Let's Talk About: Gay Marriage

Hello, friends!

Why don't we get a little controversial today, hmm?

I spent a lot of my past few years in college asking questions: "Why do you choose to go to services every week?" "What does your faith say about sex outside of marriage?" "What are your views on gay marriage?" I spent a lot of time "seeking first to understand," as our favorite man Stephen Covey said, before I ever sought to be understood. Okay, to be honest, I did not "seek to be understood" often enough.

Perhaps that was my fault. But I didn't want to make anyone uncomfortable--so I sat there and listened to various friends explain why alcohol was frowned upon in some religious groups, why gay marriage is not okay with them, their views on abortion. Opinions I often disagreed with, sometimes very strongly. I asked, and listened, and learned a lot, and (tried to) mostly keep silent if I disagreed. This blog is by all means not about pushing you to agree with my opinions (unless, of course, I can convince some more people about the importance of interfaith work, but you know what I mean), but in this post I wanted to explore a situation I recently dealt with on an individual level, and it does involve sharing my opinion. Bear with me.

Sitting in my car one night last week, I heard the end of a song on the radio, and I was shocked. It sounded like a hip hop song supporting gay rights. What?! This was on mainstream radio! I was shocked and a little excited, so I shut off my car and ran into the house to start looking for the video, and I found the song, called "Same Love," as in "All love is the same love." Here is the official video:

I am not going to lie: it touched me. To hear a somewhat mainstream artist sing about this, bluntly address a lot of the hate that exists in our society, and try to fight it, meant a lot to me. The video also tells a love story. I'm sure it makes a lot of people uncomfortable because the story involves two men, but if it were about a straight couple of two races for example, living out their lives together, getting married, supporting one another in illness, it would engender an emotional response, maybe even tears from a lot of people. I loved this video.

I decided to post the video as my Facebook status. Several times I put it up, then immediately deleted it. And why? Because some of the messages in the video seem to attack Christianity and conservatives: comments like "We paraphrase a book written 3,500 years ago" and "The right-wing conservatives this it's [being gay] a decision." I am so intent upon trying to not hurt peoples' feelings, that sometimes I let that overcome my desire to share my own opinion, and to share something that really had an impact on me. Clearly, the video makes some gross generalizations--not all Christians oppose gay marriage, and not all conservatives think one can decide upon their sexuality. I am not claiming this song is perfect. But the singer was apparently raised attending church, and so if we look at it from his perspective, he is commenting upon an institution he knows about, for better or for worse.

So I'm not going to hide. I am sorry if anyone was offended by the video, but I am not sorry I posted it. I like to spread the news when something really touches me, as this song and video did, and I was honestly shocked that none of my friends had shared the video earlier (it came out last fall). It's a love story, simple as that.

I'm wondering, though, how we can talk about these controversial issues in ways that people feel like everyone gets an equal say, and no one feels attacked. Because inherent in some conversations about gay marriage with very religious people might be the thought that their opinions are backwards, hateful, unfair. Granted, some are, but I have never met someone who said anything hateful about gay people or anybody (I could not be friends with someone harboring such blind hate in their hearts). My friends often cite passages from the Torah or Bible that lead to their opposition of the practice of same-sex relationships. I do not agree with their viewpoints, but I respect their religious convictions...and I wish they could see some of my side of the argument. I rarely brought them up, though, for fear that my friends would think that I was judging them for their judgment of homosexuals.

But I also am not sure if religious folks fully understand just how hard it is to hear about opposition to gay marriage--imagine if we said something like, "I oppose people being allowed to get married in a church" or "I do not support the right of heterosexuals to get married, let's make it illegal." It goes against the very fiber of my being to deny someone the same rights that I and many other are granted, to get married simply because we happen to like members of the opposite sex, and it's like "Why would my marriage in a church affect you?" And it wouldn't. That's a large part of what makes it hard to hear your opinions, because to some extent, it is very hard for us not to think of it as discrimination, or to understand why we cannot at least offer the freedom. We're not forcing anyone to take advantage of it. But once I've spoken with many of you who do oppose it, I at least understand why you feel that way. That doesn't mean it's not hard to hear it.

Then I have spoken with other, very liberal people who could never imagine being friends with people who oppose gay marriage, and that is not right either, to dismiss someone so completely without even listening to them. It seems black and white, but things rarely are.

I thought that I had spent these past four years having meaningful, interfaith discussions--and I did. But I think there was something missing in them, because I didn't have the courage or chutzpah to speak up, to voice my opinions. It was out of an attempt to keep the peace, but that was at the expense of really having full, well-rounded discussions where everyone had the opportunity to contribute. I forgot about the second part of Stephen Covey's idea: "Seek first to understand, then to be understood." I want to be understood.

In the end, the current debate about gay marriage in our country comes down to one main thing for me: freedom. The main opposition I see today to gay marriage comes from conservative, mainly Christian, religious groups. That is not right. Our country is founded on religious freedom, and guess what? My movement of Judaism strongly supports gay marriage, they have released numerous official comments in this regard. So what this means is that, right now, my religion is in some way being subjected to the opinions of another religion, and that is just blatantly wrong. Allowing freedom for homosexual couples to get married does not need to affect religious people--they can still choose to only marry heterosexual couples, only allow same-sex couples into their groups, exclude homosexuals from participating in their rituals. But by keeping gay marriage banned, our country is preventing those religions that support it from enjoying the full exercise of their religion. G-d willing, with a few more successes like the one we had this past week in the Supreme Court, this imbalance will be rectified. And hopefully our lawmakers can find a way to put many of their religious assumptions aside--from whichever side of the argument they fall on--and make decisions that can really benefit all Americans.

Now go out and love one another.

<3,
Allyson

-------------------------

For more posts, or to join the e-mail list, please head to www.christmasandkreplach.blogspot.com.

The Trees Were Red

Hello friends,

I went to visit Dachau Concentration Camp two weeks ago during a visit to Munich, my first ever visit to a concentration camp, and I wanted to share my impressions here:

All I could see was red.

Red on the gravel crunching under my ballet flats. Red on the tall trees towering above the open fields. Red smeared across the doorways of religious monuments at one end of the compound. Red everywhere.

Not literally, of course, but the taint of the horrors that happened at Dachau and other camps like it chilled my blood. I happened to visit on a hot, cloudless day. Objectively speaking, the entire place could look lovely--big, open area, two rows of tall, full trees towering over the middle main road of the compound. But it was the little things that really got to me. The entry gates that read "Work will make you free," one of the lies that Nazis thought up to convince people to work harder, or the nondescript sign down a small forest path that read, "Execution Range with Blood Ditch." Birds chirped around me, I stood alone, and saw this stone, almost unnoticed, on a forest path.

 On the ground at Dachau Concentration Camp, outside of Munich, Germany

To give a brief description of the layout of the camp (Dachau apparently was the model used to design most of the other camps), we walked in through the gates down at the bottom right of the image below and stood in a big open area (3). This was where the prisoners would be lined up and counted, etc. On this end now stands a museum building (5), a monument in several languages, and a black metal memorial sculpture made to look like barbed wire but if you look closely includes images of humans in agony. As you turn to face down the main central road of the camp, flanked on both sides by trees (1), extending out on either side are where the barracks once stood (2). Now, only two have been recreated, but the outlining foundations of the others extend back a long way.

Layout of Dachau, from http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauCampMap.html

At the opposite end (6, 7, 9) are the locations of several memorial locations, like a Jewish building, and Christian buildings from various denominations. All in all, they are pretty stark, to be honest. The horror for me lay in looking out across the enormity of the place and its emptiness. The camp was meant to hold 6,000 (mostly political) prisoners, but when it was liberated in 1945, it had 30,000.

View from a window in the recreated barracks

Number 11 is where "Barracks X" aka a gas chamber and crematorium stand. I stood in a gas chamber. I stood in a gas chamber. Red, everything, everything was red in the feeling, in the darkness, in the chill horrors of what the camp was built for. Whether or not the gas chamber was ever used is up for discussion, but the hatred palpable in the design of the building where they stood was horrible. There was a room for prisoners to wait in. Then one for them to strip of all their clothes, and where they were told they were going to take "showers." This led into the gas chamber, complete with fake shower heads to keep prisoners calm. Then the next room was for storing dead bodies. Then the ovens. One room after another, systematic, treating the people like they were not even human, just numbers to be processed through the huge chain of murder.

A pile of dead bodies outside the Dachau crematorium

How could people have done this to one another? This is not only about antisemitism, or religion in general, or color or politics. It's about all of that. It's about how a group of people, yes, led by one madman, but how an entire group of people undertook an operation to try to rid Europe and ultimately the world of "undesirable" types. Yes, this included Jews, and yes, that means the Holocaust (or "Shoah," as Jewish circles often refer to it) holds particular weight for me. Why would someone ever want to kill me, simply because I pray in Hebrew? Or if someone were to abstain from eating pork or doing something on Saturdays? It's hard to comprehend. But the murders extended beyond Jews, too, to the disabled, to Catholics, to the political opposition, to Gypsies, and others.

Which makes interfaith efforts today all the more essential. As I have written before, the old adage of not talking about religion just doesn't hold for me. I have had many tough conversations, sometimes even with friends, when we disagree vehemently on critical issues. Sometimes I honestly wonder if my very religious Christian friends think I am doomed to some bad fate because of my religion. But we talk about the issues. We come to the table acknowledging that we respect one another and our mutual faith choices, and then we talk about it. I'm not advocating walking up to strangers and saying, "Hi, I'm Jewish/Christian/Muslim/etc. Let's chat!" (*ahem* Not that I've ever done that before *ahem*) but if you see an opportunity where maybe you don't understand something someone says about their religion, or maybe someone doesn't seem to understand your views, open the door. I often find asking questions is the best way to explore these topics, by simply saying to someone, "As a religious individual, what is your view on this topic?" with no expectations usually of even discussing my views unless they ask. It can be hard to listen, but also essential.

So remember the horrors of the Holocaust as you go about your day today, tomorrow, this week. Jewish people really focus on the idea of "never forget" with regard to the Holocaust, but I fear that we do. We forget that 12,000,000 died just a few decades ago. Twelve million. We go about our days, myself included, and herald the strides that are being made, that the new Pope came out and supported people of all faiths and even those with no faith, that Muslims in Britain vehemently responded in opposition to the crazy man who killed a solider there just a few weeks ago supposedly because of his mistaken sense of Muslim duty. But the Holocaust was not so long ago, and even today people are persecuted for their beliefs in places around the world.


The number 12,000,000 did not mean as much as it did when I stood in Dachau and realized just how large a camp for 6,000 people was, and it put some things in perspective. I visited the camp as part of a three-week backpacking trip through Europe this month, and many times I visited Jewish sites in the places we went. The museum in Amsterdam. A memorial in Berlin. The Jewish section in Prague. Places devoid of the strong Jewish presence that existed there before the Shoah. Maybe the Nazis did not kill all European Jews, but those Jews that remain are mere shadows of the vibrant communities that once existed there. Perhaps I'm cynical because of all of my research into contemporary antisemitism in Europe, and I am sure that many Jewish individuals happily live in various European nations today, but many times all I can see--in Dachau, in Berlin, everywhere in Europe--is red. Here's to hoping that with the right efforts from people of all faiths, some day that red will no longer symbolize death, but love.

Now go out and love one another.

<3,
Allyson

Going to the __________ and we're gonna get married

Hello, friends.

I'm 22. When did that happen? (Actually, it happened on February 8. I may be terrible at remembering names, but I do know my birthday!) Most of my friends are vaguely the same age: 21, 23, etc. In many cultures around the world, by this age my friends and I would already be married with multiple children.

This trend is not limited only to people in far-off places, though, places like rural Africa or islands in a distant sea. Marrying young is a trend for many traditional religious folks even in the US, whether they are amongst my friends in the Modern Orthodox community in NYC or my traditionalist Christian friends from further south. Is it for the best, though?

Some of my secular friends can't even contemplate marriage yet. "We just graduated college, for goodness' sake! Marriage?! We barely even know what to do with the next year of our lives, let alone the rest of our lives!" seems to be the feeling in that group. Then some of my more religious friends are much more certain of their desire to get married. I can comfortably discuss their desires to marry and have children, probably not immediately, but at some point in the next few years. Certainly there are some people who fall on the opposite sides (religious people who are definitely not comfortable thinking about marriage right now, and secular people who know they want to get married) but my experience thus far has shown that those with a stronger faith life are more firm and open in their desire to get married.

I think it has to do with religious community norms. Amongst Christian groups getting married is often pushed, as in Jewish communities. From early on, discussions in religious groups, religious schools, etc. often focus upon marriage and children, and what the particular religion views as the proper home life. Celibacy until marriage for strict Catholics, for example, or marrying another Jew for many Jews. I remember having a full-fledged mock wedding in Hebrew School when we were maybe 10, complete with wine and a chupah (pronounced with a "ch" like in "challah," chuh-paa, a traditional Jewish wedding canopy).

But secular folks might be missing similar opportunities to openly discuss these ideas, unless their parents decide to discuss it regularly for some reason. Let's look at TV shows as an example of a small view of secular culture. In these, the secular culture presents a lot of sex outside of marriage in its twenty-something sitcoms (thinking of "Friends" and "How I Met Your Mother," both shows I love but they do have a lot of sex in them). Then you have the middle-age sitcoms that present the kind of ideal mid-life situation: married with kids, thinking back on crazier younger days, but with stable family lives (like "Everybody Loves Raymond" or "Modern Family"). But do we present enough of a clear, perhaps less sex-crazed route for non-religious young people? Because I just don't love this view in the media, through shows like these where people appear to have sex with a bunch of people throughout their twenties, until they finally find someone they like enough to marry in their thirties. My personal views on the matter completely aside, I think there has to be an alternative other than this rampant sex model or more conservative interactions until marriage. Can't we have some balance? I wonder if this type of sex-driven relationship model (and for more info, check out any of the many articles published in the last few years about "hook-up" culture) is one of the reasons behind some failed marriages today, as religious groups also tend to frown upon divorce and thus also have a higher marriage success rate.

Maybe some secular people also feel a bit awkward like I do, talking so openly about marriage and how we want to get married, almost as though by saying "I want to get married" implies either that I do not fulfilled with just myself, or that I am confident that someone will actually want to marry me. It's different for religious communities in which everyone plans to get married, but in secular culture, I understand that it can be a little awkward to discuss.

Then there's the whole complication of whether or not people want to have children! In religious communities, again, having children is usually seen as a mitzvah (a good deed). But for some secular people (again, I am not claiming this as my opinion), without the cultural and religious norm of propagating life as being an ideal situation, they might ask why they would have children. "Interrupt my life and career, for what?" Same thing with sex in general: without a religious reason to abstain, why would people do so? I am sure there are many in the middle, but for some reason it often seems like a there exists a sharp divide between the very religious opinion of relationships, and the sexual one presented in the media.

How can we present a healthy view of romantic relationships in both religious and secular culture? Can there be a middle point between the two? Is marrying young a better option than marrying later, or vice versa? How can we teach our young men and women to have healthy partnerships in life that both fulfill their needs and still maintain respect for themselves and others? I think this is not only a religious issue, but also a cultural one. What does your religion teach about this?

Now go out and love one another.

<3,
Allyson