Imagine being told you belong to a faith that is fighting to keep you out—and refusing to leave. In this week’s Madlik, Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz welcome Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox-ordained rabbi, for a deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation.
This week in Parashat Vayeshev we meet Tamar, a woman pushed to the margins of Judah’s family and forced to disguise herself just to claim a place in the future of Israel. When her story is finally revealed, Judah looks at her and utters the words that change everything:
צדקה ממני – “She is more righteous than I.”
It’s the moment when the tradition stops staring at law in the abstract and finally sees a human face behind it.
Twenty-six years after Rabbi Steve Greenberg came out as the first openly gay Orthodox-ordained rabbi, that’s still the work: turning letters into faces. Steve once said that his willingness to be vulnerable to the Torah required the Torah to be vulnerable to him. If the people who interpret our texts truly heard queer stories, they might read those verses differently.
So this week on Madlik, with Rabbi Adam Mintz and me, we ask:
Are we entering a chapter where LGBTQ Jews are not merely tolerated, but embraced as teachers of Torah?
Along the way we look at Tamar’s courage, the surprising flexibility of yibbum (levirate marriage), the paradox of chesed – kindness that sometimes overlaps with forbidden intimacy – and the Torah’s first truth about human beings:
“It is not good for a human being to be alone.”
We also touch on a striking new reality: in non-Orthodox seminaries, a majority of rabbinical students now identify as LGBTQ. What does that mean for the Judaism of tomorrow?