Homosexuality and the Bible — One Very Wrong Way to Deal With the Text

Rabbi Steve Greenberg addressed students at Oberlin College on the issue of homosexuality recently. Author of Wrestling With God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, Greenberg is an openly-homosexual rabbi on a mission to normalize homosexuality within Judaism.

According to The Oberlin Review:

Greenberg is the author of Wrestling with God and Men, a book that addresses hermeneutical and cultural conflicts between homosexuality and Orthodoxy in Judaism. He is also the founder of the Jerusalem Open House, a drop-in center for gays and lesbians. He began his talk with a long description of his adolescence and early adulthood, and the formative events that led to his current status as the authoritative voice of gay Orthodox Jews.

The rabbi argued that the biblical prohibitions against homosexual behavior are actually evidence of animus toward women (or toward men who would play the role of a woman); but he saved his most interesting argument for last:

His last statement, after a brief Q&A, was the story from Genesis of God seeking to relieve Adam’s loneliness. None of the animals suited Adam’s fancy, as Greenberg told it–it took another human being.

“When it comes to the free human heart, God cannot impose the answer to the problem of human loneliness,” Greenberg said. “He can only hope that Adam goes out and finds what works.”

So God cannot “impose the answer to the problem of human loneliness?” That is precisely what God did in Genesis 2:18-25.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

God did not tell Adam to go out and find “what works.”