Akharey Moys-Kadoshim and Sodomy / אחרי מות־קדשים און מישכּבֿ־⁠זכר

This is a weekly series

of parsha dvarim written by a frum, atheist, transsexual anarchist. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make us more comfortable) and uses Torah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

This parsha is an important piece of my parnosa (income), and the full dvar is paywalled for four weeks to help me sustain my work as a writer. But it's important to me that anyone can access Yiddishkeyt—if you can't afford to subscribe, email me and I'll send you the link for free.

An appeal

My friend Kamal needs help to leave Gaza. He is trying to immigrate to Greece to search for his missing son, who in desperation took a small and dangerous lifeboat across the Mediterranean. Last week he told me that he's tired from hunger and hasn't eaten in two weeks. Please donate what you can.

Content note: Homophobia, mention of genocide in Palestine

It's a difficult parsha this week.

There is plenty to talk about that avoids what I think are the most obvious and pressing lines in Torah, or at least the lines that cause me the most tsures personally.

We could instead discuss ethics, guilt, and tsedoke (charity). The goat of Azozeyl takes on the sins of the Jewish people and is abandoned to the wilderness. We are instructed to observe an annual day of self-denial and purification (Yom Kipur). Hashem gives us rules about sacrifices. Honor your parents and elders. Keep Shabos. Do not glean the edges of our fields, for they are to be left for the poor and the hungry stranger. Don't eat blood. Don't steal. Don't falsely swear Hashem's name or defraud another Jew. Pay wages on the same day as the work is done. Don't hold a grudge. Don't mix linen and wool fibers. Don't do divination or turn to ghosts. Don't destroy the corners of your beard or sell your daughter into sex work. Love your neighbor. The land is "flowing with milk and honey", and we will obey lest we be spewed out from it.

We are also given a long list of prohibited carnal relationships with women based on kinship: do not "uncover the nakedness" of your father by seeing your mother naked; nor your father's wife, your sister, your son's daughter, your father's wife's daughter, your mother's sister, your father's brother's wife, your son's wife, or your brother's wife. Do not uncover the nakedness of mothers and daughters together, nor sisters.

The following pasukim loom over the entire Torah for me. There is both so much and not much to say about them:

Misha leyens Vayikro 18:22 and 20:13

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Immediately after this first line about lying with men, we are told not to have sex with animals. The context of the pasuk used to justify homophobia is also used to link gay sex with bestiality. But we could also make an alternative link: the pasuk comes after a long list of forbidden relations with women. The next line could be read as we are not to have sex with the men we are related to either. This is a reading I heard from my friend, teacher, and Torah scholar Lexi Kohanski, which she heard years ago. I couldn't find attribution to the idea.

As a faggot, I am personally invested in finding alternate readings to these pasukim, but I can't compromise my integrity. If Torah intended to be neutral on gay sex and only forbid incest, then it could have listed "your mother's wife" or other same-sex relationships; it does not. There is a lot of homoeroticism in our text—Dovid and Yoynoson, Rus and Naomi, the marriage of the Jewish people with Hashem—but nowhere in Torah are we given explicit queer marriages.

There is a lot to be said on what makes a marriage, or what makes a man or a woman. We could speak at length about why Torah says that sex with your mother is "uncovering the nakedness of your father". I am not an expert on gender and sexuality in antiquity, but I think it is safe to say that people have been having gay sex since long before Torah was given at Sinai. If gay sex weren't a common practice, then there would be no reason to prohibit it. (By this logic, incest and bestiality were also common enough to warrant explicit prohibition, which is uncomfortable but probably not untrue.)

Torah repeats—like a refrain—that we must shun the social norms of our goyishe neighbors when they are in conflict with the laws of Hashem. We are warned of the social contagion of normalizing "abominable" goyishe behavior like idol worship. Gay sex is placed in this category.

The mainstream view is that the prohibition refers to homosexual anal sex (sodomy) specifically. Depending on who you ask, non-anal sex between men might be permissible; or, homosexuality may be so forbidden that gay men are not even allowed to be alone together:

Prohibited homosexual activity includes any non-platonic physical contact; even yichud (seclusion) with someone of the same gender is forbidden for homosexually active individuals. ... Today's galus seeks to legitimize and mainstream the abominable practice (toeiva) of homosexuality. Frighteningly, we who live here are not only practically affected, but also axiologically and ideationally infected. Not only our behavior but our very Weltanschauung [worldview] has been compromised and contaminated.

—"Torah View on Homosexuality" by Ravs Hershel Schachter, Mayer Twersky, Michael Rosensweig, and Mordechai Willig, 2010

The Rabbis above go on to decry political correctness and recommend conversion therapy for gay Jews. I have been advised several times to seek such "professional guidance" by frum Jewish men who liked me and wanted to mentor me before finding out that I'm a homo. I don't talk to them anymore.

"Frum shuls are like gay saunas"

Last year I privately wrote one of my first dvarim, on Kadoshim:

Last week we read Parsha Kadoshim. I don't have a black hat or—despite my efforts for the Omer—a beard, but everyone gave me a warm "Gut Shabos" and a firm handshake. I fancy the young Rabbi and the chest hair revealed at the unbuttoned collar of his shirt. My self-consciousness dissipates when we start singing nigunim. The melodies are emergent. We're following each other in a musical language I don't know well yet, but I'm learning from the men surrounding me: some beautiful, some ugly, all sharing our voices (and our aerosols—we're practically fluid-bonded) in a slightly dingy, slightly dirty, dimly lit space away from the women. The singing transcends words and thoughts. We're breathing together, sighing moaning begging for Moshiakh together. I'm finally out of my head and in my chest. I close my eyes and their voices fill me.

I was afraid to publish it because I was still attending that shul and maintaining a tense but affectionate relationship with that Rabbi. I don't have a Rabbi anymore.

The above scene in Eyes Wide Open is the best media representation I've seen of an afternoon in a frum shul: the plastic tablecloth, drinking spirits straight out of little plastic cups and eating off styrofoam plates, drunkenly thumping on the table and trying not to spill. It's homosocial, of course, with the women on the other side of the mekhitse (if they're present at all). In between songs, we discuss Torah, argue about politics, and drink. The main character, Aaron (expertly played by Zohar Strauss), sits next to his secret younger lover; they only touch after the rest of the men do first, arms around each others' shoulders. We feel the tension between the acceptable homoerotic behavior and the forbidden sexual behavior. Those lines are blurred for me and for them. But for a moment in song, we're drunk and we're happy.

Cut off

It's obvious that a violent prohibition on homosexual relationships is fucked up—a conclusion from the line of thought that prizes reproduction above love or happiness. But nonetheless, it is included in Torah, and therefore serious Jews must engage with it.

Misha leyens Vayikro 18:29

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I refuse to stop having gay sex—and not just gay sex, but sodomy—or to live as a sad "cisgender" woman. Therefore my engagement with Torah on this issue is that of being cut off from my people. Torah offers that as a punishment, a promise, and Hashem has seen it through. I've been kicked out of shul by Zionists (who are more disturbed by the words "free Palestine" than by the mass death of children) for daring to express an anti-war politic. Frumers believe themselves pious but chat loshn-horeh at my expense for being a gay transsexual, and they've kicked me out of shul too. Leftist queers (Jews and goyim alike) are uncomfortable with my being visibly orthodox, and I'm litmus tested about Israel or simply ignored. The only place I feel relaxed is the bathhouse: a gay environment where no one talks and we're naked, so no one knows how Jewish I am.

That's not entirely true. The goyim don't usually recognize my beard and nose and hair as Jewish, but the other Jews do. We don't talk but sometimes we touch. In the bathhouse, we are less cut off. Or, we're cut off together.