Of course, but having said that you've said relatively little. I readily assume that most prophets from most religions were doing the best they could given their cultural and intellectual limitations. But this does not grant their "revelatory visions" the status of holy writ.
I cannot speak to other prophets from other religions. But in terms of our own prophets and their revelations, yes, it actually does grant them the status of holy writ. That is why we have a fixed canon of Tanach, and are able to use verses from nevi'im as prooftexts to support halachic arguments.
It is important for me to understand the text as being a product of divine inspiration
through human agency because I do believe that the Written Torah we have is not perfect: it requires the human
tikkunim which we are empowered to create within the paradigm of
torah sheb'al peh. This is to my understanding the most important facet of the concept of
dibrah torah ki'lshon b'nai adam, that because the Written Torah is set down in the idiom (both linguistic and cultural) of the time and place of those who wrote it, we must continually re-examine and reinterpret it as our
lashon (both linguistic and cultural) evolves.
But we do this through halachah and aggadah, not by simply junking verses we don't like, and just writing them off to ignorance.
I'm not sure why these two sentences are bound together. It's almost as if you are saying ...... which is obviously nonsense. One's ability to reframe or otherwise rationalize xenophobic pronouncements makes them no less faulty. And while I appreciate the creative efforts taken to make such verses at least minimally palatable, they retain the quality of a tortured obeisance to literalism.
I think you are forgetting that, first of all,
pshat is not the only kind of meaning there is-- it isn't even always the applicable halachic meaning. And second of all,
pshat is what our Rabbis tell us it is. The Perushim and Tanna'im, who had broad and deep powers of interpretation we no longer enjoy, could tell us what we were to consider
pshat and what not-- so for example, when they teach us that
'ayin tachat 'ayin means financial reparations resulting from a judicial process, they indicate that we are to understand that as the
pshat of that verse-- that we are not to conclude that literally removing someone's eye if they have knocked out someone's eye is in any way an acceptable reading, even if it is a reading we do not use in application.
So when I say that I presume there is a reading of those two verses in Vayikra that does not indicate a blanket ban on homosexuality and all that entails, I mean just that. Maybe that is a limitation of context, as I described above, and which RabbiO seems to feel is a correct and justifiable reading; maybe it is restricting application to some
drash or
remez or even
sohd that I cannot guess at. Or maybe it is a clarification of what is
pshat, which I do not know and would not have the power to declare if I did.
Hence my conclusion that the verses should be put into halachic abeyance until Eliyahu ha-Navi and the moshiach come to teach us.
