Wider Lessons of Gay Pride Month: MEeting the “Enemy”

Israel started its Gay Pride Month celebrations yesterday with Jerusalem’s Gay Pride parade. Tel Aviv’s march – the largest in the Middle East – will take place next Friday (June 12). Whether we “agree” or not with homosexuality, there’s a wider lesson in this for all of us. Here’s my own story (I’m not gay). And no, that’s not a misprint in the title. It does say “MEeting”; I’ll end this post with another “misprint” – something for you to look forward to….

In my early 20’s, I met a young woman (for the sake of her privacy, I’ll call her Toni). She was nothing like most girls/women I had ever met – very serious about religion and other social issues. We had many discussions, among other matters we talked about “feminism” – something completely alien to someone like me, a product of Jewish Orthodox education from 1st to 12th grade. After a month, she told me her not so secret “secret”: she was a lesbian.

Almost everyone spends all their youth growing up in much the same social milieu, even if they move once or twice to a different city. That provides comfort, for we quickly learn who’s who, how to behave, what is expected of us, and most of all: what’s considered “normal.” The downside, of course, is that such a milieu is a social bubble; we basically have no idea how other social groups and certainly different cultural enclaves live their lives and what they consider to be important or “acceptable.”

This is especially true and problematic for citizens of large countries and/or countries that are mostly separated territorially from the rest of the world. Those two elements characterize Americans more than any other significant nation on the planet. If you’ve never seen it, look up Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cartoon cover; it even has its own Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue

Israelis, on the other hand, are quite aware of global “multiculturalism,” as there’s hardly an Israeli who hasn’t flown overseas – many several times over to such “exotica” as Thailand, Croatia, Japan, China, Argentina, New Zealand etc.

The same phenomenon is true not only for countries, but also for very cohesive social groups (religious, ethnic, and so on) – Orthodox Jews among them. This is not necessarily negative; such cultural self-ghettoization has enabled the Jewish People to survive longer than any other ethno-national culture on the face of the Earth (Chinese culture as we understand it today goes back “only” 2500 years to Confucius). But it does leave the average individual within that cultural enclave quite clueless about other ways of life. Like I was.

It might seem that there isn’t much of a cultural gap between modern Orthodoxy and Conservative Judaism. In a sense, modern Orthodoxy is today’s Beit Shammai (very strict in its interpretation of the law) and the Conservative approach to halakha [Jewish law] is Beit Hillel (far more lenient and flexible). Interestingly – something that many Orthodox today have forgotten – the final law decision was almost always according to Beit Hillel!

Back to “Toni”: the two of us had a religio-cultural “oil and water” interaction. My first shock: she wore a kippah (skullcap) all the time – something that back in the 1970s was unheard of (at least for me). The second shock: she put on tefillin (phylacteries) every morning! Ensuing conversations were certainly eye-opening. In a word – which I had read about and only understood in very general terms – “feminism.” In fact, ancient Jewish law actually treated women quite well for the “norms” of that age; Judaism has always placed social justice at a high normative level – not to mention the occasional female leader of the Israelites (e.g., Devorah).

For me, the experience was an “education” in the wider sense of the term. The main lesson: keep one’s eyes and ears open for other ways of thinking and living. Of course, this does not mean that one must (or should) accept and adopt those dissimilar perspectives.

What’s the value, then, of opening up to other ways of life? First, additive: we can learn about new things. Second, refractive: it’s a mirror to our own way of doing things i.e., forcing us to consider whether everything we’re used to doing makes sense. And third, it improves our social intelligence – better understanding and tolerance of “strange” things that others might be saying/doing.

For instance, different cultures have different conceptions of “social distance”: Latins (southern Europe and South America) tend to stand very close to each other when conversing, touching each other all the time; conversely, Anglos keep a significant distance. When the two get together without understanding the other’s cultural behavior, Latins consider Anglos to be weak and off-putting for not getting up close, whereas the reverse has the latter considering the former to be “pushy” and aggressive for constantly “invading my space.”

But why the word “enemy” in the title of this essay? Because in Orthodox circles, anyone of another Jewish “sect” was (and certainly in Israel, still is) considered to be a dangerous “enemy” – the Conservative movement perhaps even more so than Reform Judaism, precisely because the former adheres to the same general basis: halakha. In any case, meeting such an “enemy” in Toni, not only showed me how absurd such theological demonization can be, but also constituted a life lesson in listening to different ideas, opinions and practices – even if ultimately one does not necessarily accept all (or parts) of that way of living.

This is especially relevant to Israeli society. Despite its openness to other cultures around the world, we Israelis have become highly intolerant of the “other” in our midst. More “social conversation” and less “political demonization” is certainly called for.

The bottom line: in life, when we come across a person who is “strange” or even seemingly “threatening” (our values, not physically) – what sociologists call “the other” – we should stop and think. Perhaps what we need to face is ourselves: the eneME?