Rebecca Alpert and Singers Maddie Sifantus, Suzanne Boucher, and Sally Sweitzer

Rebecca Alpert | Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies, Temple University

In addition to my day job as a university professor, I find myself engaged from time to time in work related to my previous career as a rabbi: dispensing sermonic wisdom, chanting the occasional liturgy, representing “the Jewish position” on this or that in public life, teaching seminary students. Although I enjoy donning my rabbinic persona in these roles, my most favored clerical activity is officiating at weddings. I love that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and other states to which I’ve traveled) grant me the privilege, by virtue of my status as a member of the clergy, to perform this official function. Perhaps it’s the irony I appreciate. Jews learned (and Muslims are learning) how to turn our leaders from judges and legal experts to compassionate caregivers to fit the Protestant model, but this American practice welcomes us back as representatives of the government and its laws.

This might seem an odd preference for a lesbian rabbi. If I can’t have a legal wedding of my own, why do I enjoy providing this service for others?  Why be an accomplice to providing straight couples not only with official state approval of their relationships, but also with the 1138 federal benefits that accrue based on this approval? Although for several years I stopped performing weddings in protest, I couldn’t resist the calls of friends who desired to share this most intimate moment with me. Call it masochism or altruism, but I do get enormous pleasure from assisting people in love to declare their love publicly, and being an accessory to having their love recognized by the state, even if I am prevented from asking another rabbi to do the same for me and my partner in the state in which we live.

Of course, I also perform lesbian and gay “commitment ceremonies,” and I enjoy working with these couples, too. But the disparity vexes me: without being able to confer state recognition, I am not giving these couples what I can give the others. I could not even confer “synagogue” recognition for these Jewish lesbian and gay second-class citizens if my own Reconstructionist denomination of American Judaism did not support me and all the other Reconstructionist rabbis who regularly perform these religiously recognized if un-stately ceremonies. This support has grown so much over the years in Reconstructionist and other non-Orthodox Jewish circles that it has attained the status of a deeply held religious belief for liberal Jews.

Notice that I use First Amendment language here intentionally; I believe that our conviction about the power and value of marriage equality should be recognized on the basis of the religious freedom clause of the U. S. Constitution, which promises disestablishment and the free exercise of religion, and I should have the right as a member of the Reconstructionist clergy to perform legal weddings for gay and lesbian couples.

In other words, if Reconstructionist Judaism believes in the equality of heterosexual and homosexual relationships, then the fact I must perform a different ceremony (one recognized by the state, the other not) for each group is an infringement on my religious freedom. How, I reason, could the state have a compelling interest in keeping me from fulfilling this religious obligation?

Most legal experts I have discussed this with have dismissed this claim. They argue that the courts have moved to limit, not expand, religious freedom in recent years, and such a lawsuit would surely fail. And throughout U. S. history, court decisions regarding the religious freedom clause have frequently refused to recognize the deeply held religious convictions of those outside the Protestant mainstream, especially when these convictions manifest themselves not only in private belief but also in public ritual. But works that I have published on this subject have received a lot of positive attention from other rabbis, priests, and ministers who see the logic clearly.[1]

Of course the law is not necessarily logical. And perhaps it would be better if weddings were not sanctioned by the state, and religions such as mine had the authority to bless relationships, homo and hetero, for those couples who want that blessing without mixing these things up. But as long as I have this “power vested in me” I believe I should have the right to assert it on behalf of any couple, whether they identify as man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, or some transgender variation on that theme.

Dr. Rebecca T. Alpert is Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at Temple University. She is a graduate of Barnard College. She was ordained as a rabbi at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1976 and served as dean of students there for ten years. She taught Jewish Studies at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges; at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey; Gratz College; and The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Rebecca is the author of Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (forthcoming, 2011), co-author (with Jacob Staub) of Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach (1985; rev.ed., 2000), author of Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition published by Columbia University Press (1997), editor of Voices of the Religious Left: A Contemporary Sourcebook for Temple University Press (2000) and co-editor (with Sue Elwell and Shirley Idelson) of Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation published by Rutgers University Press in 2001. She has written numerous articles on Jewish medical ethics and contemporary Jewish life, published in Tikkun, Judaism, Shofar , and The Journal of American Ethnic History. She is currently at work on a book about Jews and baseball.