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COPYRIGHT 2005 American Jewish Congress
I have a vivid memory of being in Rabbi Neil Gillman's class in 1988 when he talked about the struggles around the decision to ordain women as Conservative rabbis. He recounted a story about someone who, on the day of the decision to admit women to the Rabbinical School at JTS, said: "Today women, tomorrow gays." My visceral reaction was: "That's preposterous. How can people lump the two together when they are so different?" My reaction has stayed with me over the years as I have become passionate about the need to accept gay and lesbian Jews fully, including the need to ordain them. I see how, as the movement was just beginning to make room for women, I wanted desperately to justify the innovations as halakhically valid and, therefore, defensible. The obstacles to finding valid halakhic frameworks for embracing gay and lesbian people seemed much harder to surmount. At the time, I understood that the speaker in Rabbi Gillman's story was using the homosexuality scenario to discredit the inclusion of women, and certainly he was trying to do that. But today I see him as prescient. Once our movement made a commitment to address the pressing moral challenge of our day--the exclusion of women--it emerged as a movement that is able to reorient its understanding of halakha so that people can affirm the core belief that halakha and morality are grounded in the same reality. So it makes perfect sense to me that it is not enough for us just to ordain women. Ordaining women and not gays and lesbians leaves us living with the same dissonance. Until we fully accept gays and lesbians we continue to espouse a view of halakha that lacks a core connection to morality.
My college roommate and I both applied to rabbinical school at the same time, and we were both accepted. She was an exceptional student...
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