Marianna Frey
May 4, 2024
Shabbat Shalom,
As many of you know, I come from a long line of teachers and have found passion and joy in educating. Also as many of you know, my journey through Jewishness has not been “traditional”; I was raised in a culturally Jewish home by parents who wanted us to be able to choose our own religion and spirituality when we were old enough to make educated decisions. I have been studying Hebrew with Leslie Schwartz, Jewishness and Torah with Rabbi Setel, and have been lucky to have patient and invested Jewish friends here in medical school who have invited me to Jewish events and are willing to explain anything and everything along the way.
With all this being said, I wanted to take this as an opportunity to share some of what I’ve learned in my last few years of studying.
Starting broadly, the Torah is made up of five books. The first book, Genesis, is, in short, an origin story for the world, the People Israel, and their relationship with God. In the second book, Exodus, the people Israel are first enslaved by Pharoah in Egypt and then eventually led out. In Leviticus, the third book, God comes down from Mount Sinai, resides among the People, and provides a long set of rules regarding holiness; more on that later. Briefly, the last two books, Numbers and Deuteronomy, tell the story of Israel testing God’s limits, then being presented a choice of “blessings” for keeping the rules of the Torah or “curses” for breaking the rules.
My portion, or parashah, is in Leviticus, the third book of the Torah, which outlines rules and rituals meant to allow the mortal Israelites to coexist with a God that is, at this time in the Torah’s story, residing among them in the Tabernacle, a sort of mobile temple-tent where God’s presence could dwell.
Leviticus, which comes from “Levi”, the term for priests, provides detailed guidance on coexisting with a very holy (kadosh), very powerful being. The book lists rules for the priests, rules for the people, and rules for specific rituals. Originally, Leviticus probably acted as a manual for priests. A central concern of Leviticus is “ritual readiness” or tahor in Hebrew, which is often erroneously translated as “purity” or “cleanliness”, but is really a state of being closer, rather than further, from holiness, and thus ready to perform certain rituals. Explicit in Leviticus is the idea that all of us are continually cycling between ritual readiness, tahor, and unreadiness, tamei, for reasons both within and beyond our control. Rabbi Setel herself has written about ritual readiness and unreadiness, describing the complexities and intricacies of a theme in the Torah that has physical, moral, and societal overlay and is not always consistent. One of the major ways to transition from tamei to tahor is through offerings, which are discussed extensively throughout Leviticus, and are actually very interesting in a metaphorical sense. If I had you all for a one hour lecture, I might have time to talk about some of the details regarding offerings, priestly leadership, and the very interesting idea described in Leviticus that no one is above the law and everyone is collectively responsible for the mistakes of the Jewish community. However, we don’t have that kind of time, because we have good food and friends to spend time with, so we will take a raincheck on that.
So, we have now discussed the Torah, some details about Leviticus, the concepts of tahor and tamei, and to zoom in further, I’d like to provide the context for my portion “Achrei Mot”, or “After the Death”. In the portion immediately preceding mine, Nadav and Avihu, sons of Aaron, are killed mysteriously after presenting “alien fire” at the altar to God in the Tabernacle. Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and Tzara’at, some sort of skin disease or plague that may or may not have been related to leprosy, are discussed as things which cause a person to become tamei and which require offerings, priestly action, and ritual to return to a state of tahor. So essentially, preceding my portion is a long list of ways you can become ritually unready, things you and others can do to return to readiness, and an unfortunate event in which Aaron’s sons are punished, for what appears to be a mistake, with the ultimate sentence of death.
Now, on to the details of my portion. The first section of my portion describes the ritual of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. It outlines rituals that everyone, and specifically the priests, to perform to address the effects of any transgressions that remained up to that point in the year. Originally, this involved symbolically transferring the transgressions to a goat. Yes, this is where the idea of a “scapegoat” comes from, which is kind of fun. And yes, I actually think this is the interesting part of the portion. However, I think the last part of the portion, which I chose to read aloud, is more important to discuss, and to engage with, although it would be far more comfortable to sweep it under the rug.
The last section of Achrei Mot, again, the section I read aloud, lists rules for sexual encounters as would be relevant to a cis-male audience, detailing who a cis-male can and cannot “lie with”. “Lying with” is widely accepted to mean “have sex with”, based on other uses of the phrase throughout the Torah. These rules range from the important-to-state and obvious, “Do not lie with your mother’s sister” to the mildly horrifying and easily-weaponizable, “Do not lie with a[nother] male as one would lie with a woman, it is an abhorrence”. What can be said about this?
Commentators, or scholars and rabbis, from the Middle Ages through today have offered their thoughts on each section of the Torah. There are a plethora of ways that these commentators have interpreted this last line forbidding males from lying with males as they would females, and frankly, there are issues with all the interpretations. Rabbi Abraham Cohen, editor of the Soncino Commentary book. believes these lines were written to avoid any “parody of heterosexual sex” that might “waste seed” or semen in a subsistent world where children were valuable workers and pregnancy was a dangerous, resource-heavy medical condition. Commentators note the lack of any lines in the Torah that forbid female-female sex, which would not endanger procreation in quite the same way, as evidence for this interpretation. Etz Hayim, the Conservative movement’s commentary book, hypothesizes that these “Incest Laws” were written to avoid “sexually overheating” a home: “A household would become impossibly “overheated” if sexually mature brothers and sisters, parents and children could regard each other as sexually available”. From still a different angle, some conservative scholars believe that one can literally interpret this line as only prohibiting anal sex, in which the male would insert “as with a female”, and it does not prohibit any other type of homosexual intercourse (Etz Hayim). Some commentators pull no punches; “Being an act abhorrent to the human soul and contrary to nature, [male-male intercourse] is described as an abomination”, is written in Soncino commentary. All of these interpretations are fairly literalist, and I leave it to you to consider all their implications.
Significant scholarship is written on the overall sex-positive perspective of Judaism, and if we take that as a baseline, then some less literal commentaries can be considered. One interpretation of these lines would be their function of differentiating the Israelites from the surrounding “Other”, including the Egyptian and Canaanite peoples. The Women’s Bible commentary justifies the inclusion of the most odious lines in this portion as necessarily constraining the boundaries, and thus the distinct concepts, of a female body and a male body.
One can abstract the ideas presented even further, making them more comfortable to engage with: for example, Rabbi Zoë Klein, of the Reform Temple Isaiah in LA, creatively interprets the “nakedness” that is repeatedly forbidden from being exposed as simply a metaphor for weaknesses. So in her reading, the Torah is telling us not to uncover someone’s weaknesses, to let people hide flaws as they wish. She ends her d’var Torah with: “Let us clothe our loved ones with kindness. Let us wrap them in blessings as with a garment.” This lovely metaphor completely reinterprets the translations of the original Hebrew, thwarting any danger of the wording being weaponized against LGBTQIA+ Jews. But by her interpretation, we should look away from our loved ones’ weaknesses and moments of embarrassment, as a show of respect and love, which I don’t agree with. Ignoring a problem is not how I show love and respect. Similarly, I think we should engage with this portion head-on.
Various interpretations are written along the lines of “this was written at a time when procreation was valued above all else” or “They didn’t mean it literally”, or “It was important to state some of these rules and we can ignore the others”. To me, not only is that not honestly Jewish in the way I have come to understand the tradition, it is not consistent with my values as I go through this journey toward a stronger Jewish identity.
As much as I love teaching, I probably love learning more. And if I’ve learned anything in medical school, it’s that learning is uncomfortable. In engaging with discomfort, we stand the most to gain. Our late classmate taught us that, if nothing else. I am not going to pretend I have come to terms with this line in the Torah, or with several other lines in this portion, or with huge parts of the broader Jewish religion. What I love about my experience studying for this Bat Mitzvah, working with Drorah, Leslie, and the community I have found here, are the ways I have been encouraged to question, to criticize, and to disagree. I do not accept what is written here, that males cannot engage in sexual acts as they would with females, but I will engage with the interpretation of scholars over the ages. I won’t accept the people who leverage lines like this, from any religious texts, against my peers, my patients, and my family, but I will talk to them.
I have been sitting with this passage for months, and I am okay not accepting some of the lines as they are written. Some people refer to this as “wrestling with the Torah”, but I prefer to think of my mental-self sitting with my arms crossed, pouting, as I think hard about what it means to identify with a religion that has this book as its primary text. And what’s exciting to me is that I don’t have answers yet… but that’s why I finally feel Jewish enough. Sitting in discomfort is my answer. In a bizarre parallel to my medical training, I have become very comfortable with not knowing. With having some kind of answer, just out of reach, that I know I’ll never be able to fully grasp. Not being comfortable, continually learning, disagreeing, and fighting for justice are all written in the Torah many more times than this line prohibiting gay sex, echoed maybe two other times in the entire Torah. And I think the more we all engage and strongly disagree, the more we can move forward into a more just world.