Bullying and gay teen suicide — and those who stand idly by

by Steven Greenberg.

This past spring, my partner and I moved to Cincinnati. Soon after we arrived, an Orthodox synagogue in town prohibited our attendance. The rabbi of the shul called apologetically to inform us that the ruling had come from a rabbi whose authority exceeded his own.

I decided to call this rabbi, who is the head of a prominent yeshiva and a respected halachic authority. I wanted to meet him personally to discuss the decision with him. He agreed to speak with me on the phone.

He said that he had heard that I advocated changing the Torah. I told him that this is not true, that in fact I am trying to find a way for people who are gay or lesbian to still be a part of Orthodox communities. I shared with him that people who are gay and lesbian who want to remain true to the Torah are in a great deal of pain. Many have just left the community. Some young gay people become so desperate they attempt suicide.

His reply: “Maybe it’s a mitzvah for them to do so.”

At first I was speechless. I asked for clarification, and yes, this is exactly what he meant. Since gay people are guilty of capital crimes, perhaps it might be a good idea for them to do the job themselves. For the rest of the conversation I was shaking, using every ounce of my strength to end the conversation without losing my composure.

His uncensored expression, one he might wish he hadn’t said, was surely beyond the pale in every in every way, even for the strictest of Orthodox rabbis. But, in retrospect, I am grateful to him for this transparent, if painful, honesty.

Whether it is said so baldly or not, for many in the Orthodox community it would be better for us to disappear, one way or another. When teenagers come to understand how intense the communal desire for their erasure is, how brutal it can be, they can easily give in to despair as a number of them did just last month.

I have hesitated to share this story for many reasons. I am a committed religious Jew and am indeed embarrassed to share negative portrayals of my own community. My instinct is to follow Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s adage: Avoid complaining about what other people do wrong and simply add goodness. But silence at this point is unacceptable. I can no longer stand passively by as the blood of my brothers and sisters is spilled.

To my colleagues, I say this: It is not possible to abstain from choosing. Either stand with the more than 170Orthodox rabbis who have openly and proudly condemned homophobia and bigotry, while at the same time maintaining a traditionalist reading of the halacha regarding homosexuality, or stand with the rosh yeshiva who told me that teenage suicide is a mitzvah. Either we give a teen hope that a good life as a gay person is possible, in whatever religious community he or she lives, or we confirm his or her worst nightmares — and ours.

Now, it is fair to worry, as many Orthodox leaders do, that taking a stand against homophobia might be interpreted as approving of all homosexual behavior. It surely need not be, but more importantly, is the fear of misinterpretation worth risking the very lives of our kids?

Nor is it enough simply to decry bullying. Religious communities of all sorts need to make it possible for a 13-year-old to expect that life will be good. We have a duty to make it clear that if a teenager discovers herself to be gay, she can still dream of a happy future. Depriving young people of hope for the future is a deadly game.

Last month, more than 500 mourners attended a memorial for Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old from Tehachapi (near Bakersfield) who hung himself from a tree in his backyard Sept. 19. One classmate and friend, Jamie Elaine Phillips, told reporters that Seth had known he was gay and had been teased about it for years. “This year it got much worse,” she said. “People would say, ‘You should go kill yourself. You should go away. You’re gay, who cares about you?’ ”

There are at least three steps that my colleagues in the Orthodox rabbinate, and leaders of Orthodox organizations, can and should take at this time.

First, if they have not already done so, they should sign the Statement of Principles (http://www.bit.ly/cbthuc). Even those who think the document is too conservative ought to consider signing as a powerful rejoinder to the rash of recent gay teen suicides — at least seven young men in seven different states. As the statement itself says, “Embarrassing, harassing or demeaning someone with a homosexual orientation or same-sex attraction is a violation of Torah prohibitions that embody the deepest values of Judaism.” There is no better time to reaffirm this than now.

Second, I have been deeply disappointed to see so few Orthodox institutions represented on a recent letter, spearheaded by the LGBT advocacy group Keshet, condemning bullying and homophobia in the Jewish community. Signing this letter should be a no-brainer (http://www.bit.ly/ceUH4y). The letter says nothing about the contentious issues of same-sex marriage or homosexuality in Jewish law. It says that bullying is unacceptable. It is especially disappointing for Orthodox schools to quietly abstain from signing on.

Third, Orthodox institutions must immediately cut off any support or endorsement of so-called “reparative therapy,” which has been denounced by every professional medical and psychiatric association, and that has never worked for more than a sliver of “patients.” So long as we perpetuate the myth that homosexuality is a pathology to be cured, we encourage kids who find they cannot cure themselves to despair, and consider ending their lives.

According to a 2007 study, one in six LGBT teenagers considers suicide, and one in 20 actually attempts it. This is not a marginal problem affecting just a few depressed kids; it is an epidemic, spread by hatred and its most valuable ally, silence. Whatever our opinions are regarding two verses in Leviticus, there is another that cannot be forgotten: Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.

Rabbi Steven Greenberg is a senior teaching fellow at the New York–based Clal — the National Center for Jewish Learning and Leadership, and the director of Orthodox programming at Nehirim. He is the author of “Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition.”

Rene Magritte, "Six Elements," 1926

I got to see this in person over the weekend at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A new study, called Women Give 2010, from the Women’s Philanthropy Institute and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, found that women are more likely to give to charity than men.

The study looked at single men and single women to determine if there are gender differences on giving. The study also broke the groups into income quintiles, with the lowest earning $23,509 or less and the highest earning more than $103,000.

The study found that women were more likely to give in every income category. At the top quintile, 96% of women in the study were likely to give compared with 76% for men.

Women also tend to donate more dollars. In the top quintile, women said they planned to $1,910 an year (this was in 2007, so the numbers may have come down since then, given the recession). That is more than twice the amount planned by men of the same income group.

The study doesn’t offer any explanations for the differences, aside from describing women’s rising earning power and education levels. Are men and women wired differently when it comes to charity? Would the results still hold true for millionaires? These questions have yet to be studied.

Via Zach Weiner.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a gathering of young members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party this weekend that the “multikulti” concept – where people of different backgrounds would live together happily – does not work in Germany.

At “the beginning of the 1960s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country,” said Ms. Merkel at the event in Potsdam, near Berlin. “We kidded ourselves a while. We said: ‘They won’t stay, [after some time] they will be gone,’ but this isn’t reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side by side and to enjoy each other … has failed, utterly failed.”

The crowd gathered in Potsdam greeted the above remark, delivered from the podium with fervor by Ms. Merkel, with a standing ovation. And her comments come just days after a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think tank (which is affiliated with the center-left Social Democratic Party) found that more than 30 percent of people believed Germany was “overrun by foreigners” who had come to Germany chiefly for its social benefits.

Even more terrifying:

The study also found that 13 percent of Germans would welcome a “Führer” – a German word for leader that is explicitly associated with Adolf Hitler – to run the country “with a firm hand.” Some 60 percent of Germans would “restrict the practice of Islam,” and 17 percent think Jews have “too much influence,” according to the study.

In between France’s expulsion of tens of thousands of Roma immigrants and the assimilation of would-be book-banner Geer Wilders and other nationalist politicians into the mainstream of European politics, one is faced with a sobering picture of Europe. The continent of the Enlightenment still dreams in unreason. It falls to us to confront their monsters, leading by humane example.

Dorathea Tanning, "Insomnia," 1957

“We need                   and we need [it/them] right now.”

a.) “jobs”

b.) “massive overhauls of our crumbling infrastructure”

c.) “a reevaluation of our inhumane and breathtakingly expensive drug enforcement policies and incarceration system”

d.) “1,000 laser systems put in the sky”

If you answered A-C, congratulations, you are a rational, compassionate, sane human being! If you answered D, congratulations, you are the frontrunner in West Virginia’s Senate race!

“If there is a rogue missile aimed at our country, we have 33 minutes to figure out what we’re going to do,” [Republican John] Raese said told the crowd at a recent campaign stop, according to NBC’s Shawna Thomas and Carrie Dann. “We are sitting with the only technology in the world that works and it’s laser technology. We need 1,000 laser systems put in the sky and we need it right now. That is [of] paramount importance.”

The cost of such a program? A cool “$20 billion,” according to Raese.

Raes went on to elaborate on the thought-process which led him to the 1,000-laser figure:

Just 900 lasers is leaving the job undone–and Americans aren’t ones for leaving things undone. 900 would leave inexcusable holes in our national security, holes we know our enemies would exploit. If, hypothetically, Iran or North Korea, some day in the unforeseeable future, develops a missile that can hit the US, God forbid, they’ll know there are lasers up there, lasers with only 899 redundancies. Just 900 lasers will embolden our enemies! They’ll know we could handle 900 missles simultaneously, but 901…?

I hope–no, I know Real Americans are wiser than that; that we don’t have to relearn the lessons of 9/11, about what happens when you have only 900 space lasers. If we leave those holes open, we’ll have to answer to our children for them one day.

But 1,100 lasers, that’s wasteful. I would fight against 1,100 lasers, and all the pork it would bring to the aerospace big-interests in Ohio and Florida. That’s the sort of looseness with our money, the tax-and-spend mindset in Washington I’m running against. I’m running against it because, with this out-of-control growing deficit, we’ll have to answer to our children one day. After we’ve spent ourselves into bankruptcy, they’ll look up at us with teary eyes, and they’ll ask us, “Daddy, why isn’t America great anymore?” And we can just wipe their eyes, point up to the sky, and tell them, “Because we put up exactly 100 lasers too many.”

Here’s the basic gist:

My aim was to create garments that the majority of the US citizenry would find offensive and, more specifically, submit designs so despicable that most custom-tee printers would refuse to print them. Still, my ultimate goal was to find a willing printer and get the shirts made no matter what. Mark Twain, perhaps the quintessential American author, once wrote: “Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.” Each entrepreneur who refused my business would define yet another instance of American indecency and chip away at the bedrock of liberty as we know it.

I began by setting some guidelines: The topics of racism, sexism, and politics were deemed too easy for this exercise, primarily because online retailers already provide a bountiful selection of knee-jerk schlock marketed to college students and bigots. I also afforded myself the luxury of ratcheting up the viciousness of the shirt designs if the printer proved too eager to accept the initial unseemly idea.

Much like going up on your roof, because you are not boring at all, it only gets better from here.