A recent public forum at Yeshiva University that took on the question of homosexuality in the Orthodox Jewish world has prompted a backlash from students and teachers, who fired back with petitions and public lectures condemning the event.
Critics of the event, held December 22, say it lent legitimacy to those who are trying to water down aspects of Jewish law, which explicitly bans homosexuality. With some students and rabbis calling the event a desecration of God's name, YU President Richard Joel and Rabbi Yona Reiss, dean of the rabbinical school, circulated a statement in the days after the forum reiterating the "absolute prohibition of homosexual relationships according to Jewish law."
In a lecture at YU on December 28, Rabbi Mayer Twersky sharply criticized the event, while acknowledging that its organizers probably had good intentions. "Not only in my lifetime, but I think in your lifetimes, there was a point in which such a shmooze [discussion] would have been unimaginable, inconceivable. Not only unnecessary, but inappropriate. Wrong," he said.
"If the Torah says something is a toevah [abomination], it is that," he said. "And there's no need and, more importantly, no justification for being politically correct in terms of what it is. The Torah says it, the Torah's value judgments are eternally true."
The controversial forum seeking to address the painful conflict of being a gay Jew was prompted by two anonymous accounts in YU's student newspapers. Attracting several hundred people to a packed auditorium, four gay students and graduates shared their stories in a discussion that deliberately avoided the question of halacha.
Source: Jerusalem Post
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