ABSTRACT
Orthodox gay Jews are marrying and creating their own forms of celebrated commitment. In this chapter, Rabbi Steve Greenberg explores this phenomenon by addressing moral and religious meanings of marriage. Greenberg challenges the halakhic system to address the needs of gay Jews whose religious convictions extend to their desire for a halakhkically (legally) meaningful marriage ceremony.
Greenberg analyzes the existing legal frameworks of the Jewish wedding and how it is not relevant to the realities of same-sex love and relationship. There are other legal frameworks for relationship and obligation. Greenberg combines the model of shutafiut (partnership) based on a Talmudic business model, and adds the power of shevuot (legal oaths) to supply a sense of holiness and exclusive loyalty to the ceremony.
For Greenberg, Jewish marriage does not merely celebrate the love of two. Love is not nearly enough for marriage. Marriage is the means by which the love between two people becomes a gift to the larger world and, ultimately, to God. Marriage is a decision to offer “the love of two” as resource for world building.
Greenberg offers a different narrative myth that provides a cosmic frame for “what God is up to in the love of two women or two men.” He finds a sliver of the creation story, reread by the rabbis and shaped into a ritual by the medieval mystics, that offers a vision of love without hierarchy which he claims marks how gay love becomes a gift to humanity and to God.
