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By Root 376 0

viewed exile as a punishment for Israel's sins, in more recent centuries such diverse Jewish groups as Kabbalists and hasidim, on the one hand, and Reformers on the other, have offered positive evaluations of Israel's being dispersed throughout the world. Fallen sparks of holiness are scattered everywhere, taught the mystics. They lie waiting for Jews to discover them, uplift them, and restore them to their source. We are spread throughout the world in order to seek these, in order to look for God in the most unlikely places. The great spiritual adventure that the mystics find in Judaism precisely requires us to be everywhere in order to do our work of uplifting and transformation.47 If a Jew finds himself or herself in an unexpected place, according to many a Hasidic tale, it is because there is something to be done there that only his or her particular soul can accomplish. A classic Hasidic text claims that it is easier to enter God's presence in the diaspora than in the Holy Land, just as it is easier to approach the king out at a country inn than in his heavily guarded palace.48 The Reformers put it differently: they felt that we were scattered about the world in order better to fulfill our prophetic mission, to be a “light unto the nations” in teaching the values of justice and decency embodied in our prophetic heritage. Perhaps to the surprise of both mystics and Reformers, their messages are not that different from each other. The task of redemption calls upon us to live within the non-Jewish world, to stand as Abraham's descendents and be ‘ivrim, contrarians, in societies that are otherwise too monochromatic, to be an ongoing minority, struggling for survival, providing a certain leaven to otherwise uniform societies, and perhaps also showing the way to so many minorities seeking acceptance yet frightened of disappearing. The American Jewish experience has taught us that our presence as a moral voice, when we use it well, can add much to the broader society in which we live, even when we are only a small fraction of the population.

Let me try to explain this role of the Jew as contrarian by use of a perhaps surprising analogy. My framework here is the old six-day creation story.

Here it was, Friday afternoon. A little while before the sun was to set, God looked around at all He had made, including the animals on the sixth day, and said to His divine Self: “It's not quite enough! Heaven and earth are not quite finished. I need a partner, someone in My own image, someone I can love.” So He made humans, for the sake of love. In order that they not suffer the same terrible loneliness He had known throughout eternity, He made them male and female, along with the incredibly ingenious and delicate mechanism of sexual attraction and love, where the same emotional toolkit would be used both to propagate the species and to express the most sublime of human feelings. Quite a feat!

But then God looked out over all these humans that were about to emerge and got worried. “Gee, they're pretty boring,” He said. “All the same in too many ways. Something about them reminds Me of cattle, with all that breeding and all those generations. Will there be no one who bucks the system? No one to be different? Who will be the leaven in all this dough?” Then the thought came to the exalted divine Mind. “Know what I'll do? I'll count them off, and one in every ten I'll shape the other way round. I'll make them love the same sex instead of the other one! That will create dissonance, contrariness, oddity. Yes, some people will probably hate them. But think how many artists, poets, and philosophers they'll bring forth! They will save My humans from boredom, and someday they'll be blessed by all.”

Just as God was feeling great about His new gay-friendly Self, however, a question arose. “What do you mean by ‘bring forth’?” He asked. “Their reproductive mechanisms won't work, will they? How will they convey this cutting-edge, creative, dissonant culture from one generation to the next? How will they pass it on?”

Just then, Abraham happened to