As a gay man from the Orthodox Jewish community, am I accepted or merely tolerated?

We queer Jews are not pariahs of the Orthodox community, but we are not fully accepted, either

(Menucha Colish Photography)

The best time in history to be gay and Jewish is surely right now. During the Inquisition, those accused of sodomy and illicit Judaizing were more likely to die at the stake. In pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany, antisemitic propaganda targeted gay Jews in particular and left them with the fewest options for survival.

Happily, such existential precarity is now a distant memory. Internally, my religious community has a newfound tolerance. Take, for example, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom’s guidebook on how teachers can work to foster the wellbeing of their LGBT+ students which is now informing Orthodox educational policy across the world.

However, as a gay man who grew up in the Orthodox Jewish community, I am both grateful for this progress and acutely aware of how often this embrace feels qualified.

When I first came out, I was often told that people had no problem with my own sexuality, as long as I was not too steeped in “gay culture.” Nobody would stop me from living my life how I pleased, but they would not tell me that being out was a good idea, either. I was teaching in a yeshiva at the time, and stopped soon after I came out. It was clear that I was more than welcome to attend classes as a student, but no longer as a teacher. It was no longer appropriate for me to be a leader in my yeshiva. Rather, my presence, like that of many other queer Orthodox Jews, became merely tolerated.

When you are merely tolerated, pride is not an option. We can be as spiritually ambitious as we want in private, but any public ambition is inappropriate for those whose identity is seemingly conditional. I poured a lot of energy back then into trying to become the most palatable version of myself.

Yeshiva University, the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy and my alma mater, says it  “[welcomes], [loves] and [cares] for all our students, including our LGBTQ students.” Yet, this affirmation only appears on a now archived page about why it would rather challenge the New York Human Rights Law in the US Supreme Court than sanction a Pride Alliance on its undergraduate campus.

I myself have taken part in various panels on Judaism and LGBT+ identity during which, on two separate occasions, the rabbi/rabbanit presiding made sure to publicly wish me happiness, dignity, and community. Sadly, these blessings ring hollow when followed by equally public proclamations that I, a gay man, should never be a father. We queer Jews are not pariahs of the Orthodox community, but we are not fully accepted, either. Rather, we are merely tolerated.

My peers and I are included in most areas of Jewish life. Few social gatherings would actively exclude us, and few synagogues would expel us. But in order to attend, it is our job – and not the community’s – to make ourselves as tolerable as possible. We implicitly agree that central parts of our lives are antithetical to community values: hate the sin, love the sinner.

Spending too much time being merely tolerated can poison the soul. It can make you believe that you only deserve love that is conditional upon maintaining an inauthentic, socially desirable persona. It limits our ability to dream, and makes the queer ones desperate. Conversion therapy with abusive practitioners, self-harm, and even suicide are not unheard of among queer people in my community.

In psychological research, being highly involved in an organized religion – any religion – is associated with greater well-being. More religious people have access to community resources, social support, and a narrative to help direct their lives. A recent meta-analysis of 73 studies, though, revealed that this trend is limited to heterosexuals. For LGBT+ people, spirituality provides that bump in well-being, but organized religiousness does not.

That is the cost of being tolerated.  Thanks to tolerance, we are more aware than ever that queer, religious people exist. But tolerance cannot give anyone a script on how to be queer, religious, and happy.

We must write that script for ourselves.

More and more queer people raised Orthodox are rejecting theologies of tolerance in favor of making for themselves what sociologist Orit Avishai calls a shift towards “lives that are livable”.

When two Israeli friends of mine, Chana and Yael, were planning their wedding, they were beset with questions: what would an Orthodox marriage ceremony look like without a groom? How could they even get married in a country whose rabbinate refuses to serve them? To answer these questions, they followed the Jewish tradition: When exiled to the desert, they built their own tabernacle, drew their own water from stone.

Orthodox lesbian friends sent them a live document of other queer Jewish couples’ ceremonies, which they used as a foundation for their own. They married in New York in Chana’s aunt and uncle’s backyard. I became ordained by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (really!) and officiated. Their families either flew in or joined by Zoom. Two more queer Jewish friends worked the cameras. Afterwards, Chana and Yael added their own ceremony to the live document, so that future couples may use their experience to guide them through their own deserts.

My community of queer people who grew up Orthodox overflows with individuals who find that we are no longer prepared to settle for tolerance. The scripts we write, the livable lives we make, we do for ourselves, for each other, and for our Jewish communities. Thanks to these individuals, and their choice to live out loud, all signs point to our Orthodox home communities realizing that tolerance isn’t an end goal, but rather a step along the way.