Beautiful and loving — but don’t call it holy

With last week's Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in that state, our country is about to undergo a major debate about marriage, its importance and its boundaries. The Jewish community has a lot to contribute to this discussion, since our religion introduced to civilization the idea that some love relationships can be holy and some — such as those between members of the same sex — cannot.

Proponents of same-sex marriage argue that homosexuality is a natural, unchangeable sexual orientation, and it's thus not fair to expect gays and lesbians to enter into opposite-sex marriages. They insist, rather, that same-sex relationships come naturally for gays and lesbians, and such unions can be just as beautiful, loving and holy as opposite-sex relationships. They may be right about beautiful and loving. But not holy, as far as Judaism is concerned.

For our people, holy doesn't just mean "elevated" or "spiritual." Rather, kedushah (holiness) is a sort of religious specialness, with the specifics of what is or is not holy coming exclusively from God, and thus not open to human redefinition.

Now, I personally know lots of terrific, nurturing same-sex couples. (I was even part of one once.) And hospital-visitation and inheritance laws should afford dignity and respect to people who chose to live out their lives with a member of the same sex. But when gays and lesbians demand kiddushin — the Jewish term for marriage — the answer has to be no.

The advocacy of same-sex marriage because such unions are "natural" for gays and lesbians is particularly ironic, given something interesting but rarely discussed about the Jewish texts and terms relating to kedushah. Jewish holiness generally refers not to doing what comes naturally, but to doing what is unnatural, precisely because God has shown us, through His Torah and His commandments, a better way of living.

The prime example is Shabbat. Every aspect of our calendar is based on nature — the month from the moon, the year from the sun, the day from the earth — except the week. We have a seven-day week for no reason other than God's creation of the earth in six days and His rest on the seventh. In a state of nature, we would work nonstop — and indeed most people do. But the Torah teaches us that if we rest one out of seven days, our lives will be better. Hence the Friday night Kiddush quotes Genesis 2:3, telling us God blessed the seventh day vayikadesh oto — and He made it holy.

Another good example of holiness in Judaism is Jewish mourning rituals, from saying Kaddish to joining a burial society: a chevra kadishah. Jewish customs when someone passes on are not "natural." Many world societies worship their dead, or they treat the dead like garbage. Jewish law rejects such practices, and it provides a richly detailed and comprehensive set of instructions, so that mourners don't have to wonder how to cope with all the practical, social and theological issues they face. Mourning is one area in which Jewish law clearly hits home with the laity. Many rabbis report hardly ever seeing certain congregants until a parent dies, at which point they see them every day for almost a year.

Just as we have Kiddush and Kaddish, we also have kiddushin. Jewish marriages are set up for a man and a woman not because it's natural, but because it's part of God's plan for helping our lives and our society. Gay men and women who claim to have been "born that way" have got it wrong. In a state of nature, people aren't gay or straight. People are what Freud called "polymorphously perverse." That's another way of saying, essentially, "anything that moves." But society helps individuals develop sexual identities and romantic bonds of various sorts. Societies in history have celebrated varieties of sexual congress that would seem to us to range from the conventional to the bizarre. But God has shown us through His Torah that only a tiny percentage of all possible relationships can be holy.

Some of the relationships the Torah forbids are self-evidently off-limits, such as brother-sister unions. Other taboos are harder for moderns to follow — such as the marriage of a Kohen (descendent of the priestly caste) to a divorced woman. It may be that, 30-plus years into the gay liberation movement, Judaism's rejection of same-sex couplings is no longer self-evident to much of the populace and calls for more teaching and explaining. But Judaism can no more grant kiddushin to two women or two men than it can start to observe Shabbat every sixth or every fifth day.

Whether it's to preserve an ideal environment for raising children, to promote healthy balance between the sexes or simply because we ought to accept God's norms about the fundamental bedrocks of society even when we don't understand them, the Jewish community ought to speak out firmly against any rewriting of marriage laws.

David Benkof is a historian and the author (as David Bianco) of "Modern Jewish History for Everyone" and "Gay Essentials: Facts for Your Queer Brain." He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).