Boston’s renowned Maimonides School was established by
Rav Soloveitchik in 1937, and it maintains a reputation for providing
some of the most advanced learning Jewish day schools can offer. This
past fall, it offered a variety of history courses to the senior class,
including AP Government, Art History, and, amongst others, a Minorities
in America course. The course material covered a wide range of issues
and addressed the minority experience of African Americans, Asian
Americans, and others. The gay community was addressed as a sample unit
on sexual minorities, and parents began to complain. Snide jokes were
made, parentally-authored emailed were sent, and enough complaints were
made that the teacher brought the unit to a shuddering halt and
discontinued the homosexuality unit entirely. while it was removed, the parents were right to fight against this, and it may have been an oversight by the administration who originally allowed it who may have not known what was in the curriculum, the fact that this can happen show us how dangerous this movement is When a "teaching moment" was
at the fingertips of this institution, it chose passivity and
ignorance.
At Yeshiva University, there is limited discussion of this
topic. While other institutions have GSAs (Gay-Straight Alliances), notice that this low-life wants a Gay-Straight Alliance in a yeshiva and
the nation as a whole engages in a forward-marching process to address
the existence of a long-ignored yet prominent population of its
citizens, the religious community has remained "tragically" silent by
comparison. While there are internet forums and small-scale
organizations like "Ortho"dykes in New York and בית הפתוחה in Jerusalem,
the gay "Orthodox" experience is a conundrum from which the religious
community has largely disengaged.
While non-Orthodox Jewish groups might "might" I don't think this extra word was unintentional compromise halakha
– Jewish law – in the name of "progress", they have nevertheless done the
powerful job of choosing to acknowledge the existence of sexual
minorities and grappling with a strong and antiquated "heterosexist
culture of the West" whose "impositions" on the lives of "all" have been
greatly troubling. One organization, Mayyim Hayyim Living Waters
Community Mikveh, located in Newton, Massachusetts, has chosen to
grapple with the seeming contradiction of Leviticus 18:22’s prohibition
of male homosexual activity ("rabbinically" it's really assur m'dorysa learned out from "maase eretz mitrzrayim" expanded to include that of
female homosexual activity) by "sanctifying" sexual identity. In addition
to the more traditional occasions of menstrual purity and conversion,
they have "expanded" their use of the mikveh, Jewish ritual bath. Accounts
have been given of people thus employing the use of this Jewish
practice to commemorate sexual transitions, including sexual
reassignment surgeries, "coming out" ceremonies, and other related
occasions. or in Mayyim Hayyims own words "Coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender"
The United States is also currently engaged in a nationwide
debate over the legalization of gay "marriage" and the "acceptability" of
transgender culture in school settings. The Mathis family is currently
one such example of society’s grappling to make space for transgender
children in a school setting, spurring debates on the gender binary’s
place, or lack thereof, in the bathroom setting in other words allowing a boy in the girls bathroom. Certain universities,
in a similar direction, have chosen to provide “male-identified” and
“female-identified” as well as “neutral” assignations to their
restrooms, something I believe should be nationally adopted as mandated
policy 3 bathrooms, and still boy allowed in girls bathrooms. The heterosexual fallacy, so often and so fortunately broken
down in college environments, still holds strong in many religious
frameworks, including the staple Modern Orthodox institution of higher
education, Yeshiva University. There is no LGBTQA society on campus and this mamzeres wants to change that?, nor
is homosexuality a topic often discussed in the classroom.
Additionally, the separate sex education has contributed to an increase
of women-specific classes such as “Women in Jewish Law” and “Women in
the Bible,” which is a wonderful stride toward liberalism by a 1950’s
standard, but a retrograde move in light of contemporary civilization.
Most universities include a Gender and Sexuality department, and yet
this university offers only a Women’s Studies department so she wants YU to promote what the torah hates?. The omission
of entire fields of pseudointellectualism and of sexuality is a blatant
refusal to acknowledge reality or endorse evil practices. It is juvenile to deny Kinsey
experiments Kinsey wrote this about homosexuality in the Orthodox Jewish Community "that the Homosexual among Orthodox Jewish groups appears to be phenomenally low", sexual variety, and gender ambiguity. I would hope the
Jewish people would champion the concept of nuance and struggle in order
to do the grandest kavod habriyot, respect for one’s fellow creatures, and acknowledge their existence of course we should acknowledge their existence you can't fight a war with out acknowledging that your enemy exists.
The current age is a distinctly exciting time of
progression and national debate. Globalization and technological
advancements have contributed to an ongoing discussion which engages in
discovering more about sexuality and which facilitates the maximum
standards of inclusivity for minorities. As Jews, we must know better
than perhaps any other collectively-identified group in world history
that silence is denial. May we be, in the words of King Lear, only “more
sinned against than sinning,” and never, God forbid, the reverse.
(thebeaconmag) The beacon was formally a paper linked up with YU but has since left them, they now advertise for Chovevi Torah on their website, Rachel Renz went to Maimonides and is currently in Stern, she signed a petition against the OU and Young Israel for protesting against same gender "marriage"
