by Rabbi Steve Greenberg
Senior rabbis at Yeshiva University were ready to quit. The impetus for their drastic threat to leave was the administration’s recent settlement agreement to let a small group of LGBTQ students meet over pizza.
It is the most recent chapter in a 2021 lawsuit brought against Yeshiva University by the YU Pride Alliance, an unofficial student group. The case has, since then, roiled the university.
According to the New York Times, Yeshiva agreed to recognize the club (now renamed “Hareni”), bringing to an end its attempt to deny the group official recognition on religious grounds. The school’s clubs are required to adhere to the norms of halakha — Jewish law — but exactly what that means in the case of an LGBTQ club is still being hotly contested.
The school had originally responded to the students’ request by creating a club that would, in the words of the dean of the rabbinical school, “allow for students who are battling this yetzer hara [evil inclination] to gather for rabbinically approved events to help them omed b’nisayon [meet the challenge] to resist all temptation to act upon their desires.” What the rabbis envisioned as a celibacy support club had zero student buy-in and zero student attendance.
Zak Sawyer, a spokesman for the students, said that the settlement went far beyond the university’s original offer. He claims that Hareni secured written guarantees ensuring that it would have the same rights and privileges as other student clubs, including access to campus spaces, official student event calendars, and the ability to use LGBTQ in its public materials — none of which existed under YU’s prior “initiative.”
The news of the Hareni club’s establishment touched off a storm in the YU community. Beyond the threats of resignation, truly offensive comments were made in public. Speaking to Haredi podcaster David Lichtenstein, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, an esteemed senior Talmud professor, and Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz, the dean of the rabbinical school, portrayed these YU students as reshaim and kofrim (wicked people and heretics).
In the same podcast, Rabbi Schachter appears to painfully misconstrue the students’ motives. He claimed that the impetus for the club is part of a worldwide campaign to undermine creation, “convince the whole world that men should become women, and women should become men.”
These students, however, did not come to YU to wage a cultural battle. They came for an array of personal reasons, central among them a hunger for intense Jewish learning and a collegiate experience of religious communal life. For them, the club is a resource for remaining Orthodox, not unraveling it.