I Do If You Do

Authorizing Marriage? is an excellent collection of ten rich, well-documented, and concise essays that explore aspects of same-sex relationships past and present within Judaism and Christianity. The common theme among them is recognition of the public nature of rites and union. To view this volume as a Jewish-Christian apologetic for same-sex marriage would be oversimplification, overestimation, and misinterpretation. Instead, Authorizing Marriage? (note the question mark) interrogates scripture, commentary, and liturgy in the presence of the specter of imagined same-sex nuptials. Far from being a how-to handbook for making a Jewish or Christian wedding, this conversation raises consciousness about what ceremonies contain and how we must reconsider what we mean when we speak of "gay marriage."

Jordan observes in the introduction that "one has to be employed either in a secular school (where the study of religion is often suspect) or in one of the dwindling number of 'liberal' seminaries or religious institutions in order to write affirmatively about same-sex topics in religion" (5). Whatever one's position on same-sex marriage, the poignancy of Jordan's statement is undeniable: that contributors had to consider what they might write without damaging their own or their institutions' credibility. He further mentions that some potential authors were forced to withdraw because of such pressures (5).

The volume opens with an essay by Saul M. Olyan on the relationship between David and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1. While locating male friendship within ancient covenant practice, he hypothesizes that the author "drew purposefully on the vocabulary and rhetorical conventions of treaty discourse in an intentionally subversive way, manipulating such familiar forms" (14). Olyan states that "it cannot be shown that any community in Israel ever opposed all homoerotic sexual acts, nor is it evident that consensual anal intercourse between males was proscribed by any circle before the Holiness School [i.e., Leviticus] interdicted it at a time likely long after the composition of David's Lament" (15). Mary Ann Tolbert shows the similar significance of friendship in John 15, which establishes "mutual dependence, intimacy, freedom of association, and love—even to death—as its most important qualities" (49). In contrast, "many of the values attributed to modern marriage . . . are not found at all or not found in the same way in ancient constructions" (41). Likewise, Dale B. Martin points out the irony that "promoters of modern Christian 'family values' . . . portray themselves as supporters of the Christian tradition. In fact, they would be considered heretics by the 'orthodox' Church Fathers" (34). Daniel Boyarin characterizes the "Torah [as] the authorized female object of erotic, straight desire between Rabbis, in their own powerfully eroticized relationships with one another" (54). Analyzing a Talmudic story, Boyarin demonstrates doubling between a woman and the preferred Torah—as well as a man's admiration of the effeminately beautiful body of a scholar. He compares men's study, above marriage and the family, to Platonic exaltations of "valorized homoerotic intellectual passion [versus] a subordinated functional heterosexual world of getting and spending" (65).

Steven Greenberg's chapter seeks to "set aside the questions of the halakhic legitimacy of gay relationships and their formalization, and focus instead on what form such ceremonies ought to take" (82). He concludes that "gay unions help to pave the way for us to heal the very problem of difference, and in a gesture no less redemptive than the rebuilding of Jerusalem" (100). With a complementary turn of phrase, Laurence Paul Hemming states that the "binary male/female is itself placed in the midst of something wider, which we struggle to bring to speech. . . . If the essential manifolding of human being is brought to light by the androgynos, is there perhaps more to be said of human coupling and combining than has so far been spoken?" (80). Mark Jordan points to how same-sex nuptials often attempt to claim legitimacy by tracing a "new liturgical genealogy" of lost...