Judaism¹s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality
DENNIS PRAGER
When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into
marriage, it changed the world. The Torah's prohibition of non-marital
sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible.
Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in
their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can
largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and
later carried forward by Christianity.
This revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital
bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened
male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the
possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the
arduous task of elevating the status of women.
It is probably impossible for us, who live thousands of years after
Judaism began this process, to perceive the extent to which
undisciplined sex can dominate man's life and the life of society.
Throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of
the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society.
Human sexuality, especially male sexuality, is polymorphous, or utterly
wild (far more so than animal sexuality). Men have had sex with women
and with men; with little girls and young boys; with a single partner
and in large groups; with total strangers and immediate family members;
and with a variety of domesticated animals. They have achieved orgasm
with inanimate objects such as leather, shoes, and other pieces of
clothing, through urinating and defecating on each other (interested
readers can see a photograph of the former at select art museums
exhibiting the works of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe); by
dressing in women's garments; by watching other human beings being
tortured; by fondling children of either sex; by listening to a woman's
disembodied voice (e.g., ³phone sex²); and, of course, by looking at
pictures of bodies or parts of bodies. There is little, animate or
inanimate, that has not excited some men to orgasm. Of course, not all
of these practices have been condoned by societies ‹ parent-child incest
and seducing another's man's wife have rarely been countenanced ‹ but
many have, and all illustrate what the unchanneled, or in Freudian
terms, the ³un-sublimated,² sex drive can lead to.
De-sexualizing God and religion
Among the consequences of the unchanneled sex drive is the sexualization
of everything ‹ including religion. Unless the sex drive is
appropriately harnessed (not squelched ‹ which leads to its own
destructive consequences), higher religion could not have developed.
Thus, the first thing Judaism did was to de-sexualize God: ³In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth² by his will, not
through any sexual behavior. This was an utterly radical break with all
other religions, and it alone changed human history. The gods of
virtually all civilizations engaged in sexual relations. In the Near
East, the Babylonian god Ishtar seduced a man, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian
hero. In Egyptian religion, the god Osiris had sexual relations with his
sister, the goddess Isis, and she conceived the god Horus. In Canaan,
El, the chief god, had sex with Asherah. In Hindu belief, the god
Krishna was sexually active, having had many wives and pursuing Radha;
the god Samba, son of Krishna, seduced mortal women and men. In Greek
beliefs, Zeus married Hera, chased women, abducted the beautiful young
male, Ganymede, and masturbated at other times; Poseidon married
Amphitrite, pursued Demeter, and raped Tantalus. In Rome, the gods
sexually pursued both men and women.
Given the sexual activity of the gods, it is not surprising that the
religions themselves were replete with all forms of sexual activity. In
the ancient Near Fast and elsewhere, virgins were deflowered by priests
prior to engaging in relations with their husbands, and sacred or ritual
prostitution was almost universal. Psychiatrist and sexual historian
Norman Sussman describes the situation thus: ³Male and female
prostitutes, serving temporarily or permanently and performing
heterosexual, homosexual oral-genital, bestial, and other forms of
sexual activities, dispense their favors in behalf of the temple.²
Throughout the ancient Near East, from very early times, anal
intercourse formed a part of goddess worship. In ancient Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and Canaan, annual ceremonial intercourse took place
between the king and a priestess. Women prostitutes had intercourse with
male worshippers in the sanctuaries and temples of ancient Mesopotamia,
Phoenicia, Cyprus, Corinth, Carthage, Sicily, Egypt, Libya, West Africa,
and ancient and modern India. In ancient Israel itself, there were
repeated attempts to re-introduce temple prostitution, resulting in
repeated Jewish wars against cultic sex. The Bible records that the
Judean king Asa ³put away the qdeshim [temple male prostitutes] out of
the land²; that his successor, Jehosaphat put away out of the land
....the remnant of the qdeshim that remained in the days of his father
Asa²; and that later, King Josiah, in his religious reforms, ³broke down
the houses of the qdeshim.² In India until this century, certain Hindu
cults have required intercourse between monks and nuns, and wives would
have intercourse with priests who represent the god. Until it was made
illegal in 1948, when India gained independence, Hindu temples in many
parts of India had both women and boy prostitutes. In the fourteenth
century, the Chinese found homosexual Tibetan religious rites practiced
at the court of a Mongol emperor. In Sri Lanka through this century,
Buddhist worship of the goddess Pattini has involved priests dressed as
women, and the consort of the goddess is symbolically castrated.
Judaism placed controls on sexual activity. It could no longer dominate
religion and social life. It was to be sanctified ‹ which in Hebrew
means ³separated² ‹ from the world and placed in the home, in the bed of
husband and wife. Judaism's restricting of sexual behavior was one of
the essential elements that enabled society to progress. Along with
ethical monotheism, the revolution begun by the Torah when it declared
war on the sexual practices of the world wrought the most far-reaching
changes in history.
Inventing homosexuality
The revolutionary nature of Judaism's prohibiting all forms of
non-marital sex was nowhere more radical, more challenging to the
prevailing assumptions of mankind, than with regard to homosexuality.
Indeed, Judaism may be said to have invented the notion of
homosexuality, for in the ancient world sexuality was not divided
between heterosexuality and homosexuality. That division was the Bible's
doing. Before the Bible, the world divided sexuality between penetrator
(active partner) and penetrated (passive partner).
As Martha Nussbaum, professor of philosophy at Brown University,
recently wrote, the ancients were no more concerned with people's gender
preference than people today are with others' eating preferences:
"Ancient categories of sexual experience differed considerably from our
own... The central distinction in sexual morality was the distinction
between active and passive roles. The gender of the object... is not in
itself morally problematic. Boys and women are very often treated
interchangeably as objects of [male] desire. What is socially important
is to penetrate rather than to be penetrated. Sex is understood
fundamentally not as interaction, but as a doing of some thing to
someone..."
Judaism changed all this. It rendered the ³gender of the object² very
³morally problematic²; it declared that no one is ³interchangeable²
sexually. And as a result, it ensured that sex would in fact be
³fundamentally interaction² and not simply ³a doing of something to
someone².
To appreciate the extent of the revolution wrought by Judaism's
prohibiting homosexuality and demanding that all sexual interaction be
male-female, it is first necessary to appreciate just how universally
accepted, valued, and practiced homosexuality has been throughout the
world.
The one continuous exception was Jewish civilization ‹ and a thousand
years later, Christian civilization. Other than the Jews, ³none of the
archaic civilizations prohibited homosexuality per se,² Dr. David E.
Greenberg notes. It was Judaism alone that about 3,000 years ago
declared homosexuality wrong.
And it said so in the most powerful and unambiguous language it could:
³Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is an
abomination.² ³And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of
them have committed an abomination.² It is Judaism's sexual morality,
not homosexuality, that historically has been deviant.
Greenberg, whose _The Construction of Homosexuality_ is the most
thorough historical study of homosexuality ever written, summarizes the
ubiquitous nature of homosexuality in these words: ³With only a few
exceptions, male homosexuality was not stigmatized or repressed so long
as it conformed to norms regarding gender and the relative ages and
statuses of the partners... The major exceptions to this acceptance seem
to have arisen in two circumstances.² Both of these circumstances were
Jewish.
Bible truth
The Hebrew Bible, in particular the Torah (The Five Books of Moses), has
done more to civilize the world than any other book or idea in history.
It is the Hebrew Bible that gave humanity such ideas as a universal,
moral, loving God; ethical obligations to this God; the need for history
to move forward to moral and spiritual redemption; the belief that
history has meaning; and the notion that human freedom and social
justice are the divinely desired states for all people. It gave the
world the Ten Commandments, ethical monotheism, and the concept of
holiness (the goal of raising human beings from the animal-like to the
God-like). Therefore, when this Bible makes strong moral proclamations,
I listen with great respect. And regarding male homosexuality ‹ female
homosexuality is not mentioned ‹ this Bible speaks in such clear and
direct language that one does not have to be a religious fundamentalist
in order to be influenced by its views. All that is necessary is to
consider oneself a serious Jew or Christian.
Jews or Christians who take the Bible's views on homosexuality seriously
are not obligated to prove that they are not fundamentalists or
literalists, let alone bigots (though, of course, people have used the
Bible to defend bigotry). Rather, those who claim homosexuality is
compatible with Judaism or Christianity bear the burden of proof to
reconcile this view with their Bible. Given the unambiguous nature of
the biblical attitude toward homosexuality, however, such a
reconciliation is not possible. All that is possible is to declare: ³I
am aware that the Bible condemns homosexuality, and I consider the Bible
wrong.² That would be an intellectually honest approach. But this
approach leads to another problem. If one chooses which of the Bible's
moral injunctions to take seriously (and the Bible states its
prohibition of homosexuality not only as a law, but as a value ‹ ³it is
an abomination²), of what moral use is the Bible?
Advocates of the religious acceptance of homosexuality respond that
while the Bible is morally advanced in some areas, it is morally
regressive in others. Its condemnation of homosexuality is one example,
and the Torah's permitting slavery is another. Far from being immoral,
however, the Torah's prohibition of homosexuality was a major part of
its liberation (1) of the human being from the bonds of unrestrained
sexuality and (2) of women from being peripheral to men's lives. As for
slavery, while the Bible declares homosexuality wrong, it never declares
slavery good.
Those who advocate religious acceptance of homosexuality also argue that
the Bible prescribes the death penalty for a multitude of sins,
including such seemingly inconsequential acts as gathering wood on the
Sabbath. Thus, the fact that the Torah declares homosexuality a capital
offense may mean that homosexuality is no more grave an offense than
some violation of the Sabbath. And since we no longer condemn people who
violate the Sabbath, why continue to condemn people who engage in
homosexual acts?
The answer is that we do not derive our approach toward homosexuality
from the fact that the Torah made it a capital offense. We learn it from
the fact that the Bible makes a moral statement about homosexuality. It
makes no statement about gathering wood on the Sabbath. The Torah uses
its strongest term of censure ‹ ³abomination² ‹ to describe
homosexuality. It is the Bible's moral evaluation of homosexuality that
distinguishes homosexuality from other offenses, capital or otherwise.
As Professor Greenberg, who betrays no inclination toward religious
belief writes, ³When the word toevah (³abomination²) does appear in the
Hebrew Bible, it is sometimes applied to idolatry, cult prostitution,
magic, or divination, and is sometimes used more generally. It always
conveys great repugnance² (emphasis added). Moreover, the Bible lists
homosexuality together with child sacrifice among the ³abominations²
practiced by the peoples living in the land about to be conquered by the
Jews. The two are certainly not morally equatable, but they both
characterized a morally primitive world that Judaism set out to destroy.
They both characterized a way of life opposite to the one that God
demanded of Jews (and even of non-Jew ‹ homosexuality is among the
sexual offenses that constitute one of the ³seven laws of the children
of Noah² that Judaism holds all people must observe). Finally, the Bible
adds a unique threat to the Jews if they engage in homosexuality and the
other offenses of the Canaanites: ³You will be vomited out of the land²
just as the non-Jews who practise these things were vomited out of the
land. Again, as Greenberg notes, this threat ³suggests that the offenses
were considered serious indeed.²
Choose life
Judaism cannot make peace with homosexuality because homosexuality
denies many of Judaism's most fundamental principles. It denies life, it
denies God's expressed desire that men and women cohabit, and it denies
the root structure that Judaism wishes for all mankind, the family.
If one can speak of Judaism's essence, it is contained in the Torah
statement, ³I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the
curse, and you shall choose life.² Judaism affirms whatever enhances
life, and it opposes or separates whatever represents death. Thus, a
Jewish priest (cohen) is to concern himself only with life. Perhaps
alone among world religions, Judaism forbade its priests to come into
contact with the dead. To cite some other examples, meat (death) is
separated from milk (life); menstruation (death) is separated from
sexual intercourse (life); carnivorous animals (death) are separated
from vegetarian, kosher, animals (life). This is probably why the Torah
juxtaposes child sacrifice with male homosexuality. Though they are not
morally analogous, both represent death: one deprives children of life,
the other prevents their having life. This parallelism is present in the
Talmud: ³He who does not engage in propagation of the race is as though
he had shed blood.²
GOD'S FIRST DECLARATION about man (the human being generally, and the
male specifically) is, ³It is not good for man to be alone.² Now,
presumably, in order to solve the problem of man's aloneness, God could
have made another man or even a community of men. But instead God solved
man's aloneness by creating one other person, a woman ‹ not a man, not a
few women, not a community of men and women. Man's solitude was not a
function of his not being with other people; it was a function of his
being without a woman. Of course, Judaism also holds that women need
men. But both the Torah statement and Jewish law have been more adamant
about men marrying than about women marrying. Judaism is worried about
what happens to men and to society when men do not channel their
passions into marriage. In this regard, the Torah and Judaism were
highly prescient: the overwhelming majority of violent crimes are
committed by unmarried men. Thus, male celibacy, a sacred state in many
religions, is a sin in Judaism. In order to become fully human, male and
female must join. In the words of Genesis, ³God created the human ...
male and female He created them.² The union of male and female is not
merely some lovely ideal; it is the essence of the Jewish outlook on
becoming human. To deny it is tantamount to denying a primary purpose of
life.
Few Jews need to be informed of the centrality of family to Jewish life.
Throughout their history, one of the Jews' most distinguishing
characteristics has been their commitment to family life. To Judaism,
the family ‹ not the nation, and not the individual ‹ is to be the
fundamental unit, the building block of society. Thus, when God blesses
Abraham He says, ³Through you all the families of the earth will be
blessed.²
The enemy of women
Yet another reason for Judaism's opposition to homosexuality is
homosexuality's negative effect on women.
One of the most remarkable aspects of contemporary societies' acceptance
of homosexuality is the lack of outcry from and on behalf of women. I
say ³outcry² because there is certainly much quiet crying by women over
this issue, as heard in the frequent lament from single women that so
many single men are gay. But the major reason for anyone concerned with
women's equality to be concerned with homosexuality is the direct
correlation between the prevalence of male homosexuality and the
relegation of women to a low social role. The improvement of the
condition of women has only occurred in Western civilization, the
civilization least tolerant of homosexuality.
In societies where men sought out men for love and sex, women were
relegated to society's periphery. Thus, for example, ancient Greece,
which elevated homosexuality to an ideal, was characterized by ³a
misogynistic attitude,² in Norman Sussman's words. Homosexuality in
ancient Greece, he writes, ³was closely linked to an idealized concept
of the man as the focus of intellectual and physical activities...The
woman was seen as serving but two roles. As a wife, she ran the home. As
a courtesan, she satisfied male sexual desires.² Classicist Eva Keuls
describes Athens at its height of philosophical and artistic greatness
as ³a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters,
denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect monuments to the male
genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers...²
In medieval France, when men stressed male-male love, it ³implied a
corresponding lack of interest in women. In the Song of Roland, a French
mini-epic given its final form in the late eleventh or twelfth century,
women appear only as shadowy marginal figures: ³The deepest signs of
affection in the poem, as well as in similar ones appear in the love of
man for man...² The women of Arab society, wherein male homosexuality
has been widespread, remain in a notably low state in the modern world.
This may be a coincidence, but common sense suggests a linkage. So, too,
in traditional Chinese culture, the low state of women has been linked
to widespread homosexuality. As a French physician reported from China
in the nineteenth century, ³Chinese women were such docile, homebound
dullards that the men, like those of ancient Greece, sought courtesans
and boys.²
While traditional Judaism is not as egalitarian as many late twentieth
century Jews would like, it was Judaism ‹ very much through its
insistence on marriage and family and its rejection of infidelity and
homosexuality ‹ that initiated the process of elevating the status of
women. While other cultures were writing homoerotic poetry, the Jews
wrote the Song of Songs, one of the most beautiful poems depicting
male-female sensual love ever written.
A final reason for opposition to homosexuality is the homosexual
³lifestyle.² While it is possible for male homosexuals to live lives of
fidelity comparable to those of heterosexual males, it is usually not
the case. While the typical lesbian has had fewer than ten ³lovers,² the
typical male homosexual in America has had over 500. In general, neither
homosexuals nor heterosexuals confront the fact that it is this male
homosexual lifestyle, more than the specific homosexual act, that
disturbs most people. This is probably why less attention is paid to
female homosexuality. When male sexuality is not controlled, the
consequences are considerably more destructive than when female
sexuality is not controlled. Men rape. Women do not. Men, not women,
engage in fetishes. Men are more frequently consumed by their sex drive,
and wander from sex partner to sex partner. Men, not women, are sexually
sadistic. The indiscriminate sex that characterizes much of male
homosexual life represents the antithesis of Judaism's goal of elevating
human life from the animal-like to the Godlike.
For the rest (and the rest is well worth reading), go to:
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/homosexuality/ho0003.html
--
Charles Hohenstein (to reply, remove Gene Robinson)
"The sad huddle of affluent bedwetters, thumbsuckers,
treehuggers, social climbers, homophiles, quavery ladies,
and chronic petition signers that makes up the current
Episcopal Church . . ." -‹Thomas Lipscomb
|
