Bishop Gene Robinson, Rabbi Steven Greenberg
lead April 22 forum at L.A.’s Cathedral Center

By Pat McCaughan

In an unprecedented interfaith gathering, Bishop Gene Robinson and Rabbi Steven Greenberg joined about 150 Jewish rabbis and Episcopal to examine Scripture and traditional religious views of homosexuality April 22 at the Cathedral Center in Los Angeles.

Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, said he and Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal priest to be elected bishop, share a conviction “that no one need leave their community of faith in order to insist upon God’s love and justice.”

Whether conservative or liberal, Reconstructionist or Reformed, clergy attending “The Test of Time: Challenges to Traditional Christian and Jewish Views of Homosexuality” ate a kosher luncheon and shared common experiences from their respective congregations.

Greenberg, who is senior teaching fellow at the National Jewish Center of Learning and Leadership, a New York-based think tank, and Robinson, elected last year to lead the Diocese of New Hampshire, shared their personal journeys during the three-hour session.

Participating rabbis and priests examined portions of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans and the Acts of the Apostles, and rabbinic midrash of Hebrew verses in Genesis and Leviticus. Ultimately, both Greenberg and Robinson proclaimed a desire for more conversation and additional opportunities to grapple with the text and one another.

“It was groundbreaking,” Greenberg said later. “We didn’t address same-sex marriage or a particular problem per se but addressed the larger question of how we read both of our sacred text in light of this new human experience.

“We did it with real textual study and tension. In many scenarios the text is used either to silence conversation or it’s abused by not being taken very seriously, or by being a stopping point on the way toward whatever social or political initiative one wants to achieve. There was attention to the human condition that was real and attention to the sacred text and tradition that was real, neither was given up and that was quite unique.”

Robinson agreed, saying the day reminded him of “two things I’ve called our people to in the Diocese of New Hampshire: infinite respect and radical hospitality. Today we had an infinite respect for one another’s traditions and there was a radical hospitality on the part of rabbis and the L.A. priests of the diocese here to really engage one another in substantive ways. The energy in the room was indescribable. It was as hopeful an event as I’ve been to in a long time.”
The occasion represented a new level of interfaith engagement, said both Rabbi Mark Diamond, executive director of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, and the Rt. Rev. J. Jon Bruno, bishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles.

“Much of the interfaith work we do is nice and warm and fuzzy but we don’t often enough get beneath the surface, don’t often enough get deeper,” Diamond said. “This was serious textual discourse, studying and learning and sharing and dialogue between Episcopal priests and rabbis of different denominations.”

He said about 60 rabbis representing Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Reformist denominations attended the gathering. The Board of Rabbis has about 250 members throughout Southern California, he said.

About 100 priests representing both liberal and conservative viewpoints were also present, Bruno said. He said there are currently about 250 active priests in the six-county Diocese of Los Angeles.

“We invited everyone here from both of our denominations, with the intent that people would be able to express their viewpoints,” he said.

Greenberg noted, however, that “precious few” Orthodox rabbis attended.

And while some conservative priests did not attend, others were turned away because of space constraints. Robinson said he’s stopped worrying about who’s not in the room.

“I made a decision a long time ago to thank God for whoever’s there and to work as hard as I can to give folks a language to talk to those folks who wouldn’t come because Steve and I were there. And we’re reaching those people.”

Greenberg, author of Wrestling With God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), said the value in such gatherings is raising questions, rather than providing answers.

“My hope is that this kind of conversation can spread not certainty but questions far and wide,” he said. “The single-most important challenge right now for our right-of -center colleagues is to get them to a place of modesty and humility, of not really knowing, so that rather than shouting certainties across a fence and walking away, we learn to live with the ambiguity of not fully knowing.”

During remarks frequently interrupted by applause, Greenberg said his aim in writing the book includes possibilities for a welcoming synagogue like the one he attends, defined by three principles that rabbis agree to: no humiliation of gay and lesbian people; no expectation of advocacy by the synagogue; and no lying about sexual identity.

“An Orthodox synagogue is not a proper platform for larger advocacy of gay and lesbian liberation,” said Greenberg, who is a senior teaching fellow at the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a think tank and leadership training institute in New York City.

“However, we as gay and lesbian people in a congregation get to say the truth about who we are. We get to be real because the price of lying has stolen from us years, shamed us and undermined our very humanity. We’ve been deprived of the ability to live with integrity and we will not stand for it one moment more. You don’t have to agree or solve the problem, just don’t make us lie.

“It seems to me that these principles, at least for orthodox synagogues, might be able to shape a world where we agree to a policy but not upon the same rationales. We disagree about why, we just agree to what and thereby allow ourselves to live shoulder to shoulder with people we don’t fully agree with,” he said, adding that he and his partner belong to such a synagogue.

Greenberg is featured in Trembling Before G-d, an award-winning documentary about Orthodox gay Jews. He and film maker Sandi Simch Dubowski coordinated an educational outreach project using the film in the U.S., Canada, U.K., South America and Israel.

“When we started traveling with the film, there were protests at theaters by both evangelical Christian and orthodox Jews—we claimed to be doing interfaith work,” he said jokingly. “All sorts of people who would never speak to each other were holding the same placards.”

But, the film helped rabbis and members of the Orthodox community began to share their pain, he added. “They began to feel stuck. They began to feel it was their job to protect people and to defend the law and they didn’t know how to do it.” Bringing them to that place of unknowing was transforming, he said.

Since an aspect of the gathering at the Cathedral Center of St. Paul also included
the mutual relationship of biography and theology, both men shared stories from their personal journeys.

Greenberg said he spent 10 years weeping under a prayer shawl on Yom Kippur, reckoning with his life but not really coming to terms with his sexuality.

The 11th year, he decided to become “vulnerable to the text. I realized that being vulnerable to the text obligates the text, makes the text vulnerable to me and everybody like me and … it dawned on me that the text can’t speak its truth unless everyone’s there and I haven’t been there and folks like me haven’t been there.”

He decided to go back and try to make sense of Scripture with that new understanding, including the testimony of experience. He began to write and those efforts eventually led to Wrestling with God and Men.

The title is taken from the Genesis story of Jacob who, after wrestling with the angel all night, refuses to let go until he receives a blessing.

“I think we’re at a point in gay theology where we’re saying we will not let you go till you bless us,” Greenberg said.

Unlike the furor that surrounded the election of Gene Robinson last year, Greenberg said media response to his coming out was “tame”.

“One rabbi said ‘there is no such thing as an Orthodox gay rabbi, you cannot be Orthodox and gay. To say you are Orthodox and gay is like saying you are an Orthodox rabbi who eats cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur. You are no Orthodox rabbi, you are a Reformed rabbi.”

Greenberg replied: “Nobody jumps off a bridge for the sake of a cheeseburger. Nobody takes Prozac to get rid of a desperate desire for a shrimp cocktail and nobody falls into a lifelong depression and gets shock therapy for want of a ham sandwich. To deprive a human being of intimacy, love and companionship is not to deprive them of a cheeseburger.”

Robinson, on the other hand, told the gathering that after news of 2003 General Convention’s decision concerning him, and after such programs as Sixty Minutes, they probably “know more about me than you ever wanted to know.”

Robinson, who grew up in a rural Disciples of Christ church, said the good news came through despite early teachings that gays were an “abomination.”

“God got to me through the Word despite what the church was doing with the word. That’s why we are so committed to the text because God can get through them despite all the awful things we do with them. So, I had the audacity to actually believe I was loved beyond my wildest imagining, just like it says.”

Noting that he is in the process of making a movie, For the Bible Tells Me So, about gay faith experiences, he added. “And we just need to keep singing that song.”

He said he’s been able to live through the furor surrounding his election and consecration because “our God is a living God and didn’t just wind this world up and leave it to run on its own, but has the audacity to be active in our lives. I have felt so close to God during all this that praying almost feels redundant.

“We’re now dealing with people in our church with whom I share so much. I share the historic creeds. I share the belief and authority of the Scripture. I share the catechism. I share the baptismal covenantal promises made and I’m dealing with people who are willing to throw all that out the window and say that all that we hold so blessedly in common, all of that is trumped by this one issue. If that isn’t idolatry I don’t know what it is.

He cited his “latest death threat: There’s a picture cut out of me and my partner Mark embracing at my consecration and this person wrote ‘I have a bullet for each of your heads when you least expect it.’ So, the first question I want to ask you is what’s all the fuss about? Why are people going so ballistic over a Steve Greenberg and a Gene Robinson standing up and just saying who they are? Actually, that’s not the problem. We’re saying who we are and we’re saying that God loves us. That’s the irritating part. That’s the hard part.”

Three days after he was elected Bishop of New Hampshire, Robinson also received a letter from an inmate in the New Hampshire State Women’s Prison.

“It said, ‘I am neither gay nor Christian particularly but your election makes me think there is a community of people out there who might love me in spite of what I’ve done.’ And since that time, I’ve received letters from 30 different prisons from all kinds of people who’ve done all kinds of things who see in this election something none of us intended … they see something for them.”

The 18-year-old woman who sent him the note had, at 15, killed her mother, Robinson said. “Yet, she saw something in this for her, for her own salvation.” She and other women at the prison, whom he visited and played softball with, followed the news of the July General Convention and Robinson said he returned to baptize one of them in September.

“They wanted to talk about God and they wanted to talk about what God thought about them.”
Robinson mentioned also the Concord Outright Group, a group for gay and lesbian teens and questioning teens he was involved with many years ago.

“There were about 35 kids, not one was involved in a faith community of any kind but every one was absolutely certain about what God thought about them,” he said. “They could quote Leviticus; they would no more have been able to find it in a Bible than fly to moon but they knew exactly what it said.

“Your faith and mine have to face the reality that we have been complicit not only in the oppression but of the little murder of gay and lesbian folk. Every one of those kids knew exactly what God thought about them and they were dead wrong, but it was horrifying.”

He returned and spent Christmas Eve with the women in state prison, noting that “their prayers made my prayers look like child’s play. God always works on the margins.

“I used to think Jesus did things that angered some people and it got him killed. It finally occurred to me that none of us gets into trouble for preaching a God who’s too angry, too harsh, too punitive or too judgmental, But, you start preaching a God who’s too loving, too forgiving, too merciful and you will be in trouble, there will be people who will get you for preaching such good news and it’s what all of us are called to do.”

Greenberg and Robinson agree that the there is a connection between misogyny and hatred of gays.
“We’re going to have to decide if we worship a living God or a God locked up tight in Scripture however many years ago,” Robinson said. “Do we worship a living God who leads us into all truth as opposed to one who dictated it all and shut the book? I would argue for a living God.”

Robinson said that the issues dividing the church aren’t really about authority of
Scripture or “all the Christians around would be tithing. They would not be eating shellfish. They would be doing a lot of things if this were really about that.

“On other hand, one of the reasons I love working with Steve is we both take the text very seriously. We both think the way to deal with those few brief verses which supposedly deal with homosexuality is to go through the text, not around it or by eliminating the text.

“I actually believe in Scriptural Authority,” said Greenberg. “What’s astounding to me is that anybody is sure they know what it means. For me, the Torah is the word of God. I just think it’s marvelously, amazingly unclear and intentionally so. Were it clear, it would have died a very early death. Its divinity is in the multiplicity of possibilities it embodies.

“The notion that any one person, my pastor or my rabbi, has the one true intent of God hidden in that verse and that all other possible readings are not legitimate is just astounding to me. For the Jewish tradition, God hides a multitude of possible intents inside every verse and our job is to debate, to wrangle and haggle and discuss and challenge. God is on both sides of important controversies. Once you have that conviction, it transforms what it means to say the text is revealed. Sure, it is, but what that means is it’s in our hands to negotiate.”

Robinson noted that earlier in the day, “while eating a kosher meal, rabbis and priests were discussing some verses from the Book of Acts describing Peter’s conversation that not eating kosher and not being circumcised is OK in this new church they were putting together. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

About his consecration causing conflict in the church, Robinson replied: “The church has always been in conflict. If it weren’t in conflict it wouldn’t be paying attention to its own members or the world. That doesn’t frighten me.

“So what if we’re having a difficult time? The real question is, how are we treating one another while in conflict? We’re having this difficult time and by the Grace of God can we hold together practice infinite respect and radical hospitality amongst ourselves? I think the answer is yes.
“There were folks who were going to leave if I were elected. Then they were going to leave if I was consented to. Then they were going to leave if I was consecrated.

They’ve now said we’re not leaving, we’re going to form a church within a church. What you’re seeing less and less of is people wanting to go to a place of anger and exclusion.”
Robinson said he believes the Spirit will pull us back together.

“Episcopalians hold such a spectrum of viewpoints about—take your pick, abortion, who should be president, whether or not we should be in Iraq. The question is can we continue to come together at communion rail, around the altar and be nourished by the body and blood of Christ and go back to our pews and fight about abortion, and whether or not we should be in Iraq?

“Everyone is welcome at the table in this diocese,” Bruno said. “No one is pushed away, including those who’ve chosen to withhold from the diocesan pledge. I remain in communion with them. I pray with them and I will continue to do that. I will keep arms around everyone and love them as they stay, as they go. They have to make that decision.”

“I don’t know if we ought to be frightened in general of schism, the very existence of the Episcopal Church is a schism,” Greenberg added. He noted that schismatic can lead to creating new realities.

He believes that, as the position of women in the world rises to something close to parity with men, as equality becomes more evident, it’s less and less clear what is wrong with homosexuality because homophobia is one small room in the larger hotel of misogyny and, fundamentally, the hatred of women is behind the threat of homosexuality. Men, who behave in any way like women are seen as a threat to the patriarchy which is in process of being reframed, reformed, and maybe even dissolving. It is so important to ask that question.”



In Los Angeles, Bishop Gene Robinson (right) listens as Rabbi Steven Greenberg answers reporter's question at press conference following April 22 Bible study for diocesan clergy and members of Southern California Board of Rabbis.

PHOTO: JANET KAWAMOTO