By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — He started out with the most outrageously un-rabbinic analysis of why Haiti suffered so much more than did the other part of the island, the Dominican Republic, during last year’s catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake: it was due to the widespread practice of homosexuality and the per capita AIDS statistics, he claimed. This is rampant in Haiti, he asserted, and he implied that the Dominican Republic, being far less deviant, was therefore spared.
|Rabbi Yehuda Levin of New York then proceeded, in a You Tube feed, to connect this week’s frightening and significant East Coast earthquake to homosexuality, gay marriage, and even to legislative acts that support and/or legalize same-sex marriage. In fairness, the rabbi follows a long line of right-wing Christian theologians who have demonized gay people in ways that demean the compassionate Scriptural tradition and contemporaneously trivialize devastating moments of wide-scale human suffering.
Hearing and seeing Levin’s contemptible remarks, I discovered a moment when I was embarrassed to be a Jew.
The rabbi, after pointing to the New York State Assembly’s recent statute sanctioning marriage equality as the source of God’s wrath in the matter of 5.8 quake that shook the Empire State (and especially terrified workers and residents in lower Manhattan as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 looms), then had the chutzpah to claim that he and his colleagues do not scorn homosexuals. “We don’t hate homosexuals,” he says. “I feel bad for homosexuals. It’s a revolt against God and literally, there’s hell to pay.” [Huffington Post]
Rabbi Levin and his myopic, judgmental, dispassionate cohorts in the religious culture represents hell’s best-ever payday.
“There’s a direct connection between earthquakes and homosexuality,” said the rabbi. He expressed empathy about “the cracks in the Washington Monument, the broken spires of the National Cathedral.” But still, he lamented, “many people scoff and ignore” the obvious reality that such natural disasters are instigated by God to teach us what is right and what is wrong.
This bit of puerile preaching reminded me of the similarly uninspired rabbi who once explained that the Six Million Jews who perished in the Holocaust were victimized because not all of our people had properly mounted mezuzahs on our doorways. And the other fundamentalist rabbi who rationalized that the genocide began in Germany exactly because that was the birth-nation of Reform Judaism.
It is bad enough that these disasters occur, with increasing frequency and force, all over this churning earth of ours—from Haiti to the Bayou to Indonesia to Japan. Next thing we know, these religious zealots and bigots will claim that global warming is happening because someone turned a light on during the Sabbath.
And they don’t know from light.
*
Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego