Acharei Mot-Kedoshim (Leviticus 16:1-20-27): April 24, 2021/12 Iyyar 5781

This week, we have another parashah double feature with Acharei Mot and Kedoshim. Split between the two portions is a set of laws known to biblical scholars as the Holiness Code. This code details many different ways in which the Israelites are to behave as God's chosen nation. These laws run the gamut from equality before the law to appropriate handling of sacrifices to laws about prohibited mixtures. And then there's all the sexual ethics. Twice in the course of the Holiness Code, there appears the commandment not to "lie with a male as one lies with a woman," a verse that finds its way into American public policy discourse in 2021. But this d'var Torah is not about sexuality per se. It's about how our perceptions of sexuality affect our world.

Although there are undeniably people whose anti-gay positions are based on the abovementioned verse from this week's parashah, that alone is not enough to explain their attitude, as the verse only proscribes one thing - penetrative intercourse between two men. Having a sexual orientation towards members of the same sex is not forbidden at all (and indeed, a state of being cannot be a sin). So why do people hate homosexuals for who they are? On some level, I suspect that it ties into one of the other categories of prohibitions, that of mixtures.

It seems to be a human instinct to divide the world into rigid categories, including when it comes to gender. Every aspect of life gets assigned to one of the boxes. Homosexuality, perhaps, can be seen as a mixing of those things, violating the rigid boundaries of the categories. If we tie "sexually oriented towards women" to our conception of "male", then where does that leave a gay man?

From a young age, we learn which things are "boy things" and which are "girl things": boys wear blue, like cars and trucks, play sports, and have short hair; girls wear pink, like dolls, do ballet, and have long hair. As adults, we can probably look back and realize that there is no intrinsic relationship between any of those associations, but as children, the connection is self-evident. To violate this division, especially for kids, is to invite scorn and teasing. That said, the direction of the "violation" makes a difference in how it gets treated by society. It is far easier for a girl to like "boy things" than vice versa.

When I was in fourth grade, my music teacher noted that my singing voice was very good, and she encouraged me to join choir. This encouragement continued, although the teachers changed, until I started middle school in seventh grade. Even though I liked to sing, I never joined choir. Only girls did choir - boys did band. There were girls in band too, but even there, the gender line was clear. Girls in band played woodwind instruments (except the saxophone), and everything else was "for boys". Of course, this division wasn't an actual rule. There was nothing preventing a girl from playing the trombone or a boy from playing the flute, but we all knew that it was not something that one did.

Looking through the Jewish lens, we see a certain gendering of ritual practices, even in many egalitarian settings. Bar mitzvah boys are frequently gifted a kiddush cup, while bat mitzvah girls get a set of candlesticks. Why? Because traditionally, the woman of the house lights the candles to begin Shabbat, while the man of the house recites kiddush at the start of the meal. But even the most Orthodox authority will tell you that a man who is on his own is required to light the candles, and a group of all women still needs to say kiddush. 

The place where we see the real perception warping is in the context of "positive, time-bound mitzvot". There is a principle in classical halakha that exempts women from nearly all mitzvot where the commandment is to take a specific action at a specific time. This is the reason that in Orthodoxy, women do not wear a tallit. Conservative halakha has adopted the position that, the role of women in society having changed since that exemption was established, there is no reason to maintain it, and women ought to be obligated in all the mitzvot that men are. But even if they are not obligated, what if a woman just wants to fulfill the mitzvah of tzitzit voluntarily? I had this discussion with an Orthodox gentleman at the Kotel who remarked on how he had never seen something like my green tallit before. I explained that, in the liberal movements of Judaism, one sees more variety in the hues and materials of tallitot. Of course the fact that in these movements, women also wear tallitot came up. He argued that wearing a tallit to make a statement is not appropriate, and he wasn't wrong. One should perform mitzvot for the right reasons. I made the point that a woman might choose to take on mitzvot that have historically been the realm of men not in order to make a statement but out of a belief in the beauty and importance of the mitzvah. My interlocutor could not conceive of a Jewish woman who was Jewishly-educated wanting to wear a tallit for any reason other than politics. And that is precisely the point. If we tell our daughters that wearing a tallit is for boys and that girls should not fulfill that mitzvah, the only reason they will have for wanting to wear a tallit is to be contrarian or edgy. If we teach girls that this is a mitzvah to be fulfilled, even if we frame it in the context of their exemption from the mitzvah, we open up the possibility that they will want to do it out of love for the commandments and the desire to use them to come closer to God.

When we attach supreme importance to adhering to the socially defined definitions of masculinity or femininity, it opens the door to a warping our interpersonal interactions around that concept. I was first introduced to ballroom and Latin dancing at a summer program in Middle school. I took a workshop in salsa, and I was the only boy in a group of 14. As I got older, and especially once I got to college, I continued to dance. The way that many of my peers reacted to the idea of a male doing something like ballroom dancing, let alone Latin dancing where hips are moving in ways that "men aren't supposed to move"was pretty standard. It was not a positive reaction. With the rise of Facebook I began to connect with other members of the dancing community, and the internal response to this sort of hypermasculine, let's not show emotion, dancing is for girls attitude was essentially to impune the properly masculine status of those who chose to play sports like football where they were spending all of their time around other men, as opposed to in Ballroom where we were always not just around, but embracing women, and in competition those women were dressed quite revealingly. I get the urge to turn the allegations of being something less than a man back on those who level them, but that doesn't really do anyone any good. Rather, we should be looking to question or challenge the idea that singing or dancing or liking pink or indulging in emotions other than anger (the effect of the societal pressure on men and boys to express emotions only as anger is important to discuss, but not something we have time for here) is somehow beneath the dignity of the male sex.

It is true that the book of Leviticus prohibits at least some gay sex acts. It does not however, prohibit gay people, nor does it even address the concept of sexual orientation or gender identity or gender roles. Rather than treating deviation from the present norms of masculinity or femininity as a front against nature or God, we should recognize the infinite diversity of our human species which is created in the image of God. After all, until the 1940s, it was still common in American society (and in some parts of the Catholic-influenced world, it still is in the 21st century) to regard blue as a soft, gentle color, perfect for delicate femininity, while pink, as a lighter shade of red, was hot and passionate, the color of blood, and only really appropriate for boys.