By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — When I closed my eyes to sleep last night, I reflected about President Obama’s thoughtful affirmation concerning the legal right of any two people to declare a marriage between them. I confess that while never opposing anybody’s right to marry anybody else, the long-standing, Jewish oligarchic tradition that attended my upbringing created a certain clash of feelings, a pastiche of biases and masculine sensibilities: there was a stand-off in my soul.
Ironic, given the fact that I have dedicated my pastoral work for so long to an inclusive ministry, a rabbinate of non-judgmental intervention and the conviction that a living God is a singular God creating one humanity. I know that the president’s timing and text were both affected by the utterances of others, the politics—even by his pressing need to appease the Hollywood elite and raise funds for his reelection. But I’m not cynical about that: his profession requires votes in the same way mine needs prayer books.
It’s good when a president listens to his spouse, to his children, and to his heart. It softens the tendency many of us have to channel serious concerns—and the lives of real people who are only guilty of loving one another—into the rhetorical chambers of hypocrisy and harshness that prevail in our civilization. In struggling with the question of gay marriage, I never paid much snuff to either the Bible-bangers on the right or the left-righteous noisemakers that drew a line from the Civil Rights Movement to this less global, though stern matter.
I’ve drawn a line, perhaps like the president, to the quiet, personal question of “who defines love?” Certainly not the partners in the heterosexual marital institution—a system cravenly ballyhooed even though it carries a 50% failure rate [including in my own experience] and that has bogged down our creaking legal system with bloody battles of custody, property, money, and spite. “People of faith” have never heard of faithfulness? Have any of the media-hyped, Nielsen-provoking celebrity weddings that have amounted to nothing more than a quick bout of “going steady” involved anything but heterosexual couples or done one thing to glorify the poetic majestic of human love?
I’ve drawn another line, privately, to the innumerable mediations I have facilitated, or failed to facilitate, between married men and women so drawn into hateful cycles of vengeance and retribution that I came to understand the root of war. Gender guaranteed only that children would suffer and wander and grieve. Sorry, fundamentalists, but I personally know and thank God for many children who did not have “a father and a mother.” They just had two devoted parents. In this world, that’s everything.
And I woke up this morning to what I read in the Hebrew Scripture a long time ago: David’s lover Jonathan fell in battle and the future king of Israel wrote a poem inscribed in the literature of heaven:
O Jonathan, slain upon the high places,
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan;
Very pleasant hast thou been unto me:
Thy love to me was wonderful,
Passing the love of women.
Thank you, Mr. President. I, too, have evolved.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com