When Chaim Elbaum stood up to field questions last night, he said that Kehilat Yedidya, is the first Israeli Orthodox community to ask him to come to screen and speak about his short film And Thou Shalt Love , and about his personal decision to accept his homosexuality while insisting on remaining an observant and believing Jew.

It would be all too easy to dismiss all the synagogues that have not invited him as benighted and homophobic—and those would certainly be correct adjectives to apply in many cases. But Orthodox Judaism’s legal structure requires that changes in attitudes and behavior be grounded in the halachic discourse. In the case of homosexuality, the prohibition in the Torah and in rabbinic writings is so severe that the halachic resolution is likely to require decades of discussion and argumentation. Even Elbaum acknowledged last night that he doesn’t yet know what the ultimate halachic resolution of the issue could or should be. Will the proscriptions against homosexuality eventually be completely overturned, placing same-sex relationships on a par with opposite-sex ones? Or will the solution involve a recognition that the heterosexual family is still an ideal to be aspired to—but that homosexuals who are unable to achieve that ideal may legitimately and openly have families of their own type? Or is some other, as yet unimaginable resolution in the offing?

What is certain is that the process must begin by the acknowledgment that current halachic attitudes to homosexuality create an injustice that the halacha and that the community of believers cannot tolerate. And Thou Shalt Love tells a powerful fictional story, based on Elbaum’s personal experience, about Ohad, a young student at a hesder yeshiva who has fallen in love with Nir, a soldier who is his study partner. Convinced that his infatuation is sinful, he has made contact with a telephone hotline for religious men with sexual identity problems. The telephone counselor prescribes a 40-day course of penance and prayer which, the counselor promises, will rid Ohad of his sinful desires.

The film begins on the last day of the penance. Nir suddenly appears, having received an unscheduled week-long leave from the army, and Ohad realizes that nothing has changed.

Ohad could, of course, achieve liberation by rejecting the yeshiva, observance, and God. Yet what saves Ohad in the end is that he never doubts his love for God and God’s love for him; his relationship with the divine is intense and personal. He cannot understand why God created him in a way that seems to be contrary to God’s own commandments, and he is alone, terribly alone—he feels there is no one he can talk to. At first he accepts the telephone counselor’s dictum that his homosexuality is a trial imposed on him by God, but when Nir returns and his live is rekindled, Ohad cannot accept that there is anything impure in his feelings.

And Thou Shalt Love does not offer a halachic solution. What it does, very powerfully, is demonstrate that the current Orthodox Jewish understanding of homosexuality creates suffering and injustice of a type that cannot be tolerated in a system that is meant to be the practical expression of God’s immanence in the world.

In his recent post on the conversion obstructionism of Israel’s established church, Gershom wrote: “We need to define a civic Israeli identity not dependent on halakhic status.” He’s right, but it’s sad that he is.

The secular Israeli state’s way of determining who is Jewish—and therefore who belongs to the state’s majority culture and ethnic group—is a religious definition. True, that’s partly an artifact of Israeli politics, but not just. It’s a definition with roots in deep in Jewish religion and history, and in the way the Jewish nation views itself. And it’s something to be proud of.

The halachic position is that a person need not be Jewish to be close to God. Being a member of the Chosen People means being subject to special duties, but it gives you no monopoly on righteousness or spirituality.

As a result, the traditional attitude towards prospective converts is one of skepticism. What do they need it for? Why take on all the duties and limitations that being a Jew requires? Why number yourself among an oppressed and despised people? So candidates for conversion have traditionally been discouraged; if they persist, the process is a long and arduous one.

In its early decades, Israel’s secular government was able to live fairly comfortably with the religious definition of belonging to the Jewish people. The problematic cases were relatively few. That changed with the huge influx of Russian and Ethiopian immigrants in the 1990s. Over the space of a few years, Israel gained a large population of individuals who were not religiously Jewish but whom the Israeli state sought to absorb into the majority culture.

Clearly, most of these immigrants were not going to become observant Jews. Yet, in the context of Israeli society, they could not be legitimize members of Israeli society without undergoing religious conversion.

Recognizing that the challenge we face today requires a reconsideration of conversion law, a few rabbis and religious politicians have sought to make becoming much easier. But their efforts have been stymied by the religious establishment.

These religious functionaries, who receive their salaries from the state, have not only served their country and people badly—they have made it almost inevitable that the religious definition of Judaism will have to be circumvented.

Israel, like most other countries, has a majority culture and a minority culture. As Yoav Orgad points out in today’s Ha’aretz, it’s legitimate for national majorities to seek to promote their culture and maintain their majority status, as long as they respect minority rights.

Orgad points out that Israel’s current religious definition of membership in its majority community differs from that in many other democracies:

Israel seeks Jewish immigrants, even if their culture is different from the majority one, as in the case of ultra-Orthodox Jews; Israel does not want non-Jewish immigrants, even if they study the poet Bialik and salute the flag. Holland does not have an ethnic problem with non-Dutch persons, so long as they become Dutch from the cultural point of view and accept that country’s values and language.

Orgad proposes that Israeli adopt an immigration policy that bases belonging to Israel’s majority not on ethnicity but on the acceptance of “certain cultural and national norms.” In other words, ethnic Jews would not automatically become citizens until they met certain conditions, and non-Jews could become citizens by assimilating into the majority culture.

Defining those cultural and national norms will not be easy—today there are several warring versions of what the majority culture is or ought to be. What determines one’s assimilation into Israeli culture? Knowledge of Bialik, Brenner, and Hanoch Levin? Familiarity with traditional Jewish texts? Fluency in the Hebrew language? Holocaust awareness? A country that can’t put together a curriculum acceptable to all Jews is one that hasn’t yet defined an identity that one could be naturalized into.

That’s a major reason why the religious definition of who is a Jew remains on the books —it’s as much inertia as politics.

I’d love to see Israel’s religious leaders wake up and engage in some creative discourse on how we could preserve the laudable elements of the halacha of conversion in the framework of a solution appropriate to today’s reality. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen.

So in the meantime we need to get to work on fashioning an Israeli Jewish identity that melds our religious heritage, our national history, and modern secular Hebrew culture in an open and thoughtful way.

It might look something like the culture of South Jerusalem.

I also recommend Daniel Rynhold’s review of Chaim Rapoport’s book Judaism and Homosexuality: An Authentic OrthodoxView from the Edah Journal. As you’ll see there, the problem is a tough one and a serious solution will require a lot of hard work.

It’s important to point out that in Rabbinic Judaism, which is what Orthodox Judaism today is, the nature and meaning of the biblical injunction against homosexuality is only part of the story. A true Orthodox solution to the problem will have to grapple with the halachic literature on the subject over the ages.

Loving, happy families with gay parents present a challenge—but a potentially productive one—for Orthodox Jewish halacha. As long as homosexuality was practiced in hiding, it could be dismissed as deviant, unhealthy, and incompatible with society’s vested interest in promoting strong families as the best environment for raising and educating children. Looking at families like Aviv’s, it’s hard to raise any rational objection to such non-traditional family structures. Objectively, many traditional, nuclear families fail to provide children with the emotional security they need; how can we condemn a non-traditional structure that does so provide?

I’m committed to a life based on halacha, Jewish law. But as a student of Jewish law, I’m also aware how supple it can be. Yes, such flexibility is too little seen these days, when most establishment Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox authorities see their task as fighting a rear-guard action against all that is new and different. But this system has succeeded time and again in meeting challenges presented by social, psychological, and political innovations. The change comes slowly— all too slowly for the impatient—but when the system works, it produces a process of intensive, careful analysis and thought. And halacha’s greatest, most creative, and indeed most radical moments have come when it has faced what seemed to be insuperable challenges. That happened in the past with the destruction of the Temple, and such a process has been underway in our time as the halachic tradition grapples with the creation of the state of Israel and the advent of feminism.

If I’ve angered traditionalists by suggesting we should try to find a way to accept families like Caryn Aviv’s, I’ll anger the I’m-ok-you’re-ok faction by asserting that we must take tradition seriously rather than simply cast it aside when it is inconvenient. To find a solution we must seek to understand the severe prohibitions against homosexuality that we see in the halachic tradition, and in the traditions of other societies. To dismiss them as primitive superstition is an act of hubris—it assumes that we, at the dawn of the 21^st century, have reached an epitome of wisdom never achieved before in the history of mankind. On the face of it, that seems to me to be a questionable working assumption.

I don’t know what the solution is, or what the ultimate halachic resolution of the question of homosexuality will be. The process take a long time, and will require both daring and humility. And I suspect that the answer may look different than anything we can imagine today.

But Caryn Aviv’s big gay Jewish family (I’ve met them and none of them are fat—that’s the only false note in the article) is a signpost pointing down a road that the halacha must travel.

As usual, the story is a lot more complicated than that. Undeniably, a lot more people in Israel, particularly religious and traditional ones, should be encouraged to allow organ donation when a tragedy occurs. But the rabbis’ concerns are important ones and this law has succeeded because it has addressed those concerns.

I am reminded of two talks on Jewish organ donation I heard some years ago, within a short space of time of each other. The first was a breezy talk based solidly in the secular discourse. All opposition to organ donation is based in superstition, the speaker said. And he attributed Orthodox opposition to organ donation to a mystical belief that bodies need to be kept whole for the promised resurrection of the dead in the Messianic age. He saw no ethical dilemmas in organ donation at all.

The second talk was by an ultra-Orthodox rabbi. He offered a learned and lucid discussion of the halachic issues and precedents.

He noted that the Torah command to save lives means that if donating an organ can save a life, it not only can or must be done. But the same respect for life means that under no circumstances can the donation of the organ cause the death of the donor.

The principal problem for halachic authorities is how to determine the moment of death. The halachic precedents speak of the cessation of heartbeat. Brain death, a relatively new concept, is one that the halachic authorities are still grappling with. Since, usually, organs must be taken for donation while the blood is still circulating, this is a vital problem.

Many Orthodox authorities now accept that the cessation of major brain functions, not the cessation of heartbeat, marks the point of death. Many others still hold out for the old definition. What’s important to understand, however, is that the rabbis’ concern is an eminently moral one.

So, of course, are the concerns of secular and non-Jewish advocates of organ donation. The problem begins when concern is cast aside, for the questions are real and difficult ones. The issue of brain death was examined and discussed at length by secular philosophers and physicians before it became commonly accepted. But, having now become the common wisdom in most of the West, there is a danger of it being taken for granted, as the first speaker I heard did. This is the point where secular thinking can fade into true belief—quasi-religious doctrine that becomes impervious to doubt and must be defended against all opponents. The protectors of the faith would then rather dismiss those who disagree with them as primitives rather than engage their arguments.

Too many Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox rabbis have committed themselves so much to opposing change of any sort that they, too, are impervious to persuasion. But a large number of them support organ donation in principle, and many accept the concept of brain death, within careful boundaries (see the website of the Halachic Organ Donor Society).

In fact, the dialectic, analytical approach of the halachic discourse can, if pursued in order to discover new truths rather than to protect old ones, be an extremely productive way for addressing the complexities of issues like the definition of death.

Notably, the most recent case of organ donation in Israel came from an 18-month old girl who was the granddaughter of an Orthodox rabbi. Rabbi Avraham Walfish said that the family decided to donate her organs because they viewed it as a halachic obligation. So it’s right and proper that Israel’s legislators engaged in a dialogue with rabbinic authorities in drafting this new and welcome law.