ABSTRACT
i am a gay Orthodox rabbi. I resisted this identity for a long time. Throughout the years when I struggled with it, many would counsel me to reject one or the other of these inert elements. An Orthodox friend urged me not to barter my soul for sexual freedom. Gay friends told me to get out of the Orthodox world, which they saw as intractable, cruel, and oppressive. Sometimes I wondered if I was fooling myself to think that with enough effort, oxygen and hydrogen might be squeezed into water. Thankfully, there were moments when a glimmer of possibility shone through, when I could begin to see how the Torah might be read differently, how Talmudic passages could add up in other than damning ways. It took me five years to do the research for a book that argues just this, that gay Orthodox Jews are neither wanton sinners nor obsessive compulsives for seeking both the intimate love of partner and the love of God. The intellectual and religious justification was just the last act of the story. The two journeys, religious and sexual, while not simultaneous, are intertwined over a period of almost twenty years. Becoming a gay Orthodox rabbi has taken more than half my life.
