A few weeks ago, a friend of mine told me that he didn’t think he could be a buddhist because he needed the sweeping imagination of hinduism or islam. At the time, I had only a vague understanding of what he meant: I imagined the brightly hued posters of hindu gods with animal heads, multiple limbs, crushing bodies under their feet; I imagined the erotic temple carvings of perfectly breasted women mid-coitus; and I imagined the poetry of Rumi and the away-carrying experience of divine union.
But it wasn’t until I started reading midrash and Jewish exegesis over the past couple of weeks that I have come to understand (I think) what he meant. I’ve just finished reading Rabbi Greenberg’s book Wrestling with God and Men about homosexuality in the Jewish tradition. After reading the introduction—which was quite moving to me—I thought it would be an apologia for homosexuality, similar to several I’d read in the Mormon and wider Christian contexts before. However, Rabbi Greenberg instead sets out to engage the foundational jewish texts—the Torah, Talmud, and Mishnah—in an exegetical and ultimately Midrashic mode.
I now understand the appeal and the joy in Jewish exegesis: It is anchored in a deep tradition of storytelling. In his journey through Talmud and a touch of Zohar, R. Greenberg recounts story after story, some of them fantastical (voices from heaven, angels, miracles) some of them mundane but deeply human (love and death, marriage and friendship). The book turned out to be less a legal argument, as I had expected when he started quoting Talmud, and more of an extended deep reading of various texts and stories, not just a scholarly pursuit of knowledge, but an exercise in imagination. Not only creating a legal or halakhic apologia for homosexuality, but of imagining Jewish homosexuality into being.
Whereas modern judaism can sometimes appear to be almost protestant in its public face, Greenberg has exposed me to a narrative realm, a place of story-telling and imagination that I thought was only part of the Kabbalistic tradition. Moreover, his book exposed me to the more fantastical imagination of Kabbalah (which I had always experienced as textual and linguistic play, but which I now see as equally narrative and fantastical).
In sum, it’s like stepping into Judaism has opened up a whole new narrative tradition, a whole new world of myths, tales, stories, folklore, and imagination that I hadn’t even known existed.
And it tastes so good.
I took my enthusiasm for Greenberg’s book to Judaism class tonight and learned the obvious: That Greenberg is just one of many gay jews who have been searching and telling those stories and imagining Jewish queerness over the past 20 years. But I didn’t know that, so this work was new to me. For me, I didn’t really care about the argument *for* a halakhic homosexuality and I certainly don’t care about squaring myself with orthodox rabbis. But I did feel like I’d entered a new world of narrative and interpretation and struggle. And I felt at home.
I suppose now I have to learn who these other queer jews are and begin a deeper process of learning this material. I fear I may have offended my rabbi who herself has written on the topic.