Author Bio And Photos | Q and A with Rabbi Greenberg | Articles By Rabbi Greenberg




Q: Describe the genesis of Wrestling with God and Men? What was your greatest hope in writing the book? What was your greatest reservation?

A: I began writing in order to make sense of my life as a gay Orthodox Jew. My greatest hope was that I would succeed in that reconciliation for myself and for others. My reservations were multiple. Was I being unconscionably audacious to propose a change in biblical interpretation and normative halakhic practice? Was I personally knowledgeable enough, pious enough, to challenge the great Torah scholars? And what would I do if could not find enough material to build my case? What if I discovered that, for better or worse, these two identities were utterly irreconcilable, that I was dreaming an impossible dream? Despite these reservations I had a good deal of trust in God and in the tradition that I would find a way. There was no other impetus, no other reason goading me on. In fact, when I set out to write, publication was not even on my mind.

I began writing in 1992. What emerged was an article, published in 1993. This constituted my first attempt to explain myself. Both the experience of writing and the correspondence that developed afterwards led me to the realization that I needed to do this more carefully. Just when I was ready, a fellowship materialized and I went to Israel on the Jerusalem Fellows program in 1996 for two years. The fundamental kernel of Wrestling With God and Men formed during those two years. When I returned the US I had the solid beginning of a book.

Q: There is an inherent conflict in being an Orthodox rabbi and openly gay man. Could you talk about your efforts to resolve this conflict?

A: For a religious person the first problem is one's relationship with God. Initially God is wholly allied with the accusations and humiliations of society. But at some juncture in process -- often after a torturous, self-destructive and lonely journey -- God stops being a tormentor and starts being an advocate. You realize that God is not persecuting you; the tradition is simply being misapplied.

I identify my Jewish tradition with something incredibly precious. This perception has so shaped my subjectivity and physical and moral world that I wasn't going to let it off the hook so easily. The richness of the Jewish interpretive tradition was so precious to me that I didn't want to lose that as vehicle for engaging in God. I didn't want to abandon the Jewish community. I didn't want to give up the Torah. I had spent years studying the Torah. The paradox is that difficult passages are often the most fruitful, the most enlightening if you stick with them. Trust, hard work, seeking the insights from the great minds of the past that had struggled with the dilemma before and careful attention detail most often led to marvelous illumination. Often the more difficult in the beginning, the more illuminating I would find it to be in the end. Being a rabbi actually helped me resolve my personal conflict because through my rabbinic training I found myself attracted, again and again to hard verses in the text and I was inspired to wrestle with them, turn them on their head, find new meaning and interpretation. Repeatedly, I found that they were sites of surprising revelation.

I think it is harder for people who have a fundamentalist approach to text. Either something is stated in black and white, or it is not. For such people, God is so identified with a single fixed interpretation of Scripture that there is no moving beyond the God the Tormentor stage, toward God the Advocate, God the Comforter, God the Healer of Broken Hearts.

Q: How would you define your various reading audiences?

A: My readers are Jews, Christians, people interested in religion generally, and of course, gay people. Of course this includes academics in gay studies, religious studies and Jewish studies programs, and seminarians from all different faiths.

Q: Though written from a Jewish point of view, does your book -- and your personal journey -- transcend religious boundaries? What relevance does your book have for people of other faiths?

A: Readers are going to have to tell me the answer to that question... and some already have. What people are saying is that, despite religious differences, the struggle is very similar. There is a shared need to understand God's will, both independent from and mediated by sacred texts. It is very exciting to see communities take the risks entailed in hearing gay people to tell their stories, in studying the relevant texts together with an awareness of the human consequences of different interpretations. People are confronting uncomfortable ambiguities. While we may believe in God and trust in the revelation, often enough these prove insufficient to determine with certainty what God's will is. Ambiguity is built into the enterprise. For those for whom religion is their bedrock, a secure ground in an insecure world, such discoveries can be profoundly disturbing.

The reaction I have had from readers of other religions has been supportive. Priests, both Catholic and Episcopal, have said wonderful things about my book. I also know that the publication of my book has enabled gay young people raised in religious homes to broach the subject of their identity with their parents.

Q: What do you feel is your most important contribution to the debate on the oft-quoted religious prohibitions on homosexual behavior? Is there anything in your book that you would amend, or add to?

A: I think I offer three important contributions. The first is that every place where homosexuality comes up in a Biblical context, it is violent. That fact ought to point us in a certain direction. Secondly, the fact that the Bible tells us nothing about lesbian sex and only about one act (male anal sex) tells us that Bible was not interested in homosexuality per se. Last, I think that my attempt at the end of the book to mark a path for both integrity and community by claiming that we need not agree in order to share community is rather important. Fair disagreement on the meaning of homosexuality can be tolerated while sustaining a shared communal policy of inclusion. This is perhaps the most significant contribution of all.

Q: What is the greatest possible fusion of a traditional Jewish lifestyle and a homosexual identity?

A: I can't imagine it yet... we're at the beginning of a process of turning around an age-old fear and I have no idea what the future is going to look like.

I can tell you what I'd like it to look like. Fewer people will be frightened and suicidal, fewer people will need to seek refuge a sub-culture framed around sexual liberation, fewer people will spend their lives lying to themselves and others, creating double-lives, or utterly cut off from their feelings lest they discover the dangerous secret. More family members will understand, more communities will embrace human difference and (words???)

A good goal is to envision the Welcoming Synagogue. A welcoming synagogue, as I explain in the last chapter, would be a community where a covenant of sorts was established between the leadership, the congregation and the gay and lesbian members.

In short, 1) No Humiliation: The rabbi would agree not to humiliate or intimidate gay and lesbian people from the pulpit; 2) No Advocacy: Lesbian and gay congregants would accept that the synagogue is not a proper platform for the social advocacy; and 3) No Lying: Gay and lesbian congregants will not be obligated to be silent or untruthful but will be welcome to tell the truth about their relationships and families.

What will emerge out of this, I don't know. I can imagine it being marvelous and scary for many people. In places where religion is about reframing the world as a safe garden, it will be a threat. In places where religion is about meaning and depth, it will be easier. In places where the synagogue is about familiarity and comfort, it will be harder to ask people to overcome their gender assumptions. Yet in a place where people crave a balance between familiarity and justice, between difference and comfort, it can be beautiful.

Q: As an Orthodox rabbi does it require courage to declare your gay identity publicly... and repeatedly?

A: Surely, it requires an enormous amount of courage to stand inside the sentence "I am Gay." This is very bold, very courageous, and very difficult. I remember myself trying the sentence on in my head and running away, turning around, not looking, avoiding. Then once I was able to say in my head, it would not stop repeating. For a long time I heard it in my head, but was terrified of saying it out loud to another human being.

One young man came out to me when I was still very closeted. I knew that I wasn't going to be much help to him, because I wasn't going to come out to him. He was ahead of me in the process. It was a very powerful experience. I told him that while I couldn't explain the verses in Leviticus, if he decided to have a relationship that was short of sexual intercourse, he would be leading a life well ahead in sanctity of other straights who were not keeping the Jewish laws of family purity. I was trying to give him a context in which he didn't have to hate himself. I realized that I wasn't ready to stand in this place of "I am," and he was. It was a really telling moment.

One of the most courageous moments was when I was in a teacher's house in Israel. He is a scholar of Jewish law, a smart man with a great sense of humor who had guests at his table, including his daughter and her new husband. The meal begins and he says, "Simcha, you have to see this. I got a Reform ketubah (wedding contract) of two men, one of them's not Jewish, and they're getting married! You have to see this!"

There I was feeling utterly humiliated while listening to a lampoon of same-sex love as this ketubah that was making its way around the table. I stared at the artistic depiction of the two men on a cake, and said nothing.

Finally, unable to sit in silence, I called my rebbe by his first name and said, "Aaron sit down, because I don't think you understand. Maybe it's easy to make fun of two cartoon characters on a ketubah and while you may not want to sanctify this relationship, they no doubt have searched long and hard to find each other. But you wouldn't know what it's like to struggle against the sexual norms that deprive you of any hope of love or intimacy and then finally find your heart's desire. How could you understand this unless someone in your world dared to say to you, rabbi, "I am gay." So, then let me be the first to tell you. "Rabbi, I am gay."

My teacher sat in stunned silence and then asked, " Simcha are you serious?"

"Yes," I replied.

" Have you gotten help?" he inquired, still incredulous.

"Yes," I said. "I tried, but this is who I am."

So, here is this entire religious holiday dinner party reduced to shocked silence and I ask my teacher the final question: "Rabbi, if I did go for help and I came back and said I was cured, would you let me date your daughter?"

He didn't even answer. In the midst of his silence, I said, "Of course not. You wouldn't want me anywhere near your daughter. So, if you wouldn't you risk your own daughter's happiness on such a cure, whose daughter would you risk?"

This happened years ago and we have never spoken since.

And one other word about courage: it takes a good deal of self-assurance and strength to come out to your family. In my case, my father was easy. My father took six months to deal with it. Then, one day he said, "I love you, you're my son," and that was that. My mother, on the other hand, struggled with my coming out because she's a Holocaust survivor. For my mother, just the fact that my life hasn't included marriage to a woman and the production of a nice, big family is very painful to her.

In an Orthodox community, it is incredibly difficult for people to come out to parents because parents conflate their fear and sadness with the religious injunction. Often families use the tradition to convince themselves (and their child) that homosexuality is a curable disease.

Q: Do you believe it is possible for GBLTs of all religions to lead as open, traditional and integrated a life as you have?

A: Being integrated is a great ideal. I'm on my own path, but I'm not sure I'm there yet. Honestly speaking, it is much easier to be integrated in more liberal Jewish settings. Still, integration is the aim. I can envision an integrated life in many different ways but there are not a lot of places where I can see it happening yet.

Creating traditional frames for radical lives is not easy. We might prefer to live in an already perfected world. It would be nice if the Messiah were to come tomorrow and transform our world. Until then, we are called to live "as if," the Messiah has already come -- to create by the force of our wills and the power of our imagination as much of the new social reality as we can.

Happily, this sort of imaginative social invention is already happening in between the cracks and crevices of American Jewish life. There are all kinds of experiments where people are mixing religious observance with cultural creativity, where intellectual currents are brought to bear on traditional Jewish text study and where spiritual seekers of all kinds are introduced to Judaism as a path.

I do see the beginnings of this kind of community that expects a high level of participation, an active search for God and a high level of commitment both to Jewish law and practice alongside an activism to make the world a better place.

Q: How has your family reacted to your public profile... and to the publication of Wrestling with God and Men?

A: I already spoke about my parents' reaction to my coming out. My siblings were very accepting and supportive. When the book came out, my parents were very resistant to fact that it would make a big difference. I don't think my parents had any idea what I was doing in my life. I think they are surprised at the publicity and bit daunted by the impact that the book is having. I think they are very proud about this, about my work with the film (Trembling Before G-d), and that my book making a difference. A number of friends with gay kids come to my mom and I think she is happy to talk to them.

Q: Do you have any advice for religious GLBTs in coming out to their friends, family members and community?

A: The advice is: come out, come out wherever you are. But only when you are ready. I never urge people to come out unless and until they are ready. I think it is a mistake to come out before you have clarified in your own gut that is is alright to be gay. Sometimes, coming out to your parents can sound like you hate being gay and then your parents will ally with the attempt to cure or fix you even if that was not your intent. You can't ask your parents to help you in the process of self-acceptance. This is lonely work done in dark night of the soul. Until the clarity comes it pays to come out only to known advocates, support groups in one's community, or therapists. When you are ready, remember that coming out to one's parents is a commitment to caretaking. You've got to be prepared to help your parents mourn the loss of lifelong fantasies. If you haven't turned the corner on that grief yourself, their grief will bring you back to your own.

Q: Did you have to mourn the life you thought you would have?

A: Sure. For a long while I mourned my inability to be a dad in the way I thought I would be. I really wanted kids and I wanted them early in life. It took me a good, long time to accept that. I so much wanted to be a parent and to be deprived of it was very, very hard.

Q: What would you identify as the leading issues for GLBTs as we approach the 2004 elections?

A: Two things are key. First, sustaining the pressure on elected officials to explain why they wouldn't treat same-sex marriages as a civil rights issue. We need to force elected officials to see that to deprive people of the right to establish a household with all the benefits that one gets in a marital union is an issue of civil rights and fair play. We need to sustain pressure on them to recognize this whether they agree with the language of marriage or not.

Secondly, we need to encourage people, literally to give people courage, to come out of the closet where they are, to attempt to stay in their communities of origin and to demand at very least that they hear our stories. We ought not to let others own the religious language that has so demeaned us. And we must not succumb to the simplistic notion that the debate is between religion and secularity. This raging debate is on the inside of religious communities struggling to make sense of God's world and word.

Q: What do you hope is the lasting message -- or legacy -- of Wrestling with God and Men?

A: That it would provide many people with a starting point for reconnecting to their religious traditions, which they thought denounced them, to their religious communities that they thought rejected them and to God who they thought hated them. I deeply hope that many people find their way back to the Jewish community through the book, and that all sorts of faith communities open their doors for the displaced and exiled people who long to come home.