Orthodoxy and homosexuality: Expanding our imagination

When will it become a given in Modern Orthodox and religious Zionist communities that some of our members are gay, that many of them wish to remain in our communities, that we should wish for the same, and that to enable this goal, we must acknowledge their existence and affirm some framework by which they can live fulfilling lives, lives involving homosexual intimacy?

From Zion comes forth Torah, and reasons for optimism. A 2023 documentary, The Holy Closet (more felicitously in the original Hebrew: Aron HaKodesh, playing on the two senses of aron, ark and closet), offers lifecycle snapshots of LGBTQ+ couples who are connected with religious communities in Israel; under the auspices of Eshel, which is devoted to building LGBTQ+ inclusive Orthodox communities especially in the United States, it has been screened in various American cities. Pink Lady, a 2024 Nir Bergman film adapted for the stage earlier this year, depicts a Haredi marriage that comes under serious strain when the wife discovers that her husband is in fact attracted to men. A popular podcast series, Haredit Meduberet, hosted by Esti Shoshan, recently featured an eye-opening interview with Rabbi Refael Polisuk, a faculty member at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem who made his path to the rabbinate through the “mother” of the Religious Zionist yeshivah system, Merkaz ha-Rav, and through a long and difficult process of recognizing himself as gay. An especially profound contribution in this arena is the 2024 work of autobiographical fiction, Whose Sukkah Is Falling Down, by Tzvi Ben Meir, a bestseller and prizewinner that has also been adapted for the stage, premiering a few months ago at Jerusalem’s Khan Theater. The novel tells the story of the doomed marriage of Bini (Binyamin) and Esther, both hailing from the heart of the modern religious Zionist community in Israel. I wish here to draw some insight from it.

“Conversion therapy” unfortunately retains a certain legitimacy in some Orthodox communities. The other default counsels are celibacy and passing. We tell the gay man: Consign yourself to bachelor status, a living widowhood. Or we tell him: Find a woman whom you can love, even if not in a sexual way (and perhaps, just perhaps, you could muster some sexual interest?), and together you will manage. The great virtue of Ben Meir’s novel, as a work of imagination and as a social intervention, is that, in Bini’s first-person voice, it depicts the impossibility and the harm of all three alternatives. And because it depicts their failure with such perspicacity and trenchancy, and because it echoes narratives like Rabbi Polisuk’s, we reasonably infer that such failure is the general case, or at least prevalent.

The book’s major plot engine is the absence of words. As Bini moves through the religious Zionist educational system, he confronts again and again the impossibility of speech. He cannot articulate to himself his attraction to other young men. Nor, of course, can he reveal it to others; it is an intensely guarded secret that he shares only with a very limited number of people, and only under exigent circumstances. He does tell Esther just before their engagement about his homoerotic desires, but their conversation is very brief, and full of circumlocution. Having internalized the incentive structure of the society that has formed them, they unconsciously work together to shroud the issue in evasion and silence. Ben Meir’s book attempts to fasten onto the evasions, to give expression to the silences.

I offer translations of two extended passages. The setting for the first passage is as follows. Having kept his parents and siblings in the dark into his 30s, and through six years of marriage to Esther, Bini finally reveals to his sister, Bat-Tzion, that his attraction is to men. She responds sympathetically, and, reflecting on Bini’s decision to marry Esther, says: “What choice did you have, Bini? What choice did you even make, how could you really have chosen otherwise, what were the options?” He expands on this.

I didn’t have other options. It was either to remain alone forever, or to marry a woman. And to remain alone forever wasn’t a real option. That is, it was an option that could happen, that could, God forbid, in the very worst case, if God should abandon me to my eternal bachelorhood, if I should be stuck forever. But it was forbidden for me to be stuck forever. Not because I was deathly afraid of the loneliness of the aging bachelor. In truth, I didn’t have a notion of what that meant at all. It wasn’t the loneliness that I feared. I was afraid to not be part of the game. That’s the truth. I was afraid of being disqualified, that I would leave the field, that I would sit on the bench. And the game is, to be a good boy, simply to be a good boy. … And good boys marry. And good boys marry a woman, and only a woman, and only a woman, and the crazy option of marrying a man doesn’t occur to them. And already in their mid-twenties they marry this woman. … Good boys think about the prospect of true love, but if necessary they will make do with love, enough to stake out a chuppah, to build a household. Good boys swallow and suppress and conceal deep, deep, not only their most basic desires, but also everything intuitive, everything authentic, everything that wants to burst out, their bridled id. (142-43)

In the second passage, Bini reflects on “tevilah nights,” i.e., the nights on which Esther would immerse in the mikveh, the nights on which sexual intimacy was the expectation.

I had a specific chapter of Psalms that I would whisper. Like before battle. I was fixed on the target, and wanted Esther to get back home already, but at the same time, I wanted her never to come back, and I was scared of that feeling. But I held onto it like a soldier who wants his commanding officer to say: Stand down. There won’t be a battle. We’re returning to the base. Not even to the base. Home. In fact, there’s no army at all, no weapons, no watch duties, nothing. Mission accomplished. It seems there never was a mission. You’re all OK, the commanding officer will say, and then he’ll look at me and say: You in particular. You, you’re truly OK.

Sometimes I was OK. Esther would return and we would have a pleasant evening and a night of closeness, and I would think that I was succeeding, that we were succeeding, that we were normal. That we were a loving, close couple, with emotional intimacy and physical intimacy. That everything was OK with us. The thing to which I’d obligated myself in the marriage contract had happened. Here I was, fulfilling my obligation to my wife like a Jewish man. But my wife, my Esther, would be lying next to me on the bed, her shining hair loose, smiling at me with her lips but sad at me with her eyes, and I couldn’t see. That is, I certainly had the capacity to see, but I couldn’t muster the willingness to look straight… I couldn’t see that she was missing something and wasn’t really satisfied. I couldn’t see that no woman, no woman in the world, wants her husband to have to plead with God before she returns from tevilah like a person might plead for a miracle. No woman wants to be a mission. No woman in the world wants to be a mission. No woman in the world, desiring her husband, wants him to be checking off a checklist, to see her in his heart as the black point in the middle of a target, and not to see her, all of her. Just as I didn’t see my Esther. No woman in the world, desiring her husband, wants him to see sexual intercourse as another small drawer among the drawers of life, something you need to deal with because you committed yourself, something you need to open and then immediately close. A task you need to carry out like a painful injection that is simply necessary and nothing can be done about it. And once it happens, that’s enough, you can go on to the next drawer. No woman in the world. (169-70)

I can only understand this second passage by trying (as Bini more or less proposes to his father, at 176-77) to imagine that I lived in a community defined by an overwhelming homosexual norm, and therefore that I, though heterosexual, felt socially compelled to marry a man. I imagine that our sexual encounters would look, at best, like the ones between Bini and Esther. And here—incidentally, and yet it seems inevitable that looking with clear eyes at the situation of the gay Orthodox Jew should yield theological insight—we learn something, perhaps, about the service of God. Our tradition distinguishes between “worship out of fear” and “worship out of love.” The latter is greater than the former. But to speak of worship out of fear and out of love is to produce the false impression that there is some coherent thing, worship of God, that might be performed in more or less the same way and to the same effect from two different sets of motivations. But the analogy to marital sex (partial as it of course is) can be instructive. The contours of marital sex are determined by the background postulate of love, including physical attraction, and the absence of love denatures it. Likewise, when worship of God happens out of fear, it is like Bini’s intimacy with Esther: at best beset by tension; as a general rule superficial, false, unfulfilling, sad, unsustainable.

To return to the main point: Together the two passages frame the dilemma of gay Orthodox Jews. In modern Orthodox and religious Zionist society, adult membership is constructed exclusively around heterosexual marriage, but heterosexual marriage cannot be feigned without great harm to both spouses.

The way forward begins with seeing and accepting facts. We must accept that there are modern Orthodox Jews who are gay, that they cannot be made heterosexual, and that the only way to enable them to live happy lives in our family-centered society is by making space in it for them and for the families that they may choose to build. Orthodox Jews who live in the modern world know these things, and leaders at its margins have begun to respond to them in serious ways. But in part because of the great halakhic obstacles that stand in the way of acceptance or endorsement of gay marriage, our instinct is to turn aside from the facts. As human beings, our imaginative capacity, our ability to understand the world from a perspective not our own, is limited, and this limitation enables evasion. Novels like Ben Meir’s expand our imagination. I cannot know precisely what halakhic responses, what social changes, would follow from a robust and sympathetic confrontation with the above facts; what would happen, to put it differently, if our communities broadly, and their leaders and poskim, read and absorbed Ben Meir’s Whose Sukkah is Falling Down, alongside the other interventions noted at the outset. But I think it would be impactful.