Contextualizing a text historically gives us some perspective
on why the author thought the way he or maybe she did, and
it underlines the differences between the writer’s world and
our world, but it leaves a big problem. These verses that
won’t let people live are part of
sacred
text. It is especially
troubling when these texts are part of the Torah. We cannot
just dismiss the problem by saying “that’s how it was then
but this is now,” unless we want to make the Torah into
a museum piece. Imagine tour guides saying, “that was a
Torah; the Jewish people used to live by it.” Besides, it isn’t
true that these texts were only destructive in the past.
Countless murders, gay-bashings, political initiatives by
homophobes, non-Jewish and Jewish, attest that these texts
still hold malignant power.
Reinterpret, because we are the ones who must determine what
a text means in our time.
Interpretation is in
our
hands. Let
me give you three examples of how the rabbis of the Talmud
radically re-read texts that were unlivable. The first such text
is a law in Deuteronomy 21:18-21. “If a man has a wayward
and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother…
they shall bring him to the elders of the town [and state their
complaint]. Thereupon the men of his town shall stone him
to death.” The rabbis narrowed and narrowed the require-
ments for application until a
baraita
,
a Tannaitic tradition,
flatly states, “There never was a case of the rebellious son
and never will be.” Why then was the law given, the Talmud
inquires? “To study and to reap the reward of studying.”
(
Sanhedrin 71a)
The second example of a biblical law being radically changed
by interpretation is “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
In its biblical contexts, in Exodus 21:24 and Leviticus 24:20,
it sounds like people’s eyes and teeth should be taken out if
they knock out other people’s eyes and teeth. But the Talmud
in tractate Bava Qamma goes through an intricate argument
to insist that “an eye for an eye” means monetary compensa-
tion, and that is the law as we have had it for the last 1900
years. There is also no biblical narrative in which eyes or
teeth are extracted as an Israelite punishment.
The third example of law being changed by interpretation is
Hillel’s
prosbul
.
The sage Hillel saw the great hardship people
were having because of the observance of the Sabbatical year,
the seventh year, in which all debts were canceled. Commerce
was grinding to a halt and no one would lend money to the
needy. So Hillel reinterpreted two verses from Deuteronomy
(15:2, 9)
to abrogate debt cancellation by having creditors
transfer debts owed them to the court and authorizing the
court to collect. The authorizing document was called a
prosbul
.
Once people were assured that they could collect
on debts, the economic system was no longer stalled
(
Gittin 36b).
1
Once we see that a law – designed for the people to live with
and thrive with – is having the opposite effect, the process of
interpretation can find new meanings in the text by which
living and thriving is possible. Our texts on
mishkav zachar
k’mishkevei isha
,
literally, having sex with a man as if he were
a woman, might mean a ban on sex in which one partner
rules over and subordinates the other: man or woman. More-
over, some scholars have argued that homosexual rape is what
these texts reference: violent, non-consensual sex. Laws are
meant to promote human flourishing and when they are
seriously deterring human flourishing, they need to be rein-
terpreted rather than merely ignored. In Jewish law, we have
a principle of not making legal policies that make large
numbers of people into sinners.
My hope is that LGBT rabbis show us a way people can live
by these texts and not die by them. For, in
Acharei Mot
,
it
says:
va-chai bahem
– “
You shall live by them” – meaning by
the commandments. And the rabbis comment, “and not die
by them.” Not have your selfhood stifled or in hiding. Not
be bullied or bashed. Not, God forbid, commit suicide.
But live, pridefully, openly, and joyously.
1
In Gittin 36b, the rabbis argue that Hillel did not change biblical law
but rather rabbinic law. After the first was destroyed, the biblical jubilee
year ceased to exist and hence, the constraints of the sabbatical year were
also voided. But the rabbis of the Second Temple period reestablished the
laws of the sabbatical year by rabbinic law, and it was these that Hillel
superseded through the
prosbul.
Excerpted from Rabbi Rachel Adler’s sermon presented at Beth Chayim
Chadashim on May 12, 2012.
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