Gay Love and Jewish Tradition

The first same-sex marriage I conducted was between two women who had been together for nineteen years. They stood under the huppah with tears streaming down their faces.

We’ve come a long way. At one time, the rhetoric dominating the discourse on homosexuality among the gatekeepers of traditional Judaism was condemnatory at best, cruel at worst. In one of his milder statements, the great halakhic authority Rabbi Moshe Feinstein wrote in the 1970s: “To speak of a desire for homosexual intimacy is a contradiction in terms.” Few would make such a statement today. Let us be grateful for small mercies.

But now Sam Schulman has offered a streamlined denunciation not of homosexuality itself but of same-sex marriage. Despite some slightly snarky asides—about the Conservative movement’s approval of rabbinic officiation at such unions, Schulman writes: “looking upon their work, the rabbis found it very good”—his tone is measured and his argument cogent. Pointing out that kiddushin in the Jewish tradition mandates a procreative effort to build a Jewish family, he argues that, in this respect, marriage in Judaism is not viewed as a romantic alliance between two partners. Therefore, he concludes, same-sex marriage, whatever may be its mitigations and merits, is not Jewish marriage.