The Wronging of Alan Turing: Sex, Shame, and the Complexity of a Human Being

Cross-posted to State of Formation.

Are you reading this on a computer? Then thank the guy on the left. The English mathematician Alan Turing, who would have turned 100 this June 23, is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modern computer science. As Jack Copeland writes:

Turing conceived the principle of the modern computer. He described an abstract digital computing machine consisting of a limitless memory and a scanner that moves back and forth through the memory, symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols…The actions of the scanner are dictated by a program of instructions that is stored in the memory in the form of symbols. This is Turing's stored-program concept, and implicit in it is the possibility of the machine operating on and modifying its own program.

Turing was also a pioneer in artificial intelligence: the “Turing Test, in which an artificial intelligence would be judged intelligent if another human could not tell the difference between the responses of a human and the artificially intelligent machine,” remains the ideal toward which AI continues to strive. Additionally, Turing’s work in cryptography played a critical role in the Allied victory in World War II. He developed codebreaking machines and algorithms, which revealed the positions of Nazi Germany’s U-Boats and detailed Hitler’s communications with his generals. Copeland suggests that the contributions of Turing and his team may have shortened the war by two to four years, which translates, by his calculations, into 14 to 21 million lives saved.
For his outsized contributions to the war effort and for revolutionizing the shape of modern sciences, economies, and societies, you might expect Turing to have been lauded as a national hero. Instead, in 1952 Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” after reporting a petty burglary that a male lover of his participated in—homosexuality being illegal at the time. He was offered a choice between imprisonment, and chemical castration through injections of a synthetic estrogen. He chose the latter. In 1954, he died of cyanide poisoning; an event many suspect was a suicide—though Copeland contends that the evidence for this is scant. In 2009 then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the government's treatment of Turing.
What does all this have to do with Jewish ethics? As it turns out, plenty. We can read Turing’s ordeal at the hands of British indecency law as a modern example of what the Talmud calls “verbal wronging.” Commenting on Mishnah Bava Metzia 4:10, which states, “Just as there is [fraud by] overreaching in buying and selling, so there is wrong done by words,” b. Bava Metzia 58b records the following discussion:

R. Johanan said on the authority of R. Simeon b. Yohai: Verbal wrong is more heinous than monetary wrong…R. Eleazar said: The one affects his person, the other [only] his money.  R. Samuel b. Nahmani said: For [monetary wronging] restoration is possible, but not for [verbal wronging.]
A tanna recited before R. Nahman b. Isaac: He who publicly shames his neighbor is as though he had shed blood. Whereupon he remarked to him, “You say well, for I have seen it [as a result of such shaming], the ruddiness departing and paleness supervening.”[1]

This passage does a couple of interesting things. First, and most obviously, it understands a form of unquantifiable, non-material damage as greater than material wrong—precisely for the reason of its unquantifiability. If I know exactly how much someone has lost due to a wrong, I stand a chance of being able to make it up to them; and if I know a person has lost something material, I know that there is a tangible means by which I might be able to make restitution. To use Abraham Joshua Heschel’s language, monetary wrong is a wrong done in space, and a change to a space at least stands a chance of being undone. Verbal wronging, on the other hand, is a wrong done in time.[2] Once someone has seen or heard something, I cannot (short of erasing their memory in some way, which would likely involve grievous physical harm) make them unsee or unhear it, because I cannot erase the moment in time in which the perception took place.
Second, it recognizes that not only a person’s psyche, but their social self as well, is integral to their being. Furthermore, these aspects of the self are just as vulnerable to real injury as the physical aspect—the text goes so far as to explicitly compare, in somatic, visual terms, the result of shaming to that of physically drawing blood. In doing so, the text recognizes that a person is complex and interconnected, irreducible to a single feature, and vulnerable in many different ways.
If Turing did in fact commit suicide as a result of his ordeal, this would be a case where verbal wronging quite literally resulted in bloodshed. It would also not be the only case in which bloodshed has literally resulted from verbal wronging—one need only look at the recent rash of queer teen suicides in response to anti-gay bullying. Even if Turing did not commit suicide, however, his case and others like it stand as testimony to the pettiness of such shaming, and to the tangible damage it can do.
Consider that Turing’s sexuality harmed no one. Consider that his sexuality was exposed in the process of his actually performing a civic duty—reporting an actual crime. For this he was rewarded with a prosecution that besmirched his name and wasted public time and money, as well as his own. In the end he was offered a choice a choice between two significant injuries: the loss of his freedom and career, or the loss of his sexuality. I would suggest we consider the number of lives he saved and his contributions to a discipline without which all our lives would be radically different, but the truth is, what was done to Turing would have been just as wrong had it been done to anyone else.
There is one sense, however, in which comparing the pettiness of Turing’s shaming to the vast weight of his accomplishments serves to highlight an especially sinister feature of verbal wronging:  it makes a person’s life entirely about the ways in which they differ from a prescribed standard.  The whole person—their accomplishments, their interests, their loves, their sense of self—become inconsequential. They are reduced to a single act or characteristic that has been marked as worthy of derision, and in this way they are marked as other, and dehumanized. This is true of the all-too-common phenomenon of slut-shaming, which I discussed in a previous article. It is true of the anti-gay bullying which continues to drive too many youth to suicide, it is true of Turing’s treatment, and it is true of countless other cases in which we publicly shame people over actions or characteristics which have no bearing on our own lives (but which may be immensely and legitimately important to the victim of that shame). And it stands in direct contrast to the broad and complex vision of humanity suggested by our Talmudic text.
This photograph, of a sculpture of Turing at Bletchley Park, England, was taken by Jon Callas. It was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons and is used in accordance with a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

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[1] Soncino Translation.
[2] See A.J. Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1951, 1979)

"Rules By Which They Could Not Live:" My Bat Mitzvah Drash

Cross-posted to State of Formation.

The parshah I’ve worked on for my Bat Mitzvah is, given my graduate research, apt—and not entirely accidental. My research deals with sexual ethics—and queer sexuality in particular— in Judaism. And as you follow along in your Chumashim, you will notice that parshat K’doshim-Acharei Mot contains perhaps two of the most controversial verses in the Hebrew Bible: Leviticus 18:22—“you will not lie with a man as with the lyings of a woman”—and Leviticus 20:13—“If one lies with mankind as one lies with womankind, they have both committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death.”
In my research, naturally, I have had to deal with these verses, and with possible mitigating interpretations of them. I can tell you the following—first, many such interpretations exist. Second, all of them, to my mind, are some degree of unsatisfying.  There is always the feeling that these interpretations are trying to turn the text into something that it is not. They always, to my mind, fail to erase the stark punch to the gut these verses in their plain sense are to a reader.

At this point, I’d like you to imagine me, at twelve, just starting to realize that I like girls, reading Leviticus for the first time.  And then I would like you to imagine, after that experience, how you, as a twelve-year-old, would respond to the suggestion that you commit to a faith that holds this text as sacred. These verses are alienating. No matter how we try to turn them, they are disturbing. And if you are queer, like me—no matter the interpretation, no matter the academic distance you may try to put between yourself and your subject—ultimately, they still hurt. Any effective and honest response to them, therefore, must begin by acknowledging that.

Futhermore, such a response should, in my opinion, not attempt to retroactively paint the past meanings of the text as something it is not. We have, as a species, a strong tendency to confuse is and ought. That is, we assume that because a thing is the status quo—because it’s “natural,” or “traditional,” or so on—that it is therefore ethically valid. Or, conversely, we might assume that, because we find a thing ethically valid, that it therefore must reflect the natural or original state of affairs.
But these assumptions are erroneous. Just because a thing is “natural” or “traditional” doesn’t make it right—after all, murder, sexual violence, tribalism, and racism are all natural states of affairs. And just because a thing is right doesn’t mean it reflects some primordial state of perfection—racial and sexual equality, for instance (despite assertions to the contrary), appear to be fairly recent concepts.

Effective advocacy for equality or justice, then, needs to start from the understanding that there is a problem to be fixed—that there is something in the world that is wrong and broken. I would suggest that in some cases, the same is true for effective engagement with religious text. David Weiss Halivni posits that Rabbinic interpretation is generated in response to what he describes as the “maculateness” of the Biblical text—that is, the text, as a result of existing within human history, has problems or inconsistencies within it whose function is to generate interpretive responses. He writes, “When the people of Israel congregated once more—at long last and of their own accord—they found not Moses and the pure and perfect Torah of the wilderness, but Ezra and his composite Torah, mad maculate by centuries of human history.” (Peshat and Derash, vi.)
I’d like to go one step further—the text has actively unethical commands in it, whose purpose is to teach us to recognize them. These texts are meant to reflect and demonstrate the brokenness of the world, and goad us into doing something about it.

I would add at this point that we do not have a very good track record when it comes to responding to such texts. Indeed, a look into the prophetic literature reveals that God anticipates this. In Ezekiel 20:25-26 we find the chilling admission: “I gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live: When they set aside every first issue of the womb, I defiled them by their very gifts”—that is, instead of consecrating the firstborn to the temple they sacrificed them—“that I might render them desolate, that they might know I am Adonai.”

God, in other words, knew that the Israelites would get the commandment tragically, horrifically wrong—and handed it down anyway. Suffice it to note, by the way, that while theodicy (that is, the justification of God in the face of suffering or evil) is not the main focus of this drash, the fact that God would take such action, at such terrible consequence, anticipating our brokenness and fallibility, raises deeply troubling questions about the very nature of God.

Despite our poor record thus far, there nevertheless are Rabbinic precedents for this sort of interpretation. Perhaps the best-known example is found in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 68b-72a. This sugya engages the Biblical edict (Deut. 21:18-21) that “if a man has a [stubborn and rebellious] son…they shall bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community…[and] the men of his town shall stone him to death.”

Clearly, the Rabbinic interpreters are deeply troubled by this text. First the mishnah (Sanh. 8:1-5) and then the Gemara restrict the definition of the stubborn and rebellious son to the point of absurdity, until the Gemara finally says, “There never has been a stubborn and rebellious son, and never will be. Why, then, was the law written? That you may study it and receive reward.” (71a)

Notice what this interpretation doesn’t do. It doesn’t say that the law used to apply but no longer does. It doesn’t try to excuse it, or to erase it. It brings it forward in all its bald horror, allows it to punch us in the gut, and then goes about making sure that it will never be carried out. Yet in doing so, it preserves a purpose for the law—it is there to learn from. It is there as a witness, as a thing to study—and we should bear in mind that in Talmudic parlance, there is a very real sense of fighting and struggle implicit in study and learning. (For more on this, see Jeffrey Rubenstein’s excellent book, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud.)

There are clearly some differences between the Exodus and Sanhedrin texts, and the ones we have in front of us. Against the assertion that “there never was such a son,” there have been, and continue to be, many, many LGBTQ people who have been hurt, directly or indirectly, as a result of the texts we’ll be chanting shortly. And I’d argue vociferously against the notion that there is personal reward to be gained from learning these texts—we should instead be hanging our heads in shame. But as for why the law was written? “That you may study it” may be the only interpretation I can accept.

In studying this text, I am confronted with a world that is so broken that even the Scriptures given to it, even the laws contained within those Scriptures, contain ethical abominations, contain violent and dehumanizing prescriptions. I am also powerfully confronted with an obligation to help fix it. I am reminded that this law was written, not so that I may “study and receive reward,” but to force me to think critically about it, to stir me and make me uncomfortable, to punch me in the gut so that I may “study and DO SOMETHING.” Shabbat Shalom.

This image is used under a Creative Commons 3.0 license and was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

The Times We Shouldn’t Defend Our Traditions

(Cross-posted to State of Formation.)

“Philosophers,” says Martha Nussbaum, “don’t write like prophets….they have to believe, I think, that at least a part of evil is not innate or necessary, that at least a good part of it is based on error, whether societal or personal.” For prophets, on the other hand, “the urgency and magnitude of the evils they see admit of no delay, no calm and patient dialogue…Suppose Jeremiah had said, ‘the heart of Israel is corrupt utterly, but on the other hand there are some very nice people there.’” (Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, 1999, 240-1)

Nussbaum’s own inclinations and ultimate sympathies lie with the philosopher—and most of the time, mine do, too. Often, I firmly believe that attributing a problem or an evil to an entire religion, or religion as a whole, is not only inaccurate and unhelpful, but actively destructive. I often jump into the fray to point out concrete examples of principles and themes of a tradition, or groups or individual practitioners within a faith—mine or any other—that I truly believe are at work for the good. I truly believe that religion is not a monolith, and that it can do, and has done, great work in the service of humanity and of our universe. And I truly, deeply believe that the God I serve is good.

Yet both Nussbaum and I—precisely because of “the philosopher’s interest in the nuances of individual cases” (Nussbaum, 1999, 241)—are sometimes compelled to admit that the prophet has a point. Sometimes, stating the nuance and the capacity for good in a tradition that has hurt people is deeply inappropriate. Sometimes, devotion to the underlying goodness of a tradition and to its prerogative to practice as it sees fit comes at great cost to the lives of real people.

This past week, Rolling Stone published a heartbreaking article, "One Town's War On Gay Teens," detailing the toll of anti-gay bullying in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin school district. In 1994, according to the article, the conservative, evangelical group Minnesota Family Council (MFC) pushed the Anoka-Hennepin school board into adopting a districtwide policy, “which pronounced that within the health curriculum, ‘homosexuality not be taught/addressed as a normal, valid lifestyle.’” While the language was specific to the health curriculum, the policy practically erased discussion of homosexuality “in any context.”

When queer students—or even students who were perceived as such—complained to teachers and administrators of anti-gay bullying, they received no relevant support, and the homophobic smears continued unabated. The policy may have been quiet, but its toll is now known nationwide. Since 1999, nine students, many of whom were queer or taunted as such, committed suicide, most famously 15-year old Justin Aaberg in July of 2010.

In many of the progressive circles I frequent, both online and in real life, variations on a theme of the same angry, horrified response to the Rolling Stone article came up: Is this truly what “Christian love” looks like? Is it true that people like the MFC can’t be made to see the grave harm they’ve caused? And the conclusion often was: no, these people knew exactly what they were doing. To make the non-conformers this desperate was precisely the point.

And as much as I want to believe otherwise, I find myself agreeing with this conclusion. According to the article, MFC activist Barb Anderson blames “pro-gay groups for the tragedies”:

She explained that such "child corruption" agencies allow "quote-unquote gay kids" to wrongly feel legitimized. "And then these kids are locked into a lifestyle with their choices limited, and many times this can be disastrous to them as they get into the behavior which leads to disease and death," Anderson said. She added that if LGBT kids weren't encouraged to come out of the closet in the first place, they wouldn't be in a position to be bullied. (emphasis mine.)

And Nussbaum notes with astonishment that Roger Scrunton argued—in 1995!—that “schools ought to teach revulsion toward homosexuality, on the grounds that the perpetuation of this revulsion is ‘a human good.’” (Nussbaum 1999, 192) I will pause for that statement to fully sink in. If one truly believes that, well, what are a few suicides?

It is, in a way, ironic that one of the go-to Scriptures for anti-gay activists is the story, in Genesis 18 and 19, of Sodom and Gommorah. Because according to many (to my mind, convincing) interpretations, the sexual sins of those cities of the plain were not homosexuality, but gang rape—sex used in the service not of pleasure, but of terror employed to enforce submission and conformity. Rabbi Steven Greenberg writes:

While the event that sealed the fate of the Sodomites was their demand for Lot to bring out his guests so that the mob might “know” them, this was still not seen so much as sexual excess as hatred of the stranger and exploitation of the weak…[in Sodom] no difference was tolerated. (Greenberg, Wrestling With God and Men, 2004, 65-6)

The invocation of sexualized violence to assert dominance and enforce conformity should ring familiar. For make no mistake—the bullying that drove people like Justin Aaberg to suicide, both from his classmates and, more sinisterly, from the supposedly moral, responsible adults of the MFC is nothing other than psychological and spiritual gang rape. Its purpose was none other than to strip people like Justin of all individuality, of all self-respect, of all autonomy, to break him until he shaped up—or disappeared.

So when I encountered these generalizing statements about Christianity, or religion, or despairing for the humanity of those pushing anti-gay policies, my first response was to jump in and correct the generalizations. I then decided against it. Because in the wake of such tragedies—in the wake of the real threat of harm, or of actual, already perpetrated harm—someone for whom it is most important to jump to the defense of an institution rather than to demand justice for the people that institution has hurt is, forgive me, someone who has their priorities deeply screwed up.

Our traditions and our faith communities are important to us, as they should be.  But we cannot let them become ends in themselves.  Abraham was right to argue that, for the sake of ten righteous, the city should be spared; truly, there are far more than ten righteous in the cities that are our traditions. Yet when violent crimes occur in our cities, our first response should not be to say, “we’re not all like that!” Our first response should be to root out the perpetrators, and to seek justice for the victims.

Image: John Martin, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852). This image has passed into the public domain and is used courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Value of Discomfort: Why I won't make peace with my Torah portion

I have begun to compose my d'var Torah, or drasha (an interpretation, often delivered orally, of the weekly Torah portion) for my Bat Mitzvah. My portion, not coincidentally, includes what are perhaps two of the most controversial passages in the Hebrew Bible: Leviticus 18:22--"you will not lie with a male as the lyings of a woman, it is an abomination"-- and Leviticus 20:13--"If a man lies with a male as the lyings of a woman, the two have done an abominable thing; they will surely be put to death, their blood is upon them." (translations mine)

I note in my drasha that in my research, I have encountered many mitigating interpretations of these texts, some more rigorous and thoughtful than others. However, on an academic and a religious level, at the end of the day I find all of them some kind of unsatisfying. And despite all these interpretations, on a personal level, the verses still hurt.

Both the personal hurt and the intellectual dissatisfaction are compounded by the fact that, as a lived, practiced Scripture with social and spiritual impact, their lived history is part of their being. A new interpretation, whether religiously or historically grounded, cannot remove that baggage. To say, for example, "these verses can be interpreted in terms of sexual violence" (c.f, for instance, Rabbi Steven Greenberg) or "these verses came into being in a context which could not conceive of a loving same-sex relationship" (c.f. Rabbi Bradley Artson)*-- these are good readings, some of the best, and accurate and useful as they go-- but they do nothing to address the history of the verses, and their consequences, historical and current, for pretty much any queer inhabitant of the West (and recently, the 2/3 world-- witness, for example, Uganda.) Nor can they erase the fact that when I stand before the Torah in April, I will be chanting words-- understood, if only then, in that ritual space, as God's words--that at once condemn me (as a queer person) and make me invisible (as a queer woman).

As I read them, all these interpretations ask me in some way to make peace with these texts. This is not something I am willing to do, for two reasons.

First, and more specifically, to make peace with this particular text requires me to forgive the history it carries with it. Not only am I not willing to forgive this, but I lack the authority to do so-- that belongs to those who have been hurt by it more gravely than I.

Second, and more broadly, I don't believe in making peace with Scripture in general. I think that on a practical level, this leads to a dangerous complacency. If we've made peace with a troubling Scripture, we're a great deal less likely to deal with its consequences-- and a great deal more likely to pat ourselves on the back amid self-congratulatory, patronizing intonations: "It's so wonderful we're past that, isn't it? Now let's forget it's a part of our history." Such inaction allows us to feel good about ourselves without taking much concrete action.**

On a spiritual level, I think that making peace with Scripture is perhaps not the way Scripture wishes us to interact with it. Passive acceptance is not a fitting way to receive the foundational texts of our tradition, and parts of the Hebrew Bible reflect this. Abraham negotiated with God for the lives of the Sodomites. Jacob wrestled with the messenger of God. Sarah laughed in God's face, and Miriam spoke out against Moses's arbitrary privilege.

This minor list of narratives isn't an attempt to promote a single interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and it isn't meant to give a simplistic reading of those stories-- all of which have a dark side. God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah anyway, and when Abraham himself was asked to do something abhorrent, he went right along. Sarah and Jacob, for their moments of bravery and integrity, had more than enough douchbaggery on their tallies to balance it out, and Miriam's reward for her integrity was leprosy and shunning. Yet these dark sides, I think, prove my point: Scripture is complex and troubling. It provides no unblemished (human) role models, no uncomplicated morals, and plenty of "What The Hell, Hero?" moments--many in which the hero in question is God. To make peace with it is to do a grave disservice to a wickedly complicated, history-soaked, deeply divine, and profoundly human text.

It's a lot easier to give an interpretation of a text that makes it palatable, than it is to grapple with the implications of belonging to a tradition whose Scripture is so vexing and whose history is so morally ambiguous. But in my opinion, anyone who tells you that religion is supposed to be easy, or even comforting, is full of shit.

If you are a theist, then theism-- inasmuch as it functions in a faith that the universe cares about you in some way, or that something about you is eternal-- yes, that's comforting, because that's fundamentally divine. But religion-- the social, textual, cultural, historical, and moral context into which you place that belief-- religion is a human thing. Religion is HARD. It should force you to take a hard look at the interaction between the better angels of whatever divinity you believe in and the reality of your existence-- and if you're looking at that honestly, you will realize that you will always come up short. You will also realize that as long as you keep working, that that fact is OK. Honest engagement with religion requires you to live with ambiguity and paradox. It should always keep you just a bit off center. It should demand that you think critically about yourself and about it, and it should require that when you see something that isn't right, in it or in yourself, that you speak up and DO something.

Obviously, throughout history, there are countless examples of religion failing to function in that way, and the consequences have often been horrendous. The consequences of the texts in my parsha are but one body of testimony to that fact. That, too, is part of our shared Scripture as practitioners of religion. That, too, we must grapple with. And that is why, as a practitioner who loves my tradition and my Scripture(in the same challenging, frustrating, adversarial way that I love my species, despite semi-regular exclamations to the effect of "I HATE people!")-- I will not make peace with my parsha. I will chant it with respect and awe, with frustration and profound anger and hurt. And I will stand at the bimah and deliver a d'var torah in which I tell those assembled that in no way should they forget, excise, or avoid this text. Instead, they should wrestle it, as Jacob wrestled God's messenger.

And then they should try not to be as much of a douchebag as he was afterwards.

*In no way do I wish to imply that either Greenberg or Artson fail to do the hard work of engaging the texts and their vexation. Both do a masterful job of it. I am simply using interpretations that they use as part of this process as stand-alone examples here.

**I also do not wish to imply that providing a welcoming and inclusive worship space does not count as valuable action, but I would suggest that avoiding these texts without then making concrete changes-- for example, actually making queer worshipers visible and performing queer life-cycle events-- does not actually count as providing such a space.