Sunday, March 05, 2006
Gays and Conservative Judaism
Congregation Beth El offers Family Membership to Gay and Lesbian couples. In this regard we are ahead of the curve. Our Conservative Movement is about to readdress the issue of homosexuality in Jewish law. The law committee will take up the issue at a meeting next week. I'll be going to the Rabbinical Assembly's annual convention in Mexico City in two weeks and this promises to be a hot topic. To read about the controversy in THE FORWARD click here: http://forward.com/main/article.php?ref=siegel200603011107
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So, now that they've been exposed in both trying to hide their deliberations, and having taken the brave and courageous step of postponing a decision yet again...what will you as a Conservative Rabbi who's already made commitment in your move on membership, or what can we as the Conservative movement's laity do to move these supposed "leaders of the movement" from their reprehensible and embarrassingly obvious bobbing and weaving on the issue? Will this become a political acid test for who will be the next chancellor? I am an adult who chose Conservative Judaism because it seemed the right way---not too right and not too left, and I've made that my adult lifestyle and how I raise my kids. I realize fully that the middle of the road is probably the hardest place to be, but I find this "don't ask don't tell" policy just reprehensible, and the cloak and dagger stuff just beyond acceptable. Between my disappointment on the local level, and this at the movement level,I am really losing all faith in this supposed movement.
"Sof Ma'arav"
Dear Rich and "Sof Ma'arav",
Thanks for posting your opinions. I'm glad this can be a forum for open debate. I think that open debate is what has made our people so vibrant. I also think it is what is making the discussions among the Conservative Movement's Comm. on Jewish Law and Standards so frustrating. Many of us, Rabbis and lay people alike would like to see the position papers and have them debated openly.
I don't think, however, that the Law Comm.'s deliberations are "cloak and dagger". I believe that they are honestly and earnestly trying to find halachic pathways to inclusion for gays and lesbians. Ours, at Beth El was a rather simple step, relatively free of halachic implications. The Law Comm. hopes to go further and be more conclusive. I believe that they are taking their responsibilities seriously, balancing their obligations to both Halacha and the gay community. Until such time as they have fully evaluated the issue from a Halachic standpoint I am content to be patient and let the process continue along the path toward both decision and compromise.
It is my hope that more of our Movement will come to understand that gay couples can and do have devoted, committed, loving families. It is this truth that motivated us as a shul to take this step some 4 years ago. And yet, as the process unfolds I urge you (all of us) to recognize that balancing obligations is not just a difficult and often frustrating endeavor, but a most meaningful one as well. As an old proverb says, "A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor." Studying the sources, debating their implications, and understanding our community with greater sensitivity will make us all both stronger and more compassionate.
Glad to see this being discussed by the Rabbinical Assemby and by Beth El. When the different opinions are circulated for comment, I hope you will share them with us as well as your own views in response to those various authorities. I, for one, agree with Rich Dutkin.
I wish that the religion that i was raised in and that I love would have accepted this years ago. Maybe if they had my brother would have felt more of a connection both to the Jewish religion and to Beth El, the synagogue he was also raised in. Too many years have gone by of not accepting the differences in people.
So I want to take a minute to report what is going on here at JTS surrounding this issue. It's an incredible time here at the Seminary, with students making speeches and other public declarations of their opinions on the subject of equal rights for all people in the Conservative movement, regardless of their sexual orientation. When we found out Wednesday afternoon that CJLS postponed their decision, we were upset and annoyed. Some people said that this is typical, CJLS never votes on something during the first reading of teshuvot, while others said that this was a delay tactic until we get a new chancellor. I happen to know students who have had to leave JTS because they did not want to be in the closet. There are also students who cannot, at this time, be open about their sexuality within the walls of the Seminary. Many students here show their support by wearing rainbow'd buttons that proclaim "Ordination Regardless of Orientation." We wear these buttons to show that regardless of whether we are gay or straight, we are dedicated to serving the Jewish community and supporting each other.
Thanks Abbi, for the update. FYI, fellow bloggers, Abbi is a former Beth El Religious School student who is now in the Graduate School of JTS, finishing her degree in Jewish education. Abbi will be entering Rabbinical School at the Seminary in the fall.
I stand by my depiction of this affair as "cloak and dagger" and add a yech, yech, and "I need to take a shower" about the proceedings...as reported in media such as the Forward, NYT, and the following post, from another websitesite, from RavRapper:Last week, the official press release from the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly claimed that a decision on the movement’s policy concerning homosexuality had been put off yet again, this time to December, because the teshuvot under consideration needed “extensive revisions.” Pushing the next meeting off to December already sounded suspicious, since the law committee was scheduled to meet in both June and September, either of which would have provided enough time for revisions to be made. And the committee had already seen the teshuvot before, so it was hard to imagine that the need for “extensive revisions” would have come as a surprise. Everyone assumed the delay was a strategic move related to the fact that JTS would have a new Chancellor by December. Current Chancellor, Dr. Ismar Schorsch, has been vehemently and vocally opposed to gay ordination and gay unions.
The first hint that anyone– including most garden variety Conservative rabbis– got that something shadier had gone down came in a New York Times article published the day after the meeting. There, Rabbi Kass Abelson, head of the law committee, declared that the Tucker teshuvah (the most lenient option under consideration, though he didn’t mention it by name) was so “revolutionary” that a simple majority of the committee had voted– against the author’s wishes, as was later discovered– to turn the teshuva into a “takanah.” (The Conservative Movement seems to use the word takanah to mean “a really big decision” rather than its usual technical sense.) And, lo and behold, it just so happens to be that last year a small group of rabbis pushed through an (illegal) change to the Rabbinical Assembly’s constitution upping the number of votes needed by the law committee to approve a takanah from 13 (a simple majority) to 20 (80%). Thus, for all intents and purposes, the Tucker teshuva as written is dead in the water– there’s precisely no chance that it could garner 80% of the committee’s votes. Rabbi Abelson noted in the Times article that the law committee had not approved a single takanah in the 20 years he had served on the committee– and that was before the 80% rule was in effect.
Read the sordid details in this week’s Forward article below. And note that in addition to the rule-changing fiasco, the delay until December means that four rabbis who are known to be pro-change, including two of the authors on the Tucker teshuva, will have rotated off the committee. Then stay posted (or write your favorite Conservative rabbi and yell). A group of concerned rabbis will be trying to bring the matter to light at the Rabbinical Assembly’s annual meeting, starting this Sunday in Mexico City. (Mexico City?!)
Gay Issues Roil Rabbis In Advance Of Parley
By JENNIFER SIEGEL
March 17, 2006
On the eve of their annual convention, Conservative rabbis are locked in a fierce debate over whether movement leaders have employed improper tactics to preserve the ban on gay clergy and same-sex marriage.
The fight is expected to play out in Mexico City next week, at the annual parley of the Rabbinical Assembly, the 1,600-member union of Conservative clergy. At issue is a procedural rule, quietly adopted last June by the assembly’s executive council, that allows the movement’s top lawmaking body to raise the threshold of votes needed to approve certain major positions.
Under previous rules, the movement’s 30-member Committee on Jewish Law and Standards had required only six votes to give legitimacy to a minority opinion. The new rule raises the bar to 20 votes when dealing with selected “momentous” decisions.
Many movement rabbis say that they were unaware of the rule change until last week, when the law committee decided to apply the 20-vote threshold to a sweeping opinion that seeks to overturn the movement’s ban on homosexual sex. Other rabbis have further objected to the law committee’s decision to delay voting on the gay issue until December, after the terms of five out of the law committee’s 25 voting members — including four expected to vote for reform — are set to expire.
At the upcoming convention in Mexico City, more than two-dozen rabbis are expected to introduce a resolution to overturn the 20-vote rule.
The intensifying fight over gays and lesbians comes as the Conservative movement is facing challenges on several fronts, including the search for a new chancellor at its flagship institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The debate is not only forcing Conservative rabbis to confront contentious theological issues about homosexuality, but also wider questions about the movement’s commitment to viewing rabbinic law, or Halacha, as an evolving process and remaining a big tent that welcomes multiple opinions.
“The real question comes down to, ‘How does the Conservative movement operate?’” said Rabbi Leonard Gordon, a Philadelphia pulpit rabbi and chair of the Rabbinical Assembly’s social action committee, who opposes the new 20-vote threshold. “Does it operate with the idea of diversity — that there are multiple perspectives on law? [This new rule] means that the Conservative movement’s whole theory of legal change is now being transformed.”
Last week, in an effort to address the mounting concerns and objections, the president of the Rabbinical Assembly, Rabbi Perry “Rafi” Rank, sent an e-mail out to his fellow clergymen in which he argued that a “supermajority would further protect the integrity of the [law committee] in reassuring all that extraordinary decisions… are promulgated only on the basis of overwhelming consensus.”
The movement’s law committee functions in many ways as an advisory council, with pulpit rabbis being viewed as the religious authorities of their respective congregations. Conservative rabbis are forbidden to perform interfaith marriages, recognize the children of non-Jewish mothers as Jews, or perform a second marriage without a religious divorce — but are otherwise not required to comply with decisions passed by the law committee.
Furthermore, the modest six-vote threshold for passing a teshuvah, or legal opinion, enables multiple — even conflicting — interpretations of the tradition to pass as official positions of the movement. A small minority of congregations, for example, continue to restrict women’s participation in services, despite decisions, passed in the 1980s, permitting the ordination of female rabbis and the counting of women in a minyan, or prayer quorum.
Last June, the Rabbinical Assembly’s 35-member executive council approved a new set of internal guidelines for the law committee, including the provision for classifying a legal decision as a takanah, or an amendment to Jewish law rather than an interpretation. The executive council specified that takanot must be passed with a minimum of 20 votes, or 80% of committee members, rather than the six needed for a teshuvah, and ruled that a decision may be designated as a takanah by a majority vote of law committee members, even over the objection of its authors.
The law committee had recommended that only 13 votes — a simple majority — be required for approval of a takanah, and argued that the right to designate an opinion as such should reside with its authors. At the June executive council meeting, the law committee’s chair, Rabbi Kassel Abelson, and its vice chair, Rabbi Elliot Dorff, testified against the more stringent standards.
Rank, the president of the Rabbinical Assembly, said that the assembly’s executive council wanted to ensure that the law committee achieves some measure of consensus on momentous changes. Also, he said, the executive committee was spurred by the existing rule requiring 20 votes to overturn a decision of the law committee. Acccording to Rank, the logic was: “Well, if it takes 20 votes to overturn a decision of the law committee, it should take at least 20 votes to overturn a rule of the Torah.”
Dorff, however, told the Forward that the rule for repealing a previous law committee decision was a function of basic math — if only six votes are needed to approve an opinion, then the only way to protect the minority view is to set a 20-vote threshold. He also noted that many of the movement’s most controversial and innovative legal opinions have been passed as teshuvot, and argued that the author’s intent should determine how an opinion is characterized.
“Otherwise, a majority of the committee at any moment can say that what someone has introduced as a teshuvah is actually a takanah that requires a supermajority,” Dorff said, in an interview with the Forward.
When the law committee convened in Maryland last week, it considered four separate legal opinions on homosexual sex, and the possibility of sanctioning gay clergy and same-sex relationships. The most liberal opinion — a wholesale rejection of the ban on homosexuality co-authored by Rabbi Gordon Tucker, a rumored candidate for the JTS post — was classified as a takanah, through the vote of a modest majority, and over the objections of its authors.
“The law committee said that in its current form, it’s not a simple teshuvah, it’s a takanah, and they suggested that the authors may want to recast their approach,” said the Rabbinical Assembly’s executive vice president, Rabbi Joel Meyers, who attended the meeting but is not a member of the law committee. “The authors didn’t agree.”
According to Dorff, there also “was a move behind the scenes” to designate a reformist opinion he co-authored as a takanah, but that attempt “failed before it ever came to the table.” Dorff’s opinion upholds the biblical prohibition of homosexuality as a narrow proscription against homosexual anal sex, but allows homosexual affection and relationships in general. It would permit gay ordination and same-sex marriage.
In the days after the law committee meeting, rabbis across the movement reacted with a mixture of befuddlement, anger and frustration. Some rabbis have said that their ignorance about the new takanah provision is emblematic of what they described as the overall secrecy surrounding the law committee’s deliberations on homosexuality. Law committee meetings generally are open to the movement’s rabbis, but not the sessions on homosexuality.
Other rabbis have questioned whether the rule change — which was adopted after the law committee had already reopened active consideration of homosexuality — was designed to stack the deck against reform, even at the expense of undermining the movement’s historical tolerance for a diversity of opinions.
Critics of the executive council have pointed out that the Rabbinical Assembly’s constitution stipulates that any law committee decision “that obtains six votes in committee shall be considered an official opinion of the committee,” and that any changes to the constitution must be approved by a vote of the entire Rabbinical Assembly membership. Meyers, however, told the Forward that the assembly’s executive council routinely approves operating procedures for various committees, and pointed out that the original draft of the new law committee rules — including the establishment of official procedures regarding takanot — came from law committee itself.
Dorff said he is concerned not only about the high threshold for approving a takanah, but also by the committee’s vote to table a ruling on the homosexual opinions until December, a move he said demonstrates “more than a little political maneuvering.”
Last week’s meeting was the last one of the law committee in its current configuration because each spring five out of the 25 voting law committee members finish their terms. This year, the committee will be losing four members known for their liberal views on homosexuality, including Rabbis Ben Zion Bergman and Robert Fine, co-authors of the Tucker opinion.
New appointments to the law committee are made by the heads of leading organizations in the Conservative movement and then approved by the Rabbinical Assembly’s executive council. The assembly will make three appointments, and the Jewish Theological Seminary and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism one each. Some critics have asserted that several recent appointees to the committee have been particularly conservative, including Rabbi Leonard Levy, who authored one of the four decisions last week. Levy argued that homosexuality is a sickness that can be cured through therapy, according to movement insiders.
Sof Maarav
Please see post of 3/17 "On to Mexico" to continue this conversation.
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