Writings from Rabbi Glickman

Tacoma is starting to sound like Sodom and Gomorrah these days. It’s sad, but true – the great evil of these two ancient towns, towns so horribly corrupt that God decided to destroy them, seems to be alive and well right here in our own corner of the world. It’s come across most clearly, of late, in the debate over Initiative 1 – Tuesday’s ballot referendum that would eliminate local laws currently protecting us from discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Where are the remnants of Sodom in the Initiative 1 debate? As an avid student of the Hebrew Bible, I find them not in the behavior of gay and lesbian Tacomans, but in the words and deeds of their opponents – the supporters of Initiative 1.

For centuries, you see, Jews have been debating what it was that the people of Sodom did to warrant all of the hellfire and brimstone that God rained down upon them. All we know is that, as a group, they told a man hosting a couple of strangers in town to “bring them out to us so that we might know them [emphasis mine].”

Does this mean that the Sodomites wanted to know these people in the “biblical” – i.e., sexual – sense? For many centuries, the standard rabbinic answer has been: No! Of course not! When the Sodomites said that they wanted to ‘know’ the people in Lot’s house, they just wanted to know who those guys were. Period. Their sin wasn’t sexual perversion, it was xenophobia – fear of the stranger, fear of people who were different than they. So fearful were they of these strangers that the people of Sodom treated them in a manner completely devoid of justice and compassion.

In the truest sense of the word, then, “sodomy” isn’t homosexuality or anything like it. Instead, sodomy is the act of oppressing people simply because we don’t know them; sodomy is cruelty to those who are different than us; sodomy is what happens when we condemn people because of their race, creed, gender, clothing style, sexual orientation, hair color, musical taste, political affiliation, or anything other than their character as human beings.

With this new understanding of the term, it makes me wonder which group contains more sodomizers – gay and lesbian Tacomans, or the supporters of Initiative 1.

Unlike many of my clergy colleagues, I will never claim to fully know God, nor to completely understand what it is that God wants of me. I do, however, think I’ve gotten a few glimpses of God, and those glimpses have been quite instructive. Having had them, I cannot imagine that God would want me to support Initiative 1 or anything like it. Initiative 1 would allow us to judge our fellow citizens on the basis of their sexual orientation – a factor completely unrelated to the nobility and worth of their character. To do so would be profoundly unholy, an abomination far beneath the dignity of the great city in which we live.

The God I have glimpsed does want us to judge – to judge others based on the righteousness of their behavior, the kindness of their hearts, and the strength of their spirits. This God, as far as I can tell, calls us to respond to the mysteries of all who differ from us not with fear and malice, but with kindness and compassion. And, as a result of it all, this God cares far more about the quality of who a person is and strives to become than about the gender of the people that person wants to sleep with.

My friends, decisions such as the one we in Tacoma will make on Tuesday are what establish the true character of our community. Nestled as we are between mountain and sea, we stand poised to make a crucial choice: Will Tacoma be a place of human majesty and nourishing spirit? Or will we allow it to become like Sodom – a community that judges out of fear and discomfort rather than out of our faith in human potential and character.

That spectacular mountain, you’ll recall, used to be a volcano. May we, unlike those of ancient Sodom, be worthy of its beauty – its silent beauty – for a long, long time.

Vote “No” on Initiative 1 – not only is that the right choice but, I hope you’ll agree, it seems to be the sacred choice, too.

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