The Real Tragedy

Read this blog entry. Weep for what the frum community has become.

I'm choking right now. I want to throw something. I want to break something. I want to hurt someone.

I can't even finish reading through the garbage responses to this person's blog post, and worse, his own comments.

Here's a guy who loves nothing more than to bash the Torah world. Yes, some of his issues with the way things are done in frum society are valid, even if his vituperative spewing is not. But it turns out he's just fine with maltreating frum Jews simply because they're gay.

The hypocrisy is just so rank. I am so appalled that I can barely express it.

This rabbi left the Torah world. One of his students wrote him and said he could deal with the gayness, but the leaving frumkeit just baffled him. What this kid didn't understand is that it takes a lot to stay in the frum community and put up with the shunning and the whispers and the ostracism. Do I wish he could have managed it? Yes. We need people to see that there are true frum Jews who are gay, and who insist on being frum even in the face of the kind of hatred that's so clear in the comments section of this blog entry.

But I don't blame him. Not at all. There's a limit to what people can do, and everyone has his own limit. I left frumkeit twice since I realized that I was gay. I came back both times. I never once, during either of those times, stopped being convinced that the Torah is true and that going off the derekh was wrong. But I couldn't. I just couldn't take it.

And if I didn't have the support of my wonderful partner and the responsibility for raising our daughter to be a good Jew, I don't know that I'd be taking it right now. So how about that? Being in a homosekshul relationship is actually keeping me frum.

I have watched as friends of mine have given up after years of putting up with the inhumanity in the frum community towards gay people. It kills me. I watch these victims of the soul-murdering homophobes in the frum community being treated in a way that Jewish law simply does not permit. And I listen to the self-righteous screeches of the "God Hates Fags" imitators as they try to justify their hatred and lynch mentality with a verse that 95% of them have never learned through in their lives. And I want to throttle them.

Be proud, you 'phobes. There goes another one. Smile, people, because Rabbi Alan Stadtmauer has shown that there's no such thing as a frum gay Jew. Smile, because you have one more example to use, and cheer, because it'll keep you from having to see that yedeichem shafchu et ha-dam ha-zeh.

I have to keep reminding myself that Judaism is about serving Hashem, and not about serving a community of blind and cruel imbeciles.

Those of you in the frum community who are not among the 'phobes, I salute you for your courage, and I just wish that you weren't such a damned small minority.