Steven Greenberg (rabbi)

Steven Greenberg (born 1956) is an American rabbi with a rabbinic ordination from the Orthodox movement′s rabbinical seminary of Yeshiva University (RIETS). He is generally described as the first openly gay Orthodox Jewish rabbi, since he publicly disclosed he was gay in an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv in 1999 and participated in a 2001 documentary film about homosexual men and women raised in the Orthodox Jewish world. Some Orthodox Jews, including many rabbis, dispute his being an Orthodox rabbi.

Greenberg is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Diversity Project at CLAL – the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and the author of the book “Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition” which received the Koret Jewish Book Award for Philosophy and Thought in 2005.

Life and career

Early life and education

Greenberg, the son of Conservative Jewish parents, was raised in Columbus, Ohio. When he was about 15, he began studying with an Orthodox rabbi. He attended Yeshiva University in New York as an undergraduate and then as a rabbinical student. When he was 20, he went to study at the Yeshivat Har Etzion, a hesder yeshiva in the West Bank near Jerusalem. He received his BA in philosophy from Yeshiva University, and his rabbinic ordination from the rabbinical seminary of Yeshiva University (RIETS) in 1983.

While at Yeshivat Har Etzion, he was attracted to a fellow student and concluded that he was bisexual. He went to consult with rabbi Yosef Sholom Eliashiv, a respected old rabbi in Jerusalem, telling him: “Master, I am attracted to both men and women. What shall I do?” And the rabbi replied according to Greenberg: “My dear one, my friend, then you have twice the power of love. Use it carefully.” Greenberg remembers that he left with the trust that it would all work out. However, he realised that the rabbi wasn't permitting him to have sex with men, but was telling him that his desire was not ugly in and of itself.

Greenberg did not admit he was gay until he was 28, and even afterwards continued to date women for another seven years. In 1993 he wrote the article “Gayness and God”, admitting he was gay, and published it under the pseudonym “Yaakov Levado” (meaning Jacob alone) in Tikkun magazine, but only came out six years later in an article titled “In the name of partnership” published in the Israeli daily newspaper Maariv on March 5, 1999.

Personal Life

Greenberg currently lives in Cincinnati with his partner Steven Goldstein and their infant daughter, born on November 11, 2010.

Career

Early in his career, Greenberg held an Orthodox pulpit on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Since 1985, he is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Diversity Project at CLAL – the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, an interdenominational Jewish think tank, leadership training institute, and resource center. He is the director of Orthodox programs for Nehirim: GLBT Jewish Culture & Spirituality, an organization which builds community for GLBT Jews, partners, and allies, and serves on the board of Eshel, an organization that works to build community for gays and lesbians in the Orthodox world. From 1996 to 1998 he spent two years in Jerusalem on a fellowship from the Mandel Institute, studying educational policy issues and researching rabbinic attitudes toward homosexuality.

Publications

Greenberg is a frequent commentator for the media and has published several articles on Jewish law and church and state issues.

In a 2001 article “Between Intermarriage and Conversion: Finding a Middle Way” published in CLAL, Greenberg proposes using the rabbinic concept of ger toshav, (resident alien), to provide an accepted place for non-Jewish partners of intermarried couples, allowing them to experience “the joys of living in a Jewish home without insisting on conversion”. As a marriage of a Jew and a ger toshav would not be legitimate under halachic law, Greenberg suggests using “cultural creativity” to find “new rituals that partake of Jewish resources and speak honestly about what is actually happening”, the same as for gay couples, where in his opinion “kiddushin, the traditional ritual for the Jewish wedding, simply doesn’t apply”.

In 2004 his critically acclaimed book Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition was published. It received the 2005 Koret Jewish Book Award for Philosophy and Thought, considered one of the highest honors for authors writing prose on Jewish themes, and was a finalist for the 17th Annual Lambda Literary Awards.

Controversies

After Greenberg′s coming out, Rabbi Moshe Tendler, Rosh Yeshiva at Yeshiva University stated: “Being an Orthodox Rabbi and actively gay is an oxymoron ... [It is] the exact same as if he said, ‘I'm an Orthodox rabbi and I eat ham sandwiches on Yom Kippur’. In Tendler′s opinion “it is very sad that an individual who attended our yeshiva sunk to the depths of what we consider a depraved society” and called Greenberg “a reform rabbi”.

Trembling Before G-d

Greenberg participated in the critically acclaimed 2001 documentary film Trembling Before G-d, featured at the Sundance Festival. The film about gay men and women raised in the Orthodox Jewish world helped break the silence around homosexuality in religious Jewish circles, and ignited protests among ultra-Orthodox Jews. Rabbi Avi Shafran, a leader of Agudath Israel of America who scolded the movie for not showing Orthodox Jews who have undergone therapy to change their sexual inclinations, wrote: “Rabbi Steve Greenberg, billed as ‘the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi’[, a]ddressing the Torah's strong prohibition of male homosexual acts, ... suggests to the camera, without elaboration: ‘There are other ways of reading the Torah’. What Rabbi Greenberg apparently believes is that elements of the Jewish religious tradition are negotiable, that the Torah, like a Hollywood script, can be sent back for a rewrite. That approach can be called many things, but ‘Orthodox’ is not among them.”

Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition

In his book Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, Greenberg writes: “While the common understanding of the verse ‘Thou shall not lie with a male as one lies with a woman’ [Leviticus 18:22] has been taken to refer to both active and passive partners ... it would appear that the verse directly refers only to the active partner engulfing his penis in the body of another man. According to this analysis the verse prohibits one, and only one, sexual practice between men, namely, anal intercourse, and speaks specifically to the active partner. There is no mention of any other behavior that this verse would prohibit.” In Greenberg′s interpretation “the verse prohibits the kind of sex between men that is designed to effect the power and mastery of the penetrator. Sex for the conquest, for shoring up the ego, for selfaggrandizement, or worse, for the perverse pleasure of demeaning another man is prohibited,” and he adds that reading Leviticus 18:22 “as a law against sexual domination and appropriation ... offers gay people a way to reconnect to God, Torah, and the Jewish people”. In addition to it, Greenberg states that “the very verse that was for centuries read as requiring the ongoing demotion of women through the marking of intercourse as humiliation and thus femininity as degraded could be read as a full-fledged critique of the maledominated social hierarchy! The only way to redeem intercourse from its inevitable dominations is to press for gender equality on the deepest of emotional planes, to work formally toward ending the gender hierarchy, and to heal the ugly misogyny at its foundation”.

Wrestling with God and Men has been rejected as a valid Orthodox Jewish treatment of homosexuality. In his review of the book for the Edah Journal, Rabbi Asher Lopatin, who affirms Greenberg′s “importance as a voice within the Orthodox community”, and calls him “a brilliant, thoughtful and courageous rabbi” and his book “a brilliant work of creativity and research” states that “Wrestling with God and Man [sic], and Rabbi Greenberg’s voice in this book fall outside the bounds of Orthodoxy” for three reasons: Because Greenberg “is not committing himself fully to Orthodoxy”, because he “does not follow Orthodox methodology”, and because he “is not sufficiently halakhically creative”, not having “combined — in a novel way to be sure — [his] commitment to his homosexual identity and way of life with the binding nature of halakhah”. At the same time, Lopatin is confident, that “Greenberg can write the Orthodox book that will show us that he is committed to staying the long and difficult course of persuasion that Orthodoxy demands”.

Same-sex wedding ceremony

On November 11, 2011, it was reported that Greenberg officiated at a same-sex wedding at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C the day before. The event was described by the Israeli magazine, +972 as “for the first time in history an openly-gay American rabbi ordained by the Orthodox movement has officiated at a same-sex wedding ceremony”. This description led many people in the Orthodox community, including some of Greenberg′s friends and colleagues, to think that he had performed a Jewish wedding ceremony (kiddushin). In a post on the Morethodoxy-blog, one of them, Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky states: “This wedding ceremony raises a serious question for the part of the Modern Orthodox community in which I live. The question is not about whether we should recognize the ceremony as being religiously significant. We obviously do not and cannot. The formal religious partnering of two men or two women is unalterably contrary to both the law and the spirit of the Torah and the Halacha, and an Orthodox gay marriage ceremony is as hopeless a misnomer as an Orthodox intermarriage is.” Greenberg commented that “while it was a wedding according to the laws of the District of Columbia, it was not a kiddushin. My position was and still is that kiddushin is not appropriate for same-sex couples”. Two weeks later, Greenberg wrote in an article in the Jewish Week, “I did not conduct a ‘gay Orthodox wedding’. I officiated at a ceremony that celebrated the decision of two men to commit to each other in love and to do so in binding fashion before family and friends. Though it was a legal marriage according to the laws of the District of Columbia, as far as Orthodox Jewish law (halacha) is concerned, there was no kiddushin (Jewish wedding ceremony) performed.”

In response to the ceremony which Greenberg calls “a same-sex commitment ceremony”, more than 100 Orthodox rabbis signed a statement calling gay marriage a “desecration of Torah values”, saying: “We, as rabbis from a broad spectrum of the Orthodox community around the world, wish to correct the false impression that an Orthodox-approved same-gender wedding took place. By definition, a union that is not sanctioned by Torah law is not an Orthodox wedding, and by definition a person who conducts such a ceremony is not an Orthodox rabbi.”

Selected publications

• Greenberg, Steven, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. ISBN 0-299-19090-0
  • “It Is Not Good for Man To Be Alone”. Review of the book in The Forward by Jay Michaelson, April 30, 2004.
• Levado, Yaakov, “Gayness and God”, Tikkun magazine, 1993.
• Greenberg, Steven, “The Roots of Secular Humanistic Judaism”. Shma magazine, September 2000.
• Greenberg, Steve, “Same-Sex Civil Marriage”. CLAL on Culture, 2000.
• Greenberg, Steve, “Between Intermarriage and Conversion: Finding a Middle Way”. CLAL Spirit and Story, 2001.
• Greenberg, Steve and Danny Wohl, “Prayer to accompany the Torah reading of Leviticus 18 on Yom Kippur Afternoon”.

Weblinks

• 'My truth isn't an ugly one'. Steven Greenberg tells Libby Brooks how he squares his sexuality with his faith. The Guardian, May 30, 2003