Steven Greenberg (rabbi) - Controversy and Criticism

Controversy and Criticism

After Greenberg′s coming out, Rabbi Moshe Tendler, Rosh Yeshiva at Yeshiva University stated: “Being an Orthodox Rabbi and actively gay is an oxymoron ... the exact same as if he said, ‘I'm an Orthodox rabbi and I eat ham sandwiches on Yom Kippur’. In Tendler′s opinion “it is very sad that an individual who attended our yeshiva sunk to the depths of what we consider a depraved society” and called Greenberg “a reform rabbi”.

Commenting on Greenberg's role in "Trembling before God", Rabbi Avi Shafran, a leader of Agudath Israel of America who scolded the movie for not showing Orthodox Jews who have undergone therapy to change their sexual inclinations, wrote: “Rabbi Steve Greenberg, billed as ‘the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi’ddressing the Torah's strong prohibition of male homosexual acts, ... suggests to the camera, without elaboration: ‘There are other ways of reading the Torah’. What Rabbi Greenberg apparently believes is that elements of the Jewish religious tradition are negotiable, that the Torah, like a Hollywood script, can be sent back for a rewrite. That approach can be called many things, but ‘Orthodox’ is not among them.”

In his review of Wrestling with God and Men for the Edah Journal, Rabbi Asher Lopatin rejects the book as a valid Orthodox Jewish treatment of homosexuality. While Lopatin affirms Greenberg′s “importance as a voice within the Orthodox community”, and calls him “a brilliant, thoughtful and courageous rabbi” and his book “a brilliant work of creativity and research”, he writes that “Wrestling with God and Man, and Rabbi Greenberg’s voice in this book fall outside the bounds of Orthodoxy” for three reasons: Because Greenberg “is not committing himself fully to Orthodoxy”, because he “does not follow Orthodox methodology”, and because he “is not sufficiently halakhically creative”, not having “combined — in a novel way to be sure — commitment to his homosexual identity and way of life with the binding nature of halakhah”. At the same time, Lopatin is confident, that “Greenberg can write the Orthodox book that will show us that he is committed to staying the long and difficult course of persuasion that Orthodoxy demands”.

Greenberg′s officiating at what is considered the first marriage between two Orthodox men in the United States presided over by an Orthodox rabbi, first reported by +972 Magazine on November 11, 2011, and subsequently widely reported and discussed in the Jewish press, attracted controversy and was rejected by most within the Orthodox Jewish community, including some of Greenberg′s friends and colleagues who thought that he had performed a Jewish wedding (kiddushin). In a post on the Morethodoxy-blog, one of them, Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky stated: “This wedding ceremony raises a serious question for the part of the Modern Orthodox community in which I live. The question is not about whether we should recognize the ceremony as being religiously significant. We obviously do not and cannot. The formal religious partnering of two men or two women is unalterably contrary to both the law and the spirit of the Torah and the Halacha, and an Orthodox gay marriage ceremony is as hopeless a misnomer as an Orthodox intermarriage is.” Rabbi Josh Yuter, a modern Orthodox New York rabbi who was acknowledged by the National Jewish Outreach Program as one of the Top Ten Jewish Influencers in social media, published a response to the ceremony in his blog, coming to the conclusion that “the formal recognition of a homosexual marriage – male or female – would in fact be condoning a halakhicaly prohibited union, regardless of the private behaviors of the individuals. It would therefore follow that Rabbis who are committed to halakha should therefore not officiate or participate in these ceremonies, nor should halakhic communities formally recognize the couple as such, as they would with any other union prohibited by Jewish law.”

Greenberg described the wedding as a “same-sex committment ceremony”, commenting that “while it was a wedding according to the laws of the District of Columbia, it was not a kiddushin,” adding “my position was and still is that kiddushin is not appropriate for same-sex couples.” Two weeks later, he wrote in an article in the Jewish Week, “I did not conduct a ‘gay Orthodox wedding’. I officiated at a ceremony that celebrated the decision of two men to commit to each other in love and to do so in binding fashion before family and friends. Though it was a legal marriage according to the laws of the District of Columbia, as far as Orthodox Jewish law (halacha) is concerned, there was no kiddushin (Jewish wedding ceremony) performed.”

On December 5, 2011, in response to the ceremony, more than 100 Orthodox rabbis signed a statement calling gay marriage a “desecration of Torah values”, saying: “We, as rabbis from a broad spectrum of the Orthodox community around the world, wish to correct the false impression that an Orthodox-approved same-gender wedding took place. By definition, a union that is not sanctioned by Torah law is not an Orthodox wedding, and by definition a person who conducts such a ceremony is not an Orthodox rabbi.”