The Redemption of Jewish Pride: A Tale of Two Brothers
My brother came out to me at the height of both of our darknesses. Post-graduation from Yeshiva University, he knew little of his way forward. Still living at home, aimless on the job front, forced to countenance the evil of conversion therapy, certain of his sexuality but afraid to come out, he let me step into his closet so we could walk out together.
I’d just returned from two dismal years of yeshiva in Israel. The yeshiva part likely exacerbated my psychic pain, but the deep depression, vicious anxiety, and obsessive sexual and violent thoughts would have made even the beaches of Hawaii feel like the 7th realm of hell. Like so many other yeshiva bochurs (students), I was a mess, both physically and psychically, with no conceivable light in my future, except for more religion. Not believing that I could live a life outside this pain, I couldn’t fathom living a life outside of religion either. Religion, even if my punishing taskmaster, was also the only light of salvation I could hope for.
Whereas my brother’s darkness felt imposed by externals: society and Orthodox culture, my darkness felt like they grew out of the soil of my heart. Starting in senior year of my yeshiva day high school, I began sensing, seeing, feeling viscerally, vivid images of violent homosexual activities. Visions of penises stormed my mind, every damn second. I couldn’t turn any of it off: not the bloodied penis, cut off, or the severed penis for some reason always thrown into a mesh metal garbage basket, first hitting the wall and then sliding off cinematically. While these thoughts haunted me, they did allow me to connect with an older brother who only knew apathy toward me. We learned to share our secrets, me the thoughts of penises, him the need to negate a desire for them, both of us sharing in the hidden pains we were forced to carry around because of shame.
Yet, somehow my brother moved on where I stagnated. He chose: to leave home, to get a job, any job that would give him enough money to live on his own, to move in with a more progressive group of friends, to explore his sexuality with other men. Where I wallowed in religious thought, a quirk of our personality differences, he opened door after door to the unknown. Eventually, I followed in his footsteps, sometimes wearing his hand me down shoes, on the path toward maturity, autonomy, toward a confidence to make my own choices, both Jewish and not. I used to joke that my parents were more tolerant toward my deviance from the Jewish path only because Isaac made my dalliances seem tame, desirable, and of course that remains true.
But more than that — he tamed the secular world, that world we both learned to fear and therefore avoid. He explored where I followed, and would patiently teach me how to live, one advocated shower at a time. Whereas he lived a proud gay life, I shouted for gay rights from every rooftop I could find. Maybe I could fight for him this time, I thought, taking up the torch. If he never spent too many hours poring over theological knots to reconcile homosexuality with God, I did so in his stead. Picking up his fight worked to awaken me to the worlds of the marginalized. Ultimately, his proud life allowed me to feel comfortable with my own fluid, amorphous, sexual identity. He’s built, from scratch, a life for himself, and like many gay people, has been forced to serve as a heroic role model, an example of the possibilities of happiness within a gay, and in this case Jewish life.
Somehow, together, we overcame the cages of our past to create a viable present. In a depressingly broken world it’s hard to know what it means to celebrate, but this past weekend felt different. Not only because of the historic Supreme Court ruling, but because this past Sunday I stood as the officiant of my brother’s wedding. In the backyard of his and his partner’s cottage, I married off my brother, which I can already tell, will serve as the pinnacle of cool for my life. The ceremony consisted of both American, Irish Catholic, and Jewish images, rituals and ideas. We made the ceremony together from the ruins of our Jewish experiences, including a version of this, excising all of that, and yet it felt Jewish, respectful, healthily aware of our heritage.
Perhaps the Jewish community will more readily accept this in a few years, maybe a few decades, but the real heroes of our community have always been the marginalized. This holds true in all societies. In the rush to proclaim that “Love Won,” it’s too easy to forget what it took for love to win. It took a type of heroism that only fear and hate can engender: the heroism of living your life in the face of deep discrimination. This Pride month therefore demands not only personal celebrations, but public acknowledgments of the ways that many gay Jewish people chose to stay in the fold and drag many of us into the avant-garde of morality and equality. Some, like my brother, prefer to do it through living a great life, while others take a more vocal approach: both are heroes regardless and deserve our praise.
Brothers tend to look awful in the tales of the Bible. They murder and kidnap each other, or sell one another into slavery. They lie and steal and cheat and hate and threaten and any exception would simply prove the rule. Above all, they do not communicate. And yet, somehow, these two Jewish brothers, both a decade ago wholly unprepared for the larger world of adulthood, stood together under the chuppah to celebrate life and love on a historic weekend.
If this is not redemption, I don’t know what is.
Happy Jewish Pride!!!
