When a Faygele Becomes a Rabbi

I cannot believe it's taken me so long to get to mentioning this, but's it's been an insane week. The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement has voted to ordain openly gay and lesbian rabbis! It's very exciting, although I'll temper the news in just a bit. Wednesday, when it happened, there was a suddenly flurry of activity--I was getting emails, work and personal, from all sorts of people who seemed to crawl out of the woodwork to get me the news. I spoke to Idit Klein of Keshet, who seemed exceedingly cool, and Rabbi Menachem Creditor, easily one of my favorite people on the planet since I was about sixteen, in order to clarify for myself exactly what the accepted teshuvot permit and do not permit.

I'd like to call this one a win. Not a full win, maybe, but an amazing win. Although the status quo is still an acceptable pose for an individual congregational rabbi (or movement seminary, although let's just not go there for now) to take, the C movement has also accepted a new halakhic interpretation that says Leviticus bans only male anal sex, and thus postulating that gays can be rabbis and can officiate at committment ceremonies.

If you're up for it, check out the links and commentary provided here, because this will prove much more useful than any attempted explanations I could provide. However, two things os special note:

1) Please, do not use the term "gay marriage". It is factually unsound, as I informed the JTA on Thursday when they sent out an email (shockingly, a request for money) that said that the CJLS had approved gay marriage. The next email they sent had different wording. Whoops!

1a) What's the difference? you may ask. Gay marriage would include a whole set of ceremonies that are, to my extremely limited understanding, halakhically traif for non-heteronormative couplings. So, like, no kiddushin, etc.

1b) Why don't I sound more enraged about this technicality? you may ask. After all, I get thoroughly self-righteous when the question of "gay marriage" comes up in a US legal context. Well, that's because I don't think laws, at least in a country that includes the separation of Church and State among its highest civil values, ought to decide things based on religious understandings of situations. Religion, likewise, shouldn't decide things based on political understandings of things. This is religion sticking to religion, and I like that. Plus, I've been learning more about truly Jewish, halakhically-respectful, committment ceremonies, and I'm starting to be okay with them--how beautiful!

2) I learned from the amazing Danya Ruttenberg about a very interesting mathematical situation: the CJLS has twenty-five members and needs a majority vote to pass such a teshuvah. Both the original policy (no gays) and the new paper (yay gays!) got thirteen votes--just a majority. It means somebody overlapped. Intrigue!

So, while this doesn't mean that I'm going to rabbinical school at all/any earlier than my forties, it is SO NICE to be able to look at the Conservative Movement and say, "Damn! I am so proud to count myself among their numbers." It doesn't happen often enough, so let's just leave it with a big ole mazal tov to us all, today.

Kol tov...