Religious innovation can happen in many ways. It can involve a kind of backwards adaptation, retrieving rituals lost to other generations, but that still hold significance for our modern times. It can also involve tossing aside interpretations that aren’t relevant any more.
The later is the case for the Jewish LGBTQ community. Several Biblical passage have long been interpreted as banning homosexuality, But in the last 20 years, leaders among the progressive Jewish community have been working to update Jewish tradition and as a result, offer LGBTQ Jews a more welcoming home.
Rabbi Debra Kolodny is one of the leading advocates for updating tradition to make room for LGBTQ Jews. She’s the executive director of Nehirim, a nonprofit that offers retreats for LGBTQ Jews. Kolodny says re-interpreting tradition is a matter of human and civil rights, necessary so that LGBTQ Jews feel accepted and thrive within their own tradition. She spoke with KALW’s Judy Silber.
Transcript of the interview, edited for clarity.
JUDY SILBER: The first thing I wanted to ask you about was: how has the LGBTQ community felt isolated from Judaism? Why has there been a separation? What is the healing that has to happen?
DEBRA KOLODNY: I would say that even in the progressive Jewish world, back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe even 90s, nobody was talking from the bema in a way that welcomed and honored LGBTQ lives. So if you were a child growing up in a shul, all you had was our scripture. And in Leviticus, you got to read every year when we got to that part in the Torah, that a man shall not lie with a man as he does with a woman for it is — usually translated — an abomination. And there’s a death sentence for that.
SILBER: Wait, there’s a death sentence? What does that mean?
KOLODNY: It’s an abomination and you could be put to death for that. The silence around that text, and the avoidance of that text, clearly, not only is this not welcoming, but it’s deeply, psychologically, spiritually wounding. And it doesn’t create an environment where people would choose to pursue a life of spiritual devotion.
In the last 20 years, a huge amount of work has happened in the progressive Jewish world.
SILBER: Yeah, so can you talk about that? What is making Jews who felt alienated from Judaism because of their sexuality want to come back?
KOLODNY: So I think there’s several streams of answer. One is there’s something institutional called the “Welcoming Movement.” Congregations take it upon themselves to make decisions to say overtly, we are welcoming people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. So we have an institutional policy. You are welcome here. Our rabbi will perform a marriage for you if the person you want to wed is of the same gender. If you’re transgender, we will work with you to create beautiful and new rituals, etc.
So there’s been an institutional declaration across the board in progressive Judaism. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is there have been wonderful books published like Twiced Blessed.
SILBER: What is Twiced Blessed?
KOLODNY: It’s the first published piece on lifting up the potential for you to be a spiritually engaged Jew and also be LGBTQ.
We’re also living in a moment when the Zeitgeist is saying: same sex people, same gender couples can get married. Which is totally changing the conversation about the intersection of faith and queerness. Because for many people marriage has a spiritual, religious component. And many people want to be married in spiritual or religious community by a clergy person.
So the fact that there’s access to this rite where just 10 years ago, there was not, I think is bringing people back into relationship with what they remembered perhaps as affirming, as beautiful, as heart-opening. So even while there was a sense of being perhaps rejected or denigrated, most people who are raised in religious homes also remembered, on Shabbos there was a feeling that you could just rest and be with your family and have fun. Or they remember Hannukah or the Passover seder where you can’t eat bread, but wow, that charoset tasted great.
SILBER: So you’re also rabbi. Judaism as a whole is searching for ways to bring people back into the fold. It’s searching for ways to be more inclusive to interfaith families or people who felt alienated for any number of reasons. So in that larger context, LGBTQ is just one part of that. Can you speak to that?
KOLODNY: That’s a great question and it’s not just Judaism that is engaged in this project. Because we see across the board in religious worlds that younger people are not affiliating, are not making congregational life where they want to spend their energy and money and whole heart in as being members.
So you’re absolutely right that especially in the Jewish world, LGBTQ folks and families, interfaith families, there are many folks who left Judaism and sought out spirit in other contexts. Because life in America post-Holocaust, much of the joy was stripped out of Judaism for understandable reasons. I mean, the entire culture was in posttraumatic stress experience from the Holocaust.
So this generation of Jewish leadership, myself included feels like it’s our mission to bring people back to the gloriousness that is Judaism where we’re Jews because we feel unsafe in the Christian world. Or because it’s safer to assimilate. We’re Jews because our scriptures have amazing teachings and our Mussar, our ethical tradition has brilliant guidance on how to lead a good, holy life and right relationship with your neighbors and your family members. Our rituals work. They transform our sense of possibility so that we can be our best selves, and live into what I like to call the fullness of our destiny so that we don’t live small. We live big. Not with ego, but using all of our gifts and all of our potential.
SILBER: You mentioned there’s one specific text which would seem, under Jewish law, to make it illegal for a man to be with a man. And you were telling me there are challenges to that interpretation right now. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
KOLODNY: In Judaism, we have a written tradition and an oral tradition. Sometimes the rabbis say, here’s the literal meaning of the text and this is all it can mean. And sometimes there’s endless discourse about what it could mean and there is lots of Midrashic analysis.
Of course, the reasons why there are different approaches in the Talmudic discourse is because human beings are affected by psychological and sociological paradigms. I mean, we didn’t even have a category of homosexuality until 100 years ago. People knew that this behavior existed, but not to have an identity where you knew that your sexual and emotional attraction was to someone of the same gender. Or that you were bisexual and it was to both or all genders. This is a very modern thing.
As a progressive rabbi, I would say the way of reconciling 2,000 years of rabbinic discourse is to say, wait a minute, you have to read between the lines here. You have to get clearer on what’s being prohibited. It’s a much more nuanced, much more narrow view. The way that I and other peers of mine reconcile that is to say, in this moment, what we know psychologically, medically, biologically, sociologically is different than what we knew in the past. We are obligated to apply our knowledge. To ignore what we know, that would violate principles of human and civil rights.
It’s important to weight tradition. But when the implications of giving tradition great weight are that human and civil rights are violated, and that lives are destroyed, and that people are lost to the Jewish tradition, that cost is extreme. Lives are at stake. It’s no secret that the rate of suicide and self-medication with alcohol and drugs amongst the LGBTQ population is much higher than the general population because of a sense of rejection and denial, a sense of the mocking, and the lack of human dignity that people are accorded. Lives are stake.
SILBER: Do you see that there’s a sense of healing, or a sense of relief at being welcomed back into their faith of origin? And what’s the importance of that?
KOLODNY: So I just want to make the point that it’s not as if every queer person fled from Judaism, not by a long shot. If that was true, we wouldn’t have over 200 LGBTQ rabbis, cantors and rabbinic pastors, which is remarkable.
I do see LGBTQ clery as on the forefront of doing this healing work. Because through our interpretation of scripture and through our creation of new ritual and through our capacity to pastor to people in an understanding and knowing our way around the challenges in their lives. When a family is trying to adopt a child and they’re facing barriers that no male/female partnership faces, you know how to be present for that.
There’s tremendous healing, there’s tremendous relief. So instead of religion being a pain or a weight or a burden, it becomes a resource, which is what spirituality and religion should be. So it’s not just the healing, which seems almost like it gets you to this basic threshold level of basic functioning. It releases all this energy for people to flourish. So it’s beyond healing really, to flourishing.
SILBER: If there’s a gift that the LGBTQ community has to give to the Jewish community, what would you say it is?
KOLODNY: Well, it’s a Jewish tradition that every single person has a unique Torah, no matter who they are. Because of their life experience. That’s true of those of us who are living on the margins. Let’s say, a transgender person who had to find themselves despite what the doctors told them, despite who their parents said they were. That journey of self-discovery is the journey of the spiritual master. If you have to transcend assumptions that are imposed upon you, transcend projections that are imposed upon you, to really find your heart and your soul and your mission and your passion, the level of self-reflection that takes is extraordinary. And it gives us the capacity to pastor, to teach, to help parent, to grow other souls into the fullness of their being. Because the path we’ve taken is so complicated and so nuanced.
SILBER: Thank you so much.
KOLODNY: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.
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