When Chaim Elbaum stood up to field questions last night, he said that Kehilat Yedidya, is the first Israeli Orthodox community to ask him to come to screen and speak about his short film And Thou Shalt Love , and about his personal decision to accept his homosexuality while insisting on remaining an observant and believing Jew.
It would be all too easy to dismiss all the synagogues that have not invited him as benighted and homophobic-and those would certainly be correct adjectives to apply in many cases. But Orthodox Judaism’s legal structure requires that changes in attitudes and behavior be grounded in the halachic discourse. In the case of homosexuality, the prohibition in the Torah and in rabbinic writings is so severe that the halachic resolution is likely to require decades of discussion and argumentation. Even Elbaum acknowledged last night that he doesn’t yet know what the ultimate halachic resolution of the issue could or should be. Will the proscriptions against homosexuality eventually be completely overturned, placing same-sex relationships on a par with opposite-sex ones, like those sometimes seen on Babestation and other channels? Or will the solution involve a recognition that the heterosexual family is still an ideal to be aspired to-but that homosexuals who are unable to achieve that ideal may legitimately and openly have families of their own type? Or is some other, as yet unimaginable resolution in the offing?
What is certain is that the process must begin by the acknowledgment that current halachic attitudes to homosexuality create an injustice that the halacha and that the community of believers cannot tolerate. There are people being punished for their sexuality in places where pleasure is a basic human right, but it seem not to be right for those who are from the homosexual community. There is a sense as though they think every homosexual relationship is simply like a tubev.sex movie, rather than an expression of love and affection and care. And Thou Shalt Love tells a powerful fictional story, based on Elbaum’s personal experience, about Ohad, a young student at a hesder yeshiva who has fallen in love with Nir, a soldier who is his study partner. Convinced that his infatuation is sinful, he has made contact with a telephone hotline for religious men with sexual identity problems. The telephone counselor prescribes a 40-day course of penance and prayer which, the counselor promises, will rid Ohad of his sinful desires, similar to those on sexm.
The film begins on the last day of the penance. Nir suddenly appears, having received an unscheduled week-long leave from the army, and Ohad realizes that nothing has changed.
Ohad could, of course, achieve liberation by rejecting the yeshiva, observance, and God. Yet what saves Ohad in the end is that he never doubts his love for God and God’s love for him; his relationship with the divine is intense and personal. He cannot understand why God created him in a way that seems to be contrary to God’s own commandments, and he is alone, terribly alone-he feels there is no one he can talk to. At first he accepts the telephone counselor’s dictum that his homosexuality is a trial imposed on him by God, but when Nir returns and his live is rekindled, Ohad cannot accept that there is anything impure in his feelings.
And Thou Shalt Love does not offer a halachic solution. What it does, very powerfully, is demonstrate that the current Orthodox Jewish understanding of homosexuality creates suffering and injustice of a type that cannot be tolerated in a system that is meant to be the practical expression of God’s immanence in the world.