An email, sent off-list to someone on a Conservative Jewish mailing list regarding the legitimization of homosexuality and homosexual relations in Conservative Judaism. Person in question expresses dismay at the position I seem to be taking on-list, of arguing from a position of “no-choice” with regards to sexual orientation/attraction.
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I agree with you 100%. But I do not know how to argue the position that I hold in my heart and mind… trying to do so always gets me in trouble debate-wise. As an aside, I myself am bisexual, and am not too enthusiastic about the day that may come when I fall in love with a woman and want to spend the rest of my life with her, but run into difficulty because of being out as bisexual and unwilling to dishonestly declare myself as having come out as a “lesbian” in order to plead “lack of choice.” As I have stated previously, I am not a halachic scholar and feel more than a little underqualified to argue halacha with folks here, most of whom are quite a bit older than I am and more studied. I’m not entirely convinced that there is a strictly halachic way to legitimize same-sex relations the way I would like to see them legitimized, without a radical reinterpretation of the root text (which I am willing to do, but can understand the reluctance of many Conservative Jews, and certainly of the Law Committee, to do so).

Another big part of the problem is the defining of the homosexual/non-heterosexual experience. Many gay folks of the strictly homosexual persuasion are perfectly content to argue, and to argue loudly, for lack of choice, even arguing from genetics (for which there is no scientific evidence as yet) and as such this has become largely the accepted premise in pro-gay circles. As someone who feels attraction for people on an individual and personal basis largely regardless of gender, I cannot accept this premise. I am willing to take a person at their word that they are incapable of feeling attraction for a certain sex, but obviously none of us knows what truly goes on in the hearts and minds of others. What I do feel to be a truth, though, is that a person’s orientation is more than just a simple choice. This is what I find to be so insulting about the kashrut analogy… I have a deep appreciation for the practice of kashrut and keep kosher myself… but I have known my whole life that it was a fairly simple matter to choose kashrut. The choosing may have deep ramifications for a person’s personality and identity and how they relate to themselves and the world around them… personally I believe that this is the primary reason for keeping kashrut, but we can discuss this later… but it is a simple choice.

Relationships are not as simple, and who one finds themselves attracted to or in love with is a much deeper and more complex matter. It used to be that relationships were sanctioned primarily as business deals, and that the sexual proclivities or love interests of the people involved were not of as great consequence in the initiation of the transaction as we now consider them to be (interestingly enough, I don’t hear anyone arguing that we should go back to match-making to solve these problems of love and attraction wreaking havoc with our halachic system). In our earliest history, where men had the choice to take multiple partners whereas only the woman was under significant sexual sanction, it was not, I imagine, considered problematic since the person of primary importance in the scenario had options for sexual satisfaction beyond the confines of a single life-partner, the need for true love and compatibility between married partners was less paramount than it must be in our largely monogamous paradigm.

Now that we largely accept a world view in which love and attraction and compatibility are considered primary in the choosing of a life-partner, matters of who one can enter into such a relationship with bear reexamination. The reexamination itself is not without precedent, since we have in our history the rabbinic banning of polygamy (something else that no one seems to be advocating the reinitiation of, interestingly enough… might solve some problems) but of course we all know that it is rabbinically easier to go from less restrictive to more restrictive… though the opposite is also not without precedent. The biggest problem is, I suppose, that darned slippery slope argument in which I have refused to engage. As I think I have stated before, each of the other sexual prohibitions which we uphold in Judaism have multiple halachic and extra-halachic reasons for maintaining them, and I see no way in which this will change anytime in the foreseeable future… but the fact that I cannot foresee the future does not mean much for a halachic argument… it is true that the same has been, and still could be said for homosexual relations.

The plain and painful truth is that I simply do not know how to argue it.

And honestly, this is part of why I want to go to rabbinical school… because I want to learn enough to frame my positions legitimately within the Jewish context.

In response to my thoughts on God and Buddha, my friend Getzel saw fit to remind me that while in Judaism we tend to think in terms of 1 (unity of God and of things in general), “Buddhism” tends to frame things in terms of 0, of nothingness. This reminded me of a thought I had several years ago, probably after reading The Mystery Of The Aleph by Amir Aczel followed immediately by Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. The thought that I had was that, metaphysically, the concepts of 1, 0 and ∞ are closely related, and may even mean the same thing.

I had set the thought aside years ago (this was, I think, sometime toward the end of high school, or the beginning of college), in order to think about other matters that may have seemed more practical at the time. When Getzel brought it back to the surface, I set it aside again, but knew that I couldn’t just leave it alone. When I had some silence I was going to think about it, there was no getting around it.

Well, what is Shabbat for except thinking? (Also, you know, praising God and naming babies and eating lox and drinking rye… but you know what I mean.) So, over Shabbat I did some thinking about this. Here is an approximate reconstruction of the thought process.

I started with honey. Why honey? Because nothing can live in honey. This is why it is an excellent preservative, and why it never goes bad. I was thinking of unity. What is unified? What is truly One? Something, and the absence of anything else. So honey just came to mind. Okay, so postulate a completely unified universe, a universe of honey. That is One.

Except, Honey is not really unified. See, honey has a molecular structure. Honey can be broken down. Anything, anything, at least anything of which we have knowledge, can be broken down. I should note that A photon cannot, to our knowledge be broken down, but a photon can also not be proven to have an independent existence of its own, thank you quantum mechanics. The current standard model holds quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons to be elementary particles, but the standard model is of course in flux, as science always must be.

So what is unified? What is truly One? The answer is Nothing. Nothing. Zero.

0 is the only true 1.

Okay, so we’ve got 0 and 1. Where does ∞ fit? Lets come back to the concept of unity. Unity, the absence of anything else. The state of being without separation. True unity, cosmic unity, therefore, must be infinite. Why? Because if it stops, it is separated. If it ends, the ending is a separation from… something. Anything. Or nothing. But it is a boundary which necessarily implies the existence of an outside of the boundary. And we’re no longer talking true unity.

Ein. Ein Sof. Ein Sof Ohr.

Does this actually mean anything? I don’t know. Is there any practical application to this line of thought? I don’t know. Does it fascinate me? Oh dear God yes. What do you do with this sort of thinking? What do you do when this is the sort of thing that you think about at night, then when you come to a point where something makes sense in a way you hadn’t thought of before, you smile to yourself and can finally fall asleep? And when you feel like you’ve gotten somewhere with a line of thought like this, what do you do with it? Who do you talk to about it?

This is why I majored in philosophy alongside Jewish studies. And this is why I ultimately dropped my philosophy major. All the philosophy students wanted to do was find a philosopher from the past to blow their mind and with whom they could decide they agreed and go around declaring “I Am A Kantian!” No one wanted to have their own thoughts, or find out who had had similar thoughts to theirs in the past for the sake of furthering or refining their ideas. I went into philosophy because I felt alone and I left because I felt alone.

shrug C’est La Vie, I suppose. Someday I hope to somehow put all this stuff in my brain together in a way that… creates something useful.

Since I started talking about this project I’m working on, a lot of people are pointing me toward the independent minyanim and the Havurah movement and other post-denominational resources.
I have nothing against “post-denominationalism,” the Havurah movement, et al. I’m quite fond of a number of independent minyanim and I am not placing myself in competition with them. But I do feel that the Synagogue culture needs to change, and I believe that Conservative Judaism as a movement has a lot to offer, and that the independent young 20-30-somethings that tend to split off collectively have a lot to offer in turn to The Movement, as an educated laity.

In the face of all of the complaints that The Movement isn’t filling the needs of my demographic, or that my demographic is falling away from the movement, or that the movement is losing its way, my thought is always a desperate “DO SOMETHING!” When turned in on myself, it was “Just wait till I get back from Israel, just wait until I get to rabbinical school, just wait till I’m finished with rabbinical school…” and then two nights ago I realized… Why Am I Waiting?

So here are the beginnings of an initiative to revitalize The Conservative Movement: Nogah Chadash. This is not meant to be a new movement, or a shul. This is meant to be a resource for people who are serious about Judaism and about Jewish learning, for the already committed and for the wanting to become committed and serious Jews. This is a project of Outreach and Education on a level beyond your childhood Talmud Torah. This is for people who want to explore why we do what we do, how we do it, and how we relate to each other and to our practice. It is an effort to invest in each other so that we may in turn become strong enough to invest in others.

All things be ready if our minds be so. Let’s get cracking.

At JTS a couple of weeks ago I met this really great guy A. with whom I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time in the not-too-distant future, and with whom I think I might end up working on a lot of future projects. I was wearing an orange scarf that day that my friend Kathleen bought for me a few years ago from a Tibetan shop in New Hampshire. It has Sanskrit writing along the edges and a Buddha in the middle. A. saw it and got excited. “Oh, don’t tell me, don’t tell me I’m not the only one!” I let him down a little bit by telling him that the scarf was a gift from a friend and that I didn’t actually know what the Sanskrit said, but promised that there was to be a lot of talking about Buddha and Buddhism in our future.

Last night before going to sleep I picked up a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that I’d picked up this past spring after Sakura Matsuri for $2 from some guys selling used books from a table just off St. Marks. It’s a book that people have been telling me to read for over a decade. I’m only up to chapter 5, but something struck me very early on in the narrative, and that was the use of Buddha as interchangeable with “God” and in association with “The Godhead”

I’ve encountered several different understandings of Buddha. Many of them include a worship of something divine, something, something called Buddha which is another word for what is also called, say, Jesus, or Jehovah, or Krishna, or Allah. Often this conception of Buddha is accompanied by statues and/or pictures of “Buddha” in the form of a man, and sacrifices placed before said image, bowing before said image, etc.

Someone once tried to tell me that idolatry was not actually idolatry because the statue was not the God itself but just a tangible image of the actual god, merely a representative of a deity and not the deity itself. I tried to explain to this person that that was exactly what idolatry is.

I once heard an old man argue vociferously that Buddhism could not possibly be compatible with Judaism because he’s seen Buddhists and they bow down to statues and you cannot be Jewish and bow down to statues. It is true that you cannot be a Jewish Jew who practices Judaism if you bow down to statues. But it is incorrect that this is what Buddhism is.

Buddha is not a person. Buddha is not a god. Buddha is not a noun. It is an adjective. It is a state of being. Buddha means awake. The only understanding of Buddhism that I can accept as in any way “real” is that which says “If you meet the Buddha on the road, you must kill it” and “If you say that you are a Buddhist, you are not.” Buddha is not a name for God.

And yet… it is.

See, here’s how it works… God, our God, the Jewish God, is a verb. Buddha is an adjective. And you are the noun. Simple. Yod Hey Vav Hey. You. I. I am. I God Buddha. I am Awake.

So what else is there?

This understanding of Buddhism has no place for statues and images and incense and sacrifices. Not that I have anything against incense… incense is very nice for things like calming rattled nerves and setting moods and the like… not the point. Striving to become Buddha is the point of what is called “Buddhism.” In that sense, my Judaism is Buddhism. In that sense, I am a “Buddhist.” And I am as far from an idolater as you can get.