Steven Greenberg

Co-founder of the Orthodox LGBTQ organization Eshel

A) What qualities make the nominee deserving of the Z3 Bridge Builder Award?

The Orthodox movement in Judaism developed as a reaction to religious reform and external cultural influences, and continues to navigate the challenges of locating and defending a boundary between faithfulness to tradition and unacceptable innovation. Unfortunately, this tension sometimes leads to the exclusion, or inadequate inclusion, of even some people who share beliefs and practices with the rest of the Orthodox community.

One area of particular tension in recent decades is the extent to which observant LGBTQ Jews and families are accepted in the Orthodox community. This is especially acute in haredi (or “ultra-”) Orthodox families and communities, but remains a challenge in the Modern Orthodox community as well. This is certainly a divide in need of a bridge.

Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, has been and continues to be a pioneer and bridge-builder in this encounter. After publishing an emotional but anonymous article about his own experience, Rabbi Greenberg began to receive and respond to letters from LGBTQ Orthodox Jews who didn’t see a place for themselves in the community in which they grew up. Through this correspondence, carried out with empathy and compassion, he not only gave invaluable support to individuals and families, but began to build a virtual community. He identified a need, and rose to meet that need.

Remembering his own closeted experience, Rabbi Greenberg often compassionately reminds teachers and youth leaders to “honor the ears in the room” – to keep in mind that some listeners in any class or group may be LGBTQ, and to speak in a way that respects them and their experiences, even (or especially) if they are not publicly out.

Rabbi Greenberg bravely came out in 1999, and soon thereafter took the initiative to help establish the Open House LGBTQ+ community center in Jerusalem. In 2001, after being interviewed in the documentary film “Trembling Before G-d,” Rabbi Greenberg collaborated with the film’s director on a series of over 500 screenings with audience dialogues for lay people, rabbis, and educators, first across the U.S. and then around the world.

In 2004, Rabbi Greenberg published the book Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, which traces the issue of homosexuality in the Torah, rabbinic literature, and Jewish history, offering his fresh perspective on these sacred sources. It won the Koret Jewish Book Award for Philosophy and Thought in 2005, and was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. More importantly, it brought dignity and comfort to countless LGBTQ Jews, and facilitated their reconciliation with family members.

Rabbi Greenberg has often pointed out that it would be relatively easier for LGBTQ Jews and their communities to simply leave each other, but is much harder for them to navigate a way to stay together. Motivated by his love for the Jewish people, and his intuitive understanding of the love of many LGBTQ Jews for their Orthodox communities, he has tried to facilitate conversation and acceptance, and strengthen communities for all their members. His book is particularly helpful in introducing the concept of the Welcoming Shul, seeking common ground between synagogues and those LGBTQ Jews and families who feel excluded from full belonging. For example, he suggests a shift from offering “family membership,” which in most Orthodox synagogues is limited to heterosexual couples and their children, to “household membership,” which could accommodate other family structures without the synagogue explicitly recognizing same-sex marriages. And his involvement is not simply theoretical; through Eshel, the Orthodox LGBTQ organization which he co-founded, Rabbi Greenberg and colleagues introduced the Welcoming Shuls Project, interviewing pulpit rabbis around the country about the opportunities for LGBTQ Jews and families in their congregations, and making this information available to Jews seeking a community.

In 2015, together with others, Rabbi Greenberg helped organize the first Orthodox mental health conference on homosexuality. He also contributed a chapter to a collection of essays on the subject published in 2019.

B) In what ways has the nominee demonstrated exceptional leadership and commitment to their work in bridging divides?

Rabbi Greenberg previously served as a faculty member at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. From 1986 to 2010, he was the Senior Teaching Fellow at CLAL (National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership), a resource center and leadership training institute. Both of these organizations are inter-denominational and reflect Rabbi Greenberg’s broader bridge-building role in the Jewish community.

Since coming out and becoming the public face of often-anonymous Orthodox LGBTQ Jews, Rabbi Greenberg has shown exceptional leadership, continuing to lecture in communal and academic settings, write essays, and keep this challenging issue before the public. His columns have appeared in the Jewish Week, the Times of Israel, and the Forward, among other publications. His forthrightness has led him to share very personal challenges, including the hostility that he and his family faced in one of the communities where they lived, while his creativity has produced many innovative homiletical interpretations, such as his proposal to designate the Fast of Esther (which commemorates Queen Esther revealing her Jewish identity to Ahasuerus) as a national Jewish coming-out day.

As mentioned above, Rabbi Greenberg became the educational coordinator for the post-screening outreach project around the film “Trembling Before G-d.” As he recounted at the 2022 conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, marking the twentieth anniversary of the film, he facilitated not only general dialogues with lay viewers around the world, but also confidential dialogues with groups of Orthodox rabbis and educators in Israel, who were specifically asked to focus on their human emotional reactions to the film rather than on halachic (Jewish legal) restrictions.

Rabbi Greenberg co-founded the Orthodox LGBTQ organization Eshel, which works on many fronts to help individuals, bring reconciliation to families, and make Orthodox communities more welcoming to LGBTQ members. Among Eshel’s many projects, it has recently also hosted screenings and discussions online and around the U.S. of at least two other documentaries: the Israeli film “Marry Me, However,” about the tensions experienced by Orthodox LGBTQ Israelis and their straight spouses (or former spouses) in heterosexual marriages, and “The Holy Closet,” a set of short documentaries about Orthodox LGBTQ Israelis celebrating lifecycle events within Jewish tradition.

The introduction to Rabbi Greenberg’s book Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition includes a poignant letter he received from a gay Orthodox young man who was very lonely, but couldn’t envision a partnered life for himself within the tradition he grew up in and still loved. Somewhat surprisingly, the book’s section on Biblical interpretation begins not with the prohibitions in Leviticus, but with the Genesis stories of Adam and Eve, and the fundamental human desire for companionship. Rabbi Greenberg acknowledges that kiddushin (halachic marriage) applies only to an opposite-sex couple, but is sensitive to the needs of LGBTQ couples, so in 2019 he published a proposal for a partnership/commitment ceremony and document based on halacha, and he has since performed several such ceremonies.

C) How has the nominee's work impacted the Jewish community and beyond?

As mentioned above, in his book Rabbi Greenberg introduced the concept of Welcoming Shuls, and through Eshel he and colleagues have put the idea into practice, assembling a list of synagogues and their respective parameters for acceptance and integration of LGBTQ individuals and families, offering hope, practical options, and the potential for a comfortable communal home to many LGBTQ Orthodox Jews. As he and his family have demonstrated in their own lives, and as he has taught in many synagogues and communities, welcoming a diverse membership actually strengthens the community.

Also as mentioned above, Rabbi Greenberg’s innovative approach to gay marriage in relation to Jewish tradition, which he has introduced in both theory and practice, has offered an option for lonely Orthodox LGBTQ Jews to envision a possible, hopeful future for themselves with a loving companion.

Over the last 25 years, Rabbi Greenberg’s visibility and passionate advocacy for LGBTQ individuals and families in the Orthodox community have clearly contributed to many shifts in communal conversations, both locally and on a large scale. In 2008, a joint Orthodox rabbinic placement program of Yeshiva University, the Orthodox Union, and the Rabbinical Council of America published a guide for synagogues pursuing a search for a new rabbi. The booklet included suggested interview questions for the rabbi candidates. The questions include issues of aliyot (Torah honors) for gay men, synagogue membership for gay couples, and a question about gay marriage; not all the questions are phrased in a way sympathetic to LGBTQ Jews, but at least these important issues have moved from the shadows into the communal conversation. In 2012, the Rabbinical Council of America rejected the harmful so-called “reparative therapy” for homosexuality. And there have been other recent expressions of communal support for Orthodox LGBTQ Jews, including a groundswell of popular support among alumni and others for the embattled undergraduate Pride Alliance at Yeshiva University. All of these were likely inspired in part by Rabbi Greenberg’s efforts and leadership.

As mentioned above, Eshel, the organization that Rabbi Greenberg co-founded, helps LGBTQ Jews, their families, and synagogue communities. Eshel has moved from screenings and discussions of the sometimes uncomfortable films “Marry Me, However” and “Trembling Before G-d” -- as discussed in Rabbi Greenberg’s impressive and moving reflections at the 2022 AJS conference -- to the inspiring and encouraging series “The Holy Closet,” which includes examples of straight Orthodox family members finally, if hesitantly, beginning to open their hearts to their still-traditional LGBTQ relatives, prompted by a celebration such as a wedding or bris. Thanks in part to Rabbi Greenberg and Eshel, the communal conversation has gradually shifted.

Rabbi Greenberg has also been involved in outreach and discussion beyond the United States and beyond the Jewish community. Eshel, which in addition to national programming has many local chapters around the U. S., recently introduced a chapter in Israel. And Rabbi Greenberg participated in a 2023 interfaith conference on LGBTQ issues in the UK.

In summary, Rabbi Steve Greenberg has dedicated both his life and his career to building bridges and promoting welcoming communities, all motivated by his love of the Jewish people. He would be a very fitting recipient of the Z3 Bridge Builder Award.