Senior rabbis shouldn’t quit Yeshiva University over a gay club on campus

Senior rabbis at Yeshiva University were ready to quit. The impetus for their drastic threat to leave was the administration’s recent settlement agreement to let a small group of LGBTQ students meet over pizza.

It is the most recent chapter in a 2021 lawsuit brought against Yeshiva University by the YU Pride Alliance, an unofficial student group. The case has, since then, roiled the university. 

According to the New York Times, Yeshiva agreed to recognize the club (now renamed “Hareni”), bringing to an end its attempt to deny the group official recognition on religious grounds. The school’s clubs are required to adhere to the norms of halakha — Jewish law — but exactly what that means in the case of an LGBTQ club is still being hotly contested. 

The school had originally responded to the students’ request by creating a club that would, in the words of the dean of the rabbinical school, “allow for students who are battling this yetzer hara [evil inclination] to gather for rabbinically approved events to help them omed b’nisayon [meet the challenge] to resist all temptation to act upon their desires.” What the rabbis envisioned as a celibacy support club had zero student buy-in and zero student attendance.

Zak Sawyer, a spokesman for the students, said that the settlement went far beyond the university’s original offer. He claims that Hareni secured written guarantees ensuring that it would have the same rights and privileges as other student clubs, including access to campus spaces, official student event calendars, and the ability to use LGBTQ in its public materials — none of which existed under YU’s prior “initiative.”

The news of the Hareni club’s establishment touched off a storm in the YU community. Beyond the threats of resignation, truly offensive comments were made in public. Speaking to Haredi podcaster David Lichtenstein, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, an esteemed senior Talmud professor, and Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz, the dean of the rabbinical school, portrayed these YU students as reshaim and kofrim (wicked people and heretics).

In the same podcast, Rabbi Schachter appears to painfully misconstrue the students’ motives. He claimed that the impetus for the club is part of a worldwide campaign to undermine creation, “convince the whole world that men should become women, and women should become men.”

These students, however, did not come to YU to wage a cultural battle. They came for an array of personal reasons, central among them a hunger for intense Jewish learning and a collegiate experience of religious communal life. For them, the club is a resource for remaining Orthodox, not unraveling it.

These young people are not culture war rebels trying to undermine the creation; they are responding to it. They simply reflect our generation’s recognition of human complexity. The Talmudic sages addressed categories of gender complexity not mentioned in the Torah as a response to their own lived experience. More to the point, these young people are not activists. They do not want to overthrow thousands of years of tradition. They just want a context for support, friendship, and learning.

One of the telling and disturbing questions posed to Rabbi Schachter related to ideological conflict: the Temple in Jerusalem was led for over 200 years by a heretical sect, the Sadducees, during which time the Temple functioned. No one thought to close it down. If the Temple, and later the Great Sanhedrin, could tolerate strongly differing ideologies and practices, why should a gay club be a reason to close the yeshiva? Indeed, Rabbi Schachter admitted the point and had no substantive response. 

The question is even sharper, given that YU is a bona fide university and was intentionally founded on Torah and open inquiry (Torah U’Madda). Why, among the tradition’s many tensions with modern values, methods, and sensibilities, should a gay club be a hill to die on? Why are so many other modern conflicts tolerable, and this one not? 

I wonder how these learned men, involved for so long in education, could be so terribly unempathetic to the realities of their students. When their students bring to them challenges in areas of medical ethics, family dynamics, and mental health, they are open-hearted and thoughtful. Why then can they not respond to their LGBTQ students with the same empathy and respect?

It is true that the exercise of radical empathy can loosen one’s grip on authority and certainty. Parents discover this every day. Orthodox parents of LGBTQ children have their world turned upside down when their children come out. In time, however, they often say that the experience made them much better parents.

Empathy is where it starts, but the work then demands the humility to admit what one does not know, and a willingness to learn. This is true of many contemporary halakhic questions. Becoming familiar with the varieties of scholarship that can shed light on a questioner’s circumstances is essential for giving a reliable psak halakha (halakhic ruling). 

Moreover, the failure of both empathy and inquiry in this case has life and death consequences. In the podcast, Rabbi Schachter concedes that hundreds of Orthodox LGBTQ young people are so torn that they contemplate suicide and sometimes act upon suicidal thoughts. Given such high stakes, wouldn’t we expect rabbis to pursue halakhic remedies with a much greater sense of urgency?

Sadly, the opposite is true. Fifty years ago, the former president of the university, Rabbi Norman Lamm, zt”l, offered a limited, but highly creative, halakhic framework for understanding human sexuality. Other Modern Orthodox rabbis in the US, Israel, and the UK have built upon Rabbi Lamm’s work to move their policies in shuls and schools toward acceptance. But not at YU.

And the absence of remedies affects thousands. Even if one assumes that the incidence of LGBTQ identity is 1 out of 15 (and it could be double that), there are at least 15,000 Orthodox homes across the United States in which parents are (or should be) dealing with the fact that one of their children is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

What does Rabbi Schachter expect of these young people? What trajectory is he offering them? What adult future can they hope for? What guidance is he providing for their parents?

At Eshel (the organization for Orthodox LGBTQ people and their families that I helped found), we asked the parents who came to our parents’ retreats just this question. We found that 93 percent of the Orthodox parents we work with want their kids to find a life-long Jewish partner. The overwhelming sentiment is: “It’s not good for a person to be alone.” 

If a credible adult life is not offered in earnest within the Orthodox context, then these young people will either marry deceptively and destructively out of desperation or conclude that Orthodox leadership is frozen in time and incapable of learning. It is no surprise that most just walk away. 

When I first heard of the compromise, I felt it could work. The students would not be permitted to cover the yeshiva with pride flags, but the members would have a space for open and honest sharing in group meetings, a context for raising questions and finding support. 

I also had the hope that Hareni could offer the rabbinic leadership a sustained opportunity to learn about, and even from, these young people. And what better training ground could there be for rabbinical students? With the help of Hareni members, the rabbis-in-training could grapple with issues that will surely follow them to future pulpits and classrooms. Breakthroughs cannot emerge in silence, but they just might in engagement. 

My rebbe, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, zt”l, was once asked a hard question: What would he do regarding the general halakha that justifies violating Shabbat to save a Jewish life on Shabbat, but not a non-Jewish life? His answer was that he would save a non-Jew’s life on Shabbat and be happy to be judged by heaven and punished in the particular hell set aside for such violators. 

Even if he did not wish to make a full halakhic argument for his choice, Rav Lichtenstein was clearly choosing a broad ethic of human dignity over a statutory halakhic norm, the moral salience of which he could no longer defend. 

He was willing to throw himself on the mercies of the heavenly court and suffer the consequences, rather than violate what he deemed to be the greater duty. I am eternally grateful for the student who dared to ask such a hard question and for my rebbe, who was unafraid to provide a deep and wholly unconventional response. 

We are all in desperate need of religious advisers who are not frightened by hard questions and human realities that challenge assumptions, who are willing — in the service of the One who protects the vulnerable — to learn what they do not know about an experience that is foreign to them, and who are ready to risk losing a measure of certainty, if only to accompany us on our journey.