Is hiring based on sexual orientation job discrimination if done for religious purposes?
Rabbi Daniel Nevins says that it is. Nevins is the dean of the Rabbinical School at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the academic center of Conservative Judaism. Nevins is also the co-author of a Jewish law response that calls for the ordination of gay rabbis.
On Thursday night at the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU, Nevins gave a talk about homosexuality in the Jewish community, as well as the history behind the Conservative movement's decisions regarding the status of the LGBT community in religion.
"This is one of the many cases where the secular world and the religious Jewish world clash. In this case it is a large issue for many people," Steinhardt sophomore Yossi Hoffman said.
Hoffman is also the co-president of Koach, the Conservative Jewish student group on campus.
In 1992, the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards, the law committee of Conservative Judaism, released a statement that upheld the traditional religious views that homosexuality was wrong. This consensus statement included a clause that did not allow the ordination of gay rabbis, nor did it allow hiring of openly gay synagogue staff members or youth advisors.
At the time, the community examined the issue, asking about the actual arguments that led to the decision, the implications of those arguments and the possibility of an alternate path, Nevins said. However, despite all of the talk, the status quo remained.
In 2003 the topic was re-opened. New papers were composed and then voted on in Dec. 2006. Two responsa were adopted by majority vote - one written by Rabbi Joel Roth and another co-authored by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, Danny Nevins and Avram Reisner. The platforms adopted were contradictory but marked the two opposing sides of the debate.
The results were controversial then, and they still are today. Some rabbis left the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards while other people threatened to leave the movement.
"My personal reaction was fairly indifferent. I knew it would happen at some point," Tisch senior Eli Kaplan-Wildmann said.
Kaplan-Wildmann does not see himself as Conservative or bound by Conservative law.
"What did affect me was my friends who see themselves as Conservative and were touched by the decision," Kaplan-Wildmann said.
Roth's paper encompasses the traditional viewpoint that homosexual acts are forbidden by the Torah and that gay and lesbian Jews cannot act on their homosexual urges.
The Dorff-Nevins-Reisner paper claims that on the pretense of a halakhic (Jewish law) idea known as Kavod HaBriyot, which states that religious laws can be "trumped" for the sake of a person's dignity, gay members of the Jewish community should be equal.
"This paper effectively normalized the statuses of gay and lesbian people in the Jewish community," Nevins said.
At this time, both papers are accepted by the Conservative movement leaving individual synagogues to make their own choices when hiring rabbis and other synagogue positions.
However, some people questioned the legal foundations of the responsa. During the questions-and-answers portion of the evening, students inquired about potential conflicts of interests within the law committee, the potential rift in the Conservative movement and the implications of this responsa on Jewish law in general.
"Where do you draw the line?" CAS sophomore David Avraham asked.
Ariel Siegel is a senior staff writer. E-mail her at campus@nyunews.com.
