Across the country, gay couples are fighting for the same marriage rights as straight couples. But in the Conservative Jewish movement, heterosexual couples may soon clamor for the kind of partnerships now reserved only for lesbians and gays.
This spring, a committee that creates laws for the Conservative Jewish movement approved two ceremonies for same-sex couples that strip marriage liturgy of any reference to ownership, makes double-ring ceremonies officially part of the wedding and allows either party to initiate a divorce — three issues that have long been sticking points among Jewish brides.
Traditionally, a groom gives a bride a ring and declares his ownership of his pretty new acquisition: “You are consecrated to me according to the laws of Moses and Israel.”
The bride, if she wants to, can give the groom a ring (it’s not required) and say whatever she’d like.
She can recite back a re-gendered version of what her husband says to her, but not all Conservative rabbis will go for that. Instead, the bride usually recites a poem taken from the Song of Solomon, “I am my beloved, and my beloved is mine.”
It’s lovely, but legally meaningless, and the Conservative movement has been struggling for more than a decade on how to make marriages more egalitarian without sacrificing tradition.
A different problem confronted the rabbis when they tackled the issue of same-sex partnerships.
In 2006, the Conservative movement voted to allow rabbis to officiate at same-sex unions, but they stopped short of calling such a union a kiddushin, or sanctified marriage.
Instead, the partnerships are the religious equivalent of civil unions, recognized by the community but not valid in Israel (where same-sex marriages are not yet legal).
The committee behind the 2006 law left it up to individual rabbis to come up with their own language and ceremonies, hoping that some standardized ceremony would evolve. It didn’t. After years of pressure, the committee was tasked to create a liturgy for same-sex unions.
Now some believe they might have done their job too well, opening the door to a wholesale change in what marriage could look like for straights and gays alike.
In place of the “I’m buying you for this many shekels” formula, the same-sex ceremonies have both parties declaring a kinyan, or acquisition, not of each other but of the partnership itself.
The new formula is still not a kiddushin, because a kiddushin requires the “dominant” party to acquire the “less dominant” party — and in same-sex marriages, “neither is a dominant party,” the rabbis wrote.
But unlike the debate over civil unions versus marriage in the secular arena, the Jewish gay and lesbian consolation prize looks — to some — to be better than what heterosexuals can enjoy.
This is especially true in the case of divorce. Currently, only a man can terminate a Jewish marriage with a get, or divorce document, leaving women who want to remarry or just move on with their lives at the mercy of their estranged spouses.
The same-sex model allows either party to dissolve the marriage because, as the rabbis noted, if only a man can initiate a divorce, in a marriage of two women, presumably nobody could.
When they voted to approve the new liturgy, one member of the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Law and Standards was so impressed with the egalitarian language, he said, “I want to start using this for my straight couples!”
That’s not exactly what the three rabbis who wrote the liturgy had in mind; in fact, written into the law is a caution against using the ceremonies for heterosexual couples.
“While some heterosexual couples may see in these new models of brit (covenant) and shutafut (partnership) for same-sex couples a basis for abandoning the traditional model of kiddushin, Conservative Judaism has taught us to respect ancient liturgy and to minimize modifications of text,” wrote Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner, of Baltimore, who wrote the liturgy along with Rabbi Elliot Dorff of Los Angeles and Rabbi Daniel Nevins, dean of the Rabbinical School at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
“Innovation has its rightful place beside tradition, but not in its stead,” Reisner wrote.
But the new language will no doubt find itself into heterosexual weddings, rabbis and Jewish scholars said, perhaps hastening what has been a glacially paced evolution away from sexist language in Jewish weddings.
“Anybody who sees the ceremony will say, ‘I want that for me,’ ” said Aurora Mendelsohn, 39, of Toronto, Canada, who writes about egalitarian issues in Judaism on her blog Rainbow Tallit Baby.
When Mendelsohn married 16 years ago, she and her husband wrote their own ketubah, or marriage document, with far more egalitarian language than found in traditional documents. Both bride and groom made the same acquisition declarations to each other and both engaged in the traditionally male ritual of stomping on a wine glass.
Was it kosher?
“No!” she said.
But with this new liturgy, the unusual could eventually become the traditional.
“I think it might put some pressure” on the movement, she said. “More people will see these totally egalitarian ceremonies and say, ‘Why should I have less of a role than my groom, when these two men get to do something equal?’ ”
Not all the authors of the liturgy were equally worried about how this new liturgy could affect heterosexual marriage rites.
“Our task was only to talk about homosexual marriages, but just like in medicine, sometimes drugs are used off-label, so this could be, too,” said Dorff, rector of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. “It wasn’t our intention for it to be used that way, but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.”
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