Finding Religion

        One of the core credence of my religion, Judaism, is to always question and never take anything at face value.  Though I love this notion, it has always scared me as well. When my younger brother found out that he was supposed to question, he questioned everything.  He would argue with “why” questions for hours on end driving my parents a little crazy to say the least.  I was always scared to question though.  What if I came up with the wrong answers? What if asking questions forced me to choose between liberalism and religion?
          Questioning got even harder as I realized that the friends who I usually agreed with argued that religion is outdated and causes more problems than it is worth.  Though I tried to dispute their claims, I was becoming more and more uneasy myself.  It didn’t help that in terms of friends, religion and liberalism did not go together.  At [my high school] my friends really fell into two categories. First I had my liberal friends.  Some of us were from the city and had diehard liberal parents, most of whom were somehow associated with the Clinton White House.  The others in this liberal group were mostly environmentalists and supporters of the GBLTQ [Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, Transgender, Queer/Questioning] community who rebelled against their more conservative…parents.  One thing that bound most of them together, other than an intense hatred for President Bush, was the rejection of G-d.  My other group of friends was pretty much the reverse of the liberals; the religious right.  Though they were all Christian and I was Jewish, we still found a common bond in our ties to G-d, the Old Testament, and our “good girl” status.  Even though we knew that we would never see eye to eye on politics, these girls still became some of my best friends.  I tried not to think about the disparities in my friendships.  I looked at it as having an eclectic personality which made me special and unique. 
        On June 16, 2004, I finally was forced to do something I was so afraid of doing.  I was forced to question not only my sexuality but my religion.  I remember driving home from Alexandra’s house.  It was cloudy and grey but otherwise everything looked exactly like it always did.  I was in awe.  How could the world be the same place? Hadn’t everything just changed? I took each turn on the winding…road slowly, somewhat sure that the walls of my perfectly stable world had just crashed so it would make sense if my car did too.  It wasn’t that I had any problem with homosexuality.  I had always supported my friends who were gay, lesbian, or bisexual.  It was one of a few topics which I completely disregarded any religion and simply went with what I knew was right as a liberal.  This was not particularly hard coming from a liberal family, liberal neighborhood community, and liberal Jewish community.  Obviously homosexuality was a way of life that should be supported, it was never an issue.  But that was before it was MY issue. 
          After I got over my initial denial, I started to question.  I searched for answers everywhere I could by asking friends, family, and searching in books and over the internet.  I spoke to two separate rabbis and knowledgeable members of the gay community.  Though emotionally I began to find a little bit of solid ground, I seemed to be getting nowhere closer in my quest for a religion I could live with as a liberal.  At one time I thought I was getting there during a meeting with the Auburn rabbi.  I remember meeting with him, analyzing his healthily round figure, curly, short grey beard, and wise smile.  I thought: this has to be the modern-day rabbi, the wisest member of any community with all of the answers.  Even better, he was just as liberal as I am and did not seem to have a problem with finding religion.  He told me that the religious negativity towards homosexuality came from a passage in the Torah (the Old Testament of the Bible) which stated that a man should not lie with another man like he does with a woman.  According to the rabbi, this was not even about a lifestyle choice but rejecting pagan rituals.  For a while, I felt relieved.  So, everyone else was just reading it incorrectly, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.  If that was the truth though, why were so many people up in arms against homosexuality? In the end I realized that though I respected the rabbi’s opinion, that is what it was: his opinion.  Like so many people who read the Torah or the Bible and take it as their religious guidebook, he had chosen to pick and choose through the Torah the way that he wanted to hear it.  Taking his opinion as my own would still be taking the easy way out.
        Suddenly, I am reminded of one of my favorite episodes of the television show, the West Wing.  In the episode President Bartlet talks to a conservative, religious, Republican talk show host about homosexuality. Hearing this conversation always makes me feel better because it reminds me that in fact, a lot of the Old Testament is outdated.  However, that brings me back to one of my original questions: if the Torah is outdated, and by association so is religion, why do we still practice and believe? And yet, I’m still not willing to give up Judaism.  In fact far from giving up my religion when I came out, I have since decided that in the future I would like to be a Rabbi.
        I’ve learned through all my questioning that it isn’t about everyone else’s answers.  The reason that questioning is so important is so you can form answers of your own.  I still don’t have the answers to most of my questions.  In fact, it seems that for every question that I ask, ten more come into my mind.  For now, I’m going to have to be happy having answerless questions, knowing that it’s an important first step.  When it comes to both my sexuality and religion I am realizing that there may never be a day when I am not questioning, but really, I like it better that way.
In some ways, kissing Alexandra was one of the most religiously liberating moments of my life.  Finally, I was forced to stop walking around on my tip-toes, afraid of disrupting the balance between liberalism and religion, and face it head on.

~ Student ’08

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