From SHU 419: Two Hot-Button Issues of Our Time: Gay Marriage and Female Clergy
David Shasha
Two Hot-Button Issues of Our Time: Gay Marriage and Female Clergy
We live in a day and age when most political issues take on a polarized aspect. Left wing and Right wing partisans fall into line over such issues and raise their voices in order to have their views better heard. Often, such polarization ignores compromise solutions that would preserve the integrity of our religious freedoms and allow us to balance these freedoms with the civil rights of the individual.
In speaking with people on controversial issues, I am frequently forced to step back from the heated discussion and counsel my interlocutor to rethink the framework in which they are seeing a particular issue or set of issues. As active members of a polarized society, we rarely seek to question the assumptions and the filters through which our views are formed. It is sometimes possible – not always, but occasionally – to reformulate a question in such a way that the solution to a problem might become less contested and more amenable to resolution.
Taking the issue of female clergy in a Jewish context, we must go back to a very important – though not much noted by people – event that takes place in 16th century Palestine. At that time there were, under the aegis of the Kabbalistic movements then on the ascendant, messianic tendencies that brought to the fore ideas and values that sought to reconstitute the trappings of political Jewish society as outlined in the Talmud. Jacob Berab looked to these elements and decided to begin a movement to assemble a Jewish High Court, or Sanhedrin. In order to accomplish this task, Berab reinstituted the formal ordination of rabbis. Without formally ordained rabbis, rabbis who would hold universal authority in the Jewish world, a duly recognized Sanhedrin would not be possible.
The problem that Berab faced was the fact that ordination had fallen into disuse for many centuries. The rabbinate was a decentralized faction. Rabbis ministered over individual communities and did not hold universal authority. Even as great a rabbi as Maimonides was not universally accepted by all Jews. The Jewish legal system held that duly ordained rabbis were not just regional or communal players. An ordained rabbi was to be accepted by the entire Jewish community and not one part of it.
As the historian Heinrich Graetz states:
… the Messianic period, according to the then prevailing ideas, would not come suddenly; the Israelites had to do their part in preparing the way. Maimuni, the highest authority, had taught that the Messianic time would or must be preceded by the establishment of a universally recognized Jewish court of justice, or Synhedrion. Hence the necessity was felt of having authorized and duly appointed judges, such as existed at the time of the Temple and the Talmud in Palestine, of re-introducing, in fact, the long-disused ordination. (History of the Jews, Volume IV, p. 530)
We learn here that ordination was not in existence at the time of Berab’s mission in 1540. That means that rabbis who held the title of “rabbi” were not duly recognized as rabbis in the Talmudic fashion. A rabbi in Talmudic terms was a court judge whose rulings carried absolute weight. In addition, a rabbi was not an individual actor in the community; he was a part of the legal system that held the community as a whole together.
Given the opposition to Berab and the ultimate failure of his mission to reinstitute ordination, we must keep in mind that the Talmudic system continues to remain dormant. Today’s rabbis are not formally “rabbis” in the Talmudic sense. The nomenclature permits individuals to decide law and to sit on community courts, but not to act as authoritative jurists for the entire Jewish people.
Thus, the rabbinical class is one that must be seen in relative terms. Rabbis today – as has been the case for many centuries now – are not really “rabbis.”
That is one aspect of the issue we are dealing with. The requirement of the male role in the Jewish clergy is itself a convention that has to do with the fact that the ordination of rabbis is a simulacrum of the true ordination – where only males were deemed fit to serve in the role.
So from a Halakhic point of view, if and when the true ordination is restored to the Jewish world, women will not formally be permitted to serve as rabbis.
The problem today is whether the ersatz form of ordination that we have can keep women out of the rabbinate?
First, something we need to examine is the role of the rabbinical class in the Jewish community today. Institutionally, the Orthodox rabbinate has largely ceased to act in a pastoral manner and has more and more sought to focus on the minutiae of ritual matters, merging with the lay leadership to form a leadership cadre in the community more akin to a corporatism than to a spiritual function.
As the Jewish community continues its inexorable downward spiral into a moral quagmire where ethical behavior remains a deeply questionable value, the rabbis are often deployed to rubber-stamp the behaviors of the lay body. Rather than serving the community as moral authorities, very often rabbis are the enforcers of the behaviors of laypeople.
To continue this process would be to accept a new role for rabbis as material leaders rather than moral ones. Rabbis – like many other clergy-people – serve the system rather than God. A model for this sort of behavior can be seen in the classic 1945 film “The Bishop’s Wife” where a harried David Niven is in danger of losing his soul because of the corroded values of wealthy philanthropists and his need to raise large amounts of money for a new church.
Too many rabbis today fall into this corrupt model.
So the question of women rabbis can now be seen in a different light. On the one hand, there are really no “true” rabbis in the Talmudic sense. Even if women were indeed ordained by Orthodox Jewish authorities, they are not really rabbis in the true sense of the word.
In addition, the rabbinate – for lack of a more forgiving term – has now become a highly dubious class of individuals. Corruption is now rampant in an Orthodox world where money trumps ethics and where power has supplanted wisdom.
I sometimes wonder why women would want to enter such a field?
Perhaps it would be better to eliminate the “fake” rabbinate altogether, or, at the very least, to restructure the role of the rabbi to have different tasks assigned to others. Women can productively – and Halakhically – serve as Halakhic advisors and pastoral counselors. According to Jewish law they can serve as presentors in the Synagogue by reading the Torah and acting as Cantors; though in the latter case the matter is made more complicated by the Orthodox understanding of the maxim qol be-‘Isha ‘erva that is often interpreted as precluding any public presentation of a female singing voice. Change in the Orthodox community can take place according to controversial, but Halakhically-mandated ways such as permitting women to count towards the minyan-quorum, to be able to don the tefillin-phylacteries and to participate in a more overt manner in the Synagogue services.
Orthodoxy, in its current atrophied state, will continue to resist such reforms, but will not be able to do so from a purely Halakhic standpoint. And indeed we see such reforms inching their way into progressive elements of the Modern Orthodox world – and this is a welcome development.
What we should not do is continue the false idea that the rabbinate is where change should come. We would be better off to eliminate the rabbinate as a model and look to create a more fluid mechanism to divide the work of Jewish leadership – and then welcome women into that mechanism.
Again, the basic idea is to continue to work within the strict parameters of the Halakhah rather than contort the Halakhah to fit our needs and desires. It is all a matter of the angle one takes to analyze the issue – the facts remain the same and if we do not reset our filters, we are fated to continue the acrimonious and self-defeating conversation we are now having.
The issue of Gay Marriage is now much in the news. So-called traditionalists are taking the “house is falling” attitude and pointing to an overall decadence in our culture which seeks, as the execrable Bill O’Reilly argues, to destroy our traditional culture in favor of a Secular-Progressive agenda.
What the Bill O’Reilly-types seem to be ignoring is that the United States Constitution has a provision that separates Church and State. The US also held to the creed that “all men are created equal” yet we know that it has taken many centuries for full equality under the law to be afforded to all American citizens. Good ideas are sometimes left dormant or left to be instituted as we do not fully accept their radical nature.
In the matter of marriage, those people who serve their religious faith well-know that two ceremonies are necessary. Couples must file for their marriage license and get a stamped paper from City Hall duly acknowledging that their union is legal and accepted by the state. But for those of us who keep our religious traditions, this paper does not make us married in the eyes of tradition.
Indeed, in Jewish tradition there is an elaborate three-part system that must be undertaken and completed in order to become legally married. In the various Christian and Muslim ceremonies there are ritual matters that formally sanctify and ordain a married couple as well. Without such an ordination, marriage is not formally acknowledged by the religious community.
So in this case the solution is rather simple. Marriage in the civil sphere is not the same as marriage in the religious sphere. O’Reilly and his so-called “culture warriors” should get married in church and file with City Hall as they would file for a driver’s license. The civil license has no religious meaning and does not constitute “marriage” in a religious sense. Only a minister of the faith can confer the sacrament of marriage – not a judge appointed by the State.
A civil marriage license is thus no different than a driver’s license. The reason that Conservatives have made this an issue is because of their opposition to homosexuality in general rather than because of a legal argument having to do with who can or cannot be recognized by the state as a legally recognized civil union.
The Gay community and its partisans have fallen into line with the Conservative view. Rather than questioning the status of civil marriage and what that means in legal terms, they have required that their marriages be “accepted” in a quasi-religious sense. Specifically, City Hall marriages are deemed similar to those taking place in churches. Now the Conservatives are already cognizant of the fact that there are many churches – not under State control! – already performing Gay ceremonies. So all they have recourse to is the civil authority – a State that has no legal role in religious life.
By placing this conflict in the precincts of City Hall, both sides are setting the issue in the incorrect frame. What needs to be done is to demand that civil marriage be reclassified along the lines of a driver’s license. Marriage in a civil sense is a legal arrangement that confers the ability of the two partners to share property and to act as legally authorized representatives one of the other. Just as a homosexual person can legally drive a car or enter into a legal business partnership, so too must they be able to enter into a partnership that would allow them to have legal authority as any married couple would be entitled to have as a union of two individuals.
Continuing to discuss these two matters in the terms that now exist are of little help. There will be little chance of forward movement or compromise in the matter to ensure that we can protect both individual dignity and religious freedom. Religious norms can and should be Constitutionally protected. Individual rights of women and of homosexuals must also be protected in a country that does not permit religious tests in the public arena.
In the case of women rabbis in Judaism, we have seen that the formal office of rabbi is itself not a real concern. Formally, according to the Talmud, we have no “real” rabbis today. So there is no question that the ordination of women is not at all required. It only becomes an issue when women are not permitted to enter the rabbinical profession when there is no legal justification for such an exclusion. This is not because women could sit on the ancient – now defunct – Sanhedrin, but because such an institution does not currently exist.
In the case of Gay marriage, the idea is much the same. Marriage is a religious institution and not a civil one; in a civil context there is legal union without the sanctity endowed by a religious ceremony. Religious traditions have a plethora of ritual laws and customs that anchor their own marriage laws. The State must not be able to interfere in such laws and customs. On the other hand, civil marriage is not the same as religious marriage and religious people should have no concern with what is outside of their parochial domains. Civil marriage for a Jewish couple is not at all a concern in religious terms. In fact, it is often a pain in the neck for Jewish couples as they have to formally be married twice – once in the Synagogue and another time at City Hall. The City Hall ceremony has no intrinsic significance for the couple and simply serves a formal function to allow the State to register the marriage.
There is thus no reason why homosexuals cannot have their unions registered by the State as well. Religious people should not feel at all threatened by this as their rights to freedom of religion are completely preserved and are completely unaffected by what homosexuals are and are not able to do. Laws against homosexuality have been stricken from the books in America, thus paving the way for the acceptance of Gay people as licit members of our society. There are people who do not like that, but this does not change the law and does not change the fact that those laws apply equally to anyone regardless of sexual preference.
On the other side, Jewish women and Gays often fall into the trap of the Conservatives and seek to upend the religious traditions and demand recognition in a non-civil sphere. Religious systems can be evaluated more carefully without any structural damage being done to compromise the system. The rabbinate as a class can be eliminated to allow women to serve the community, while marriage can be transformed from a religious act to a purely civil act akin to applying for a driver’s license. There is no reason to seek sanctification in the civil sphere – as the civil government must have nothing to do with religion in any way.
David Shasha
From SHU 419, May 26, 2010