renewal 519
For other Jewish feminists, the emancipation of women within Juda-
ism required a full re- evaluation, or even recreation, of the most basic
concepts of Judaism. Judith Plaskow has argued for a transformation of
Jewish notions of the nature of God, incorporating (or reintegrating)
female aspects of the divine. She has urged an integration of women’s
history into the living memory of the Jewish people, insisting on the
need to reflect the female experience in full, including female sexuality,
almost totally ignored in traditional Judaism:
In line with the fundamental feminist insight that sexuality is socially con-
structed, a Jewish feminist understanding of sexuality begins with the
insistence that what goes on in the bedroom can never be isolated from the
wider cultural context of which the bedroom is part ... Thus a Jewish
feminist approach to sexuality must take sexual mutuality as a task for the
whole of life and not just for Friday evening, fitting its commitment to sex-
ual equality into its broader vision of a society based on mutuality and
respect for difference.^7
Parallel since the 1960s to the demand for recognition of the role of
women within Judaism has been the demand of lesbians and gays (and
bisexual and transgender people) for recognition within a religious sys-
tem that has traditionally either ignored or condemned their existence.
Within modern orthodoxy both the intuitive distaste reflected by Nor-
man Lamm in 1974, who wrote that ‘male homosexual acts are treated in
the Bible as an “abomination” (Lev 18:22)’ because they are ‘prima facie
disgusting’, and the outrage expressed in Moshe Feinstein’s claim in 1976
that ‘all people, even the wicked, despise homosexuals, and even homo-
sexual partners find each other despicable’ have been tempered by the
past fifty years of increasingly public acceptance of gay and lesbian rel-
ationships in the United States, much of Europe and parts of Israel, so
that the standard claim of earlier generations that such sexuality was not
to be found among Jews is no longer common. In 1999, Steven Greenberg
became the first orthodox rabbi to declare openly that he is homosexual,
publishing in 2004 an account of his long struggle to reconcile what he
saw as two opposite sides of his identity, and attempting to reinterpret the
relevant passages in scripture to allow for the possibility that homosexual
love might be acceptable within the Jewish tradition. An implicit response
to Greenberg in 2005, by a British Habad rabbi, Chaim Rapoport,
eschewed the condemnation of previous generations, asserting the need
for orthodox communities to welcome, understand and support gays and
lesbians while continuing to insist on the inadmissibility of the sex acts