When their baby is born, most parents have dreams about how that new life will unfold. Those dreams are unrealistic — by definition, because they’re dreams — but they usually involve the glorious mastering of unavoidable conventions on the way to some high-level prize.
If you’re part of a tight community — if, say, you are an Orthodox Jew — your newborn’s dream life will include inclusion in the community, with all the pluses — a lot of love for you — and the minuses — a lot of eyes on you — that it entails.
Most parents don’t assume their children will be gay; some parents adjust to that information easily and lovingly, while others, without stinting on love, don’t know exactly how to adapt to what they think will be a radically different future. (And while all of this is far less true than it used to be, it remains true to a large extent nonetheless.)
All this means that when children come out to their Orthodox parents as gay — no matter when they do it, no matter what their parents had guessed or concluded before that watershed moment — the parents have to do a lot of recalibration. And often that includes a certain amount of vigilance, and that means a certain loss of emotional freedom.
And what all this means is that when Eshel — an organization whose primary goal is working with members of the Orthodox LGBTQ community, but that has a strong secondary goal supporting parents and family members — offers a yearly retreat for parents, that retreat turns into a strong community that provides love, understanding, and acceptance to its members.
