Opinion
OTHER VIEWS
Outside The Halachic Framework
New York/JTA
T
he Conservative
movement's Committee
on Jewish Law and
Standards on Dec. 6 validated
three responsa, or tesizuvot, on
the general subject of homosexu-
ality. In fact, the primary techni-
cal issue was the Jewish legal
status of sex between members
of the same gender.
From the answers offered to
that question followed the views
of the authors as to the permissi-
bility of commitment ceremonies
— implying, of course, a need
also for "uncommitment ceremo-
nies" — and the ordination of
gays and lesbians as clergy, who
serve as exemplars of commit-
ment to Halachah (Jewish law).
Two of the papers reaffirmed
the classical position of Jewish
law forbidding such sexual
activity and, therefore, forbade
commitment ceremonies and the
ordination of gays and lesbians.
The third paper permitted most
sexual activity between men
— forbidding only intercourse
— and sexual activity between
women. As a result, the authors
of this paper permit commit-
ment ceremonies and ordination.
I was the author of one of the
papers that reaffirmed
tion of our right to
the classic Jewish legal
adopt a legal stance
position, a position I had
attributed to one
affirmed in 1992 when
sage that the prohibi-
this subject was last
tions against sexual
on the law committee's
behavior other than
agenda. Despite the
male intercourse are
popular view of what
rabbinic in status,
Rabbi Joel
we were arguing about,
d'rabbanan, and not
Roth
I believe that the subject
biblical, which attri-
Special
of gays was not what we
bution is itself open
Commentary
were really divided over.
to serious question
It happened to be the specific
and is denied by most decisors.
subject that revealed the real fault
• Even if the prohibition
lines in the committee, and in
against sexual behavior other
the Conservative movement in
than male intercourse is rabbinic
general.
in authority and not biblical,
I believe we were divided
what justifies our abrogating that
over the following irreconcilable
prohibition? The authors of the
issues:
permissive paper argued that
• How entitled are we to over-
the talmudic category of "human
turn longstanding and uncon-
honor:' which they translated as
tested precedents of Jewish law?
"human dignity,— allowed for its
None of the authors of any of the
abrogation. I argued that the cat-
papers denied what the uncon-
egory is entirely inapplicable to
tested precedents of Jewish law
the case under discussion, even if
are, and that the preponderant
we assumed that the prohibition
majority of decisors of Jewish
is rabbinic and not biblical.
law from time immemorial con-
In almost all of the cases in
sidered all types of sexual behav- which the category is invoked,
ior between members of the
the claim is that X may-violate
same sex to be a prohibition of
the law out of deference to the
biblical status, d'oraita, based on honor of Y. In the case under
rabbinic interpretation of scrip-
discussion, X is to be entitled to
tural verses, midrash halachah.
violate the law out of deference
What divided us was the ques- to his own honor, for which claim
there is no real precedent.
What's more, such a claim is
theologically weak, since no law-
abiding Jew would ever entertain
the possibility that his honor
would supersede that of God.
And in the few cases of applica-
tion of the category that can
possibly be understood to imply
that X may violate the law out of
deference to his own honor, X is
always literally in a social context
and in the presence of others.
For example, X may wear a
hearing aid on Shabbat in the
synagogue lest he be embar-
rassed by his inability to hear the
Kaddish being recited and not
answer the communal lines when
the community does. In our case,
there is no social context since
sexual relations are, by definition,
private. Therefore, the category is
inapplicable.
• How halachically defensible
does an argument have to be
before it can be considered with-
in the halachic ballpark? We all
understand and agree that deci-
sors of Jewish law often approach
the subject before them with a
predisposition to give a specific
answer. There's nothing wrong
with that, in my opinion.
What, then, distinguishes a
good decisor from a poor one?
The good decisor is able to
judge his decision with enough
dispassion to see whether his
predisposition has blinded him
to the indefensibility of his
answer, and the poor one is not.
It is my opinion that my col-
leagues have here been blinded
to the indefensibility of their
conclusion. It is based on three
pillars — I have not discussed
one of them here — each of
which is either quite clearly false
or, at a minimum, is debatable.
For their conclusion to follow,
however, all three must be con-
sidered as true and valid. This
leads me to conclude that their
decision was arrived at entirely
independent of halachic reason-
ing, and that the defensibility of
their after-the-fact reasoning was
not relevant to them. The deci-
sion simply had to be as it was.
The combination of the above
led me to believe that the per-
missive position validated by the
law committee was really outside
the halachic framework, and I
resigned from the committee. _
Rabbi Joel Roth, a former Detroiter,
is a professor of Talmud and Jewish
law at the Jewish Theological
Seminary.
Not A Fringe Assemblage
New YorkIJTA
E
yen Borat, the bum-
blingly anti-Semitic
comic character, could
not have contrived a more
absurd and utterly offensive
assemblage: David Duke, erst-
while Imperial Wizard of the
Ku Klux Klan, alongside Robert
Faurisson, the French pseudo-
academic who argues that the
Holocaust never happened,
accompanied for dramatic
effect by a group of fervently
Orthodox Jews whose anti-
Zionist fanaticism motivates
them to desecrate the memory
of millions of murdered Jews.
On Dec. 11-12, they and
other likeminded sociopaths
"debated" at the Iranian Foreign
Ministry in Tehran whether
28
December 21 -2006
or not my grandpar-
England, who strut-
ents and my 5-1/2-
ted through the
year-old brother were
conference halls
gassed at Auschwitz.
and gladly posed
And the sponsors of
for the cameras.
the "International
Rabbi Friedman
Conference on 'Review
told the press
Menachem Z.
of the Holocaust: Global
that he believes
Rosensaft
Vision) " are the very
that only about
Special
folks James Baker and
1 million Jews
Commentary
Lee Hamilton, authors
perished in the
of a recent re-evalua-
Holocaust. Rabbi
tion of U.S. policy in Iraq, want
Cohen declared that he does
to enlist to stabilize the Middle
not consider Iranian President
East.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who
Other participants in this
sponsored the conference and
perversion included Australian
who has called frequently for
socialite Michele Renouf, who
the Jewish state to be destroyed,
explained that anti-Semitism
an anti-Semite.
is caused by "the anti-gentile
The Tehran reunion of mis-
nature of Judaism," and Rabbis
fits demonstrates conclusively
Moishe Arye Friedman from
why the Ahmadinejad gov-
Austria and Ahron Cohen from
ernment cannot be allowed
anywhere near responsible
political endeavors of any kind.
If the international community
ostracized South Africa dur-
ing apartheid and Saddam
Hussein's Iraq, it should isolate
present-day Iran in the most
remote diplomatic Siberia
imaginable.
'Shameful Conference'
Ahmadinejad has made
it clear that his espousal of
Holocaust denial is a pretext for
his desire to destroy the State
of Israel. In response, a group
of Iranian students showed
tremendous moral courage by
publicly demonstrating against
their president, burning his pic-
ture and protesting the "shame-
ful conference," which, in the
words of one student, "brought
to our country Nazis and racists
from around the world."
In contrast, the reaction of
the U.S. government was sur-
prisingly, even shockingly, sub-
dued. Substantially after Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,
German Chancellor Angela
Merkel and British Prime
Minister Tony Blair all sharply
condemned the Tehran confer-
ence, the White House issued a
statement calling the event an
"affront to the entire civilized
world" and accusing the Iranian
regime of providing "a platform
for hatred."
President Bush, however,
has not personally spoken out
on the subject, relegating his
administration's response to an
institutional press release. The
man who usually never misses