Who’s Afraid of Jewish Marriage?

I’m grateful for my respondents’ careful attention to my argument, which all three of them oppose—in individual ways that also have more in common with each other than I would have expected.

David Wolpe, the rabbi of a Conservative synagogue, stands to my “left” as a wholehearted supporter of Jewish same-sex marriage. Sherif Gergis, a Catholic, is to my “right” in opposing same-sex marriage more comprehensively than I do, on grounds that are not religious but sociological: he fears its effect on traditional marriage. Shlomo Brody’s position might be described as above me: as an Orthodox rabbi, he need not even debate same-sex marriage since homosexual acts are clearly prohibited in Jewish law, and so he concentrates mostly on the very grave crisis in heterosexual marriage.

Yet each of the three, despite his differences from the other two, advances the identical criticism of a central tenet of my argument. So let me make that the gravamen of my reply. Before doing so, though, I want to acknowledge a perhaps surprising fact: neither in the three responses, nor in this reply, nor indeed in my original piece does any of us have as much to say about homosexuality or the nature of same-sex marriage as we do about the nature of marriage itself and Jewish marriage in particular.