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29  four Looking Back to Look Forward Parashat Vayera (Genesis 18:1–22:24) Gwynn Kessler The first word of Genesis 18:1, vayera, which connotes both seeing and appearing, alerts the reader to the importance of vision throughout Genesis 18–22. Indeed, Parashat Vayera as a whole presents a virtual feast for the eyes. Casting our gaze across the whole picture, we are first brought into the circle, or at least right outside the tent, of Abraham and Sarah. We then peer far beyond this location to the blinding plains of Sodom. And finally, toward the end of the parasha, we are perched on a mountaintop, called YHWH Yireh (God sees) in the land of Moriah (Seeing). Although vision provides a powerful leitmotif running through the parasha, many people have continued to see the story about God’s destruction of Sodom as recounted in Genesis 19 in near utter isolation—especially when dealing with what the Bible says about “homosexuality.” Instead of treating Genesis 19 as if it stands alone, here I contextualize the story of Sodom as part of its larger literary unit. The Torah invites precisely such a contextualization since the first explicit mention of God’s plan to destroy Sodom (and Gomorrah) appears in Genesis 18:20,1 soon after God appears to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre (18:1) and promises the birth of Isaac to Abraham and Sarah (18:10–15); Jewish tradition, insofar as both chapters (and the three that follow) are read together in the annual synagogue lectionary, also encourages us to set these chapters in dialogue. In what follows, I interpret Parashat Vayera through one of its own leitmotifs: vision . However, instead of following a heteronormative, homophobic, fixed gaze that places primary import on a purported condemnation of “homosexuality” in the story of Sodom—thus placing queer readers in the role of passive and silenced sacrificial victims—I read Parashat Vayera with a “queer eye,” which is never fixed, at least for too long, on, and from, one place. I open up various readings, using different characters and points of view, in an attempt to forefront the multiplicity of available interpretations of almost any given text. For queer theory, a central point is not to find one static, inherent meaning in a text but to view a text from multiple angles—to borrow a well-known rabbinic dictum, “to turn it and turn it”—until, at least for the moment, one glimpses as much as can be seen, differently. This type of reading acknowledges that interpretation is an active, as well as an open, process, which invites LGBTQ readers to offer alternative readings that alter the standard of vision, the frame of reference of visibility, and to further illuminate what can be seen and 30 Gwynn Kessler known from this parasha.2 In such readings, where queer functions as an active verb rather than a more or less fixed noun, queer interpretation describes a process, a fluid movement between reader, text, and world, “that reinscribes (or queers) each and the relations between them.”3 Instead of asking what “the Bible says about homosexuality ,” queer readings turn the tables and ask what can LGBTQ people and their allies say—and teach—about the Bible.4 In order to reflect more broadly on the process of (queer) interpretation, I begin by using one queer, and feminist, strategy, that of highlighting a character positioned on the margins, “low and outside” any given narrative frame.5 My starting point is the unnamed character of Lot’s wife, who toward the end of the Sodom story “looks back” at where she is from and what she is leaving behind: “And his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt” (Gen. 19:26). Other writers have filled in the story of Lot’s wife’s looking back by drawing from and building on midrashic sources;6 here, my purpose is to use this peripheral character’s act of looking back to explore a central Jewish preoccupation, Biblical interpretation—the very process of looking back at texts. Obviously, for a tradition and a people that reconceive their texts and themselves in large part through repeated acts of looking back, as Judaism and Jews do, Lot’s wife, who pays dearly for her perhaps uncontrollable, albeit certainly understandable act, represents an anomaly. We can, of course, delineate the differences between an apparently compulsive act of willed disobedience (Lot and presumably his family were...

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