by ben harris & joe eskenazi
special to j.
new york | In a decision certain to have far-reaching consequences, the Conservative movement on Wednesday issued a ruling as intricate and confusing as one would expect of a body committed to the seemingly irreconcilable notions of tradition and change.
The movement’s Law Committee on Dec. 6 endorsed three separate teshuvot, or responsa, on the subject of homosexuality — one affirming the movement’s traditional ban on homosexual rabbis and commitment ceremonies, and another reversing those positions but upholding the biblical prohibition on male intercourse.
Both papers earned 13 votes, a majority of the 25-member committee (A third teshuvot also affirmed the movement’s traditional position on homosexuality and garnered the six votes needed for acceptance.)
It is now likely that more Conservative rabbis will begin performing commitment ceremonies, comfortable in the knowledge that they enjoy halachic sanction from the movement’s highest legal body. Rabbis who refuse to do so can also back up their decision with a halachic rationale.
While many in the Conservative movement seemed to echo the assessment of Rabbi Daniel Pressman of Congregation Beth David in Saratoga — “This is complicated, good news” — the immediate ramifications are anything but clear-cut.
Since the movement issued what could be described as a split decision, one could honor either a prohibition or a commencement of gay and lesbian ordination in the seminaries. In a letter emailed around the nation shortly after the ruling, Arnold Eisen, the chancellor-elect of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, said the dueling teshuvot mean “the ball is thus in our court with regard to the question of ordination of gays and lesbians at JTS — a decision regarding admission and graduation requirements that we will treat as such and not as the matter of law that stood before the Law Committee.”
Eisen, currently a professor of Jewish Culture and Religion at Stanford University, said the decision regarding homosexual ordination would be answered based on “what we think best serves the Conservative Movement and larger American Jewish community” and will come following an extensive survey querying “rabbis, Conservative Jewish laypeople and the movement’s leadership”; Eisen also reached out to fellow Conservative seminary heads around the world for a caucus.
The timeframe for this endeavor is uncertain. Life will certainly not change for closeted homosexual rabbinical students in the interim.
At the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, however, leaders long have made clear their intention to ordain gay rabbis if the law committee issued a permissive ruling; a final decision from UJ is anticipated in several weeks’ time.
Despite the 1992 decision of the movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which upheld the ban on gay rabbis and commitment ceremonies, a number of Conservative rabbis — including more than a few in the Bay Area — do perform such ceremonies. Now they can continue to do so with the blessing of the national movement.
Rabbi Mark Bloom of Oakland’s Temple Beth Abraham said the committee’s ruling, in many ways, cuts the baby in half: Progressive rabbis (which describes Bloom and most of his Bay Area colleagues) will think it doesn’t go far enough, while “rabbis who fall on the opposite side will worry it will mean the end of K’lal Yisroel [the Jewish people] since it goes completely against the grain of 2,000 years of rabbinical decisions.”
Bloom anticipates some congregants may leave the Conservative movement for Modern Orthodoxy and a few professors might quit at the movement’s seminaries — and, indeed, the Law Committee’s four most conservative members have already resigned — but he does not foresee any congregations abandoning the movement or forming their own “traditional Conservative movement.”
“That already exists. It started when women were ordained and is very small,” he noted.
“I don’t think a movement can be created on the sole position of being opposed to homosexuality. There’s not enough strength behind that.”
Palo Alto’s Rabbi David Booth of Kol Emeth doesn’t believe this week’s ruling will affect Bay Area life until several years down the road, when local congregations decide if they are willing to hire a gay rabbi.
While finding a Bay Area Conservative rabbi to perform a commitment ceremony is not an especially difficult task, the ruling could embolden progressive rabbis elsewhere.
“I think there will be a significant change,” said Ayelet Cohen, a JTS graduate and rabbi of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a Manhattan synagogue for gays and lesbians.
An outspoken proponent of changing the traditional prohibition on homosexuality, Cohen performed commitment ceremonies for gay couples prior to this week’s decision by the committee. She said opponents of change no longer will be able to use the law committee’s 1992 statement on homosexuality as an excuse to continue excluding gays from the movement.
“According to the current position of the movement, gay men and women are lesser human beings than heterosexuals.” Cohen said. “Gay people can be kept out of every level of lay leadership in our movement. Until now, rabbis have been able to say, ‘There’s nothing I can do. My hands are tied.’”
Rabbi Moshe Levin, the spiritual leader of San Francisco’s Ner Tamid, said opening the door to ordination of gay and lesbian clergy and commitment ceremonies was a painfully overdue move. Conservative Judaism aims to strike a balance between tradition and change, and the rabbi contends the past two decades haven’t seen much change.
“People can say we’re finally moving forward. Our last real move forward was the acceptance of women for ordination. The feeling has been ‘What have we done lately?’” he said.
“We’ve spent most of the last 20 years circling the wagons around tradition and now this is another step in balancing tradition with contemporary values.”
Levin feels the teshuvah penned by Rabbis Eliot Dorff, Daniel Nevins and Avram Reisner will rapidly make acceptance of openly gay and lesbian clergy and commitment ceremonies the majority position, just as it did for women on the bimah 20 years ago.
“Women, music in the synagogue and now this is the third [major ruling]. And it also might be the last for a while. I don’t see anything else halachically holding the Conservative movement back from its dynamic role,” he said.
He noted there are already “quite a number of gay and lesbian rabbis in the Conservative movement and rabbinical schools — it’s just a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation. [The ruling] will be more profound for the gay and lesbian community, particularly here in San Francisco, to be able to turn to a Conservative rabbi and say ‘I want to have a commitment ceremony’ and rabbis are now able to say ‘Sure, what date?’”
KeshetJTS, a student advocacy group, says a survey shows that eight out of 10 members of the JTS community would support such a move.
“I think that congregants are ahead of their rabbis on many issues, and this is one of them,” said Rabbi Steve Greenberg, an openly gay Orthodox rabbi and senior teaching fellow at CLAL-the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. “I can tell you that there are people who have wanted to go to the seminary to become a rabbi and have chosen to go elsewhere, and will be thrilled that that option will now be open to them.”
Meanwhile, Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the movement’s congregational arm, announced immediately that he was recommending a change in the organization’s hiring practices, which had previously required employees to be observant of Jewish law — conveniently barring gays and lesbians.
“I see no reason why we should not revise our hiring policies so we may consider applicants for United Synagogue jobs no matter what their sexual orientation may be,” Epstein said in a statement.
Ben Harris is a jta staff writer. Joe Eskenazi is a j. staff writer.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California