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The CLAL Diversity Project

Rabbi Steven Greenberg heads the CLAL Diversity Project, a coordinated effort to provide Jewish communities with the intellectual, spiritual and pedagogic resources to respond to the challenges of human diversity and more specifically to the questions of sexual orientation.

For more information on the CLAL Diversity Project, email Ruth Bregman.

CLAL Diversity Project

Background

For more than two and a half years Rabbi Steve Greenberg traveled with filmmaker Sandi Simcha DuBowski, conducting dialogues about the film Trembling Before G-d in theatres, community centers, synagogues, and churches. The groundbreaking work of the documentary was used to open a conversation that had been taboo in many traditional religious environments. The film presents the testimonies of seven gay Orthodox and formerly Orthodox Jews and introduces the viewer to the struggle for understanding and acceptance that gay people face in traditional religious environments.

However, the film did not address "head on" the substantive religious questions.  Its task was to ask a good question, not to answer it. The absence of any meaningful "response" to the normative halakhic ruling has been frustrating to many.

Filling this gap is Rabbi Greenberg’s new book, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

Wrestling with God and Men is the product of Rabbi Greenberg's ten-year struggle to reconcile his two identities. In his book Greenberg marks a path that is both responsible to human realities and deeply committed to God and Torah. Employing traditional rabbinic resources, Greenberg presents readers with surprising biblical interpretations of the creation story, the love of David and Jonathan, the destruction of Sodom, and the condemnatory verses of Leviticus. Drawing on a wide array of religious texts, Greenberg introduces readers to occasions of same-sex love in Talmudic narratives, medieval Jewish poetry and prose, and traditional Jewish case law literature.

Ultimately, Greenberg argues that the historical record is more diverse and the law is more open to reconsideration than has ever been admitted, and that the well-being, if not the very lives, of gay people are at stake.  Orthodox communities must open up dialogue and discussion alongside serious learning—precisely the foundation upon which Jewish law rests—in order to truly deal with the issue of same-sex love.
CLAL Diversity Project

In January of 2004, CLAL created the CLAL Diversity Project to send CLAL’s message of diversity and tolerance into the community at large on the issues of gay and lesbian inclusion. This project continues and expands Rabbi Greenberg’s work.

Book Tour as Communal and Religious Challenge

The first legs of the book tour took Steve to Mexico City, London, Brighton, Leeds, and Glasgow to conduct community conversations. In Leeds, he was invited to speak in an Orthodox synagogue by Rabbi David Sedley. A controversy broke out around the engagement when the rival Orthodox rabbi in Leeds publicly attacked Rabbi Sedley for the invitation. The synagogue’s elders promptly canceled the event without consulting their rabbi, who in consequence resigned from the post. The news of Sedley’s decision to leave the post sparked heated debate in the press and in the community.

The Leeds book event did eventually occur when key members of the synagogue, one of whom is a parent of a gay child, paid for an outside venue. The event, quite well publicized by the furor, was packed with Jews from both communities.

While such dramatic events are surely not envisioned or even desired, the opening up of this conversation is itself a challenge to many. Following the events in the United Kingdom, the Diversity Project moved on to the U.S., where Steve did events in twenty-five cities.

The timing of the publication of Wrestling has surely been fortuitous. The book was released February 15th, 2004 just as the Massachusetts Supreme Court had voted to clear the way for same-sex civil marriage, Mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing civil marriage licenses to same-sex couples in San Francisco and President Bush announced his support for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage in the United States.  

Against the emotionally gripping backdrop of hundreds of longtime couples lining up on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco and later in Cambridge three events marked the book tour.  The first was in San Francisco, where State Assemblyman Mark Leno and Rabbi Greenberg were invited to the prestigious Grace Cathedral Forum to speak together on religious and political concerns of same-sex marriage. The weekly event is web cast to thousands of listeners as well. The second event, sponsored by the University of Judaism, the west coast center of Conservative Judaism, convened a public conversation on “Same-Sex Marriage” with Dennis Prager, Rabbi Elliot Dorff, Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky and Rabbi Greenberg. The Conservative Movement does not permit its rabbis to conduct same-sex marriages, nor will it yet ordain openly lesbian or gay rabbis.  And the third was a forum sponsored by Harvard University Institute of Politics and the Human Rights Campaign.  Before a packed audience of more than 800, Rabbi Steven Greenberg, Bishop Gene Robinson and Reverend Zina Jacques asked what it means to be moral, sexual humans in our society. (You can view this 9/21/04 JFK Forum event online at:  www.iop.harvard.edu/events_forum_archive.html.)

The CLAL Diversity Project is slated to continue until the end of 2005. It has already touched, inspired and encouraged many people. Many who have felt exiled have for the first time imagined coming home to their Jewish roots.  In San Francisco, at an event at the newly constructed San Francisco Jewish Community Center, a young man approached Rabbi Greenberg and said, "Thank you, Rabbi. I cannot explain this feeling I have now, but perhaps the best way to communicate to you what this means to me is to say that for the first time I feel clean, I feel your words have washed me clean. Thank you."

Curriculum Project

To date there is no coordinated curriculum on homosexuality for traditional Jewish educational settings. Last year CLAL received a seed grant from the Nathan Cummings Foundation to create a curriculum on Judaism and homosexuality for schools, youth groups and summer camp staffs. Rabbi Steven Greenberg heads the project, which brings together educators, psychologists and curriculum specialists to help create this resource.  He has met with Matt Lavine, the director of "In-Schools Programming" for the national office of the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, and with Shlomo Ashkenazi, a therapist who has specialized with Orthodox gay clients over many years and was the founder of the Hetrick-Martin School, a high school for glbt youth. Dr. Saudra Epstein of the Akiva Academy of Philadelphia and Mark Stolovitzky, Headmaster of Kadima in Buffalo, independently have begun to address the issue of sexual orientation in the context of their schools and have recently joined Rabbi Greenberg on his curriculum team.  In addition, Naomi Mark, the New York based therapist who appeared in Trembling and who orchestrated our Orthodox Mental Health Conference, has joined the curricular team.  

In 2002, the Trembling Before G-d Outreach Project carried the film to over 2000 Israeli educators and school counselors.  Amy Persky, a social worker in Jerusalem, served as a lead facilitator and conducted hundreds of post-screening Trembling dialogues with Israeli educators and therapists in religious schools.  Amy has agreed to take a central role in developing the curriculum.  

The materials will be based upon the work of the Israel Outreach Project conducted in 2002-2003 (with the help of Amy Persky), the work of the Mental Health Conference convened in October 2003, and Rabbi Greenberg’s newly published book, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Further funding is needed to complete, pilot, and hone the curricula in 2005 and then to implement it in 2006.