New Leader for Family of Gay Worshipers : Religion: Rabbi Marc Blumenthal hopes mainstream Judaism will soon accept his congregation into its spiritual home.

As Rabbi Marc Blumenthal prepares to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, he sees the High Holy Days as having particular importance at Congregation Beth Chayim Chadashim, the world’s oldest gay and lesbian synagogue.

“For all Jews, this time marks a return to our roots, to our spiritual sources, to our families,” said Blumenthal, the newly installed rabbi at the 20-year-old congregation in the Fairfax District.

“In our particular context, in this particular year, it’s a chance to re-create our families within the congregation, to integrate our families of birth and of choice with each other. And it’s a chance for us to reflect and recognize that hatred is not a family value, no matter what any politician says.”

The way Blumenthal sees it, a congregation “should provide a sense of home and family. It should offer a healthy environment in which to worship.”

Gay and lesbian Jews, however, “have not been afforded that possibility in 99.9% of traditional congregations. . . . Until we can kiss our lovers on (Sabbath) without others looking at us oddly; until we can have our relationships and anniversaries affirmed; until we can have illnesses such as AIDS openly acknowledged by the congregation, we are not at home.”

Congregation president Noah Alexander agreed. “Some of us have virtually nothing by way of blood family,” he said. “This congregation isn’t virtual family--it is our family.”

And like any extended Jewish family, the congregation will greet the new year as an intergenerational mix. Thus, a recent Sabbath service, the first led by Blumenthal, included worshipers ranging from their teens to their 80s; the athletic and the disabled; those in hand-embroidered skullcaps and those who never wear them.

The congregation also includes more than two dozen children, principally from former marriages or adoptions, bisexuals such as board member Fran Chalin, and even occasional heterosexuals, such as writers Ellen Jaffe McClain and her husband, Spencer Gill.

“Most reform congregations cater to couples with kids, and to older people,” McClain said. “We never really felt comfortable there. So, we joined here.”

For almost all members of the congregation, it has been a long trek in search of a home.

Beth Chayim Chadashim, whose Hebrew name means “The House of New Life,” was founded 20 years ago by eight Jews who had previously rented space from the gay Metropolitan Community Church. It was the first gay and lesbian congregation anywhere, and it remains one of only three with full- time rabbinic leadership. (The others are in San Francisco and New York).

The paucity of such congregations stems not from lack of need, Blumenthal insists, estimating that Los Angeles County alone may have as many as 60,000 gay and lesbian Jews. Rather, he says, it reflects an “overly narrow” interpretation of religious law. The argument most frequently thrown against him is the injunction in Leviticus prohibiting a man from sleeping with another man as he would with a woman. Blumenthal responds that religious laws must evolve with the times. Even the most orthodox of Jews, he notes, no longer demand enforcement of biblical passages calling for the sacrifice of animals, the killing of children who disobey their parents or the killing of public drunkards.

Similarly, the nearly 3,000-year-old tradition prohibiting the ordination of women has largely been abandoned by Reform and Conservative Judaism over the last two decades. The next sea change, he predicted, may well be the full acceptance of gays and lesbians within the Jewish mainstream.

“I’ve heard a lot about ‘hating the sin, but loving the sinner,’ ” Blumenthal said. “Quite frankly, that doesn’t cut it anymore.

“Jewish tradition teaches that God did not create in vain. All of us are created in partnership with God. Nor can any of us work for the common good until we have achieved our own good.

“Jewish law commands us to be true to ourselves. If I acted as if I were a straight man, I would not be true to myself.”

Ordained at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 1986, Blumenthal was repeatedly asked to officiate at funerals of gay men who had died of AIDS--without mentioning either their sexual orientation or the disease. The experience, he said, left him “very uncomfortable.”

The turning point came one night when he was awakened by a caller. A Jewish funeral home had refused the traditional washing and cleansing of the body of someone who died from AIDS.

Blumenthal called the home and told them to treat the body as they would if the deceased had died of hepatitis. Otherwise, he would report the home to the appropriate authorities, effectively cutting their caseload.

The body was washed and cleansed.

Soon afterward, Blumenthal moved to Colorado to serve as the Rocky Mountain Rabbinical Council’s executive director and Jewish community chaplain. He was also appointed to Gov. Roy Romer’s council on AIDS issues, and he helped campaign to successfully defeat an initiative aimed at repealing Denver’s gay rights law.

Last summer, Beth Chayim Chadashim, many of whose members drive from Orange County and the desert to attend services, recruited Blumenthal to the Pico Boulevard congregation.

With his religious books not yet out of their moving crates, Blumenthal is already calling for a larger building to house his 450-member congregation because on may occasions there is not enough room for everyone to sit. He is pushing for an accelerated program to provide dinners to people with AIDS, and an expansion of groups studying gay, lesbian and bisexual identity in the Jewish culture.

“We have to affirm who we are--it’s part of our heritage,” said Blumenthal. “And if I were to die tomorrow, I know I’d be remembered by a few hundred people at Kaddish.

“Talk about family values, how many people could say that?”