Rebbe, did you know that I ran in yeshiva? Most nights, when seder ended, I’d return my Talmud to my makom in the beit midrash, change from ironed khakis and a starched button-down shirt into gym shorts and a t-shirt, loop my headphones into my ears, and set out.
Running was one of my greatest joys when I lived in Alon Shvut. The streets were always empty after 11 p.m., and the freshness of the nighttime air was a welcome change from the musk of the beit midrash. Like many West Bank settlements, ours was carved directly into the rocky hillside; in the spring and summer I could stand at its highest point, where the eagle-shaped yeshiva sits, and see the lights of Jerusalem, only twenty kilometers to the north.
But the hilly terrain also made for a hard run. After all, the settlements were not built for convenience, but to take up as much land as possible. As a runner, one had to learn the topography of the roads, and how to recover from one uphill stretch in time to face the next. The key was to find small sections where one could coast just long enough to catch one’s breath.
My favorite of these was Migdal Eder. At first, the street drew me for the reprieve of its relative flatness, but I continued to return because of one house, several in from the curb, whose residents ran laundry late at night. As soon as I was on the street, there was the floral scent of detergent, just sweet enough to induce a pleasant sense of nostalgia. Every time I passed the house, I imagined its laundry room: the bottles of detergent and the piles of folded laundry — the flowing skirts and long-sleeved shirts of the women, and the well-worn undershirts and tzitzit of the men. I’d inhale the fragrant air and think, this is exactly where I belong.
In the final week of my shana aleph, you invited the students of your original shiur to your house for one last meeting. By then almost none of us were still your students. We had spent the better part of the year under your tutelage, learning how to “break our teeth” over lines of Talmud, and many of us had finally taken the leap from your shiur into those conducted in Hebrew for Israeli students. I had made the switch upon returning from pesach break, with just a few weeks left in the year, and although I struggled to follow the lectures, I was proud to learn alongside men for whom Hebrew was the mother tongue.
As we sat around your table, you asked each of us to share one way we’d grown that year. We’d arrived ten months earlier, just weeks after graduating from high school, charged with the same task facing thousands of other Americans arriving for their gap year: to decide what kind of Jew we’d become. Would we live in America or Israel? Which tradition would we align ourselves with: religious Zionist, Modern Orthodox, Centrist Orthodox, Yeshivish? What did we want in a future spouse? In a future family? What would we do for work, and how would we make time each day for Torah study? The list extended endlessly, and we were expected to address as much of it as we could.
As I contemplated your question, I wondered what I should report. For some, the changes were apparent. Those who’d adopted you as their personal rabbi sported awkwardly long sideburns, similar to the ones you kept meticulously shaped — the outcome of your rabbi’s strict interpretation of Leviticus 19:27, “You shall not round the corners of your head, and neither shall you mar the corners of your beard.” Those who’d decided to make aliyah were just as easy to identify, outfitted in Teva sandals and t-shirts — the standard wardrobe of an Israeli student — and an Israeli accent indistinguishable from the real thing. What is it like for you to watch, year after year, as batches of new students arrive? Can you predict the transformations that will take place? Are you able to guess what of a bochur’s identity will fall away? Tell me: when you were a student in our yeshiva, what did you give up?
As you know, I struggled my first year with the unchanging nature of Jewish law, and with what I can only describe as the stranglehold of rabbinic authority. I spent hours in the library researching why we can’t amend the laws instituted before us, trying — and failing — to accept the concept of yeridat hadorot, the belief that each generation has less access to God than the one before it, and therefore less power to adjudicate legal decisions. The belief implies that statutes of the past are closer to the truth than we could ever imagine. But how can that be? What system of law doesn’t evolve to accommodate new contexts?
Your shiur was a salve for my anxiety. In the world of Talmudic study, our yeshiva is renowned for using the Brisker derech, a methodology developed in 19th-century Brisk, Belarus, by the great-grandfather of the wife of our yeshiva’s revered and long-time head. The methodology works by taking a localized argument between two rabbinic camps and, through the formation of a conceptual binary known as a chakirah, transforming the argument into a conflict over fundamental and wide-ranging legal concepts. Your job was to train us in the methodology, just as you had once been trained in our beit midrash.
Every day we followed the same routine: you’d assign us a dizzying list of sources that sent us scrambling to track down volumes of rabbinic commentary, and then together in pairs we’d prepare the material, trying our best to piece the different cases into a cohesive framework. After several hours of study, we’d gather in your classroom, where you’d drill us one by one, asking us to formulate the chakirah and trace it through the sources. There was no hand-holding in your classroom. You made us state and defend what we thought, even as you eviscerated our arguments. It took me a while to learn that your deadpan personality wasn’t mean or affected, but a mixture of social awkwardness and years of committed, often solitary, study. You took your job seriously, and you did it well.
Soon after our training began, I found that the chakirah’s real power lies in how it alters the Talmud scholar’s reality. Within several months the chakirah became our interpretative frame for analyzing the world and, most importantly, sidestepping the ethical questions our sacred texts raised. When — for it was always a when, not an if — we encountered a scriptural verse or rabbinic decree that challenged our sense of right and wrong, our solution was to create a chakirah to escape the moral dilemma. For example: Was marriage the act of a man purchasing a woman as he would a plot of land, or elevating her to a status of sacred separateness? Was being gay — and thus sentenced to a life of abstinence and loneliness — a punishment from God, or an opportunity to devote oneself completely to His will? It didn’t matter if both options were true, or even if the troubling interpretation became the basis for the law. What mattered was our ability to suspend the problematic side of the chakirah within a logic game and, by doing so, neutralize the threat it posed to our faith.
It was this use of the chakirah — the ability to conjure up a protective cognitive dissonance — that I called upon when it was my turn to account for a year’s growth. Ignoring the tightness in my chest and the constriction of my throat, I looked into your eyes as I told the room that what I had gained was a renewed belief in the authority of the rabbinic tradition. My secret chakirah: What did it mean to belong? Was it sacrifice or acceptance?
You looked proud.
Over the past several years, I’ve tried to understand why it took me so long to disentangle myself from Orthodoxy, and why, in my first year in yeshiva, I was not bothered by my life in the West Bank. I rarely considered the humanity of the Palestinians and was ignorant of the colonial history of the land on which I lived. In the all-Jewish sections of the West Bank, Palestinians appear as cashiers at the supermarket, or as drivers of the occasional car with an Arabic license plate, but figuratively they are omnipresent, mostly in the form of a visual synecdoche: the apartheid wall, or what we were taught to call the “security” wall. The wall did more than physically distinguish “us” from “them”; the language used to justify its existence created an all-pervading atmosphere of fear. Perhaps this is why I did not realize something was terribly amiss; yeshiva had steeped me in a culture rooted in paranoia and hate, affects that metastasize until they blot out everything else. But the deeper explanation, I think, is that sometimes people are willing to overlook what should bother them in favor of what they believe can save them.
Shortly after I left yeshiva, I participated in a social media campaign premised on the belief that publicizing one’s insecurities to the world would sap them of their power. We wrote these insecurities on our faces in black sharpie, framed by the negation “I am not my…” The framing did not appeal to me; then, as now, I believed that insecurities shape us, and that no amount of negation will make it otherwise. But the campaign provided an opportunity to reveal, with the phrase “I am not my household,” the secret I had kept from many of my friends, including you, for years: my parents are lesbians.
The week after the campaign went live, you called my house looking for me, but I was already in New York, at college. By then my picture had gone semi-viral in our yeshiva’s small online community, and word of it must have traveled to you. When my mother told you I wasn’t home, you asked to speak to my father. Why did you ask when you already knew the answer to your question? Could you not believe I hadn’t told you the truth? Still, I’m sure you were confused. How had the son of two lesbians become your student at a Zionist yeshiva in the West Bank?
It was a fluke, really. My parents, who met in the early 80s at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and had two children before separating when I was five. They disagreed on nearly everything, but managed to agree on the need for their children to receive a Jewish education. So when the liberal Jewish day school my sister and I attended closed down, my parents sent us to the only other option in Columbus, Ohio: the Orthodox school. My difficulties there began on day one, my first day of fifth grade, when I was immediately marked as a double outsider — not Orthodox, and with gay parents. I soon learned that my new friends were not allowed to come over to my house to play, and some parents even asked their rabbi if their children could be my friend.
To cope, I did the only thing that would make fitting in easier: I became Orthodox.
My journey to Orthodoxy took nearly five years to complete and ended shortly before I turned fifteen. Immediately after I started at my new school, I joined the local chapter of the Orthodox youth group, an extracurricular activity I would continue until I graduated from high school. Years later I’d learn that the youth group’s purpose was to convince non-Orthodox children to convert to Orthodoxy — often against the explicit wish of their parents — but by then I was already committed to the mission. The summer before eighth grade, I left my liberal sleepaway camp for the Orthodox Zionist camp my classmates attended. Then I started spending the weekends at my new friends’ houses so that I wouldn’t break the Sabbath by driving, and refused to eat at restaurants not certified kosher — which, in Columbus, Ohio, meant that I no longer ate at restaurants. Along the way, I began wearing a kippah and tzitzit every day.
Most importantly, I took pains to conceal the facts of my family. At the beginning, I told people that I didn’t have a father, which was technically true. I had a sperm donor, not a father — my parents drilled that mantra into me at a young age. But the mysterious air of my answer left me vulnerable to more questions, so I changed my response to: “It’s just me, my mother, and my sister at home.” This was still a lie –I had two mothers who, post-split, both had new partners. And although I found this response elicited fewer questions than my first, it came with its own problems. Once, the school principal told me I had to find a better way to phrase what I wanted to say; apparently, a classmate’s parent had thought my father died. In the end, when I travelled to other cities where people didn’t know me, I found it easiest to fabricate a father: to pick elements of my mothers’ lives and meld them together to create an entirely new person. My imaginary father had my bio mom’s profession, non-bio mom’s birthplace, and my bio mom’s birth year.
Homophobia permeates Orthodoxy, and not just its theology; it’s in the visible discomfort that arises when people are confronted with the very idea of homosexuality, and the disgust in their voices when forced to acknowledge it. Orthodoxy is a network of expectations and beliefs that need to be safeguarded from the influences of the outside world, and it falls to the Orthodox Jew to create a siyag, or fence, around this Torah. Lying about my parents, I told myself, upheld this barrier. It was a sacrifice I had to make.
But that explanation robs me of agency and overlooks a fundamental truth: I have never felt more alive than when I was Orthodox, and especially when I was lying about who I was. That is why I fell in love with yeshiva, a place that did not offer a carefree environment or a pliant Judaism, but recognized that being in service to God meant being in pain. In yeshiva, I willingly conscripted myself into an ontology where every action took on a heightened importance — where living in a settlement meant doing my share in bringing the Messiah. Life was lived at an affective register I have never experienced elsewhere; it teemed with the rush and glory of religious fanaticism.
And, of course, there was you.
The mishnah in Pirkei Avot states that a father must teach his son Torah. The rabbis expound on this mishnah, ruling that a father may fulfill his obligation by hiring a teacher. There exists, then, a mutuality in the figures of the father and the teacher; a rabbi can, when needed, take the father’s place. In your shiur, I experienced this mutuality firsthand. Your task was to safeguard our souls and to teach us how to become servants of God, and I gladly gave myself over to your care. In yeshiva, a shiur is a community and the rabbi its leader; being your student was an identity I proudly wore. Yes, you were demanding and stern, a sharp comment always on the tip of your tongue. But behind your hardness there was affection, too — the affection I imagined a father feels for a child.
Ultimately, I left Orthodoxy not because my parents were gay, but because I was. For years, I prayed to God to turn me straight. When, in my second year of yeshiva, I realized my prayers hadn’t worked, I daydreamed a plan to kill myself with a gun stolen from one of the night guards, who sometimes fell asleep on their shifts.
In the six years since I left Orthodoxy, I’ve met gay men who have chosen to remain within the community, and who have criticized my decision to leave the fold. Their scrutiny poses a question: “If we can stay, why can’t you?” Their challenge frames my decision to leave as, at worst, a sign of weakness, and, at best, an act of selfish grandiosity.
At the close of my first year in Israel, in the days preceding my flight home, I prepared for the loss of what I knew I’d be leaving behind: a routine of learning and prayer, the constant presence of rabbis to answer questions, and the support of my friends. But what proved the hardest to live without was something I did not anticipate: the religious intensity that defined yeshiva life. Back in Ohio, I was confronted by America’s heterogeneity — endless ways to live, and no agreed-upon goal. The calmness of my parents’ world surprised me most; it brought the fever pitch of urgency I had become accustomed to into sharp relief. My first response was annoyance. How could they live this way? But as the summer wore on, that annoyance morphed into another question: was the way I lived — as an Orthodox Jew — the only way?
One alternative way came from my sister, who had become Orthodox at the same time as I did. Throughout high school we had served as each other’s support system, providing encouragement when our parents disapproved of religious commitments we took on. After high school she spent time learning in Israel but, unlike me, chose a seminary in one of the Haredi enclaves of Jerusalem. Unsurprisingly, she returned nearly Haredi, and refused to appear in public wearing anything less than loose-fitting black skirts that reached the ground and long-sleeve shirts that covered her collarbone. Soon after, she enrolled in the more conservative of the two Orthodox women’s universities in New York City, where, people joked — with a hint of seriousness — women attended to find a husband, not earn a degree. Sure enough, halfway through my first year in yeshiva, she started dating for marriage, a ritual that involved the writing of a shidduch resume, securing proper references, and hiring a matchmaker to arrange dates.
Several weeks before my flight home, my sister called to warn me that she was different than when I left — she was changing, figuring things out. I knew she had recently taken a break from dating-for-marriage after a flurry of unsuccessful matches, so I assumed that’s what she was referring to. But when she greeted me at the airport in a tight skirt that ended above the knee and a shirt with sleeves that didn’t reach her elbows, I understood the extent of her transformation. Later, one of my mothers confided that my sister had called months earlier in a panic, claiming that she was suffocating under the weight of Orthodoxy’s expectations. She’d reached her breaking point.
I did not offer my sister support or attempt to understand her pain; at the time, I could only view her reevaluation of Jewish law as a threat to my own religious beliefs. We argued quietly throughout the summer, our conflict always returning to the question of sacrifice, something I had fetishized in the bubble-world of yeshiva: How much are you willing to give up?
Without ever saying it explicitly, my sister and I had long before made a pact never to speak about, or show pride in, our parents’ sexuality. That June, the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act called that pact into question. I was at my summer internship when the ruling was delivered; my officemates rigged an old television set so we could watch. As the crowd in the court’s plaza erupted into celebration, I struggled to articulate an appropriate response. I was happy, sure. Weren’t the ability to marry and the protections marriage afforded what I’d always wanted for my parents? But as soon as the happiness came, I heard your voice in my head, instructing me to remain steadfast in my belief in God and His laws prohibiting homosexuality.
This time, though, I could not accept your admonishments. The events of the summer — my sister’s reevaluation of Orthodoxy and the celebration of my parents’ sexuality after the Court decision — had shaken the bedrock of my religious devotion. What emerged from that wasn’t just a reckoning with my sister and parents, but a version of myself I had tried for so long to annihilate: a gay man — me.
When I returned to yeshiva for my second year, I looked to the Brisker derech to theorize away the threat my sexuality posed to my religious resolve. But hard as I tried, the clarity I had achieved in my first year eluded me. I prayed to God to ease my pain, but my prayers went unanswered. Instead, I discovered in God’s silence an unsavory truth: the Brisker derech — and the abstraction central to its project — only works in a theoretical space cut off from the problem as it actually exists. When you’re the problem, there is no escaping into metaphysics.
I began spending my days in bed, reading novels and sleeping. Rumors circulated about why I was absent, why I was always sad. Friends spied on me, reporting back to the head of the second-year program. I felt paranoid and trapped, worried that at any moment you would walk through the door and demand to know why I was missing, why I no longer attended prayer services, why I was lacking in my duty as an eved Hashem. What would I say to you then? Would I admit that the words of Jewish law now appeared to me warped and fraudulent? Would I tell you that I was not who you thought I was? That I was gay?
I was consumed by despair, but it wasn’t just my own fate that preoccupied me. And this, perhaps, is what pushed me onto a different path than those gay men who stay.
A few months after my return to yeshiva, the director of the American program invited the second-year students to spend Shabbat at his home in the neighboring settlement of Efrat. On Friday, as the sun set, we prayed the evening service at the top of one of the tallest hills in the northern part of the settlement. It’s so beautiful, my friends murmured, as they turned to the east, west, and south, where one could see the outlines of other settlements dotting the hilltops. But I couldn’t follow their gaze; my eyes were focused elsewhere, to the north, where one could see over the top of the apartheid wall and into the edge of Bethlehem. The buildings were dilapidated, especially when juxtaposed with the spectacle of the light shining off the settlements’ Jerusalem stone homes. What about that scene was beautiful? What did my friends have to overlook in order to protect their sense of security and holiness? Standing on that hilltop, I witnessed the Brisker derech, a strategy that was supposed to bring us closer to God’s word, fail all of us. The theoretical tricks we had performed to ease our troubled consciences only worked by negating Jewish law’s “others,” and nowhere was this clearer than in how we treated the Palestinians. Here was a truth I could never outrun: everywhere around me were inequities. We’d just convinced ourselves they weren’t there.
Avi, Mori: my father, my teacher. For five years you didn’t stop calling, and for five years I never answered. How could I have a conversation I knew would not be a conversation at all? When I still lived in the Jewish section of Washington Heights, and I knew you’d be in town visiting talmidim, I’d make sure our paths never crossed. It was excruciating to know you were only two blocks over and that I couldn’t bring myself to see your face.
I refused your calls because I told myself that a pain of my choosing, a pain I could anticipate, was better than a pain I could not predict. Your Orthodoxy leaves no room for pluralism, for other interpretations or truths. How could I do anything but fail you? I loved you like a father, and I could not bear to disappoint you as a child.
Nor could I fully escape you. For years after I left yeshiva — and still, occasionally, to this day, almost ten years later — I dreamed of it. After I came out, the dreams became more frequent, until I was dreaming of yeshiva almost every night, almost always the same dream:
I am back in the settlements. It is daytime. The sky is clear, one of those days where only the slightest tufts of white appear in a radiantly blue expanse. I buzz with possibility. Sometimes I hitchhike from a nearby settlement to yeshiva; my friend Jason, a serious bochur with bright orange-red hair, sits next to me in the backseat of a dusty, beat up Peugeot. Otherwise, the dream begins with me walking on the cobblestone pathway of the yeshiva grounds. In the distance I can hear the trickle of the fountain in the yeshiva’s fishpond, beside which I used to nap during the afternoon break. I make my way to the beit midrash, walk up the flight of concrete steps, and inhale the heaviness of the air, the product of hundreds of men learning in close proximity. I am as I am now: not Orthodox, but gay, pierced, tattooed. I stand at the top of the stairs and watch as heads in the room slowly turn to inspect me, the outsider, one who has clearly lost his way. But then those who recognize me for who I once was appear: my friends, the rebbes, the rosh yeshivas. We stand there for several moments, taking each other in, a nearly palpable hesitation hanging like a question mark in the air. And then we are one large circle, hugging, dancing, crying, inseparable.
And then I wake.
Certain scenes thrust me outside my body. I observe myself from a distance and think, what would you say if you could see me now? These are moments I know you would find sacrilegious: on a grungy living room dance floor, my body slick with sweat, every body touching, grinding, rubbing against each other; or, lying face-down on a bed, drunk on wine, my head rushing from inhalants, a man’s bare cock pressed against my asshole, spreading. These moments, so removed from how I used to live, lift me until I find myself standing alongside you, looking at the scene unfold from afar, wondering how I got to this place.
It happened when I read the New Testament for the first time. The Orthodox community saw reading the New Testament as an act of idolatrous suspicion. So when a college class presented me with the opportunity to study it, I gleefully — and in my head, scandalously — grabbed for it. I quickly fell in love with the synoptic gospels and the different versions of Jesus each offered. Matthew, written to convince Jews to convert to early Christianity, became my favorite, but Luke’s parables, which I found cryptic, like a good midrash, appealed too. In particular, I found myself enticed by the parable of the prodigal son.
The younger son, welcomed home by his father with open arms, was an attractive figure for someone who had lost his religion and saw no way back. But what I loved most about the parable wasn’t only what occurs in the scene of reunion, but what’s missing from it. Surely, when the son returns home, he has changed — grown older, adopted different customs and habits. Yet that goes unremarked upon; the father and son pick up again as if nothing has transpired. I like to think that this is not an instance of narrative erasure, that we are not to assume the son has had to revert to his former self for his father’s sake. Rather, I like to believe that the son has changed, and that the love of the father, and the possibility of reparation, arrives without preconditions.
You and I are Jews, though, and we have our own texts for how to deal with so-called sinners. And I have a waking fantasy of learning it with you, at your makom in the beit midrash, all of our differences acknowledged and on full display:
Kiddushin, 40a:
“Rabbi Ilai the Elder says: If a person sees that his evil inclination is overcoming him, he should go to a place where he is not known, and wear black clothes, and he should cover himself in black garments, and he should do as his heart desires, but he should not desecrate the name of Heaven in public.”
When I finish reading, we both sit quietly. I do not have to explain to you why I’ve chosen this passage for us to learn. It is clear that we have come to an impasse, that there is no point on the horizon of interpretation in which our trajectories will meet. The passage of Talmud reminds us of what we both already know: sometimes redemption does not exist, sometimes resolution would mean denying who we are, and sometimes absolution is a fiction that can only live in stories.
