“In God’s Image: Moving from Abomination to Acceptance”
Rabbi Amy R. Perlin, D.D. May, 10, 2013 Shabbat Bemidbar
Temple B’nai Shalom, Fairfax Station, VA, with gratitude to The Sexuality Spectrum exhibit at HUC-JIR
I had the privilege of attending the meeting of the Board of Governors of HUC-JIR (Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion), our Reform seminary, this week, in NYC. As many of you know, I really don’t like New York. It is too busy, too crowded, too dirty, too noisy and has way too many tall buildings for my taste. I may have been born in the Empire State, but give me the Old Dominion any day, where people are polite, the pace of life is slower, trees surround me, and green is a color of nature not paint on a graffitied wall.
They keep us going from early morning to night at these meetings. Sometimes when special committees meet, we are given the opportunity to take advantage of a campus scholar, or an art exhibit. I did both this past Monday. Why not learn all I can so I can bring it back to you? And learn, I did.
To my surprise, tonight’s sermon, and the study that will follow after services, was born during a visit to the new and controversial exhibition in the HUC museum and lobby. I will explore some of the art work after services, with the adults, as part of our study and discussion, but there was an important lesson to learned by Jews of all ages from this exhibition, displaying works of art by Jews and non-Jews from all over the world, art that is religious and non-religious.
The exhibit could have been entitled with our Adult Ed/L.I.F.E. theme for this year — “In God’s Image.” For at its essence, the goal of the museum curator was to show the variety of human gender identity, all of which is part of the spectrum of human life and experience.
In one of the rooms, there was a fascinating piece of art, which I have put in your service folder, entitled “Abomination: Wrestling with Leviticus 18:22.” It was an installation composed of three pieces: two framed images, which depict a person dressed in garments made of fabric that had been printed with pages of the Talmud. These people’s shapes are visible, but not their faces. They are curled up in words that describe them as an abomination.
Imagine, being a Jew and knowing that for some of your fellow Jews you are an abomination, because of who you love or how you look or live, or how you were born. Imagine living Jewish values, loving God and Torah, giving tzedakah, living a moral life, caring about your family and friends, … living, learning, and loving, only to be labeled unkosher, unholy, unworthy, and “less than.” Imagine the pain of trying to embrace a tradition that has texts that label you as “the other.”
This shouldn’t be too hard for 53% of us in this room. In this week’s Torah portion, Bemidbar in Hebrew, the first chapters of the book of Numbers, in English, the people of Israel are being counted – not all of the people, just the adult men who are eligible to fight with Moses en route to the Promised Land. From the very beginning of the book of Numbers, it becomes clear that adult males are the ONLY ones who count in this Israelite world. And when the census is taken and the shekels are collected for each head, again, only men count.
Now, the book is entitled Bemidbar/In the Wilderness, and the Biblical wilderness is a world far from here in time and place, BUT this message of Torah became the seed from which many exclusions were sprouted in Jewish traditional life. Men, adult men, are God’s army, God’s normal… and the rest of us – the women and children are LESS THAN. It doesn’t feel very good if you aren’t the “chosen image” in the Torah.
Now, I must caution myself and my scholarship with the words of Professor Rachel Adler of HUC’s Los Angeles school:
“Reject the notion that the Bible speaks with a single voice and look for counter-narrative. The Bible is not a single consistent voice of authority.”
We cannot say that the entire Torah is negative on women or labels certain people as “other,” “abomination,” or “less than.” We can only say that Leviticus 18:22 does that, or the first chapters of the book of Numbers.
In Genesis 1, we receive a hopeful view of God’s image from the Torah for all humanity. This new planet created by God will have humans, male and female, and depending on your reading, those who may be both — all created by God, all created in God’s image and likeness. Every person who lives has God’s image. Just as in the song “From a Distance” we are reminded that from a distance, we are all earthlings on a blue planet floating in a solar system, third rock from the sun.
I will never depart from this Jewish view, as I embrace and grapple with our tradition. Genesis 1 opens the Torah with acceptance of all, and responsibility for all to be partners in the ongoing work of creation. It sets the tone for our modern relationship with God. This is the image of God we teach our children at TBS. This is the worldview that Seth will cite as he holds up a mirror to our society tomorrow and wants an end to bullying and hate. We are all water-filled, carbon-based units struggling to make sense of this complicated and ever-changing world, often using our religious beliefs and teachings to help us find meaning, purpose and direction, using our faith tradition as a moral compass to navigate our universe.
If Genesis is all embracing, and Numbers begins with male exclusivity, then a look at Exodus and Deuteronomy, the second and fifth books of our Torah, seem to offer multiple images of “us” in relation to “them,” that are theologically based. In Exodus, “we” stand at Sinai to receive Torah, together, “men, women, and children, and the strangers in our midst.” The word of God is accessible to all of us and for all of us to hear, each in our own way, with our own interpretation.
In Deuteronomy, “we” are a people defined by the laws and values we observe that help to make us just, honest, moral, and faithful human beings. That is the Torah that will be handed to Seth tomorrow by his father. Our last book of Torah, Deuteronomy, teaches us, over and over again, to be a giving society. As a collective community, adat Yisrael, b’nai Yisrael, the congregation and children of Israel are taught to care for the “other” in our society. We are told that we are responsible for the “poor, the widow, and the orphan” – the economically disenfranchised, and we must protect them and provide a safety net for the most vulnerable in our society. It is not “us” and “them” – we are all one, mutually responsible for sustaining the image of God, and the dignity of God, in every person, from brother to slave, stranger to sojourner.
Amalek, from whom Haman and Hitler are said to have descended, is the group that attacked us from the rear killing the sick, the old, the women and their children. The Torah makes it clear that we must never become Amalek. The people of Israel must pursue justice for all, for the voiceless and weak, and those of means who may also be demonized for having by those who do not have.
The cornerstone of what makes us Reform Jews is the message of Deuteronomy that inspired the prophetic voices of Torah. We must be fair in our weights and measures in the marketplace, and we must not only seek, but work and advocate for fairness and justice in all aspects of our lives. We cannot pray to God in the sanctuary, if we do not live God’s ways “when we lie down and when we rise up,” to quote the Shema. We must reflect God’s image every minute of our lives, whether we are in the privacy of our own homes, or when we are in traffic rushing on our way.
And then, there is the middle book of our Torah, Leviticus, upon which the work of art, Abomination, is based. On the floor of the installation, between the two framed photographs, was a small box, almost like a coffin, that the artists say represents a geniza, a place where sacred objects that have outlived their usefulness go to be buried forever. Draped on the box is a shroud, the Jewish burial garment worn by men and women, and a small pillow filled with straw, similar to the pillow placed under our heads in our coffins. The pillowcase and the shroud are also made of fabric imprinted with the part of the Talmud called Arbah Mitot. Not my favorite passage to say the least. It is the part of the Talmud that explicates the verses of Leviticus that label certain people abominations, because of who they might love or how they live. The words on the fabric are themselves an abomination to me.
I was so moved by these garments, the pillow, the straw, and the meanings that flooded to my brain when I experienced them. This work of art shows us the death of our Jewish values, as we sacrifice “the other” on an altar of bigotry and hatred, bullying and bias. This creation of “the other” in our sacred texts has buried Judaism, for centuries, in a rejection of good people, and has poisoned the Judeo-Christian world with fundamentalist Jews and Christians who disenfranchise and demean the image of God, in the name of God. For them, God’s image is limited to those of the majority, who live and love the way they do, and all others, 1/7 or more of all humans, are to be closeted away, denied rights and respect, endowed to them by the Creator God of Genesis.
Leviticus is not a monolithic book either. It may create abomination in an ancient worldview, but it is still the book of the Holiness Code of Chapter 19, which teaches, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord, your God, am holy.” Simple geometry would postulate that if we are all created in God’s image and we are all holy, THEN… God’s image is our holiness, and by definition, that image is a multi-faceted kaleidoscope of human expression and possibility, worthy of embrace, understanding, and acceptance. The spectrum of light has all of the colors of the rainbow. That is not a coincidence.
Our sacred responsibility is to shine a light on the magnificence and complexity of creation and the creative process, so that all Jews and all human beings, 100% of God’s creation, the spectrum of humanity, can live and love with respect and honor.
When we label “the other” an abomination, we deny that person or community the right to shine in the light of God’s creation. We say that Jews embrace the concept of “L’chaim” – “To Life” and that needs to mean something. Live and let live. Judge less and love more. There must always be laws to prevent lawlessness and there must always be punishments for those who break faith with the holiness of their creative possibility, for those who perpetrate crimes. But, it is never a crime to be who God created you to be. NEVER.
Rabbis have always been interpreters and re-interpreters of our tradition in every generation. So, too, artists and writers, philosophers and sages, teachers in every age call us to witness injustice and to do something about it.
To those who want us to be silent at the Wall in Jerusalem, I say, that day has past. We are not an abomination.
To those in this blessed Old Dominion who prevent me from marrying two Jews who love one another, because their relationship does not meet their criteria for marriage, I say, the time for change is now.
To those who bully and hate those who are different in race or image, thought, or faith, we say, the only abomination is your behavior.
My message is quite simple. May the pages of our Torah and our Talmud never force anyone to curl up under a shadow of shame. Each book of Torah was written in a given time and world, and reflects its divinely inspired genius, as well as its human limitations. My Torah, our Torah in 2013, must be a Torah of values, justice, openness, caring, acceptance, and welcome, where every single person is respected and embraced, as a unique image of God. Shabbat Shalom.