Rabbi Lamm against the Zeitgeist

(This is an expanded version of an article that appeared in The Jewish Press on June 8.)

In the past month:

• Kfar Saba held its first pride parade, and Tel Aviv’s was its largest ever.
• Rishon Letzion appointed an LGBT community coordinator.
• Israel’s consul general in Sao Paulo, Brazil praised Jews who marched in that city’s pride parade.
• A Gallup poll reported 67% of Americans support same-sex marriage, compared with 27% in 1996.

How should Jews feel about these developments?

“Sexual morality is the root of all spiritual and moral welfare,” Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch states in his commentary to Vayikra 5:31. He adds on Vayikra 18:6:

“The moral and social disintegration of the antediluvian world set in when men first began to choose their mates not in accordance with God’s Will but in accordance with their personal caprice, as it says [Rav Hirsch cites Bereshis 6:2]. This state of affairs extinguished the Divine spirit in man and sent mankind to its grave.”

Rabbi Hirsch’s concerns are a recurring theme in the writing of a major Modern Orthodox figure: Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, president of Yeshiva University from 1976 to 2013. The following material might surprise both some adherents of Modern Orthodoxy and its critics.

In an address from 1968 on “The Challenges of the Modern Rabbinate,” Rabbi Lamm remarked:

“Only recently a convocation of Episcopalian priests in New York declared as ‘morally neutral’ the act of homosexuality where there was true love between the two parties and no outsider is hurt. These are symptoms of the new ‘immoral ethics’ that threaten the whole structure of Jewish morality, heretofore accepted unquestionably, at least in theory, by the Western world. And here there can be no accommodation.”

Writing in The Jewish Observer the year after, Rabbi Lamm condemned

“the scandalous effort by certain clerical groups to legitimize homosexual ‘marriages’ provided both partners truly love each other. Once love is set up in opposition to law (and the tension between them is always resolved in favor of love), love itself can become a menace to all other values cherished by civilized man.”

He went on to write in “Judaism and the Modern Attitude toward Homosexuality” (1974):

“Under no circumstances can Judaism suffer homosexuality to become respectable. Were society to give its open or even tacit approval to homosexuality, it would invite more aggressiveness on the part of adult pederasts toward young people. Indeed, in the currently permissive atmosphere, the Jewish view would summon us to the semantic courage of referring to homosexuality not as ‘deviance,’ with the implication of moral neutrality and non-judgmental idiosyncrasy, but as ‘perversion’ — a less clinical and more old-fashioned word, perhaps, but one that is more in keeping with the Biblical to’evah.”

Recounting that era in his book Torah Umadda, Rabbi Lamm wrote how “the decade of the 70s was highly hedonistic, with its much touted sexual revolution, experimentalism with dress and morality (especially its legitimization of homosexuality as an acceptable ‘alternative life-style’), general permissiveness…” He maintained this stand in subsequent decades, observing in a 1992 lecture on “The Future of Creativity in Jewish Law and Thought”:

“True creativity means working out of freedom within certain restricting parameters, whether artistic, legal, moral, or spiritual…I do not accept as examples of halakhic creativity such spurious heterim as driving to shul on Shabbat, patrilinealism, ‘alternative sexual lifestyles’ — all of which, incidentally, have been paraded before the public as halakhically justified and as examples of ‘courageous’ halakhic creativity. Such is the latest grotesque ‘creative adaptation’ of Halakha by unrepentant and publicly assertive homosexual Rabbis (or: pulpit pederasts).”

Reflecting on his 1974 article in 2005, Rabbi Lamm commented that “Any homosexual militant who wants to make a point says if you don’t agree with him a hundred percent, you’re a homophobe, which is nonsense. They’re just trying to con the rest of us.” He added, “They want to take certain activities out of the closet. I say no, the Ribbono shel Olam created the closet for a reason.”

Finally, in 2007 Rabbi Lamm predicted about contemporary trends regarding “theoreticians of the New Morality”:

“[T]his as-long-as-you-don’t-hurt-anyone morality threatens to undermine the whole structure of morality as we know it, and to destroy the family as the fundamental collective unit upon which society is based. The negative rule of not-hurting-anyone-else is bound to become the sole normative criterion for all legal codes in the Western world…Thus, adultery and homosexuality will be legally permitted where both parties consent — and are of the age of consent — and no third party is injured thereby. What becomes legally permissible tends to become the moral norm as well for society at large…[T]he situation has deteriorated considerably, so much so that by 2006 a number of states have moved to recognize stable homosexual liaisons as ‘marriages.’ “

Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein once wrote of “withdraw[al] into a sort of observant secularism — a life largely motivated by secular values although regulated by religious norms.” In a related vein, today’s Modern Orthodoxy too often seems to mean private observance and public support for a zeitgeist often contrary to Judaism’s universal (Noahide) morality. For example:

• An associate director of Jerusalem’s “Proudly Modern Orthodox” Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi wrote in 2016, “I support the legalization of gay marriage.”
• An article on a recent LGBT conference in Efrat noted about a rabbi’s presentation, “He showed footage of a religious gay wedding, pointing out the ‘pure joy’ that was felt by those in attendance.”
• This month, the Talmud department chair at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah wrote of “orthodoxy’s exclusionary stance” toward “the queer community” and claimed, “With time, it gets ever more difficult to champion the cost benefit ratio.”

Rabbi Lamm’s resolute defense of traditional values is the opposite of such incoherent retreat. He exemplifies how engagement with modernity should never usurp loyalty to Torah and the global righteousness it commands.