I don't often share many personal things about myself in sermons, but tonight I am going to. Not so you can get to know me better, but to make a point. All things being equal, I have been very fortunate to live a pretty sheltered, privileged life. As a white, upper middle class, straight, American Jew born in the latter half of the 20th century and now living in the 21st century, I have had it good. I have never faced direct anti-Semitism or had my life threatened in any way. I have never been a slave, like Bill Nathan, the amazing director of the St. Joseph Home for Boys in Haiti told us this week, when he spoke at PJTC, that he was from age 6-8. I have never had any noticeable physical, psychological, emotional disabilities that would draw attention to me as being different, subject to potential ridicule. The worst that I have had, I guess, was when I was only 4'11'' tall through 11th grade, before shooting up 7 inches in one summer. But, I was cute and popular with the girls, so even that wasn't so bad. I was an athlete, did well in school, was student body president in high school and went on to college and a successful career. I don't remember being teased that much as a kid, was bullied once, maybe, in my first week of high school, but nothing major. I didn't stutter, have a birth mark, like my sister's huge red mark on her left cheek, always had friends. I went to Hebrew High school and excelled, summers at Camp Ramah where I was in the "in" crowd, and so, I have never really known what it is like to be subjected to humiliation, taunting, teasing, bullying or alienation. And so, for sure, I have absolutely no idea what it must have been like to be Tyler Clementi, or one of the other four gay young people who took their lives in the last three weeks. These deaths are horrible tragedies, not only for their families, whose pain is unimaginable, but for us as a nation, as we mourn the loss of 5 young people, the oldest 19, the youngest 13, who took their lives, it appears in all five cases, because of either the torment they endured for being gay, or being thought gay by their peers, or in Tyler's case, because of the public humiliation that he felt after his college roommates video taped him and another young man having sex in their dorm room and streamed it live on the internet. Young Seth Walsh, a 13-year old boy in Tahachapi, CA, featured in today's LA Times, was a bright, loving child who knew he was gay, tried to be himself, express himself and was taunted for it. He was teased since the 4th grade because he liked to play with girls, didn't like sports, wasn't aggressive or assertive -- he was called a sissy, that is where it began. Three years later, it ended with him hanging himself in his backyard. The others were Billy Lucas, 15 and Asher Brown, 13. Five young people now gone. The challenge tonight is that this could be many sermons: the issue of homosexuality in our society, the issue of bullying and teasing amongst our kids, the issue of privacy and the Internet, and I am sure a few other things as well. I am going to focus on the first issue, homosexuality and our society, and our own community.
In his groundbreaking book, Wrestling with God and Men, Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the first self-identified gay Orthodox rabbi, writes about a response he got from another Orthodox rabbinic scholar asked to comment on his coming out and continuing to identify as Orthodox. Greenberg had been hiding his true sexuality since the time he was a teen, trying to date women, be a "normal" boy, and actually was almost married to a woman once. Raised in a non-religious home, Greenberg discovered Orthodoxy as a young teen and became more and more religious as he grew up. Greenberg's first step into speaking his truth came in 1992 when he authored a piece that was printed in Tikkun magazine, under a pseudonym, Rabbi Yaakov Levado, meaning "Jacob alone," which he writes is based on the story of the Biblical Jacob and how he remains alone the night before meeting his brother Esau, and famously wrestling with the angel, which most of the commentators understand as a wrestling with himself to identify who he truly is. The outcome of that Biblical story, as we know, is that Jacob becomes Israel; the outcome of Greenberg's piece is that he started to no longer be "levado, alone," but become fully himself. He explains why he couldn't reveal his true identity in the article, saying, "I feared that the cost of honesty and realness would be isolation and marginalization. Coming out would compress my life into a narrow and grossly overdetermined identity. I bristled at the thought of being known widely as 'the gay Orthodox rabbi.'" (Greenberg, p. 10) Yet, the letters he received, from folks around the world, both gay and straight, Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews, gave him courage and a taste of support and acceptance. But, he also got responses such as this, from an Orthodox colleague, "A gay Orthodox rabbi is an absurdity as inconceivable as an Orthodox rabbi who eats cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur. There is no such thing as a gay Orthodox rabbi."
More...
0 comments
Post a Comment