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.

 

LESBIANS IN SEMINARY

I am part of a chassidish community. I have several children. But before I got married, I fell in love with a girl in my school. I wasn't the only girl that it happened to, but I think I was ridiculous about it. I was obsessed with her. She was short, and had dark hair and she was very tznius, the most tznius person in the whole school. She wasn't the thinnest person and she had very bad hearing and she really didn't care about the way she looked but I was, curiously, so so attracted to her. She made me crazy with wanting. And she knew that I wanted her and she teased me, egged me on, asked me to rub her back or scratch her itches or whatever.

                                                     Picture by Sophie Blackall
I wanted to look at her all the time, and when she went away to do other things or talk with other girls, I made sad eyes, and sat in a corner and moped. She got very annoyed with this and used to tell me to stop it, to go find someone else to hang out with, but I couldn't stop.
You have to understand: We were in a sleep-away seminary in Israel and we shared a room with a couple of other girls. She was sick at that time. She had a permanent headache and cough that made her weak, and at night, she would cough and cough and moan, and eventually, I would wake up and ask her what was wrong, and she would say that she felt sick and I would ask her what she wanted, what she needed, and every night she said the same thing: Please rub my chest. And this very tznius girl would open up her buttons, just one or two, and point at the area just below her collar bone and say, "It feels so good when you rub it." So I'd climb into the bed right behind her and put my arm over her shoulder and I'd rub that place, and all the time, I was dying. Dying!

Her hair smelled so good, her shoulder, and she was right there, beneath my arm, and my hand was on her skin. This went on for weeks, and each night, she fell asleep while I was rubbing her chest and I got up and went to my own bed. And each day, I was exhausted, and fell asleep on my desk and dreamed about her.

Then, one night, I was rubbing her chest as usual, when she reached up and held my hand still. It was very quiet in the room. I could hear the other girls breathing, in and out, and my own breath sounded crazy loud and I couldn't control my breathing at all. I thought I will wake up all the girls with my breathing because it sounds like a steam engine. I needed to take a bigger and bigger breath of air just to not faint. She held my hand and then, very quietly, she said, "Go lower."

I wasn't sure what she meant, but then she unbuttoned two more buttons on her nightgown and she pulled my hand lower onto her chest, where you feel, instead of bone, softer skin. "Rub here," she said.  I was completely oismentsch (out of myself), but I also could feel every part of myself, as if my skin had grown new nerves on the old nerves. I didn't move my hand right away, and I couldn't breath either. That's how it was, when we started.

The next day, she acted as if nothing had happened. She pushed me away when I wanted to sit near her. I tried to give her food or little presents,  but she wouldn't take anything from me. But that night, the same thing happened. She opened her buttons, and took my hand, and put it where she wanted to be touched. And all the while, I couldn't see her face. I could only feel her body. And each night, she moved my hand lower and lower. And neither of us was sleeping.

I don't know about her. I don't know what her life is like now, because we aren't in contact. I can only talk about myself. That experience changed me forever. I knew, then, that I liked girls, and I knew that boys didn't have anywhere near the same interest for me, and that has been true ever since.

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?

COMPASSION ISN'T ENOUGH

Can you tell me a little about yourself?

I am 41 years old. I grew up frum (religious) and I am frum now. I am a doctor who works mostly with patients from the frum community. I’ve been in practice for over 19 years. I grew up all over the United States, and I didn’t move to New York until I turned 13 years old, and that was my first exposure to East Coast frumkeit (religion). 

What’s your family background as far as yiddishkeit goes?

 My mum’s family is yeshivish, and she grew up in the Bais Yaakov system and my father’s side is part modern orthodox and part chareidi. They are all Hungarian.  We went to Hebrew Day Schools and then, in Monsey, I spent two years in a Bais Yaakov type school. They made me gay They did! 

It was a very big culture shock to come from out of town and then come to those New York views on Judaism. Outside New York, you don’t have the luxury of judging other Jews based on their observance. In Monsey, I got suspended from school for not blindly following rules. I got picked to be the class treasurer, and we worked hard to earn money for a hard-cover yearbook. The school tried to steal our money and give it to the boys for their yearbook. I refused to give it because I was the treasurer and I got sent across the street to the boys building to face the rabbi, the death sentence of our school. When I made eye contact with him, the Rabbi called me chutzpah’dik (disrespectful) and then forced me to give back the money by suspending me from school and appointing a new treasurer.

I also got suspended another time for reading a romance book. They told me at that time that I was the reason three Gedolei Hador died!

I didn’t take it seriously, though it spurred on my independence and my lack of respect for adults. I began calling myself an agnostic. I knew that people had a desperate need to follow rules even if the rules were hurting other people, and I also knew that people in authority could take advantage of people’s weaknesses and victimise people with almost no shame. I decided I did  not want to be a victim but neither did I want to be a perpetrator.

Tell me about coming out to your frum family?

I come from a family of people who don’t talk about things much, so I can’t say what my mother said when I first told her. I am sure she said all of the things that she thought were the right things to say, but her face looked brittle and fragile. I can also say that for years after I came out, no one in my family except for my nephew, ever said the word gay out loud. 

My nephew says that he is down with the gays. I think my nephew helped my family get used to the word. I remember once I came to visit and I saw some kind of book, maybe it was gay poetry on my bed, and when I asked who put it there, my nephew said he found it at a garage sale and thought I would want it. I know my Mom heard that. I know that he softened things in his family because he was so accepting and it was so normal for him and he was so loving about it. He loves throwing around the word “gay”…he just texted me and asked me why a particular store in New York is overrun by lesbians and why we gays always get the good things.

Fast forward to now: My mom has gotten to the point where she came to my partner's home for yontiff to meet the family. We took a walk and I asked her how she felt seeing the evidence of how much my partner and I loved each other. She stopped dead in her tracks, burst into tears, hugged me, and said “How do you think I feel? I am so happy for you. Happy that you found someone who you love so much and who loves you so much.” Now, my partner calls my mom on the phone, and calls her shvigger, and my Mom sometimes text messages my partner random thoughts and observations. She wishes her good yontiff.

Once, my crazy partner decided she wanted to know how my mom feels about me being gay, since my mom never actually told me. So she called my mother! My mother said “That’s putting someone on the spot. I’d like to call you back after thinking about it!” I’m pretty sure I know the tone she used, the scared, possibly annoyed tone.

When my partner told me she did this, I was convinced my mother would never call her back because avoidance is an Olympic sport in my family. We’re kind of dodgy. However, my mom called her back and answered her question and said, “I want her to be happy. I will love her no matter what.” I know what tone of voice she used for that too. It’s her teary one.

What made you think you are gay?

I didn’t wait until I thought I was gay. I waited until I knew. I was in love with one of my best friends in high school but I didn’t know what it meant. My friends and I used to go to the Village on Sundays and hang out, and once, we saw two gay men holding hands and then kissing each other. It was the first time I ever saw something like that. I didn’t think that had anything to do with me at all. 

I didn’t know anything about sexuality in 9^th grade. I had no idea what anything meant. Anything sexual I saw, I thought it was for non-Jews and eventually I would learn what Jews did, maybe in Kallah classes. So maybe that’s why we were taken aback when we saw the men, because it was sexual and personal and strange. But it didn’t have anything to do with me at all. I was full of silly little girl shock and giggling and curiosity.

My question of whether I was gay or not popped up repeatedly through 9^th grade all the way through college. Once in a while, I would ask my therapist if she thought I was gay, and she would say, "What do you think?" and I wouldn’t be able to answer the question. I didn’t know anyone gay and as soon as the question was turned on me, I put the question away on a shelf. It usually popped up around an attraction. I never acknowledged the word “attraction”…it was more like an intense relationship with a woman that felt strange to me, even given how close girls were in the frum community.

What was it like falling in love with your friend in 9^th grade?
I didn’t know I was in love. It was horrible! I wish I knew I was in love. For all of the women I was in love with when I was younger, if I had known what was going on, my life would have been so much easier, but also soooo much harder. It was adolescent and post adolescent torture not to know what was happening to me. I wanted to be around that girl all the time, think about her all the time, want to know everything about her, everything that ever happened to her, it was all consuming and I was a teenager, and I wanted that feeling to be returned. We are still good friends now, and we are both still intense people. For a while she returned my feelings, but perhaps not to the same intensity.

                                  We did NOT practice kissing. We didn't. Why would you think that...
I remember when she fell in love with someone else, when we were in college already. I was devastated. I think maybe that’s when I knew I had been in love with her. I watched her fall in love with someone else and I knew that’s exactly how I felt towards her. It was a really horrible feeling, especially to have no words for any of this. It never occurred to me that I was really gay and that that was an option for a frum girl. If I had had those words there could have been freedom in that.

                                                But what about all the girrrrrls?

What’s it like, being in a relationship with a frum gay Jew now?

A gift. I had given up hope of finding someone frum and I’d almost given up hope of finding someone Jewish and I never thought I’d find someone who matches me so perfectly, frumkeit wise. If I’d made a list of what I needed yiddishkeitwise, that would be what I get in this relationship.

                                Hi honey! I'm home!

Why did you think you wouldn’t be able to find a frum partner?

I shidduch dated men for over twenty years, until I came out to myself. I could have married two of them, one proposed and one was ready to, if I would have let it happen. He was a really nice guy and I kept wishing that I could like him like that, because he was soooo nice, but no matter what, I just couldn’t do it. 

It was after my first date with a woman that I understood all my years of dating men. I never understood what attraction was so I never understood what lack of attraction was. I never understood chemistry. I never realized the level of anxiety I was feeling on dates was past what was normal. Even on my worst date with a woman, I never felt that anxiety.

I didn’t think I’d be able to find a frum partner, because I guess, after being out for a couple of years, and going on retreats and being on dating websites and believing that I was seeing whatever was out there, I didn’t think it was possible. I knew that there was a handful of frum gay people who were out, but not more than that. Many were already taken and many I’d dated. Others weren’t my type.

How did you meet your partner in the end?

I’m so smart. I met her at the first ever Eshel retreat, almost four years ago. I saw her speak and I was a wreck. I was new to coming out, and it was my first time being around any frum gay people and whatever she said that night made sense in my head.  Year later, at another Eshel retreat, she spoke again, and I felt like she was the one for me, but I was too intimidated by her. I didn’t think she dated my type (femme). So we became "just friends", until I began to artfully pursue her, and then I won her heart.

What’s good about being a frum gay Jew?

I’ve matured and stretched more than anything else in my life has matured and stretched me. I’ve been forced to see the grey areas in people and the world, in my relationship with people I love, with my religion and with my Higher Power. I am wayyyyyy more open minded. I used to have a stick up my behind that is now half-way removed.

What’s not so great about it?

All the losses.

I lost my community of choice. I lost my best friends. I lost a place that was the only place that ever felt like home to me. I lost black and white thinking. Maybe that’s not so bad though.

I like the mainstream and I don’t see why I can’t live in it. But somehow I’ve been forced out of the mainstream and into the fringes and I have a resentment about that. I don’t consider myself out of the mainstream. I consider myself pretty normal.

What do you see as the biggest issue for gay kids growing up in the frum community?

I’m not sure if this is exclusive for gay kids. I think it’s true for all kids in the frum community. They grow up without a sense of healthy sexual self. Whether you are heterosexual or homosexual, wherever you are in the spectrum, if there’s no healthy outlet within the confines of the frum community to explore who we are sexually as children, and there’s no language given for it, then there are a lot of unhealthy consequences. I see a lot of patients who are sex addicts or who have sexual dysfunction, low self esteem, dysfunctional marriages, all kinds of unhealthy stuff. It goes on. 

This is how you catch the baby when the stork drops it.

I talk about sexuality all day in my practice. Sexuality has a huge impact on people's lives. Everyone’s lives. It only becomes especially frum people because frum people struggle with the difference between secrecy and privacy. Or tnius and secrecy. But with secrecy comes shame. Shame breeds all kinds of mental health issues.

Was/is it hard for you to come out in the frum community and why?

In one way no and in some ways yes.

As soon as I really knew I was gay, I knew I had to come out to everyone who was close to me, because I am not a duplicitous person by nature. I can’t live a dual life. So I knew I HAD to come out and it was immediate. I had no choice and it wasn’t that difficult of a decision, and I have a lot of people in my life who are really loving and supportive irregardless of where they are on the spectrum of religiosity. The parts that are more difficult  have been work related, and related to how some of my closest friends who are more chareidi are responding to my relationship with my partner.

                                What did you say? You're going GRAY???

It’s almost made me afraid of coming out. It’s made any time I am coming out to someone a more scary process now than it used to be, because I have suffered significant losses. Now I am scared, because I know what I can lose.

Even though I am out and some of my patients know I am gay, the sh*t has not hit the fan yet. I think once it does, my practice is going to be significantly affected. I think I will lose patients and referral sources. I don’t worry too much about it, because I think that being out is the right thing to do. I believe that G-d will take care of me. When I am in a good head space, that’s what I believe. Not when I am in a roaring panic head space.

Can you talk about some of the losses you have experienced?

I am going to cry if I talk about this.

I had the kind of childhood and life that never felt like I had a home until four years ago, where I was living in a yeshivish community surrounded by friends of twenty years. It was like a womb. Even though hashkofically I was to the left, everyone was very warm and loving and accepting and I had hundred of meals to go to, invitations all the time. The most important people were my best friends and their kids, who I was like an aunt to. And every day was the same and it was good. It was my first real home ever. Every shabbos morning, walking to my best friend's house for coffee before lunch, I would pause for a minute and thank H-shem for where I lived. And all of that’s gone now.

My best friend got a psak from her Rov that I am no longer allowed to have contact with her children as soon as I move to live with my partner and we haven’t talked since that psak. Her choice, not mine. I don’t know how to ever talk to her after that. A couple of my other close friends got similar piskei halacha about never being able to meet my partner. So, it was like four years of being surrounded and told about this loving accepting G-d and seeing all of this work that they were willing to do on themselves and all of the mussar that they listened to, but in the end, they only meant that their version of a loving and accepting G-d was only for people who aren’t gay. That’s what it feels like. Even if that’s black and white thinking, that’s where I am at right now. And I know that this has nothing to do with H-shem, but I do feel like most of the reason I ever wanted to be frum was the sense of community. The best and only good part of being frum, for me, was community, and now my community just booted me out. I’m not sure what’s going to keep me frum now, as I walk right into Yom Kippur.

Did you or your partner do something that might have been construed as unpleasant by the frum community where you lived?

No way. My partner is more frum than me. I think she is intrinsically more respectful. She angers less easily than me. She’s naturally tznius, inside and outside, while I have always struggled with tznius, even before I came out. 

That can’t be what pushed them over the edge. I think our relationship becoming serious was what pushed them over the edge. That’s what was considered “unpleasant.”

The frum community knew that we were very close. They knew we wanted some form of commitment. They never saw untznius behaviour from us. They never heard untznius words. We both grew up in strictly frum communities. We don’t act differently than any other frum couple in the street. We relate modestly to each other and we are as tznius as we were raised to be. That’s natural for us.

So, you weren’t rejected by your friends until you were in a relationship that began to mimic, in some ways, a straight marriage. Why do you think that is triggering for the frum community?

When I was on the phone with my best friend before Shabbos, I would be cleaning the house, or washing the dishes or peeling or cooking and at first, she laughed, because I'd never done those things before. Now I began to look like a frum mother. 

                                    Just kidding. 

My friends began to learn about my relationship and the home I was moving into, a busy frum home, with normal frum expectations and work levels. Before yontiff, I was doing the same thing my friends were doing. I think that was scary for my friends because they want to think about the gay part of me as being “other” but, instead, the gay part of me integrates me into the frum community more strongly. That makes being gay both real and very very scary, because I am more like them as a result of being in a relationship.

But for them, it’s all about the aveirah (sin). How I am dealing with the aveirah part. They just can’t reconcile the part that I am doing all these mitzvos, all of these beautiful things that I couldn’t before, making shabbos, having a lot of guests, lighting candles with my partner, going to shul, davening (praying), all of these things as part of this relationship which is, they think, an aveirah. They would rather reject the whole thing.  I barely understand this myself.

So, ironically, when you are finally able, after all these years, to have a Jewish family and to live a full Jewish life like your friends, you are rejected by the Jewish community. How insane is that!

You know what’s insane? How black and white people think about kefirah…because, in my relationship with H-shem, I am not flaunting the fact that I am doing an aveirah. I am not proud that I am defying His will in this area. 

I am proud that I doing the best that I can to be healthy with what I have, for my life, for the me that G-d made. And I believe that He knows that. I think that people think that making shabbos with my partner means I am a kofer (heretic), and then they kick me out of the community, when ALL I WANT is to be part of the frum community. Why would a kofer want, so badly, to be part of a chareidi community? I'm not hurting anyone else. They have a childlike view of these concepts. They haven’t been forced by life to see the grey.

                                Did you say GRAY again? 

Can you explain what you mean by “forced out of the Jewish community”?

I am most comfortable in a chariedi community. That’s where I grew up, and feel most comfortable. But there’s no way that any Yeshivish community will ever accept me and I am not comfortable in the modern orthodox community. Most, even many modern Orthodox communities wouldn’t accept me, but I am not comfortable in them anyway. Right now, I stay in a chariedi community where, when I wish people good shabbos in shul, they straight out ignore me and snub me. Where I do not have a shabbos table or an invitation to eat with my partner. But I’m not leaving.

I’m stubborn. This is the only place I feel comfortable. Because I believe in the good of people and it has to get better than this. I believe that people want to do good. They want to do right. And maybe, if I hold on and do the right thing for myself, it’s going to get better not just for me but for everyone. Or maybe they will wear me down. I don’t know.

If you could ask the frum community for one thing, what would it be?

For me, being selfish, since I want acceptance in the chariedi world, (I know it is beyond idealistic!) it’s not enough to ask for compassion. No one in the chareidi world does anything without a psak, without a Rov telling them that halachically, they have to do it, or at least how to do it. What I would want…well, I don’t know if we have a Gadol who is large enough, a real Gadol Hador, …but I would want a few chareidi Gedolim, or as Gadol as you get these days, to start dealing with the reality of frum gay Jews, and start looking at the piskei halacha with more of an inclusive, loving attitude.