Let’s Queer the Jewish Legal Tradition

by Amram Altzman for Newvoices.com

I had the honor of speaking at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance’s Voices of Change conference last week, where I, only for a day, became a high school student once again and spoke on a panel about navigating relationships and sexuality in high school as a feminist. While speaking, the topic of Shemirut Negi’ah, or the rabbinic prohibition of members of one sex touching members of the other sex, came up. It was there and then that I realized how abandoned I felt by the guidelines that dictate the movement with which, at least on a theological level, I identify.

To be sure, I’ve felt some sort of separation between myself and the Orthodox world since I came out of the closet over two years ago (something that has been chronicled in New Voices), and I always felt somewhat abandoned by the Orthodox community. However, that separation between myself and Orthodoxy became even more pronounced as a result of speaking at the conference.

To be clear: I spent about fifteen whole minutes being shomer negi’ah when I was in sixth grade, and then promptly stopped — at the time, for no apparent reason. Since then, I’ve never really looked back, and do not regret my decision.

However, in starting to seriously think about issues like this, I’ve come to truly understand just how much of the Jewish legal tradition — the same tradition that I was taught was timeless, applied to me, and that, as a “Good Jew,” I was charged with protecting and transmitting to the next generation — no longer applied to me. Given the fact that the rabbis who wrote the Talmud, the basis for the whole genres of legal literature that came after it, could not fathom two members of the same gender entering a lasting, romantic relationship and raising children, and that homosexual acts (or, at the very least, male homosexual acts) are biblically prohibited, there was never any need to include such discussions in the Talmud.

Thus, according to the strictest interpretations of rabbinic literature, if I wanted to obey the letter of the law, I would be barred from physical contact with women, but not from men. And, given the fact that I am queer, this seems horribly backward.

While I’m not about to become shomer negi’ah right now, the fact of the matter is that the Modern Orthodox community has started looking past the biblical prohibition that, in the past, meant that LGBTQ people could not remain part of the Modern Orthodox community. Halakhah, or Jewish law, however, has stayed behind.

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