Jay Michaelson

No need to choose between God and gay.

Six years after its American counterpart, the Conservative movement’s Israeli rabbinical school voted last week to admit gay and lesbian students. It’s one small step for LGBT people, one foot-dragging schlep for the Jews.

Total surrender to heteronomous ethics is unhealthy, period. It may be prescribed by some, but it is also what leads to fundamentalism and religious violence. Gay people know this firsthand: to love oneself as a religious queer person requires interposing one’s own experience between oneself and the text. The text in its traditional reading cannot be correct, because it is incompatible with a notion of a loving God. But that truth is only known by allowing experience, conscience, and discernment to speak.