A Queer Gentile in the Beit Midrash
As I was shown into the interfaith spiritual center of the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel to my first Beit Midrash (house of learning), I had no idea what I was getting into. Initially drawn in by the title of "Various Positions: Sex, Superstition and Deviant Behavior in the Talmud,” I still had plenty of reasons to doubt whether this program was for me. Rattling around in my mind was the obvious question: What was I—an atheist, non-Jewish, gay man, with no knowledge of Hebrew or Aramaic—doing at a reading of sacred Jewish texts normally reserved exclusively for straight male observant Jews? If I had been born a woman I would have fit precisely the radical bill—totally inverting the intended audience of Talmudic texts.
But this was no ordinary Beit Midrash. Our instructor, Rabbi Benay Lappe, is...