Hello everyone and welcome once again to the Temple Institute Parsha class.
My name is Gedalia Meyer and I am podcasting from Maale Adumim in Israel.
Times are changing faster than they ever have in the long history of changing times.
This is obvious to everyone.
Whereas 40 or 50 years ago if somebody suggested that some new world-changing invention was
somewhere in the works, it was a good bet that it wouldn t actually hit reality until
2 or 3 decades went by, assuming it happened at all.
Today, if it takes 2 or 3 years it is the same as eternity.
Whatever is coming down the pipeline in a few years has already been created and is
simply waiting for the right opportunity to emerge in the light of day.
This applies to almost everything.
It is not limited to high tech devices or alternate forms of energy.
It is just as relevant for cultural changes that involve no technology whatsoever.
Decades ago, these cultural changes were fairly slow to take place.
It could take 20 or 30 years for some major cultural change to really set in to a given
society.
Today, it's already ancient history after 5 years.
Nowhere is this trend towards rapid cultural change more evident than in the arena of religion.
For those old enough to remember, religion was a factor in the lives of most people a
half century ago.
But it had been slowly declining over the previous century.
The most recent five or ten years have seen the most precipitous decline in respect for
religion ever.
In much of the western world, to quote a religious figure or text is tantamount to intellectual
suicide.
It is assumed that anyone who grants a religious authority respect is a fanatic.
The very basic notion of belief in a deity is now openly ridiculed as a sign of hopeless
ignorance.
There is no indication that this trend will reverse in the near future.
On the contrary, if anything, the next several years will see the death of religious belief
in all but the totally committed.
This has ramifications that go beyond basic notions of belief.
As important or as irrelevant belief in God may be to the modern person, there are very
relevant spin-offs of religious belief that are currently creating major turmoil in much
of the modern world.
These tend to involve things of a sexual or reproductive nature.
The abortion debate threatens to tear American society into two camps, with no resolution
anywhere in sight.
All nuances in the debate have been eliminated as the two sides can no longer engage in serious
discussion on the matter.
There is too much at stake.
But it is in the arena of sexual norms that the cultural storm is hitting the hardest.
What was considered a serious aberration from normal less than a decade ago is now an irrevocable
part of modern society.
Sexual behavior was always rooted in the fundamental belief in the differences of the sexes.
This was not a matter of religious belief.
It was simply a fact of nature.
Every society on earth always recognized these differences.
Much of life was dictated by whatever was the accepted way of orienting social behavior
around the hard reality of the male and female dichotomy.
Virtually every religious text recognized this fundamental rule of biology and found
a place for it in whatever primary beliefs it advocated.
It seemed that if anything would survive the massive cultural rebellion against religion
that took place over the past couple of centuries, it was the very basic fact that men are men
and women are women.
But, as we all know by now, this has not been the way things went.
Though it was almost off the radar as recently as ten years ago, the trans-sexual movment
is now everwhere.
Though actual trans people are extremely small in real numbers, the ideological backers of
this movement have taken over the public debate.
To take the other side in this debate is to be a religious fanatic.
To insist that a man is a man and a woman is a woman is now equated with pushing burning
people at the stake for their false beliefs.
For those who think this trend burn out as quickly as it came in, take a look at all
the other sexual debates over the last several decades and see how those turned out.
It is entirely possible that distinction between male and female will be effectively eliminated
among human beings by the end of this century.
As difficult as that is to believe, there is no question that it is on the cultural
horizon.
Any resistance to this trend will be met with fierce accusations of primitive bigotry.
Opponents will be shunted to the ranks of Bible-thumping lunatics.
There will be no room for debate or discussion on the matter.
Of course there never was room for debate or discussion on the matter in earlier times.
It was so obvious that it simply needed no discussion.
One could quote the Bible for support, but it really wasn t necessary.
One merely had to look in the mirror to see the obvious.
Of course it never hurt having a book as authoritative as the Bible on one s side.
And there it was a plain as the story of creation, or Adam and Eve.
It was rooted in the Ten Commandments and repeated reliably every few chapters.
It happens that this week s Parsha contains the two main lists of sexual prohibitions
listed in the Torah.
The Parsha is another double reading.
It is called Acharei Mot/Kedoshim - two titles that mean After the death and Holies respectively.
The first begins with a certain aftermath of the untimely death of two of the sons of
Aaron, the high priest.
This happened a few Parshas back during a strange incident in the course of installing
the priests in their official positions of overseeing all that took place in the Mishkan.
This week s Parsha deals with a special function of the High Priest in performing an annual
ceremony to spiritual purify both himself, the entire Israelite community, and the Mishkan.
This ceremony would take place on the tenth day of the seventh month, and would be the
forerunner of the holiest day of the Jewish year - Yom Kippur.
The rest of the Parsha deals with various other laws concerning sacrificial offerings
and then this list of sexual offenses.
The list is quite long - containing about 20 prohibitions which amount to a Biblical
description of the laws of incest.
Various close relatives are included, some obvious and still widely accepted, others
rather surprising and no longer recognized outside of Orthodox Jewish society.
The second Parsha, Kedoshim, deals with a wide assortment of laws that don t seem to
have any noticeable order.
They go from the most basic moral statement found in the Bible - Love your neighbor as
yourself , to the very obscure rule about mixing different fabrics in a garment.
The last third or so of the Parsha is the second list of sexual prohibitions.
It seems to be more or less a repeat of the first list and it is not at all clear what
is really being added by this second list.
There are a few differences between the list but by-and-large they seem to be saying the
same general idea - incest in all its forms was absolutely forbidden.
Other sexual abberations such as bestiality and male homosexuality are also found on these
lists, as is sex with a woman who is menstruating.
Many today might find long lists of sexual prohibitions highly objectionable.
They might reject the very notion of sexual prohibitions to begin with.
With some of these Biblical prohibitions, the die has already been cast flat out against
the laws.
The prohibition against homosexuality can hardly be mentioned today.
It is now considered such an offense against basic morality that one wonders how long it
will be until some law is passed prohibiting it being publicly read in a synagogue.
This is a battleground that most religious Jews do not want to face.
There is nothing about the trans issue in either of these lists.
That matter certainly hadn't entered the picture thousands of years ago.
It had to wait until extremely modern times for such a contentious and outrageous issue
to really cross the threshold of acceptability.
But we can extrapolate something from these lists of sexual improprieties that applies
to our times.
Whatever was forbidden in the good old days, will be not only permitted in the not-so-far
future, but will be deemed mandatory.
Even something as unthinkable as pedophilia is now on the radar of those who wish to bring
down all sexual norms.
For those who are leery of where things are heading, this is the next great frontier of
these iconoclasts.
This is the direction society is going.
The trans issue will become a settled matter within a decade.
Whatever qualms any individual person may have over it will no longer be acceptable
in public discussion.
It will be relegated to closed religious circles of like-minded people who will find themselves
increasingly repulsed by the course taken by the louder voices within humanity.
Who knows which will be the next of the Biblical or moral abominations to be advocated as commendable
by this increasingly rapid trend?
Nobody knows where all of this is going.
We can all read the writing on the wall and realize that things will not be the way they
are five years from now.
Within a couple of decades sexual intimacy as it was known in the past and as it was
mandated in the Bible may be nothing more than an ancient relic of barbaric times.
Human society has never encountered such a period of revolutionary change.
We have almost no experience to fall back upon to guide us through the turbulent changes
heading our way.
We are entering into the great unknown.
It is a good bet that the only anchor those who wish to remain unswerved by all this will
be in the form of some religious authority.
This may be a text like the Bible or it may be a belief system that encourages them to
stick with what keeps them secure in their ideas about morality.
Anything else is very likely to be swept up in the torrent of groupthink known as the
Internet and social media.
These are extremely powerful voices, and they will only become more powerful in the coming
years as they morph into whatever form they will.
How can any individual withstand such a flood?
It may seem ridiculous to rely on an antiquated list of forbidden sexual relations in a 3000-year
old text.
However, as we head into the uncertain but plainly mapped out future, we may find that
there really is nothing else.
We will need something to reassure ourselves that certain things are right and certain
things are wrong.
There may come a time, very possibly in our own lifetimes, when there will be nothing
else to fall back on but what we believe to be the word of God.
Shabbat Shalom!