How Fair Are Your Tents: Thoughts on Parashat Balak - Rabbi Reuven Greenvald (Director of the Year-In-Israel, Hebrew Union College - Jerusalem)

Rabbis for Human Rights is commemorating Pride Shabbat this week. Let’s remember that Pride is more than parades and parties. Pride is still very much the continuation of the protest at the Stonewall Inn in NYC’s Greenwich Village in June 1969. Hard-won legal victories are at risk. Homophobia is still present in many places. And, I was surprised to encounter it personally just a few weeks ago.

I needed to replace an air conditioner in my Jerusalem apartment. A gay friend recommended a young guy who did a wonderful job installing his. I contacted the recommended technician who agreed to buy a unit in my landlord’s budget and then install the unit. Despite the war with Iran, he showed up on time and on the date we had agreed upon.

He arrived at my apartment with an older man, his dad, with whom he spoke Russian. While they were installing the unit, I was working in my home office. Every now and then I would check to see how things were going. Right before a Zoom meeting, I went out to the living room and found the dad in the apartment while the son was out on the roof of the building. The dad, now speaking Hebrew, asked me to come to my apartment door and proceeded to ask me about the sticker from the Israeli Reform Movement that quotes “Love your neighbor as yourself” on the background of a rainbow flag. Naively thinking that he might not know the Torah, I started to explain the verse and, before I could say more, he interrupted me and said this is doubly prohibited. He then said that he saw my tefillin on the kitchen table and indignantly stated that this is also doubly prohibited. I understood him to mean that being gay is a Torah violation that makes the performance of any other mitzvah null and void.

In my most assertive voice, I said to him that in my home he needs to keep his opinions to himself. He tried to repeat his homophobic views, and I said that either he keeps quiet or leaves my home immediately and I will need to talk to his son. That quieted him down. I needed the work to be finished, and I waited for the son. When the son came to tell me the work was finished, the father was not there. I began to tell him about his father’s inappropriate behavior. He told me that his father told him what transpired, and he said he berated his father that you can’t go into a customer’s home and criticize their views and lifestyle. I believed the son was sincere in his respect for my right to privacy in my own home.

Right to privacy is how the landmark US Supreme Court Lawrence v. Texas (2003) decision came to decriminalize homosexuality. The majority ruled that gay people have a right to privacy under the US Constitution. That people have a right to make love in their own homes the way they choose, I would also claim has precedence in a Jewish law that also has a connection to this week’s Torah reading, Parashat Balak.

In Parashat Balak (Numbers 22:2 - 25:9), the Torah relates that Balak the king of Moab hires Baalam, a well-known and powerful seer from northern Mesopotamia to curse the Israelites whose approach across the desert terrifies him. To Balak’s great consternation, his request for a curse results in a blessing, because Balaam the seer can only speak that which God permits. To this day, our shacharit service in synagogues opens with the prayer we call Mah Tovu which is a line from Balaam’s blessing:

Rashi’s comment on the Mah Tovu verse is adapted from a Talmudic teaching about how to build multiple family living spaces which respect privacy. Rashi’s abridgement of the Talmudic passage teaches that Baalam’s blessing is a prooftext for building housing that respects privacy:

he thus blessed them “How fair are your tents…”

I know that it will take a very long time to prove to people like the man helping to install my new AC that Leviticus 20:13’s prohibition against homosexual sex is really about sexual acts in the service of idol worship. We can’t legislate religious opinions. However, legal systems in liberal democracies must continue to keep fundamentalist religious beliefs from intruding into the private lives of everyone else. In the meantime, LGBTQ Jews and their supporters, including a growing number of religiously minded Jews in Israel and the US, can continue to mine Jewish law for values that support our public advocacy of gay rights.

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