Sweet Like Sugar (19 page)

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Authors: Wayne Hoffman

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General, #Jewish Men, #Male Friendship, #Rabbis, #Jewish, #Religion, #Jewish Gay Men, #Judaism

BOOK: Sweet Like Sugar
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I smiled back uneasily. Was I just overtired, or was the rabbi thinking unholy thoughts? Would he even have any notion of what Miami had to offer aside from kosher markets and storefront shuls?
“True,” I said, without adding anything specific.
“You think of me as an old man who knows only Torah and Talmud, but I am not blind,” he said with a knowing nod. “I am aware that most people go to Miami to look at the beautiful girls.”
“Not exactly,” I said under my breath.
“What do you mean?”
I hadn't intended for him to hear that, but I was stuck now.
“I'm not going to Miami to look at the girls,” I said, and left it at that.
The rabbi looked at me, confused.
Maybe I felt that we had grown comfortable enough to have an honest talk. Or maybe I was simply too sleep-deprived to keep up my defenses, remaining opaque in my statements and obtuse in my replies. Either way, I finally just said it: “I'm gay.”
“What?” he said, leaning toward me.
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.

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