“One hopes that both sides in the Yeshiva University dispute can model how intra-Jewish disputes should be carried on,” Jonathan Sarna told JNS.
Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the founding director of Eshel, whose mission is “to build LGBTQ+ inclusive Orthodox Jewish communities,” holds rabbinic ordination and an undergraduate degree from Yeshiva. He told JNS that there has always been a tension at Yeshiva between its values of Torah umadda, loosely translated as adhering to Jewish law while being active in the secular world.
“While YU has affiliates—a law school, medical school, a business school and social-work school—that are wholly secular, there was always a tension in the college to sustain the ethos of a Yeshiva while allowing students to prepare for a career that required a secular education,” he told JNS.
“That tension has always been a defining challenge of Yeshiva University,” Greenberg said. “This is only the latest iteration of that tension.”
Of the hundreds of congregational rabbis that Eshel has interviewed, including many ordained by Yeshiva University, most are “much closer to the human realities, much more responsible for the safety and well-being of these young people and so seem better equipped to address the halachic challenges than those who sit in an ivory tower in Washington Heights,” he told JNS. (Yeshiva’s men’s campus is in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.)
“Beyond the claim of halachic impropriety, it appears that at least some of the rabbis at YU fear that the existence of such a club would have an impact on YU’s standing in the broader Orthodox world, especially in the more yeshivish communities,” Greenberg said.
To some senior Yeshiva rabbis, the new development is that “never before has there been a claim of legitimacy and even ‘pride’ in a behavior that is deemed halachically prohibited,” Greenberg said.
He thinks that “there is surely middle ground to explore” when it comes to an LGBT club at Yeshiva.
Whatever the club is called, it could be a site for Yeshiva professors or rabbinic alumni to share their thoughts on relevant issues, according to the rabbi.
“Indeed, why not invite an array of thoughtful Orthodox psychologists, theologians, philosophers and educators from both the right and the left of Modern Orthodoxy to engage the key texts and challenging questions openly?” he posed. “Isn’t that what a confident Yeshiva University would do?”
Yeshiva is a religious institution, but one that “welcomes integration into the larger world not as a mere economic necessity, but as a vote of trust in the tradition as it engages with open inquiry,” according to Greenberg.
“Yeshiva University ought to be the laboratory that it was established to become—not a museum, or worse, a mausoleum,” he told JNS. “There are many examples in the history of halachah that would nourish such an approach.”