yesterday i went to see
my rabbi
*this is my day old memory of what he said and it was an emotional (and one-to-one) encounter, pls don’t take this as Masorti/Conservative Doctrine or a halachic post or anything -- if u have a question about the halacha i mention, i can probably find you a source*
i went in to talk about two things. one was what i should do why my summer, and by extension my life, and one was my ~relationship to god and by extension halacha~
(Next summer I could either go back to Yeshivat Hadar or do an internship and get money. Hadar would equip me better for becoming a rabbi, an internship would help me more for getting another job. It’s been on my mind because since I was ten, people have been asking me if i wanted to be a rabbi. I always knew it was, like, if I’d liked science they would have said “you should be a scientist”, but this summer two rabbinical students and a chazzanit told me I should really think about being a rabbi, so I figured they know whereof they speak, and also the rabbinate might be something I’m actually interested in myself.)
I sat down and he asked whether I wanted to shut the door, which until then I hadn’t thought of, but I was like yeah, sure.
And I started to talk about becoming a rabbi, and I hadn’t really realised until I started talking, or I had realised and knew but didn’t plan to raise it, but I feel like the lechatchila way to be a Jew and live a rich authentic flourishing Jewish life includes as a necessary, though not sufficient, part, marrying a partner of another sex and having children. And for me that’s not really a possibility if i want to live halachically. (even if i met a mamzer or ger or ben gerim, i’m very unconvinced of the goodness of having procreative sex and getting impregnated and then ejecting that baby from myself using my very own organs, not to mention the mamzeirut thing) So I want to give my life to Judaism in another way, that’s part of the motivation here.
(I’ve been reading a lot of a wonderful blog by some celibate christian lesbians, http://aqueercalling.com/, which has been really interesting but on reflection may have given me mistaken ideas about how to build a good Jewish life.)
The rabbi sort of sat with that for a moment or two and then asked me to elaborate, which I don’t know why I didn’t expect him to ask, and then I stopped looking him in the eye and looked instead directly up and away from him at the upper corner of the room because that’s what i do when i talk to rabbis about this, because otherwise i will cry and i am not ready to cry in front of really any rabbi that i know. And I said, “in 1926, my great grandma didn’t divorce her first husband, and... yeah”.
And then he was like... there are, halachic solutions? So I talked a bit about the history of the case, and then... uh. I’d talked to Rav Eitan when I was at Yeshivat Hadar about this, and he said that the Rambam says that the problem of mamzeirut comes into play with a combination of kiddushin and biah, with either one on their own not being a problem. (he’s very much a da’at yachid on this so it’s not what we tend to do today, though some people will use it in combination with lots of other factors, like if there’s a significant safek on the mamzeirut and stuff.... yeah)
Biah is not really in my life plans at the moment, and I’m not wild about kiddushin either. That’s just the Rambam, but according to everyone else the problem is either kiddushin or sex.... so i could hypothetically just get shutafut or something with some kind of... person with whom i had a mutual desire to be and a mutual desire not to have sex with one another? And then, uh, I had to explain that too. Like I just had to whip out all my innermost stuff in front of this man. Seeing as it was halachically relevant. The exact words I used were, “you might as well know all my secrets, uh, i identify as asexual, that means i don’t experience sexual attraction.” Which is a horrible feeling! I don’t want to talk to rabbis about sexual identity, at least not as it pertains to me!
(the relevant rabbi is an absolutely wonderful human being and it was good i think to have talked to him about this, i just don’t... it’s just not a discussion i want to have with non-peer-figures, i think. well, i say that, but i’d be comfortable telling one of my lecturers at uni, so maybe it is just rabbis)
I told him I had heard about the Conservative approach, which is to refuse to accept anything at all as sufficient evidence for mamzeirut. Which i think is specious in the face of a chazaka, 3 generations of documents, and the work of another beit din, for my case, but uh. Yeah.
Then he said he’d make anonymous enquiries about it with some people that he knows through being a masorti rabbi, which I still don’t know if it’s something I want or not (I don’t not want it, I’m just not sure if I’m bothered? At this point I don’t have hope), but said it would be easier if I were laying an actual concrete case before him. (I also had to say I’m not sure where I stand with respect to romantic attraction, so. yeah.). He also said that he believes that there’s almost always a halachic solution to everything, especially a case when two Jews come before a rabbi because they want to build a bayit ne’eman b’yisrael, which I... don’t know about. I don’t. yeah.
Then he gave me some really good advice about whether I should be a rabbi, but we ran out of time to talk about God, so uh, yeah.
