[A-List] The Real Sodomites

["Leigh Meyers" <the.buffalo.in.the.midst@xxxxxxxxx>]

TITLE  	The Real Sodomites
DEPARTMENT 	No Comment
BY 	Scott Horton
PUBLISHED 	April 18, 2007

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/04/horton-real-sodomites

Monday, I spoke at a conference at Chapman University in Orange
County, California, and stayed around through the afternoon for a
discussion of religion and human rights that featured a Catholic
bishop, a rabbi, and a Muslim scholar. The rabbi, Marc Dworkin, really
stole the show â providing a tour de force review of human rights
issues in the Pentateuch, from a Reform perspective. The key of his
presentation focused on the story of Sodom â the cataclysmic tale of
destruction, in which the Lord destroys the offending city after
ascertaining that there were not ten righteous humans in it (Abraham
had famously bargained Him down from fifty). The idea of the "chosen"
and the notion of a genocidal act â the destruction of a whole people
â being divinely justified are among the elements of the Old Testament
that have historically given trouble to ethicists. Reform Judaism has,
said the rabbi, tended to push these accounts to the margins.
Conversely, the curious theology of some in the American Religious
Right affords them center stage.

For English speakers, of course, the word "sodomite" has long passed
as a somewhat archaic expression for "homosexual." But this rests on
the mistranslation of two words (yadha and anashim) from the biblical
texts made by the early seventeenth century scholars appointed by King
James. (As another rabbi friend recently told me, he has a standard
practice for avoiding conflict with the followers of Pat Robertson and
Jerry Falwell, and it usually starts this way: "Let's consult the
original Hebrew, shall we?") This Reform interpretation is slowly
emerging as the view of the mainstream Protestants, who by and large
now accept that the two offending words in the King James Bible are
the result of a mistranslation, or at least a highly suspect
translation. What the rabbi offered in parsing the text was the same
analysis I heard last year from a group Presbyterian theologians â
namely, the Lord's decision to smite the Sodomites had little to do
with sexual orientation and much to do with mistreatment of visitors
and injustice. Rather the accent in these texts falls on the quality
of hospitality that the Sodomites offered to the Israelites, which was
to say, nothing we would recognize as hospitality, and even more
fundamentally, their corrupted sense of justice. Recall the account of
a man who entered the town with money seeking to buy food, but who was
denied food by all whom he approached. When at length he succumbed to
starvation, the Sodomites took his money. And when one among them
complained of the injustice of what was done, they slew the complainer
as well. Abraham reminds us that we are simple stuff â dust and ashes.
But in each of the Abrahamic faiths the divine potential of man is
recognized, the potential of a man who does justice and lives
righteously. And in the end, righteousness is inextricably connected
to justice â to the command to treat our fellow man with dignity and
respect.

The Religious Right has a habit of corrupting these texts into a sense
of a God who picks and chooses among the races and peoples of the
earth, whose violent acts reflect a preference for one people over
another and an indifference to the virtue of the individual. Their
tendency to degrade the account of Sodom and Gomorrah into a
condemnation of homosexuality is a good demonstration of just that.

But the rabbi made a powerful point. And we should all ask ourselves,
who are the Sodomites in our own society today? The Sodomites exist in
all times and in all societies. They are not those who have a
different sexual orientation. They are those among us who  have a
corrupted sense of justice, who demonize and abuse the outsider, who
pronounce righteous pieties but whose conduct reflects a thorough
contempt for one of  the most fundamental lessons of scripture: of the
sanctity of human life and our responsibility to treat all our fellow
humans with dignity and respect. They are all about us and unless we
remain ever conscious, they are within us as well.