It was the dumbest thing I did while serving as a volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces during Operation Cast Lead in 2009.

I was stationed at Kerem Shalom, bordering Gaza. Waking up late one morning, I donned my IDF uniform, loaded my plate with breakfast from the soldiers’ mess, and ran toward the military vehicle that would take us to the desert where we were building a fence to stop terrorists from smuggling explosives and drugs into Israel.

The soldiers looked at me as if I was wearing a suicide bomber’s vest. The driver yelled at me in Hebrew. The major pointed his M-16 rifle at the breakfast plate in my hand.

The shekel had dropped: I had broken a kosher law, violated a sacred boundary, and fouled my plate by bringing it out of the dining hall.

In a rapid-fire discussion, several soldiers proposed remedies to heal the breach and restore the polluted dish to its original state of purity. As a biblical scholar, I kicked myself for forgetting the Levitical kosher laws. Why do Jews fuss over kosher? I asked myself.

I found the answer in Genesis 1. Reciting the chapter in Hebrew from memory as I dug in the desert, I latched on to the word “divided/separated.”

God’s Barricades Are Good

God’s first act of creation was to erect barricades. In Genesis 1, God separates light from darkness, the waters above from the waters below, and day from night. He also installed barricades separating waters from land, day from night, Sabbath from workdays, humans from animals, and male from female. God blessed those blockades and declared them “good.”

The barriers are what hold back the mythical sea monsters of “chaos.” These dragons (sometimes called Leviathan and Rahab) are perpetually poised to extirpate God’s creation and return it to its original state of “formless and desolate emptiness.”

Dethroning God by Demolishing Divisions

The height of hubris is for humans to play (anti)-God and bulldoze these barricades.

Beguiled by the serpent’s weaponized hubris, “You will be like God,” the first humans pulled down the fence around the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and ate some of its fruit. The consequences were catastrophic.

In Genesis 6, the “sons of God” (widely interpreted as “fallen angels”) blitzed the barricades separating heaven and earth/angels and humans by having “unnatural” sex with the “daughters of men.” Scripture and tradition indict the fallen angels of hubris.

Genesis 11 tells us how the Tower of Babel was designed to erase the distinction between earth and heaven/humans and God. In response, God laughed at the humans’ hubris and confused their language.

To resolve the global chaos that followed, God separated one man — Abraham — from his clan, land, country, and religion and commissioned him to be a blessing to every family on Earth for the rest of time. Abraham’s humility sets in motion God’s salvific purposes for humankind.

But Genesis 18 tells us how human hubris returns with homosexual rape gangs in Sodom pulverizing God’s definitive barricade distinguishing male from female. Now, men want to have sex with men. In response, God rains sulfur and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah.

Death Penalty for Breaking Barriers

The next time we read about forbidden homosexual relations is in the book of Leviticus: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (18:22, cf. 20:13). The Bible prescribes the death penalty for violating the prohibition of gay sex.

In Leviticus 18, God threatens to remove the barriers separating Israel from her pagan neighbors, because this is what the Israelites effectively do by following the “practices” of Egypt (Leviticus 18:3).

Leviticus 20 ends with God commanding the Israelites to “make a distinction between clean and unclean animals and between unclean and clean birds” (20:25), reiterating the separation between kosher (permitted) and terefah (prohibited).

Why Jews Keep Kosher

Clusters of kosher laws dominate sections of the Pentateuch. “You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean,” God commands the Israelites (Leviticus 10:10).

The Hebrew Bible uses the verb badal (to divide, separate, distinguish) some 40 times. In Exodus the word is used liturgically: “And the veil shall separate for you the Holy Place from the Most Holy” (26:33).

What is the purpose of all these separations, including the sexual ones? “You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own” (Leviticus 20:26).

Kosher is key to the Jewish way of life because the kosher laws are a constant reminder of the barricades that God has installed throughout all creation. They act as ever-present cues in daily life, deflating the lingering temptation to bulldoze barriers in the mistaken belief that I can redesign God’s creation in my conceit. In fact, I can do it better than God.

Gay Hubris in Pride Month

Hubris is a hot theme in Greek mythology. It is defined as “excessive pride” or the “overweening presumption that leads a person to disregard the divinely fixed limits on human action in an ordered cosmos.”

Unsurprisingly, one of the most monumental acts of hubris, the public flaunting of both homosexuality and transgenderism — both acts of narcissistic defiance smashing the barricades erected between male and female — is now being celebrated by marking June as “Pride Month.”

The obscenity on display gets more perverse and blasphemous every year, and children are now included in “Pride” parades as part of their indoctrination into the phallic cult.

Catholics have begun to fight back by using a devotion that emerged during the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, and for a long time has been commemorated during the month of June: the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Subverting Pride Month with Jesus’s Humility

In time to subvert “Pride Month,” the Souls & Liberty Action Network has just erected a huge image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Times Square, right in the middle of New York City.

The 60’ x 20’ billboard, mounted atop the Westin Hotel at the corner of 43rd St. and 8th Ave., is reminding millions of passersby that humility is the opposite of hubris.

Jesus, God’s Logos, “through whom all things were made” and who set God’s barricades in place at the dawn of creation, is the epitome of humility.

He invites us to shed our hubris with the most comforting words in Matthew:

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

In Greek tragedy, the hero who attempts to achieve godlike status meets his nemesis, the vengeance of the gods. In the New Testament, Jesus — the Jew who alone has kept not just God’s kosher laws, but every single law in the Torah — humbles himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

He bears God’s wrath. He pays the price of our salvation. We have broken God’s barricades, and brought upon ourselves catastrophic consequences, but Jesus’s cross became the bridge over the waters of chaos and His death has defeated the dragons of chaos. Jesus’s resurrection guarantees the ultimate victory over the chaos of “Pride Month” and human hubris.

 

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.