The sun was not up over the palm trees behind his house on
Steven Greenberg struggled similarly while in the deserts of his
Both gay men have struggled to reconcile their sexual identities with the institutions in their families and lives. When Greenberg first said, “I’m gay,” he saw a cliff. He said it’s not unique to his experience but appears to many homosexuals from traditional backgrounds. He was backed up to its edge. There, the horizon was far off but clear, and the sky stretched over him until it met another far off distance. The only indistinguishable feature is what lies ahead. There was once a trajectory that seemed good. It carried him through a life that would bring him a perfect wedding, children and the accoutrements associated with conventional happiness. They were created long ago by a 16- or 17-year-old boy looking for security in television dreams.
“Every hopeful imagination of what the future holds is dashed by this one fact of your inner life,” he said.
At the cliff, the route that would bring him to safety shattered and fell like shadows into the obscurity below.
“You admit it, then all the whole array of plans, your imagination and others, they’re gone,” he said. “You mourn them; you mourn the loss of all that. What does it mean to fantasize from the time you’re 16 years old, 15 or younger?”
He said these imagined lives are desired by the young simply because they are desirable things. The rules are constructed – and enforced – by family and peers. The norms produce the ideal of happiness. But for Greenberg and Aguilera and countless others then and now and in the future, the rules don’t anymore.
The world sees its institutions as largely immutable. The Ten Commandments have governed basic morality for centuries. Religion has provided stability to social changes in many settings.
David Roseborough, an assistant professor in social work at the University of St. Thomas, wrote in a paper, “the tension between religion and sexuality is particularly pronounced for gay and lesbian people who are often ‘caught in the middle’ between a constitutional sexual orientation and a church body that rejects it.” The person who now recognizes he is gay sees that sexuality and religion are closely linked but not always comfortably.
To some of his denomination, Rabbi Steven Greenberg -- the first openly gay Rabbi in orthodox Judaism -- is an abomination. The sage in
In
“There, I felt F-R-E-E-D-O-M,” he said. He had not yet come to Greenberg’s cliff, but a weight was already removed. At
But the required reading, with its coming-of-age tales, foreshadowed a time for Aguilera when he would have to leave
Greenberg found his answer in his usual place, but one that may seem surprising. He opened his Torah and read from the Book of Jacob.
The story has violence and a young man laboring for love. His family is dysfunctional; he becomes entangled in a power struggle for his father’s inheritance. His brother is the perfect foil – a hairy and brutish hunter to Jacob’s fair-faced domesticity.
He comes into the world grabbing onto his brother’s ankle as if trying to prove himself worthy of life too. The two grow up and apart. His brother hunts while Jacob stays at home with his mother and cooks among the women.
The narrative is woven with ideas involving identity and what it means to be a man. Like many other stories in the Bible, Jacob struggles before coming to know God on a personal level. The rising action involves his vengeful brother marching with an army of 400 men to destroy him. The climax is an action scene but one with a mysterious assailant.
The man comes from nowhere, and Jacob wrestles him for hours until a stalemate is reached. Some say the mysterious figure was an angel. The story is rife with issues of acceptance and chronicles a young man torn between his church and state of being. In an interview, Greenberg adds a twist: the angel is a representation of Jacob’s feelings. He struggles with himself and overcomes his fears, and the blessing he receives afterwards is from both God and his consciousness. Following the fight, the man renames Jacob “
Greenberg sees a bit of himself in Jacob. Both possess a different kind of masculinity. Compared to the he-man, Jacob seems almost effeminate. He sees Jacob’s stalemate with the assailant as “an affirmation of his emotional growth.” Limping from the fight, Jacob is renamed
The interview is interrupted. A colleague calls and a father has a son who is gay and the man doesn’t know what to do. Greenberg asks to break momentarily while the cliff is encountered again.
Martin Aguilera’s father might have been on the other line if he weren’t a staunch Roman Catholic from
Oddly, most at
“I had to come out because it just felt right,” Aguilera said. He dated a young woman from
“Beneath these layers of tolerance, there exists an idea of the way things ‘should be,’” he said. “I think those lines of tolerance are blurred at Amherst and are much more difficult to navigate as opposed to home – where I know it's just a no-no.”
He said it’s difficult to determine whether his male friends are accepting, simply tolerant or worse.
Greenberg and Aguilera walked from respective airplanes into lives both were still dreaming of. Greenberg was starting as the first gay rabbi in his church, and Aguilera was headed home for Christmas dinner – gay at
Greenberg published “Gayness and God: Wrestlings of a Gay Orthodox Rabbi” in Tikkun magazine, a Jewish news and culture publication. A mix of memoir and close reading of the Torah, Greenberg started a more serious study on the matter of his warring identities. He published the article under a Hebrew pseudonym that translates to “and Jacob was left alone.”
“It brings about the loneliness of discovering yourself to be gay and the wrestling of men against society and the expectation of manhood and with God,” he said.
He expected a “bumpy road” after the article was published, yet it was well-received by most of his colleagues. Only one colleague could not cope with Greenberg’s new role in the Jewish faith.
“I don’t know why you are doing this to yourself,” the friend said. “I can’t deal. I’m sorry.”
His family reacted as expected in his tradition. His father took the better part of a year to come to terms. His mother, a Holocaust survivor, saw her dreams for her son disintegrate and, for several years, could not find peace with her oldest son. She saw his old trajectory of grandchildren, a marriage, and more family fade away.
Greenberg saw his mother’s grief and a woman with a set of expectations that had little room for a gay son. So he moved to slowly start transforming their shared religion.
His article, the culmination of ten years of study and self examination, became a book, “Wrestling with God and Men.” Director Sandi Simcha DuBowski featured Greenberg in his documentary, “Trembling Before G-d,” often used as a teaching tool in reconciling sexuality with faith.
He sat in the synagogue on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, each year with his tallit pulled over his head. Every year, all of Leviticus 18 is read. A rabbi reads of Moses relaying each of God’s commandments to the Israelites, and Greenberg found himself in tears.
““[A man] should not lay with another man as [he would] with a woman, it is a toeva [abomination]” (Leviticus 18:22).
“There were years when I could barely contain the tears,” he said. “At some point I decided to add protest, and I stood up. I don’t know what it meant. And finally I couldn’t cry anymore,” he said in the documentary. He approached the lectern with sweating palms. The distance between him and the open scroll shrank, and a calm fell over him.
“I realized my willingness to be vulnerable to the text required the text to be vulnerable to me and to everybody like me,” he said. “I realized that the people who decide what this verse means have never heard my story. They’ve never heard [other homosexuals’ stories]. And if they did, they would no longer be so certain.”
He said the texts should be given faces so that they can evolve just as he said they have for centuries.
“Religions – the healthy ones – respond to new circumstances all of the time,” he said in an interview. “They reinvent themselves all of the time.”
Liza Neal, director of Spiritual Life at
“Both are inherent in you and take you to different states; they are methods of expression,” she said. “Often our angst in religion over sexuality is often because we’re trying to work things out.”
Martin Aguilera stepped from his plane and towards his home and
A candle burns on the altar just as it always has.
Home was bittersweet. It's good to catch up with family and eat 50 cent tacos. Christmas on his father’s side of the family involves 30 members of an extended family and a barrel of
Just a week before, he transformed an
“What makes change is when people see and feel what it means for someone suffering in the context of a set of decisions that are intending to be good and are doing evil,” Greenberg said. He added that when changing any institution, the laws are the hardest to change. In a country currently chanting for “change” and gripping their chairs to see its first results, the LGBT community looks into the mix feeling bittersweet. For the first time in a decade, they sat back satisfied that their man had won. But with
Rabbi Steven Nathan, a spiritual advisor at
Greenberg said the queer community does not want to live in the shadows.
“They don’t want to live in lifelong denial either, and when these stories come out, they slowly begin to change what I call an empathy,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out how not one but two sexualities can exist within the world and maybe our laws up until now have applied to heterosexuals.”
He was his family’s first born after the Holocaust and his mother shared her young son’s dreams of family and children. He was named after her father, who was lost in
When Greenberg came out to his mother, he made it very clear that the decision was final, knowing that if there were any shred of doubt, she would work to change him. She mourned as if she had seen a branch of the family die.
“I was seen as the continuity, and I think it was very hard for her to see my life not carry this through in that way,” he said.
When “Trembling Before G-d” was screened in
“I think she had this fantasy that it was going to be shaming,” he said, “but what she saw was that it just wasn’t.”
“The fit between sexual orientation and religion as a relationship requiring a reworking of one’s own world view is not exclusive,” Roseborough wrote, “gays’ and lesbians’ relationships to government, family and other institutions are also relevant.”
Roseborough said the gay men he interviewed in his study often felt a resurrection after coming out of the closet. Their coming-out stories are framed as faith narratives. After coming to Greenberg’s cliff, each has regained an internal locus of control. Once studied, they see how they can create new trajectories that include their own happiness.
Both Greenberg and Aguilera said some religions are more hospitable to homosexuals than others, that some communities are more comfortable with LGBT people, but neither expresses a desire to change his religion or transfer colleges. Instead, they see the institutions in which they operate as operating for them. The pieces may not have fit before because each hadn’t yet made room for themselves or others.
Greenberg and Aguilera have started. Greenberg said
William McGuinness can be reached at wmcguinn@student.umass.edu.
