THE CHASSIDIC WRITER: A Lesbian Mother of Seven

I’d like to give this interview as a follow-up to my “Berkeh’s Story” that was posted here a short time ago.

I was born in Dallas, Texas in 1956, into an immigrant family—my grandparents had lost all their money in the Depression and then drove down to Texas with everything they owned in their car. They were Russian Jews with an orthodox background, although we were all Reform by the time I was growing up. We were a tight family. We met every week for a big traditional meal.

I was a dreamy girl, artistic and edgy and idealistic. In adolescence, I found it painful when the other girls began flirting with boys. I didn’t understand how to do that, and knew I was different. I had friends, but somehow still felt terribly lonely. In high school, I fell in love with a girl but it was socially dangerous to even name what I felt. I wrote long letters to her, I obsessed over her.  But it didn’t have a name. I didn’t know anyone else who felt like that, either.

When I met the first Lubavitch shluchim to come to Dallas, I was still full of desire that easily became a dissociated floating desire to bind my soul to a great mystical other. I believe that for me, religion was where I put physical longing.

I’m interested in the interrelationship of spiritual and sexual desire. They both go to the core of who you are.

I never told the girl I fell in love with how I felt. She was a straight girl and I wouldn’t dare. One weekend, we had plans to go camping, but it looked like rain. This was 1971, and I was sixteen and had just graduated high school. I’d come across this poster about a shabbaton (weekend learning event that takes place over the Sabbath). Because it was raining, we went to that shabbaton instead and I fell in love with religion! My life changed by a caprice of the weather. The hassidim promised me unqualified love. They promised me G-d! I was swept away.

A young Rabbi Moshe Feller was there. I call him the consummate salesman. He encouraged us to come to his new institute in St. Paul, Minnesota. I didn’t have money but he said he would take care of me. I was going to college in the fall but I went off that summer to St. Paul, to Bais Chanah Institute for Women, and talked my girl friend into going with me.  

After a while, my friend left. She said she really hated it. I grieved losing her terribly, but it didn’t stop my headlong fall into frumkeit (Orthodox Jewish religion). I soon had the worst case of “baal tshuva syndrome” (returnee to Judaism)—spouting mystical lines, obsessively attending to every detail in halacha with no compromise and no common sense, the kind of baalas teshuva that embarrasses lifers. That was me at sixteen.

But the shluchim in Dallas were thrilled because I was their first. When I left the Institute, I went to their home every couple of days of what remained of my summer, just to help me cope with my parents, who were so upset about my new frumkeit. I moved out and on to college, since I had a scholarship and thus means of support. I had little contact with them after that, and would not for years. I was lonely and confused, too young to be on my own, and the more unhappy I was, the more I clung to yiddishkeit. I began to study chassidus to dispel all the rising doubts, and fear, about my new Chassidic life. I studied a lot.

I used to dream I was a yeshiva boy. I would lose myself in learning, live in those gorgeous books, apart from the huge world that was looming too soon on my young life. I became reasonably fluent in learning, for a baal tshuvah. Then, when a new Chabad House opened in Austin, I transferred to the university there.

But I was a girl. I was told clearly that I could attain all those religious goals, and God’s loving approval, not through study but through marriage and children. I wound up with a shidduch (arranged marriage) at eighteen, and got married a month after my nineteenth birthday. The shliach in Austin made the shidduch. By that time, I was a Chassidic soldier—I just wanted to please G-d and do “the right thing,” and I would do anything to that end. I never thought about loving my husband, or desire. Nobody asked.

I had seven children in a ten-year span, and I fell in love with every one. That’s what my life became. I also became, of course, a day school teacher, and I was good at it. But no matter what I did, I lived with terrible loneliness, in the middle of so many people always around me! My marriage was empty. I watched the burden of supporting a big household and the inexplicable lack of anything vital between us wear him down over the years. We got so we rarely spoke, slept apart, and he lost interest in sex (can I blame him?)  He worked and worried about money, and turned always back to his learning. Today, I think it is a crime against non-homosexuals for gay people to marry them and steal their youth, waste their love. It’s not just about us. 

not the actual family

I was always sick with low-grade stuff, allergies, mild persistent asthma, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. I had gay dreams I didn't dare tell anyone about, developed insomnia, then panic attacks in my sleep. This went on for years. I never talked about these things.

My last child was a preemie, and I quit teaching. As he got older, and I got older, and had more quiet time, I simply became more conscious. But at the time, it felt like something had happened to my hormones and I started feeling like an adolescent, as if I’d frozen in place at age sixteen for years, and then, when I unfroze, felt…everything. Natural physical longing settled over me. I would lie alone in my separate bed and pray that I would get to hold a woman in my arms and feel her healing love and touch, just once in my life.

Then I became intensely, briefly attracted to one woman in the community and this alarmed and scared me. So I went to a therapist to try to put it in its place.

All of this was taking place in Texas, in a small Chabad community. I thought I was the only frum gay woman in the world.

The last thing you do in the frum community is share your secrets. I had friends, and found the frum community loving and supportive of its own, if you met their criteria, but even friends did not confide in one another. Secrets, once released, can hurt your children, hurting you in your most vulnerable place. So, I began to write, a way to finally talk, then I hid my writing under my bed. But as soon as I started doing that, I realized I wasn’t the only one hiding stories.

When you live in the frum world, you have a group identity and a group voice. Like everyone, I had accumulated my secrets over the years. But I wrote many stories through those sleepless nights, all of our secret stories. I hid them all.

Our Houston community had no high school because the shliach there felt it was important to send teenagers away from the pervasive secular influence. I found sending my kids away one at a time devastating. The yeshiva in many ways replaced us as parents. But at yeshiva, my sons sat long hours, were forbidden to speak of girls or talk to girls, and were constantly exhorted with very final answers to cosmic questions before they could even formulate their natural young questioning. I remembered being young and dreamy with that adolescent grandiosity that makes a kid feel they can choose any path, accomplish the world, and my kids didn’t seem to be allowed that. I could see what I hadn’t seen in myself, that they were being stamped onto one path and pushed quickly past their adolescence, and I began to feel terrible about the whole yeshiva thing.

Old dreams of making love to a woman returned. In the daytime, I would say to myself, why am I dreaming I’m a man, because I refused to imagine in the daytime that I was a woman making love to a woman in that dream. Panic attacks in my sleep returned, and sleepwalking, and insomnia. I wrote and wrote through those nights.

When I wrote “Berkeh’s Story,” I didn’t imagine myself to be Berkeh. I wrote the story purely as an act of empathy. Only now, years later and with a more educated eye, I can see why so many who read the story once it was published presumed the author was gay. But at the time, I wouldn’t allow myself to think the word lesbian or gay, and I thought I could hide behind the label of “fiction.” I wrote it, and hid it under the bed with the others.

I had a friend in Crown Heights, a kind, deep person, who did “spiritual counseling.” Because she was so naturally un-judgmental, one and then a stream of secretly gay women started showing up, like an underground railroad of chassidishe women from Crown Heights, Boro Park, Williamsburg. She told each one that there is nothing wrong with them, that despite whatever they thought and felt, they were good people, and they should go back to their husbands. I think this is what most of them wanted to hear and they were simply grateful for her unqualified acceptance of them as whole and good people. She was the first person to whom I admitted these feelings.

I shared “Berkeh’s Story” with this friend and she told me to submit it to a Moment Magazine short story contest. There were nearly a thousand entrants, and Berkeh won the competition! Moment Magazine had the second largest circulation of any Jewish periodical, and for five minutes, my story was everywhere—very exciting and very scary. One story had come out from under the bed.

My husband was a graduate of an Ivy League school. He worked in IT. He had suppressed a great deal of his interests to become frum and he was quietly proud of me for writing, though he wouldn’t read what I wrote because it would take time away from learning Torah. He decided he wasn’t worried about Moment Magazine because he didn’t think there were any frum Jews who read it.

Then one day, the Rav called me. I was scared to death. I had been taught, “If a Rav says black is white, it is white.” You make yourself a rav and you only ask a sha’aleh (question about Jewish law) when you are ready to accept, b’kabolos ol (with innocent and complete acceptance), one hundred percent of what he says.  Now he was calling me. He said, “Is that Leah Lax? I thought you were a fruma veiber mit a sheitl,” (a religious woman who covers her head with a wig). Suddenly I felt dishonest saying yes. Instead I said, “That’s what they say about me.” He asked how I dared to put such a story in a magazine. People had come to him about it. He said, “You‘ve hung out our dirty laundry.”

I was shaking hard. That was the first and only time I ever talked back to a Rav. It was the first time I argued. I argued for Berkeh. Berkeh is a good boy. He is many of our boys. All I did was show his real feelings. The Rav hung up on me.

I am NOT dirty laundry.

                                                   Thanks to Frum Satire, whose picture this is

I had been taught that halacha is a whole package, a contract with God. I didn’t know how to take just some of it. With that conversation, I felt the contract break within me. And it was pivotal.

After that, inside me, it was all over. In time, I let myself fall in love with a woman. I divorced my husband. I left the community. I stopped keeping halacha gradually because it was embedded in me, but I could never find a compromise. How could I continue to honor a contract that implied that the love that I have to give is dirty laundry?

I had never met an out lesbian. It would be years more before I met anyone else both gay and frum—I still felt like the only one in the world. But I had heard of this one Jewish lesbian that intrigued me. She wasn’t frum, but I wanted a friend, someone who might understand. I went to meet her, determined to try to forge an honest connection with someone at last, thinking no one in my community will know.

Falling in love with a woman the first time was amazing. The most glorious thing! It all happened hard and fast and I couldn’t sleep or eat from the rush of hormones that left me half nauseous and dreamy. I was forty-six years old going on sixteen, amazed that love could be the most natural thing in the world, and that without knowing, I knew just what to do.

But once we got involved, I was followed and people even took pictures of me pulling into her driveway.

I thought, H-shem gave me this gift that feels like a spectacular celebration of the life He gave me. Halacha judges me, people judge me, but H-shem gives me this amazing part of myself that halacha and rabbis want me to shut down. I’d say that, in a way, that first love experience was a big part of my separating halacha and rabbanim from G-d in my mind, and deepened my faith in G-d.

Still, I wish I’d had the courage to tell my husband and children “I’m a lesbian,” complete the divorce, and move out, all before getting into a relationship. The style of our parenting had always been to protect our children by keeping them innocent, so I never told them I was gay or, G-d forbid, that I had fallen in love with a woman, even though some of them were grown.  Years later, they would look back on my “protection” and the little lies I used to build it, as simple dishonesty. As betrayal. From your own mom. Whom you always loved and trusted.

Lashon hara (slander) was flying. People confronted my children and husband and never me. My younger kids began acting out. I stayed on too long, trying to at least make the bar mitzvah of my youngest son for him. That event, when it finally came, was a false show of togetherness that makes my son wince today to remember.

A while after I moved out, my husband insisted I come and speak openly to the children. I did a terrible job of coming out to them. I planned what to say for days, but I never got a word out. The kids didn’t let me speak, and all spoke at once. They were very hurt, not nearly as much about my being gay as my having an affair and hurting their father.

Being gay? Well, that part didn’t surprise them at all. Sigh. Nobody knows you like your kids. Some didn’t speak to me for months afterwards.

My two youngest wanted to stay with their father. They were thirteen and fourteen. That was hard. We lived in the South where there is less tolerance for issues of sexual orientation, and my lawyer said, “Don’t even try to get custody.” So I moved less than a mile away, and I saw my kids very often. Their father supported that.

After I left, the community treated my two youngest like orphans, with great pity, and they hated that. That pity drove them away from yiddishkeit (Jewish life). They said, “They act like you are dead!” They told me, “How can people reject you and at the same time say they love me, when you are a big part of me?” Kids really hate hypocrisy.

I lost my community, my friends, my family, in part my kids. I started over with nothing, alone. Gradually I found my way, and through it all, never stopped writing. I went to a university and developed my craft. Writing forced me to stay honest with myself. I got a job, new friends, new community. When I met my partner, what drew us together was how very much we shared in the present, not the past.

My life with her is peaceful, affectionate, funny, endlessly interesting. Having this good whole life has helped me enormously in my relationship with my kids, like a great pool from which I dip and share patience, strength, and good humor with them. I didn’t let my kids reject me. I just showed up and said, “I’m still here. I’m your mom.”

There’s some damage, on both sides. The healing continues. A few just don’t include me in their lives as much as before. I struggle terribly with their reticence about my partner, and so does she. She came into my life ready to play grandparent, with no children of her own. But all the grandkids are in frum homes, and she has had to gradually face the reality that they won’t open that door.

Years have passed. When I go to my kids’ houses, they have stopped being embarrassed, even the ones in Crown Heights. I arrive in my pants and uncovered hair and my son walks with his arm in mine down a busy street. We are close.

Not long after I left, I went to my ex-husband and said, “I never wanted to hurt you.” But he said he had forgiven me a long time ago. He said, too much was in H-shem’s hands, not ours. “We didn’t get to choose that you are a lesbian.” We’ve been on good terms ever since. Not everyday friends, but amiable co-parents. The others in that community shunned me, walked on the other side of the road, wouldn’t talk with me. He was the only one who stayed the same. Really, he got better. Warmer.

All those years of my marriage, I took women to the mikvah (pool for ritual immersion), since we didn’t have a mikvah lady. I thought it was a very spiritual and beautiful thing to do. I wasn’t conscious of any attraction to any of those women. But when I read the earlier interview with the mikvah lady posted on this blog, I cried. After the divorce, I heard that my community was freaked out that a lesbian had taken their women to the mikvah for years. At the time, I thought they were horribly wrong and unfair, but eventually I saw why they were upset. I can understand.

The last time I went to the mikvah, I felt my whole Jewish life was there, the kallah about to marry, all the times I immersed just before and after the births of my children, all the other months through twenty-seven years of marriage.

I co-created an exhibit called The Mikvah Project and it has been traveling around for fourteen years. I made it with a photographer and interviewed women talking about mikvah. The women knew they would remain anonymous. The photographer didn’t show their faces. So they opened up. It felt good to listen and to allow them to show their true feelings. It was the first time I’d heard frum women talk honestly about their inner lives.

But one woman I interviewed made me look at myself like never before. It probably snapped my last connection. She said she fell in love with other girls throughout her young years, then had her shidduch and married. She kept on saying she was happy, but emptiness was written all over her. Her shoulders slumped. Her clothes hung on her. Her face was lined and sad. But I’m happy!

I knew she was gay when she said, “I just had to make a kind of surgery on myself.” I flushed red and had to stop her and walk away to catch my breath. Finally I saw myself through all those years. She had cut out her sexuality so she could be the good wife and mother—a violence to her soul.

These days, I don’t need anything from the frum community. I don’t need acceptance. I am free. I can say what I think and not worry that I’m not complying.

But if I could, I would ask things for my frum children. I would ask for them to have the freedom, within the community, to have real friendships where you can admit doubts and sins and other normal human things you don’t talk about in the frum world. I would ask for women to be paid according to their skills and important qualities, and equally to the men, since my older daughter was a marvelous talented teacher but had to leave it because she was hungry and had no medical insurance, while the full-time male employees had a salary and benefits. I would ask for the frum community to erase that overarching pressure on all of them to conform, because that crushes everybody indiscriminately when, really, we’re all different.

Today, I will only live in a community that is as diverse as possible, one in which the only criteria for belonging is to be an individual. In that kind of community, I can be wholly present. I can offer all of myself.

My partner, Susan, and I travel a lot. And I keep on writing. Writing is my lens for discovering, late in life, this awesome, varied amazing world from which I was hidden for so very long.

THE GOOD RAV: A Chassidic Talmud Chacham and Rabbi speaks:

                                                   Generic photo of a rabbi. NOT the speaker

This is a transcription from a speech given by a chassidic rabbi, a paskening rov, who does not identify as gay but who has been very supportive of LGBT people. This was not a private answer, but something that was said in front of an extremely large audience. Any mistakes are mine and not the rabbi's. 

I’d like to start with my personal journey regarding Judaism and homosexuality. It goes back over twelve years. It was late Thursday night. I came back after a long meeting and my wife said to me “Why are you crying?” I told her I’m sad for a young Jewish man, an Orthodox young man in his mid-thirties, who’d been to yeshiva for a number of years. He had come around after making an appointment and cancelling it, and then making another appointment and cancelling that one too, and then again, until he actually took courage to come around. 

He presented me with three questions:

1) I have never been attracted to women. I have always been attracted to men. I know there is a commandment in the Torah to be fruitful and multiply. Pru urvu. I have to have children. Is it indeed incumbent on me to get married and have children?

2) To the extent that I am a homosexual in orientation, meaning that I am only attracted to men and not to women, how would you behave towards me if I came to your shul? Would you allow me to daven before the amud? Would you allow me to get an aliyah? Would you allow me to be part of the community? What would happen if you knew I wasn’t just a homosexual in orientation but I was actually active, and engaged in a relationship with another man? Would that make a difference to you?

3) If it’s true that the Torah in the Book of Leviticus makes it clear, unequivocal, that it’s forbidden to engage in male homosexual liaison, I have to ask the question; G-d made me this way or He allowed me to develop like this, nature, nurture, but at the end of the day, I never chose it. From a very young age, this is what I recall. This is who I am. But G-d says, “Don’t engage in male-to-male intercourse”, so that means that I am obliged and presumed to remain celibate for my whole life. I won’t ask you why would G-d should do such a thing, to allow a [gay] person to develop through nature, nurture, providence, biology - and at the same time, constrain him in such a way as to give him a commandment that means that he has to remain lonely, to live a loveless life, craving for closeness, intimacy, physical intimacy included in sexuality, nevertheless deprived, frustrated, living a life of misery.

[The young man] posed those three questions that night and I hope to answer those three questions here now…

With regard to marriage, I said to him what I thought then was the obvious answer. I still think it is and I am surprised that there are others who disagree. If anyone, man or woman, draws another person into a marital relationship knowing that the other person is heterosexual, if a gay person draws another person into a relationship knowing that the other person craves a normal marriage and they are gay and they don’t inform their spouse of their orientation, this is an ethical crime of the highest order. 

Even if they do achieve what might be called informed consent, such a marriage is, “generally speaking” (there are always exceptions to every rule) an unconceived marriage for a number of obvious reasons. Even though, halachically, a man is obliged to get married and have children, there are circumstances when a person is not emotionally or physically equipped to have children. If a person is not attracted to women, then this would mean he would be exempt from fulfilling the positive commandment “Be fruitful and multiply.”  Halachically, I explained that there is a category *, there is only a certain extent that a person must push themselves or expend his resources in order to fulfill any given commandment, including this primary commandment of getting married. If a person’s psychological infrastructure was such that it didn’t attract him to women, he is not obliged to steel himself and live in a marital relationship in order to have children.

Subsequently, even recently, I have realized how important it is that this message gets across. Firstly, because I myself have seen many cases where people have been encouraged by spiritual leaders, psychological counselors, lay leaders, to get married and very often these [gay] people have gotten married with the best intentions and subsequently, they’ve suffered the consequences. They, their spouses, their children. In the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, things become extremely messy, extremely painful for them.

The other reason is, because only recently in a kiruv journal that’s published in Flatbush, it was suggested that people who go through therapy, even though they are going to have relapses, even though it’s almost inevitable that there will be relapses into homosexual conduct, should get married. I find this to be mind-boggling! I feel it is important that people should be aware that getting married is not just a privilege, it’s a responsibility and a duty, and if a [gay] person doesn’t have the ability to remain committed and is unlikely to be able to suppress his inclination in all ways and at all times, then it’s better that he doesn’t get married. On the contrary, to give up the dream of marriage and having children and bringing grandchildren to ones own parents is an extremely difficult thing, and those people who do that, knowing that they are not able to honour the marital vows, are in actuality doing an act of altruism, in depriving themselves of blessings that they themselves may crave, the blessings of family life and children.

With regard to the second question, I said to him, paraphrasing what my friend Rabbi M said, the Torah prohibition is not about orientation, it’s about actions. Clearly, whatever a person is, no matter what his orientation is, he should be welcome in shul. He should be a full-fledged member of the synagogue, and there should not be ostracizing and then, he’d never be disenfranchised. We should accept any member, man or woman, regardless of their orientation. 

There are, however, two types of communities. There are those communities that only allow people who observe the entire Torah to be part of their community. If you do even one sin, then you are out. Clearly, such a community would not allow an active homosexual Jew to be a part of their community. But the vast majority of Jewish communities today do allow all sorts of people, many of whom don’t keep a whole host of laws, to be part of the shul membership. And it must be added, people who are dishonest in business are allowed to be members of those shuls. Dishonesty in business is an infringement of a law against ones fellow man, an interpersonal crime, whereas homosexual relations are actually only a crime between man and G-d. There is no human victim here. It’s not in an exploitative context. 

Rambam, Maimonides, writes in a number of places, in his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, that forbidden sexual relationships come under the category of Bein Adam Lemakom, between man and  G-d. Therefore, in a community that makes room for people who don’t fully observe the shabbos or the rules of niddah, Taharas Hamishpacha, family purity and so on, there is no reason they should not  allow even practicing homosexuals to be part of their community, provided they [the homosexuals] are respectful to the ethos of the synagogue. But that’s true with regard to ALL people. We allow heterosexuals to be part of our community, sometimes we have shabbatonim for young boys and girls on Friday night, we don’t check up on them when they go home, and provided they are respectful to the shul,  they behave in accordance with the ethos of the shul, then of course they can be fully participant in the shul.

I believe that most people are not compelled to do things all of the time. There may be exceptions to the rule. In terms of assessing the severity or the lack of severity of a particular crime, you have to take into consideration the context. Today, even if people know something is forbidden, and they know that’s what the Torah says and that’s what the rabbi preaches from the pulpit. Even if they know that’s what they are supposed to do, they were raised in a society that disregarded these prohibitions. Generally speaking, they are classified in halachic literature as a tinok shenisba, a child taken into captivity. 

As condescending as the term may sound, Maimonides, in his Laws of Rebels, Hilchot Mamrim, chapter 3, section 3, used this term to describe second generation Karaites, who although they knew all their Jewish obligations and were quite familiar with the rabbinical tradition, and knew what they were supposed to do, nevertheless, since they were brought up in a society that disregards these rules and did not consider them to be binding , they weren’t held responsible to the same degree type as someone who had received an education right from a young age in keeping the laws of the oral rabbinic tradition. The same thing applies here. In western society where many people are brought up under the influence of the  Zeitgeist, according to which the sexual morality of the day doesn’t necessarily honour the Torah’s view, such people, where the cap fits, can also be deserving of the title tinok shenisba.

If I say nothing else but this, dayeinu. When G-d judges people, he does not judge them according to the objective category of the crime. He judges them according to their subjective circumstances.  Now, any heterosexual, myself included, who thinks about their own challenges, knows that he often slips and falls, even when he could have done better. Think about the plight of homosexuals, such as the young man I was speaking to on that night, who was constrained in a homosexual orientation such that he was not able to have any other outlet. How many of us would actually be ready to commit ourselves to a life of celibacy and avoid all transgressions at all times? I think if we look at ourselves honestly in the mirror and if we put our hands on our hearts, we will acknowledge that this would be a very difficult achievement. 

Therefore, understanding the circumstances and the context in which a homosexual finds himself is most important. If G-d judges people according to their circumstances, we too, should do so as well. While that does not mean in any way shape or form that we want to rewrite the halacha, the law, the Torah states explicitly that which it states, nevertheless, it does make a huge difference in the way we approach an individual who is confronted with a special set of challenges, circumstances which are most difficult.

I finally come to the last question I was confronted with that night:

Lamah asah H-shem kacha? Why did G-d make me this way? This question has been so powerful that some rabbis have felt compelled to assume that there must be some magical cure, or way of transforming homosexuals, making them into heterosexuals. Recently, some rabbis issued a Torah Declaration that said that reorientation must be possible for all people because G-d, who is merciful, would not create people to have them locked in an unfulfilling life, lonely and loveless, and that the only way they could get out of this [isolation] would be through a prohibition.

This argument, in my opinion, is theologically flawed, because we find that G-d actually has put lots of people in these circumstances.  We can find many people who, whether by providence or from biology, are in circumstances where the only way to escape misery would be through violating halacha. There are people who, because of physiological, biological, emotional or even halachic conditions, can’t get married, and such people have to live a celibate life. And the only way they are able to find intimacy and physical love would be if they were to violate the halacha.

There have been, in the past, many people who were constrained and unable to have children because of premature ovulation, and the laws of niddah affected their ability to have the blessing of children. That’s an example of people committed to keep the halacha who have even suffering childlessness their whole lives, in order not to transgress the halacha. There are people in around the world who have to give up a lot, to live in destitution, even die of poverty, in order not to break shabbos. The idea that despite the nisyonos that G-d gives people, we can somehow straightjacket G-d and insist, and say G-d would never do that, is not correct and not reflective of reality. Therefore I don’t think that is a statement that can be supported. I don’t accept that as the answer to the theological question [of why did G-d make me like thus].

How then do I deal with the theological question? The answer is very simple. I don’t. I don’t have an answer. The question is an important question but it doesn’t have anything to do with homosexuality or heterosexuality or anything to do with sexuality. It has to do with all of these and many more. It has to do with the general question in theology of why do great people suffer from infertility? Why can’t great people find love and spouses? Why do great people suffer from many tragedies, and great, small, or medium-sized difficulties in their lives? We have no ability to answer that.  Therefore, it’s important to place this question in the right context. It’s not unique to the sexual portion of Leviticus. It is something about the human condition and the way G-d created us.

In my own meetings with homosexuals, I have four goals that I do believe can be achieved, I strive to achieve them and to a large extent, I have achieved them:

1.     Someone who is homosexual should not lose his life from depression, from feelings of impotence, through drugs, through ephemeral relationships and promiscuity.

2.     Someone who is homosexual should not lose their family, through them alienating their parents and siblings, or through their parents or siblings alienating them.

3.      Homosexuals should not lose their rabbis, their communities, their place in their shul, either through their shul alienating them or them alienating their shul, or through identifying themselves completely by their orientation and going off somewhere else.

4.     Homosexuals should not lose their G-d, They shouldn’t feel that just because they have such a tremendous challenge and just because they haven’t always been able to meet the requirements of this challenge according to the Torah, therefore, it’s all or nothing. Strangely, no heterosexuals seem to feel that their failings make them that way [excluded from the frum community]. For some reason, this is a mistake that’s happened; that people feel it’s either all or nothing. We have to somehow make sure that people should recognize that G-d loves all Jewish people, and the Jewish community should make room in their home for every Jew. 

      As I said before, we should do everything in our power so that homosexual Jews should not lose their lives, not lose their families, not lose their communities and not lose their G-d.

 

ORTHODOX LGBT FAQs

Orthodox LGBT FAQs (courtesy of JQY)

Common Orthodox questions, criticisms, and concerns vs. Supportive Orthodox Rabbinic Responses
Over the years, JQY has spoken at various panels and has had many private conversations with Orthodox Rabbis. We have compiled this fact sheet as a resource to describe the common questions, criticisms, and concerns that our members have heard from friends, family and community members, and that they have struggled with internally. We have paired each question with responses we have received from supportive Orthodox rabbis.

If you have any questions about any items on this fact sheet, or if you would like request a JQY panel where we can discuss these questions in greater depth, pleasecontact us.

Common Questions, Criticisms, and Concerns Supportive Rabbinic Responses Hashem does not give us anything we can not overcome. Doesn't this mean that homosexuality can be overcome? Many challenges in life are not changeable. We do not tell deaf people that they can “overcome” their deafness and hear. We learn to live our best lives with life's realities. Everyone has their nisayon (test) in life, some of which are very difficult, isn't being gay or lesbian just a nisayon for a person to overcome? A person's nisayon (test) is to make the most of their lives and be the best Jew they can be. We don't say the nisayon of a deaf person is to hear the shofar, it is to find his unique relationship to the commandment. A nisayon is intended to bring a person closer to G-d, it is not intended to make a person live in misery. Since homosexuality is called a toevah (abomination), doesn't it mean that it is an ethical evil that goes against Jewish hashkofa (thought) and must never seem normal? We do not know taamei hamitzvot (the reasons for commandments), eating shrimp and wearing shatnez (cloth containing wool and linen) are also called a toevah (abomination), if a person struggles with a sin between him/her and G-d that does not make him/her an evil person. Isn't being “out” worse than merely sinning because the person is advertises the sin publicly, which is itself yehareg va'alyaver (death is preferable to the transgression)? Being “out” actually says nothing about whether one sins, or is public about sinning. Out LGBT Orthodox Jews can still be tzniut (modest), and not discuss specific sexual behaviors publicly. One should not make assumptions about someone else's private life or their sexual behaviors just because the person is 'out'. Straight people don't go around telling people that they are straight, why do gay people feel the need to do so? Just as straight people would correct you if you assumed he or she were gay, gay people do not need to lie or pretend to be heterosexual when they are not. Every wedding, anniversary, and shidduch (arranged marriage) is a proclamation of one's heterosexuality. We do not ask an agunah (a woman who can not remarry due to not receiving a 'get') to say that she is no longer attracted to men, even though acting on this attraction would be a sin. Doesn't pride or celebration of one's sexuality go against the Jewish tradition of tzniut (modesty)? It is important to combat the internalized shame that many LGBT people experience with self-esteem i.e. pride. Furthermore, the strength and bravery it takes to come out, overcome obstacles, and persevere is what is celebrated, not any specific sexual behavior. We actually do not know whether homosexuality is genetic or environmental. Doesn't this mean that a person can and should change? Whether someone is 'born gay' or becomes gay due to environmental factors does not imply that being gay is somehow a choice or changeable. Many things that are caused by the environment are in fact unchangeable. If we are openly affirming or accepting of gays, won't this be encouraging homosexuality and lead those who are on the fence to become gay? Speaking out against homosexuality does not prevent anyone from being gay; it just increases the shame and internal suffering that LGBT people experience in the Orthodox community. Sensitivity and being welcoming is the torah way, and can be life-saving for individuals suffering in silence. We can love the sinner, but we are supposed to hate the sin, so how can we be supportive of gay Jewish organizations and homosexuality? Identifying as gay does not imply anything about whether or not a person is “sinning” by engaging in specific prohibited behaviors. Hating the sin should not mean denying a person the resources that they desperately need. Sexuality may be fluid for some, so shouldn't everyone at least make an attempt in 'reparative therapy' if it helps some individuals? Helping some does not justify hurting others. Many individuals have reported being harmed by these types of therapies, which are often conducted by unlicensed individuals who face no repercussions for irresponsible and potentially damaging interventions. How can we say “it gets better” to a life that halachicaly (from a Jewish legal standpoint) can have no sexual outlet? We don't say to agunot (women who can not remarry due to not receiving a 'get') that “it can never get better”, or that there is no value or place for them in Jewish life just because we can not legitimize any of their romantic behavior. Why should LGBT Orthodox Jews be treated any different from those who desire other sexual sins like adultery? If we are to use adultery as an analogy, it would be similar to the case of an agunah (a woman who can not remarry due to not receiving a 'get'), who through no fault of her own may not have any halachicaly (from a Jewish legal standpoint) permitted sexual behavior or marriage. Isn't homosexuality yehareg v'al yaavor (death is preferable to transgression), putting it in a different category than other sins, similar to murder? If we are to use murder as an analogy, it would be similar to the case of brain death and organ donation, where, although it is technically yehareg v'al yaavor (death is preferable to transgression), where sensitivity, ambiguity, and compassion are all imparted on those making decisions, even when they may be against rabbinic advice. While desire may not be a choice, behavior is always a choice. Shouldn't we therefore judge those who we know engage in sexual behavior as sinners? In cases of Jewish suicide, halachic burial (burial according to Jewish law) is almost never observed because we assume that the behavior is engaged in when a person is in an altered mental state. Individuals who have Aspergers, ADD, or other different issues are often exempt from general orthodox expectations. We can not truly judge a person until we are in their shoes. Shouldn't we avoid legitimizing or celebrating relationships that involve sin? Rabbis often counsel and celebrate couples who may not be following taharat hamishpocha (family purity laws) they still celebrate their relationships, and expect that the community not make any assumptions about possible sinful activity. Kedushin (Jewish marriage) can only be between a man and a woman. How can we ever legitimize marriage between two people of the same sex as halachic marriage (Jewish legal marriage)? Refusing to go to attend a loved one's life events or not permitting someone's partner to attend a simcha (celebratory event) can damage relationships and create alienation and negative feelings toward Judaism. Attendance is a sign of love and support, and can help a person maintain their connection with Orthodoxy. It is not the same as legitimizing. A parent can celebrate a loved one being happy and not being alone without legitimizing the halachic nature (Jewish legal status) of his or her relationship.

SATMAR LESBIAN LOVE STORY

I’m twenty-six, married and I have one child. My parents got married when they were just seventeen and nineteen, and I'm the youngest of seven. I grew up in a Satmar family. My mother went to Satmar schools, but my father wasn’t the type who went to the tish every Friday night. His family davened in a little shtibel. We didn’t grow up with the Rebbe on our lips or in our head. 

                                            What about on your arms? (chas vesholom!)

My first year in a new high school, there was a choir, and one of the teachers in the school told my classmate who was heading the choir, give her a solo. It was weird! This teacher had a hunch I could sing. That teacher became the first love of my life.

[R] is crazy talented, she wrote beautifully and she was always involved in everything. She was a big macher. She wore the levush, two braids hanging down to there, grey tights, not the normal beige Palm ones.

She was very different than me. Her father wore the shiny bekeshe during the week. My father wore maybe a vest. Her father wore the biber hat, and my father wore the standard Satmar hat. We ended up becoming “more than friends”…(sighs)…though it started out very slowly and unconsciously.

One evening in early Fall, I came up to [R]'s house unannounced, and we were talking a bit. I felt drawn to her, there was something pulling me to her, but I don’t know what it was. I could tell her anything and she would understand. I never had that with anyone. MY family made fun of closeness, by saying things like: ”Are you getting chummy chummy with her? Why are you running after her?" It was looked down on to be such close friends. We talked into the night. And sometimes we would just sit and be quiet on the phone. And there were even times when there was so much going on inside me and she was just there, even though I couldn’t speak.

Sometime after that day, I got a note from [R] telling me to meet her in the basement of the school. We used to correspond through notes and letters, and since she was faculty, there was nothing weird about her instructing the office staff to give me a note. In the end, she was standing in a classroom. I walked in. She told me to shut the door and she shut the light. She was asking me to come to her, and I was dead afraid. I was terrified. I didn’t know about what. My heart was hammering and my body was shaking and I cried. I can’t! I can't! She said not to worry. That was the first time we touched. She hugged me. 

Growing up, I experienced very little touch in my life. No hugging. No kissing. A kind of default setting. I'd made a conscious decision when I was about ten that no one should touch me. I would sit at the edge of the bench, so no one could sit next to me, and I stopped getting or giving hugs and kisses to anyone. Anyway, one night, [R] and I had a sleep-over, which I think is an unusual thing. So we were having a sleep over in her place, we were both in bed and drowsing off. I was in the bed right next to hers, and the air changed. I wasn’t facing her, but my body tensed like I knew something was about to happen, but when it happens, you have the biggest shock of your life. She laid her hand on my wrist. Just that. But my world exploded. The hotness, the goosebumps, the shivers, my heart stopped. Nothing more. I was sixteen, she was eighteen maybe. It was an unexplainable thing. The chemistry between us…I didn’t have to work hard for it. it was just there. I didn’t have to do anything. I could just be me. It felt so fresh and safe. It was as if I was held all the time.

Soon after, the torment and the guilt and the confusion set in. I was always the one scratching my head and worrying, what are we doing? Is this normal. We always hid it. There was a secrecy. An added sense of shame and fear. It felt like love to me, but what did I know?

After a certain time, my father and my cousins said, "You’re going to vomit from her, one day." They said that because we were always together. They thought I was in love with her. It was true, but I also knew that it was illicit, and could never be owned up to. And I never wanted to get sick and tired of her.

[R] got married first and I was more baffled than ever. I don’t understand? How could she be with him AND me? Maybe she didn’t love me anymore. Was she with me from pity? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. But she said it’s different…I hung out at their house all the time. I was there before the marriage, during and afterwards, shopping, talking. 

    The overly friendly friend at the wedding
Even after we were both married, people would ask us if we were sisters, though she wore the shpitzel and I wore a blond sheitel. Our handwriting was indistinguishable. Our singing was exactly the same. I couldn’t hear any difference between us.

The first time I met my husband, we talked for three hours, but I had no feelings afterwards. I was neutral. And then the second time, a week or so later, I was feeling, “This is stupid…what’s the point?"  I didn’t think I had the option of saying NO. I met this boy. It was okay. Now you get married. My mom asked if he was a nice person, but so what? What makes a person say yes to getting married? What is in it for them? Why should I say yes? But because I didn’t say NO, we got married.

The disconnect became even stronger after the tannaim. I didn’t want to look for an apartment, and I refused to think about what would happen after. I was busy making memories with my girlfriend. The day of the wedding was a horrible one for me, but  G-d made me look beautiful for the wedding. I was so terrified that I would hate my own wedding day.

Before heading out to the wedding hall, when we were still at home, my father began blessing me, and while he was doing that, I began to cry hysterically. To my shock and fear, my parents did too. My father said not to worry, that it would be good. But it wasn't.  It wasn’t okay. It never was. It was horrible.

After the chuppah, when we went into the yichud room, he kissed me on the lips, I was thrown back in a bad way. A lady came back to do my sheitel and my face, and she said don’t worry, it gets better. And then there was the mitzvah tanz…whoever invented that must have been very mean! I was literally freaking out. I sat awkwardly the entire time…it was one of the worst moments of my life. 

The day after the wedding I was so sick, I couldn’t look my husband in the eye. I couldn’t sit next to him. All I wanted to do was run away. It was terrible. And there was no one I could talk to. [R] didn’t understand why I felt that way. She was happily married. I didn’t know what was wrong. And my husband was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t know what to do with me. He didn’t know what to say. 

My mother kept on asking me what is wrong and I told her I don’t know. I couldn’t tell her that I don’t feel like when I am with my girlfriend. She asked me if he hates me, if he hits me. I didn’t have words for it. And then I got pregnant, and when I found out, I was crying so hard, I knew it was over. There was no way of getting out of it. This was it.

Around the same time, I told my husband I can’t go to the mikva. He was hysterical.  If I hadn’t taken a  stand then, I'd have six kids by now.

Everyone blamed the rocky start of my marriage on my tight relationship with [R], and then my father called her up ranting, and she called me up and cried and said she can’t be friends with me anymore.

I wanted to protect her, so we ended up breaking up. I was so torn, that my family wanted to wreck the one thing in my life that was good and that I had going for me.

I still have a lot of feelings for her, even after the upheaval, the wreckage we went through. I still sometimes think and wish that maybe things could turn out differently. I wanted us both to be married, raise our kids together, go shopping, plan dinners for our husbands and scheme about Purim costumes.

But that didn't happen. What happened instead was that I got married and instead of being beautiful, it was awful. I was thrown head first into freezing cold water and the shock was too great. Worst of all, I had no one to talk to about it.

Growing up, we could never talk about sexuality or "private stuff" or anything like that. I couldn’t talk about or hear any intimate words like sex, mikva, or period without cringing in embarrassment. My husband put a lot of pressure on me to go to the mikva. He said, "I won’t go to work if you don’t go to the mikva."

My husband doesn’t want to divorce me. I don’t know why. But maybe there’d be no one here to do his meals, his laundry, and his place in the community would be shattered. He still believes we can work on it and it will get better. He refuses to see the differences between the two of us. He won’t make any compromises.

I used to think I'm not gay. I can't be gay, because I'm FRUM! And if you're frum, it's either or. But I've since learned lots of things about the frum queer community (smiles).

I think that the biggest issue in the frum community is that children do not feel safe to ask questions and to talk about things and the reason is because we don’t encourage it. We aren’t comfy with broaching certain topics and because we project such discomfort, the children imbibe that and they don’t ask. Unanswered questions let a child’s mind go in strange directions. Why does a kid have to guess his way along when his mommy is having a baby or something like that? Kids aren’t dumb. They see. They understand. They are smart! They are unbiased and truthful and they take things for what they are. We give them no credit and we squish their growth by not allowing them to talk about whatever they need to ask. Why are you afraid of their questions?