Had he not heard me?
“I’m gay,” I repeated.
His eyes widened.
“You’re homosexual,” he said flatly, drawing out the “h” as if he could hardly bring himself to say the word. He shifted away from me on the couch.
“Gay,” I said.
He sat back against the cushion and stiffened. “You never mentioned this before.”
“It’s no big deal,” I said, hoping we could drop the subject and move on to something else.
“It is a very big deal,” he said. “All this time I’ve known you, I never imagined something like this.”
“Well, now you know,” I said matter-of-factly.
The rabbi didn’t say anything. He was stunned, still. And it dawned on me that this might not go well. I hadn’t ever planned a coming-out speech for the rabbi, since I hadn’t had to make a big announcement like this for years—since I’d told my parents. With them, I’d spent months going over how to phrase it, practicing with Michelle so I could anticipate what they’d say. (Somehow, in all that rehearsing, I had perfectly guessed my father’s characteristically cool and measured response—“We’re glad you told us”—but not my mother’s initial self-centered disbelief: “If you’re trying to play a joke on me, this isn’t funny.” She always did know how to catch me by surprise.)
With the rabbi, since I hadn’t planned a speech, I also hadn’t considered how he might respond, and how I might handle it. So I was winging it, at exactly the moment when I was most exhausted and least articulate.
“It doesn’t change anything,” I said.
He didn’t reply. His brow furrowed and he scratched at his beard. He stared down at the carpet.
“It doesn’t change anything,” I repeated. “Right?”
“You lied to me,” he said finally.
“When did I lie?”
“You told me you lived with a woman.”
“I do. But I told you we’re not a couple.”
“Yes, but this was only half the story,” he said. “You told me that you had tried to be a couple and it had not worked out. You did not tell me why. You did not tell me you were . . . this way.”
I cringed at his tone, and the fact that he couldn’t even say the word “gay.”
“This changes everything,” he said, rubbing his forehead with one hand.
“Why?”
He turned to me with an exasperated expression, as if he couldn’t believe I’d ask such a stupid question. “The Torah says this is a grave sin.”
I quickly remembered why I had hidden this from the rabbi for so long. Our growing ease together had lulled me into thinking that he was just like anyone else—ready to reason, ready to think for himself, ready to accept what he saw with his own eyes. While he played by the rules in his own life, he seemed to take a more open-minded view of how other people behaved.
But he was still an Orthodox rabbi, and some things, I supposed, would always be black and white. I had overestimated him as a man—or underestimated his faith.
“You really believe this?” I asked. And this time I moved away from him, scooting to the farthest edge of the sofa, turning to face him.
“I am sorry, but Jewish law is very clear,” he said. “You are breaking God’s commandments.”
“I have broken a lot of them—you know that. I don’t keep kosher, I don’t go to synagogue, I don’t observe Shabbat,” I said.
“Those are questions of conduct, and those I might at least understand,” he said, stabbing a finger into the air. “This is an affront to God himself. You are breaking the rules of nature. The Torah says what you are doing is wrong.”
“So did the Nazis,” I shot back.
He inhaled quickly through his teeth and his face hardened.
“Don’t you speak to me about Nazis,” he warned, his tone growing sharp.
Thinking better of it, I backed off, but my tone also changed.
“Who are you to judge me?” I asked. “Are you so pure?”
He looked at me coldly. “I obey God’s commandments.”
“You believe everything the Torah says?” I asked.
He stared into my eyes. “Benji, there is no other way.”
“And you honestly believe that I should spend my whole life alone and unloved because that’s what it says in the Torah?”
“No,” he said. “You should find a wife and live properly.”
“Then God should have made me heterosexual,” I said. Atheist or not, I could still speak his language.
“This is not God’s fault, Benji,” he said.
I hadn’t had to deal with this kind of bullshit for years—not since one of the Christian student groups at Maryland held a protest outside a gay dance on campus. I knew that a lot of people had some ridiculously outdated ideas about gay life, but living in a liberal area as an openly gay man, I hadn’t seen it firsthand for years. I usually had the luxury of dismissing homophobes as crazy idiots and getting on with my life. But this time, sitting face-to-face with a man I’d grown to trust and care about, I had to deal with it head-on. And I was pissed.
“I thought you told me that Judaism is not simply about not breaking rules,” I said, “but about what good deeds you do.”
“We are not talking about eating meat with a milchig fork,” he said. “The Torah says this is strictly forbidden! What good deeds have you done that could possibly outweigh such a sin?”
By this point, I’d had enough. I felt attacked, and I didn’t see the need to spare his feelings anymore.
“I befriended an old man who had lost the will to live,” I said, standing up. “A man with no friends. A judgmental old man.”
“A man who never asked for your help,” he interjected.
“A man who knows how painful it is to be alone,” I said.
He took a deep, slow breath. I took one, too, and thought we might get past this anger and have a real discussion. I sat back down, across from him in my usual chair, so I could look directly at him.
“Being gay isn’t just about sex,” I began. “It’s about relationships and finding someone to love and spend your life with.”
His hands clenched into fists in his lap. “But the Torah says—”
I cut him off. “I’m not talking about the Torah. I’m talking about you,” I said. “You can’t tell me that I’ll simply have to live without love forever. Is that really what you think?”
He paused, lips pursed. I wondered if he had any ideas, other than what the Torah told him.
“It doesn’t matter what I think. And it doesn’t matter what you think, either, about what you feel inside or what you think you want,” he said. “You are supposed to find a wife and have children together. That is God’s plan.”
“You and Sophie never had children,” I said.
“Don’t talk about Sophie,” he admonished me.
I didn’t heed his warning; I thought the fact that I’d touched a nerve was a positive sign, and figured I might get through to him more effectively if I personalized the issue even further, so he could think about things in human, rather than religious, terms.
“What if you knew that Sophie was your bashert,” I said, “but when you met her, someone told you that you were forbidden to be with her?”
His face grew red.
“I told you not to—” he began, but I cut him off.
“What if your rabbi had told you that the Torah commanded you to stay away from her? That your feelings for her were unnatural, or wrong?”
His fists tightened.
“Would you have listened?” I asked. “Could you have stayed away from her, no matter what anyone said?”
Beads of sweat formed on his forehead.
“Could you have denied what you knew was right in your heart? Could you have simply walked away and lived your life without her, alone and loveless?”
Even his ears started to redden.
“Of course not,” I said, since he wasn’t responding. “You can
’t change the way you feel, whether someone else tells you it’s right or wrong. It’s the same for me as it would be for you. What I’m looking for is the same thing you had. Except your bashert was a woman and my bashert is a man.”
Here, something snapped. The rabbi shot up out of his seat and pointed his finger at the front door, shaking, spitting mad.
“How dare you compare my marriage with your disgusting perversion, this abomination!” he growled. “I want you out of my house!”
I had heard that awful word before.
It was 1995 and my whole family had taken a vacation to Israel. The ostensible reason was that Rachel had finished her first year at Boston University and was considering applying that fall to spend her junior year abroad in either Paris or Jerusalem. My parents were pushing for Jerusalem, and to help sway her decision, they took us both on a trip in August.
These were the heady days of Oslo, and an uncharacteristically optimistic air pervaded the place. The Palestinians were gradually taking control of the territories. The border with Jordan had opened that summer. There was even talk of progress with the Syrians. Peace, it seemed, was just around the corner.
I’d been out of Hebrew school for more than a year; I left after eighth grade, telling my parents that I didn’t plan to go for confirmation, that a bar mitzvah was enough for me. (They weren’t happy about it—“Your sister got confirmed,” they’d tell me, as if this would change my mind—but in the end I got my way.) But all those years at Congregation Beth Shalom certainly paid off on this trip: It seemed like every day, my Hebrew school lessons came in handy. We visited Tiberias. We climbed Masada. We swam—or floated—in the Dead Sea. All the stories I’d learned came to life.
We had to split up when we visited the Western Wall. Men on one side, women on the other. When my father and I got past the entrance, an attendant handed us yarmulkes made of white paper, with staples holding them together. They were awful, but we both reluctantly put them on; was there a choice? We stood at the wall, surrounded by men—men in black hats, men with real yarmulkes, young men in army uniforms, old men with trembling hands. We touched the wall. Neither of us had a note to leave in the cracks. Neither of us prayed. It made no difference. We stood together for a moment, silent, not because we did not know what to say, but because nothing needed to be said.
Even a fourteen-year-old who wasn’t sure he believed in God could feel the weight of the millennia.
But history wasn’t going to sell Rachel. She wanted to see the “real” Israel—how young people lived, what they did for fun, what the country had to offer besides religious fervor and biblical landmarks.
So we headed to Tel Aviv, the heart of secular Israel, for a few days. We shopped for clothes at Dizengoff Center. We ate falafel on Ben Yehuda Street. We spent an afternoon at the beach, watching skinny people in scandalously small bathing suits playing paddle-ball on the sand and cooling off in the surf.
At night, we’d return to our rooms at the Hilton, overlooking the Mediterranean. One night, after having dinner in the old city of Jaffa, we had an unusually chatty cabdriver, eager to practice his English. He took us on a roundabout tour of Tel Aviv and gave us a running commentary about places we passed: such-and-such market, this-or-that tower. We drove around circles, observing fountains, architecture, gardens. As we got close to the Hilton, he pointed out one last site: Independence Park, right next to our hotel.
“But into this park you should not to go, special at night,” he warned.
“Is it dangerous?” my mother asked.
“Not like your parks in America, no,” he replied. “But is famous place for to meet homosexuals.”
“Oh,” said my mother. My father nodded. Then the cabbie muttered something in Hebrew. Nobody else asked what he’d said, so I asked.
“I do not know the word in English,” he said. “I think it is ‘abomination.’ ”
He said the word slowly, each syllable distinct, as if he was sounding it out in his head. Then he repeated it, his accent thick: A-bo-mee-na-shun.
He pulled into the circle in front of the Hilton and dropped us off. I jumped out first and headed inside quickly, trying to get away from the cabbie. My parents lingered longer, thanking him for the tour and offering him a generous tip.
Rachel and I had our own room and she planned to use this to her advantage. After our parents had gone to bed, Rachel decided she was going out on the town, alone. She had asked a girl who worked in one of the stores in Dizengoff Center where the college kids hung out at night and the clerk had written down an address and slipped it to her when Mom wasn’t looking. Rachel figured this was her only chance to get out on her own. She stuffed a few shekels in her pocket and brushed her hair in the bathroom mirror.
“If Mom and Dad knock on the door, don’t answer,” she said. “We’ll just tell them we were both asleep and didn’t hear them.”
“Do what you want,” I said, looking out the window, trying to determine if I could see into Independence Park from our room.
“What’s your problem?”
“Nothing.”
“Right, nothing.” Sarcasm. I’d missed that during her first year away from home.
“It’s that cabdriver.”
“What about him?”
Had she really not noticed what he’d said?
“He was an asshole,” I said.
“I guess,” she said, checking her watch.
“He’s a cabdriver. Not a rabbi.”
“Yeah, it was weird,” she said. “But it’s no big deal.”
“Right,” I said. “No big deal.” Two can play at sarcasm.
“Look, I’m going out. Don’t tell Mom and Dad. I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You promise you won’t tell?”
“Rachel, I’m not a kid. I can keep a secret.”
She stepped back and took a long look at me, sizing me up, before she turned and headed out the door.
I stood in the window and tried to make out the men in Independence Park below—walking in alone, meeting, walking out together. Did they talk to each other? Did they have sex right there behind the trees? Did they think what they were doing was an abomination? Did they care?
With Rachel gone, I could have simply taken the elevator downstairs and walked out the front door and checked out the park myself. But I was too afraid. I stayed in the room, looking out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of gay life from ten stories up.
I drove home from the rabbi’s house in a rage. I couldn’t believe I’d been such an idiot, thinking that Rabbi Zuckerman was somehow enlightened. I’d believed that he had a willingness to bend, or at least accept things he didn’t like: He might not have been thrilled that I didn’t keep kosher, but that didn’t stop him from trusting me to use his kitchen. He might have wished that I went to synagogue—any synagogue—but he never condemned my decision to avoid synagogue as sacrilege. He was probably miffed that I didn’t keep the Sabbath, but he had never quoted scripture at me and called me a sinner.
Mrs. Goldfarb was right, I realized. He had some very old-fashioned ideas. Any flexibility I’d seen in him was only in my own imagination. I’d been duped. I felt betrayed.
And I was pissed. I couldn’t go home and tell Michelle, because she’d already left for Long Island with Dan. So I headed downtown.
Even though it was a Wednesday night, the bars around Dupont Circle were mobbed, since everyone had the next four days off work.
Paradise was busier than I’d ever seen it. The manager found me in the crowd, though, to tell me he’d gotten the “Heaven on Earth” ad and liked it a lot. The knot in the back of my neck loosened just a bit. He gave me a shot of cinnamon schnapps on the house. That helped, too.
Phil rushed in a few minutes later and found me sitting at the bar.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You sounded awful on the phone.”
I told him about the fight with t
he rabbi.
“Fucking asshole,” said Phil. He gestured to the bartender for two more shots.
“I really thought I knew him,” I said.
“Can I be honest?” he asked. “I always thought it was kind of weird that you were spending so much time with a rabbi anyway. But I guess after tonight, that’s all over. Maybe you can start hanging out with the hell-bound masses again.”
I didn’t reply. We downed our shots.
Phil checked his watch. “You gonna be okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Because I’ve got to go,” he said.
“You just got here,” I said.
“I’ve got plans with Sammy.”
“Who’s Sammy?”
“The guy I’ve been seeing for three weeks,” he said. “Man, you really have been out of it.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Look, if you want me to stick around, I’ll call him and tell him I’ve got to cancel.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Go.”
Phil gave me a kiss on the cheek and a long hug, then turned and left. He never even asked if I was still planning to go to Miami.
I stood alone against the wall and checked out the crowd. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. There were crowds of friends standing around and talking too loudly. There were a handful of single guys standing on the sidelines, looking for an opening. And, of course, there were a few couples mixed in—perhaps longtime lovers, or perhaps new acquaintances—sipping drinks, eyes locked on each other’s faces.
I wondered what the rabbi would say if he could witness the scene. Would he be shocked to discover how at ease these men seemed, how casually they laughed or told stories or sang along with the music? How utterly normal it felt for them? Would he see any of that? Or would he get red in the face and storm out quoting Leviticus?
I took a deep breath and tried to push the rabbi out of my mind.
One couple close to me was talking so quietly, it was almost a whisper, yet somehow they could hear each other above the din, as if everyone else in the rowdy bar had vanished. They weren’t touching, but they were so close: their hands holding their drinks, their whispering lips, their khakiclad legs.
Sweet Like Sugar Page 16