I refuse to be Orthodox, I left Reform because it was too liberal, and Reconstructionists aren't Jews. Now I seem to have been abandoned by the Conservative movement. Not much left now.
US Jewish movement moves to allow gay rabbis10.00am Thursday November 30, 2006
CHICAGO - The Conservative Jewish movement, the faith's American-based middle ground between liberalism and orthodoxy, is nearing a leadership decision that seems likely to permit openly gay rabbis and same-sex unions.
The Rabbinical Assembly Committee on Jewish Law and Standards which last tackled the issue in 1992 meets in New York next week, its 25 members reviewing an issue that has already rent many Christian churches and simmers across Judaism.
"The way it looks, it will be decided on a more liberal understanding of the law," Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Centre for Learning and Leadership, told Reuters. "It would be a very big, big surprise if that's not the case."
Rabbi Joel Meyers, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, said: "I really don't know what will happen. Many of my colleagues are betting they will have two opinions at the end -- that rabbis can maintain the prohibition on homosexual behaviour and another that says it normalises homosexual behaviour."
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. You'd think a rabbi would know that.
Rabbi [Irwin] Kula[, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership], author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, said the move toward liberalisation among Conservatives "is not something that came down from the top. It came from Jews in the pews ... Jews who had homosexual children and wanted them to be rabbis."
Sure, great. And to hell with what your co-congregationists think. They couldn't have been doctors or lawyers instead?
Rabbi Gerald Zelizer of Neve Shalom, a Conservative congregation in Metuchen, Jew Jersey, a former president of the Rabbinical Assembly who is a contributing columnist for USA Today, said in an essay in that newspaper this year that he backed the 1992 position but now had a different view.
"Conservative Judaism has always taught that we must upgrade our biblical understanding with new scientific knowledge. Contrary to the biblical assumption that gayness is a sinful choice, our best knowledge today indicates that it is as determined and irrevocable as blue or brown eyes ..." he wrote.
Oh, OK. So you're basing the whole thing on junk genetics. It's only God's fault that people are gay, I suppose. Or did you think of that angle?
This is probably why 2/3rds of Jews in the US aren't affiliated -- they're sick and tired of the liberal wing watering the religion down and destroying its fabric, and they can't stomach the truly conservative yet stuck-in-the-shtetl Orthodox.
