Dr. Schweka's Piercing Post: Religious Supporters of Pride Have a Spine Made of Plasticine

This week, Dr. Avi Schweka, a biblical scholar and teacher with a Ph.D. from the Department of Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, published a fascinating post that received numerous reactions and shares. It discussed the stance of the Haredi sector against the upsetting and distorted local LGBTQ trends. Note: The post does not generalize the entire religious public and its rabbis, but highlights worrying trends within some parts of it.

"If we've learned anything from this past week, it's the necessity of the Haredi sector," wrote Dr. Schweka, who noted that many in the religious community question the need for Haredim. "I've asked myself that question many times, and I think what happened this week provides a clear answer."

Here, Dr. Schweka begins to elaborate on the reasons why "it's very important that the Haredim are always around," as he puts it. "I'm not talking about temptations. That's the easy part. But the effort to uphold the Torah in an open world creates a constant friction, ideological and cognitive, and this friction exacts a toll, which sometimes can be very heavy. Sometimes it might lead to decadence, to a complete dissolution of the essence, of the essence of faith and religion. As we constantly rewrite the essence of the Torah to withstand attacks on it, this essence erodes until it disappears entirely.

"I think that's what happened this week with the LGBTQ storm, which started with the protest over the surrogacy law and continued with the pride parade in Jerusalem. I'm not talking about the fact that my feed was filled with condemnations, almost all from religious people, of those who oppose this march (while there was hardly any condemnation of the march itself). I'm talking about the content. Many good and dear people (and religious), led by liberal rabbis, wrote posts that received thousands of likes, in which they explain to us why supporting LGBTQ people is the will of the Creator, and Judaism is a religion of love and compassion. It progresses with the times, and anyone who says they are sinners is simply wrong, and anyone legitimizing this phenomenon is doing the will of Hashem and speaks in the name of true Judaism, as opposed to all those who are stuck in the past and will be discarded by history.

"I hardly heard other voices. Maybe I need to change the mix of my virtual friends. I don't know. But I heard this voice loudly, and I hardly heard any other voices.

"What does all this mean? One thing: A little pressure and we break. Non-Haredi religious Judaism showed this week that its backbone is made of plasticine. As it turned out, keeping Hashem's word is important, but sitting in the back benches of the bus with all the accepted people, rather than in the corner with all the outcasts, is still a bit more important.

"At this point, I'm sure you'll all cry out, at least those being discussed, about what seems to them as false and baseless slander: How dare you imply it is succumbing to pressure, or a desire to be accepted. Heaven forbid. This position is a result of a thorough moral and ethical inquiry, and that, and only that, leads us to the conclusion that this is the will of the Creator, and this is what Judaism requires, that they may realize their love and live a partnership life according to their inclination like any other person.

"I, myself, believe, of course, anyone who claims so. People have highly developed mechanisms of self-convincing. But I know factually, objectively, that if this weren't the trend right now, those same people would be singing completely different tunes.

"How do I know? Well, here history helps me a bit. Several decades ago, they were truly persecuted. Not in terms of whether they could undergo surrogacy procedures. They were hunted down actively, even in the most advanced countries of the world. They were chased down, quite literally, using anonymous rumors, and when they were caught, they were thrown into prison for long years. Sometimes they were castrated. Many of them committed suicide, and the cases are well-known.

"And lo and behold, in those years no enlightened, humanist, liberal rabbis were heard explaining that the will of the Creator is for them to live a partnership life according to their inclination. Not because there weren't any such rabbis back then. But because in those years, the enlightened and humanistic position, accepted by enlightened and humanistic people around the world, was that such relationships were an abomination, a distortion of nature, to be fought against at all costs. This position, of course, didn't create any particular problem for believers. And lo and behold, when people don't have a problem, they don't try to solve it. The sad reality is that people are capable of voicing "unpopular" opinions from their tradition when it makes them accepted in the surrounding world; but no one will rush to voice such opinions when the surrounding world will also denounce him.

"The desire to be accepted is a huge pressure, affecting the deepest layers of the soul. And here the Haredi approach comes into play. In medieval moral and philosophical literature, there is a concept, 'to be affected'. The idea is that a person should not be easily affected... it's not about 'admiration' in today's sense, but being-affected; if something causes a person to do something, think differently, or speak differently, then that thing causes the person to be affected. Simply, it activates him.

"We, non-Haredi religious people, even when we don’t agree with the views expressed publicly, we are affected. We take these matters to heart. We try to find answers to them. We try repeatedly to find new ways to defend our positions. In summary, we enter into a debate, and inevitably, into a defensive stance. This process, as mentioned, erodes.

"The Haredim, with all their faults, are not affected. They do not play this particular game. If something very clear is written in the Torah—they refuse to enter into discussion or debate."

"And sometimes," Dr. Schweka concludes the thought-provoking post, "that's exactly what is needed."