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For gay Jews who are serious about Jewish practice, Leviticus 18:22 -- "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence" -- and its implications are painful at best and at worst alienate Jews from their tradition and communities.

In a clip from the film "Trembling before God," the gay Orthodox Rabbi Steve Greenberg describes how his own response to the reading of this verse during the afternoon service on Yom Kippur evolved over time. The quiet weeping beneath his tallit in his 20s eventually wore itself out, and he was ready to take an aliyah while the verse was being read. As he stood next to the Torah that day, an unexpected calm settled upon him. "I realized my willingness to be vulnerable to the text required the text to be vulnerable to me and to everybody like me," he said.

As gays begin to open up and tell their stories within the Jewish community, Greenberg suggested, not only will individual Jews and rabbis start to have greater empathy, but somehow even the Torah text itself will be transformed. "The letters will become faces and the very shape of the meaning of the verse will change," he said.

Greenberg will speak at the Egger Shabbaton, at the Jewish Center, March 19 to 21. He was invited as part of the Jewish Center's struggle with the question of how to be more open to gay Jews.

The Jewish community, even within Orthodoxy, has begun to open up to gays and lesbians, suggested Greenberg. Although the Orthodox community is not proactively seeking change, some rabbis, like Rabbi Yuval Cherlow in Israel, are at least talking about the need to begin the conversation.

Although the Law Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement has made some decisions about the treatment of gays and lesbians, including opening the door to both ordination commitment ceremonies, the acceptance was not unreserved. By accepting two opposing opinions about the status of homosexuals, the committee left the final decision about whether to accept gay rabbis and commitment ceremonies to individual synagogues and rabbis. "The synagogue is in the position of having to choose between a permissive and nonpermissive stance," Greenberg said. "It is legitimate in the movement to accept or reject gay rabbis and gay marriage."

Greenberg also had another reason for not letting the Conservative movement off the hook. He contended that the movement should have been discussing these issues for 20 years -- at the very least where lesbians are concerned, because lesbian sex is not prohibited in the Torah. He attributed the movement's unwillingness to start the conversation sooner to lingering homophobia. "All along, halakhah was a bit of a cover that allowed them to resist dealing with issues of gender and sexuality that they didn't want to address," he said.

Nonetheless, Greenberg added that he is happy that the movement has finally addressed these issues. And for Rabbi Adam Feldman at the Jewish Center, the law committee's decision allowed him to take up the gauntlet and begin encouraging his congregation to understand what it means to be welcoming of gays and lesbians. "My goal is that young people who grow up in this congregation know that the congregation is accepting of who they are," he explained. "It's not about gaining members -- that's not my goal. It's about who we are."

For Greenberg, it took a long time to accept his homosexuality, and it did not happen until long after he moved from Conservative to Orthodox Judaism at age 15 in Columbus, Ohio, where he grew up. His interest in Orthodox observance started almost serendipitously, when after an adolescent fight with his mother about walking to synagogue in the rain, he ended up at the nearby Orthodox shul of Rabbi Joseph Vilensky. An invitation to lunch blossomed into Saturday afternoons studying over tea and oranges, and over several months Greenberg became observant. He decided to attend Yeshiva University, where received his rabbinic ordination.

Although Greenberg started to recognize his attraction to fellow students in yeshiva, it took many years for him to admit, first privately, then publicly, that he was gay. His first step was far from home, and hence personally safe. He sought out the reigning haredi posek, or law decisor, in Jerusalem, Rabbi Shalom Yosef Elyashuv, and said to him, "Master, I'm attracted to both men and women, what should I do?" The rabbi responded, "You have twice the power of love; use it carefully." So on his return to New York City he threw himself into dating women in order to get married.

The lack of sexual contact before marriage in the Orthodox community protected him, allowing him to date women without having to engage sexually. But his lack of desire for women led to a trail of failing relationships, and after 15 years of denial, Greenberg admitted his homosexuality to himself and began in the early 1990s to come out to family and friends. In 1992, he wrote about his struggle, and eventually published the piece as an article in Tikkun magazine in 1993, under the pseudonym, Jacob Levado, or Jacob alone.

What finally gave him the chance to think deeply about both his homosexuality and his commitment to Orthodox Judaism was two years in Israel, at the end of which he came out publicly as a gay Orthodox rabbi. In 1996, after 11 years at CLAL, Greenberg got a fellowship to study educational policy in Jerusalem. Fellows were expected to spend half their time exploring an issue or problem, and he decided to look seriously at sexuality in the rabbinic tradition; the work he did eventually found its way into his book, published in 2004, "Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition."

In Jerusalem, Greenberg started a gay men's study group and was one of the organizers of the Jerusalem Open House, a community center for gays and lesbians in Jerusalem. As he was ready to leave Israel, his fellow board members urged him to come out of the closet, to provide a religious context for the community center's opening.

Although Rabbi Greenberg was not quite ready to come out publicly, fate would have it otherwise. On the airplane back to the United States he ended up sitting next to the Maariv newspaper reporter through whom his friends had wanted him to come out. "There I was," he said. "I wasn't willing to make the appointment, but obviously someone else was."

The Maariv article soon led to a similar one in the Forward in whose wake he started to get responses from the Orthodox community. Many colleagues were supportive, but a rabbi from Yeshiva University called the idea of a gay Orthodox rabbi an absurdity and compared it to a rabbi who eats cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur.

After Sandi Simcha DuBowski, director of "Trembling Before God," had bugged Greenberg numerous times over several years to appear in his film, Greenberg finally agreed to take part. The film is built around personal stories of Hassidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian and are trying to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism and God with the drastic biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality. The Shabbat after the "coming out" article appeared in the Forward, DuBowski invited himself to Greenberg's house for Shabbat lunch and asked if he could bring along a friend as well. That friend was Steven Goldstein, Greenberg's partner of over 11 years.

Greenberg has many ideas on how Judaism might look at the offending Leviticus verse and other texts from a different perspective. He wonders whether, in the biblical context, the verse was perhaps prohibiting violent or humiliating sex where powerful men taking advantage of weaker ones. "There are reasonable ways to read that text which expand it in a different direction than the one that much of the Western world and certainly the Jewish world have read it for the past 2,000 years," he said. "One reasonable way to read the verse is as a rejection of sex motivated by domination, humiliation, and violence."

Greenberg acknowledges that presently is not an accepted halakhic strategy, certainly in the eyes of most contemporary Orthodox rabbis. "However, the value of such a reading," said Greenberg, "is that Orthodox people who discover themselves to be gay need to know there is a way to feel not utterly rejected and despised by God and the Torah."

Although changes in the attitudes of the Jewish world toward homosexuality have been slow, Rabbi Greenberg has observed several.

The first is a change in attitudes as more people come to realize that they have gay relatives, friends, and colleagues. "The biggest change has been more and more people coming out and more and more people knowing gay people who strike them not as sinful or sick but as regular people trying to find love or affection in the world and get on with having a good life," he said.

Finally, Orthodox rabbis in particular are becoming clear that compassion is what is required of them. "They are not willing to change the halakhah," Greenberg said, "but they are willing to change their fundamental emotional stance. They don't see gay people as spoilers anymore; they see them increasingly in the frame of victims."

To synagogues like the Jewish Center that are trying to become more welcoming to gays and lesbians, Greenberg noted that the long-standing view of suburban synagogues as "family oriented" is outdated. Not only are gays and lesbians, along with their children, interested in being part of their local community synagogues -- but so are divorced people, blended families, single moms and dads, widows, unmarried congregants, and people who were not able to have children.

What synagogues need to do, he suggested, is to be responsive to the whole community. "Not everyone is married, has children, or is straight," Greenberg said. "Life has to go on. How do you integrate people into that world? It's no different than integrating people with wheelchairs or people who are blind or anyone different in ways that are challenging. Some congregants don't know what to do when the first Jewish person of color walks in the door."

The reality of today's synagogues is that they are multiracial, multiethnic, multisexual, and have multiple types of families. "That's what we are; that's what is real," Greenberg said. "All shuls have to figure our how to be like the tent of Abraham and Sarah -- open to the other who walks in the door and wants to be welcomed in the community."

Greenberg will speak Friday, March 19, 8:30 p.m., on "Gays in the Garden and other Birthday Suit Dreams"; Saturday, at morning Sabbath services, on "Hachnasat Orchim [Welcoming Guests]: Constructing the Welcoming Tent," and after lunch on "Wrestling with Leviticus: Four Rationales for the Biblical Prohibition." He will speak on Sunday morning, 9 a.m., on "Adam and Adama: Biblical and Rabbinic Models of the Human-Earth Relationship." To register for dinner, send a check for $20 to the Jewish Center by March 15. For more information, contact the Jewish Center at (609) 921-0100.