By Sam Weinberg
A few months ago, a student was shoved and called a slur on Wilf campus. A recent article detailed what was unquestionably a verbal and physical assault, enacted by one student upon another, in the prominent Heights Lounge during the Wilf Club Fair. Nissim Farhy, the writer of the piece, gives us harrowing words of the moment, quoting one of the victim’s recountings of the violence. The slur was unsurprisingly homophobic, making evident what many of us intuitively understand: LGBTQ students at our university have endured significant discrimination and ill-treatment.
The news of Yeshiva University and the (former) YU Pride Alliance (YUPA) ending their legal disputes with a settlement – establishing a newly recognized club, “Hareni,” with student leadership coming from the YUPA – is a welcome conclusion to a years-long, oft-bitter saga. The initial sentiment that I encountered was overwhelmingly positive, but after news began to dissipate further, dissenting voices became loud. They’re now loud enough that further discussion of the value of the club is unfortunately necessary, and may be, I hope, helpful.
Both the university and the yeshiva are homes of greater understanding, forcing the undergraduate and the talmid(a) (student) to encounter his or her ignorance in a field and make the leap toward acquiring greater knowledge. For most subjects, this is an uncontroversial procedure: I know little about biology, so I take a biology course. I know little about a sugya in Bava Metzia, so I learn it b’chavruta (with a study partner) and in shiur.
For distinctly intellectual areas, students are more willing to recognize their lack of expertise, entering the learning process that pushes us forward. Yet, while we embrace that humility in secular or judaic learning, we resist it in our interpersonal growth. We readily admit our ignorance entering a course but push back against admitting ignorance toward how we approach our friends, our classmates, our loved ones. Events like Stomp Out the Stigma – which, I’d add, my participation in last year was personally profound and meaningful – are successful in giving insight into otherwise non-intuitive points of our peers’ experiences. While Stomp Out the Stigma’s emphasis is on struggles of mental health – entirely unrelated to themes of sexuality – the act of expressing my experience, forcing students to reconcile with something in a peer’s life that they may not personally encounter, is powerful and important.
This is, in my view, the main importance of Hareni on campus. No one should have to choose silence to feel a sense of belonging on campus. Lost in much of the discourse is a basic human point: What does it mean to tell a peer that they can’t express a component of their identity? What does it mean to tell a peer that their orientation is taboo, that their existence is a violation of Jewish tradition? What does it mean to tell a peer that they do not belong here, that who they are is, by nature, unacceptable?
I’ve read many of the critiques and frustrations about the rollout of the news of Hareni. Most of the negativity thus far has focused on the rushed and confused announcement, an announcement that spawned rabbinical feedback that implied a lack of communication from the administration before the announcement. I empathize with and understand that angle: When the lone and brief initial announcement mentions “approved guidelines of Yeshiva University’s senior rabbis,” one would assume that those senior rabbis have been well-informed, and failure to do so is misleading. The confusion was so widespread that YU President Ari Berman even shared a mass email to the entire student body, in which he apologized and reviewed what the formation of the club entails. Further letters written by the roshei yeshiva implied the notion that they were heavily invested in the construction of the new club was false.
What has been more disheartening than simple confusion, however, is some of the framing of Hareni’s approval as some sort of failure of YU to reconcile traditional values with acceptance and understanding. A recent (and, frankly, embarrassing) article refers to Hareni as a “toeiva club” in the headline, saying that approval of the club shows that “YU has abandoned its moral backbone to appease external forces,” (those external forces, of course, being its own students). It asserts somehow that “for those who actually live by Torah,” recognizing the existence of queer people is unthinkable. Some of the recent additions to the discourse – including a requirement for Hareni to outwardly state on all materials that club members still abide by the Shulchan Aruch, which seems impractical at best – imply that, even in YU, many are still unconvinced that the ability to be both queer and halacha–abiding is possible. Why else constantly announce that halacha is still a value if some in our community aren’t questioning it?
Yet, erasing the existence of queer students on campus violates the fundamental principle of “believing in the infinite worth of each and every human being.” “The reality is that some of us just don’t fit the box, even as we spend inordinate energy trying to stay inside it,” writes Dr. Mark Shinar, an educational consultant whose thoughtfulness on interpersonal relationships has been eye-opening for me. Hareni’s formation is “a step toward acknowledging a population and giving them a place to be seen in a world where they often build boundaries of invisibility just to survive.”
The queer community on our campus is composed of human beings, made of flesh and blood and imbued with a soul, dreams, and aspirations. To view our brothers and sisters as anything other than that – whether it be human representations of ideology or renouncement of religious tradition – is to take part in the process of dehumanizing the existence of other people. Our religious conviction is upheld by the firm belief in our being created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God.
Love must be full in our hearts for all, says Rav Kook. Some of us who have been, as mentioned before, physically and verbally attacked – basic human respect and empathy are now concepts we must, with the very same religious conviction, fight for. With this being the case, the question is not whether or not Yeshiva University, as a religious institution, could afford to have a space dedicated to the LGBTQ community. The question is: Could we afford to not?