal reading over the outright homophobic one, partly because we have developed better tools for responding to scriptural sexism. If I had had more time to prepare and more courage I might have introduced that idea in my sermon, but it's the kind of thing that needs a lot of sources to back it up.

I think the problem is not the verse itself, but my presenting it to the community who may or may not be aware of the detailed modern scholarship about it. And yes, the historical and contemporary context too. I think if I do preach on this section again, I will do my research and do a proper, thorough critique.

[lilacsigil]

Yeah, the aged care issue is one that worries me deeply as an out lesbian in a rural community. We don't have and don't want kids (especially not for the purpose of being our care workers!) but our choices are going to come down to "move to the city" (there's at least one GLBT aged care village currently being built) or "stay here", relying on the built-up good will of people who actually know us. There are five out lesbians (and no apparent gay men or bi people) in the area; before we moved here there were none.

[liv]

Yes, I can see how that's a really scary thing. There are lots and lots of reasons why any plans people make for their old age might fall through, but it feels like the fallback scenario is worse for GLBT folk. The fact you've built up goodwill locally is a really amazing thing, but that's only as secure as you being fit enough to remain where you are.

I don't think most people really go about having kids as a specific old-age care plan. Individual older people might or might not have supportive offspring, and even helpful offspring are quite likely to reach a point where they can't provide for their parents without professional help. But as a population, lesbians and gay men are statistically less likely to have children, though I do hope that as society becomes more accepting more and more will at least have spouses or acknowledged life-partners.

[yalovetz]

I chaired a study group on this parsha last Sunday. My take on it was to look at the purpose of the passage. I argued that, since this verse is part of a section that is mostly about prohibitions against incest, that the purpose was about setting out proper sexual conduct within family and social relationships. And, like a lot of Leviticus, specifically contrasting this with the conduct of surrounding tribes and their cultic practices.

So I used it as a springboard to ask the group to think about their concept of family, what proper sexual conduct meant to them in relation to their family values, and how this differed, if at all, from the mainstream messages about sexuality and sexual conduct that we find in modern media and society.

My rabbi's answer to this was that his concept of family involved a committed loving monogamous couple raising children, and that if this verse prohibited homosexual behaviour because it couldn't result in children, the technological and sociological changes we've seen mean that's no longer the case. He argued that we should be supporting same sex marriage and valuing same sex sexual relationships that take place within that sort of monogamous framework, because they can now provide a stable basis for raising children.

My own response is rather different, and more closely aligned with one of the commenter's above. I have a rather broader definition of family than my rabbi but was prompted to think about a common mode of developing sexual relationships in our society (internet dating) and whether it fits with my own standards and values for how I want to interact with prospective sexual partners. My experience with internet dating was that it encouraged me to evaluate others along a narrow framework of whether they were a suitable partner for me, rather than seeing them as a unique and valuable person in their own right. Approaching people in the latter manner via internet dating proved not only incredibly draining but also demoralising and unreciprocal. This might seem a bit tangential to the parsha/verse, but I think it still relates back to my values with regards to creating family and living my values in sexual relationships.

[liv]

Ooh, this is brilliant, really nice drash! Sexual conduct in line with family values, I think that's a really sensible, and also an honest reading. It also means that if people are towards the more uncomfortable with homosexuality end of the spectrum, they have a really good opening to express their views in a positive way, without being pushed to either say something bigoted or to get all defensive about how they're not bigoted. The internet dating thing is a good example too.

I think what I should have done is actually planned to lead a discussion on the verse, rather than trying to evade it and being caught on the back foot because people wanted to talk about it anyway. But this is definitely something to add to my toolkit for having that discussion, when it next comes up.

[daharyn]

Here in the US we have at least one organization that's trying to bring both awareness and services to our community elders. They work on a local level and on a policy level. Is there a comparable organization *for* elders in the UK? I ask because I think it isn't enough to volunteer, it's important that we empower people as they age, and structures like this one can help build community.

(SAGE is like, the single most awesome organization at Pride every year.)

(catching up via LJ, possibly more comments as I read through.)