Tel-Chai Nation

For some time now in Hollywood Hills, Florida, a homosexual man who was excommunicated from an Orthodox synagogue for his practice/lifestyle has been picketing them to let him back in, making a fool of himself in the process. The Forward's article also sugarcoats another issue that's deeply concerning to everyone sensible now, and should be, considering all the transsexual extremism that's been going on lately:

Kehillas Hollywood Hills bills itself as a “young, vibrant, warm” Orthodox congregation in South Florida.

But every Shabbat since late January, a man has been protesting outside its doors, saying the synagogue’s rabbi banned him because he’s gay. “You have spiritually and religiously killed me,” reads one of his handwritten signs.

Brian Mandel and his husband of 10 years started attending Kehillas Hollywood Hills in the fall of 2021, a few weeks after its inception in the home of Rabbi Binyamin Brodman, a high school Judaic studies teacher. In those early days, the couple often helped make the minyan, the quorum of 10 required for communal prayer, and Mandel joined the rotation of men who chant Torah, something he has loved doing since his bar mitzvah four decades ago.

“I feel the closest to God when I lein,” Mandel said, using the Yiddish term. “When I’m leining, I’m leining for the community, but it’s like almost as though there’s no one else there — just me and Hashem.”

Because the Torah forbids male gay sex, homosexuality has long been a fractious issue in the Orthodox world, and Mandel is hardly alone among queer Jews struggling to find a spiritual home. While an ongoing survey by Eshel, a group that advocates for LGBTQ+ inclusion, has found hundreds of Orthodox rabbis who aspire to welcome queer members, several recent high-profile cases show there remain large pockets of discomfort.

A transgender woman was ousted from her teaching job at a Brooklyn yeshiva in September and in January said that her family was asked to leave Shenk Shul, a modern Orthodox synagogue in Upper Manhattan affiliated with Yeshiva University. The university has been embroiled in a legal battle over its refusal to recognize an LGBTQ+ student club.

And in 2019, a rabbinical student was asked to leave an Orthodox seminary the day after his boyfriend proposed to him at a pop concert. (Rabbi Daniel Atwood was later ordained by an Orthodox institution in Jerusalem.)

Let's take a moment to comment on the latter two topics. Since the former is apparently a man - and the paper's certainly making quite an effort to obfuscate the exact details - he's disgraced himself by making himself look like a creep who hates his born gender, which contradicts what Judaism is all about, and such people cannot be allowed to work at institutions where children are present. Naturally, none of these propagandists ever question whether it's acceptable for a man claiming to be the opposite sex to even enter such an institute while keeping his biological sex a secret, whether they could prove dangerous to children, or, whether children's well being matters. Which could explain why they got comment on the issue from somebody who's as socialist as they are:

Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel of North America, a Haredi Orthodox umbrella organization, said a synagogue’s decision to restrict LGBTQ+ attendance was “not a matter of anti-gay sentiment but rather pro-halacha standards.”

“Two men living as man and spouse implies the violation of a very serious Torah law,” Shafran said in an email.

Did they seek comment from this charlatan who acted as apologist for Haredi misogyny on purpose? Shafran's such a disgrace, that he's unqualified to comment on these issues at all. One must wonder why, say, Shmuley Boteach wasn't sought for comment, if a man of Haredi background matters. And I think that the student ordained in Jerusalem got his appointment at Pardes, which may be a left-wing institute. So that's not too surprising.

Mandel and his husband, who asked not to be named for fear of being shunned from other shuls, were well aware of this sentiment, having quit an Orthodox synagogue on Long Island, in New York, years ago after a confrontation with an anti-gay guest speaker. So while they wore their wedding rings to shul, they did not tell the rabbi or fellow synagogue attendees that they were a couple. Whenever someone asked how the two were related, Mandel said, they would say they were roommates and best friends.

For somebody supposedly attached to Orthodoxy, he sure doesn't seem to comprehend much about its beliefs, and it's shameful how he makes such an effort to force his culture upon Orthodox Judaism, or any kind of Judaism that doesn't jibe with his shoddy beliefs. That's exactly the problem with how he's going about things, right down to how he apparently won't form his own "Orthodox" synagogue to serve his mentality. As a result, he's just as much a socialist in his own way as Shafran is. And look how the paper predictably makes "anti-gay" sound like a bad thing.

As a teenager on Long Island, Mandel felt he was different from the other boys in his modern Orthodox high school, but wasn’t sure how. As an undergraduate at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he realized he was gay. He later earned master’s degrees in social work and Jewish studies at Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary; today, he does social work part time while he studies to be a nurse.

And he never wanted to learn how to relate to the opposite sex, eh? Well that's the problem, though of course, if he had limited view of the fairer sex as is the case in many ultra-Orthodox societies, that could explain how he got where he is now. As I've said before, I suspect religious customs and practices play parts in breeding homosexuality, and no religion should be let off the hook for this, period. This is precisely why Orthodox Judaism, definitely Haredi, needs some serious reevaluation in its view of how women dress too, or whether they're allowed to practice singing, because it's been causing untold damage to whole generations of women by body-shaming them, or worse.

While strict interpretations of Jewish law forbid gay sex and most large Orthodox institutions openly oppose same-sex marriage, there is a growing recognition in parts of the Orthodox world that queer Jews are an inevitable part of the community fabric. Over the past decade or more, individual synagogues have grappled with how best to accommodate this reality, as more Orthodox Jews have publicly identified as LGBTQ+ and groups like Eshel and JQY — which supports queer Orthodox youth — have emerged to support them.

In 2016, an Orthodox high school in Los Angeles adopted a nondiscrimination pledge for LGBTQ+ students. Even Yeshiva University, which asked the Supreme Court last year to let it block an existing campus Pride club, has offered to create a new one under its own auspices.

A white paper published last month by Rabbi Kenneth Brander, an Orthodox American-Israeli rabbi who founded the Miami yeshiva high school that now employs Brodman, asserted that LGBTQ+ Jews should be allowed to teach in yeshivas and be members of Orthodox synagogues as long as they are not sexually active.

And in more than a few Orthodox synagogues, gay men are called up for ritual honors like any other congregants, and “family” memberships have become “household” memberships.

“In a glacial environment, there’s been real movement,” said Miryam Kabakov, co-founder and executive director of Eshel, which offers a dating site, parent support groups and retreats as well as Torah study resources. “People’s language is different. Everyone is taking it seriously.”

But that movement is hardly universal, and experts say many LGBTQ+ Orthodox Jews who feel rejected by their community give up being observant or are alienated from the religion altogether. Or worse: A 2012 study by the Israeli health ministry found that 20% of LGBTQ+ youth had attempted suicide, compared to 3.5% for the general youth population, with the lead researcher stating that the number was higher among the Orthodox. JQY Executive Director Rachael Fried wrote in a 2020 column that nearly 3 out of 4 teens who come to the nonprofit’s drop-in center have “experienced suicidality.”

I notice one of the above writers at least had the audacity to ask why LGBT Jews don't leave Orthodoxy. Well, the far-left has certainly caused quite a bad influence to the point where they believe their homosexual/transsexual mentality and culture should be forced upon others, and worst, they believe being LGBTQ means never having to say you're sorry. But of course, they won't ask whether suicides have anything to do with if the subjects are depressed about not being able to relate properly to the opposite sex. Considering heterosexuals are far more confidant than homosexuals, that should give something to think about.

A few years before they moved to Florida, Mandel said, a guest speaker at a Long Island synagogue where the couple had been congregants for years ranted about the decline of family values with such apparent contempt for gay people that Mandel, seated in the pews, rose to cut him off. (The couple shared this story on the condition that the synagogue not be identified because they still have relatives in the area.)

“I said, ‘I didn’t come to shul for this. I’m gay. I am happily married to my husband,’” Mandel recalled. “And I stormed out.”

So nobody's allowed to form an opinion on LGBT practices and ideology any more than Islam? On which note, what if this guy's not concerned about the far worse attitudes in the Muslim world towards homosexuality (which they too have blame to shoulder for creating)? If not, it just demonstrates how self-centered and self-interested many homosexual/transsexual practitioners are, and in the case of this man in Florida, he's only trying to perform provocations.

There is no halacha, or Jewish law, restricting same-sex attraction. But the Leviticus verse prohibiting two men from having sex calls the act a to’eiva, often translated as “abhorrence” or “abomination.” To some Orthodox leaders, then, recognizing queer Jews in any way is tantamount to endorsing the worst kind of sin.

To those advocating LGBTQ+ inclusion, though, this is irrelevant. Whatever the halachic challenges around homosexuality may be, they say, the prevailing task of a synagogue is not to regulate its members’ observance of Torah and mitzvot, but to facilitate it.

They note that most modern Orthodox synagogues do not investigate members’ or attendees’ observance of other aspects of Jewish law.

Jews who drive on Shabbat, for example, are seldom if ever barred from shul membership, let alone weekly services. Rabbis do not check to see if female members are following the purity protocols around menstruation, or spot-check people’s kitchens for kashrut violations.

“They don’t know anything that takes place in our home,” Mandel said. “They don’t know anything about us. They were all talking about us instead of talking to us, and making all these assumptions.

“We know what the prohibitions are, we both come from learned backgrounds, and none of that matters,” he added. “Just because of the fact that we’re gay, we’re excluded.”

He sure is adamant about comparing perverted behavior to stuff that's hardly the same. Not to mention that concerns about menstruation are petty too by contrast. What matters is that this buffoon is an Opposite Sex Rejector (OSR), and if it turned out he believed women are literally inferior to men in every way, that'd say all you need to know what's wrong with his MO. They of course don't make clear that the Torah/Bible is more tolerant of women being lesbian than men being homosexual, because scholars of the eras likely realized male homosexuality could lead to bad omens for women in ways that're more than meets the eye.

Each Shabbat, and on Jewish holidays, Mandel arrives outside the single-story white house where Brodman and his congregation gather around 9 a.m., as services are starting. He wears shul clothes, and stays until after the prayers have concluded. On hot days, he sweats through his dress shirt. When it rains, he comes home soaked.

The signs he carries are cutting. “Maybe you belong outside,” reads one that accuses congregants of slandering and dehumanizing him. “Don’t let Kehillas ‘H H’ be the Kehilla of Hate and Homophobia!” reads another.

[...] Nearly three months since Mandel first showed up with his signs, some congregants greet him with the customary “Good Shabbos.” Others, Mandel said, tell him he’s pathetic as they walk by.

Well I'm afraid he is pathetic. Specifically because he vehemently refuses to jettison his homosexuality and learn how to best relate to women. It's regrettable he's sold on the leftist belief that anybody who's homosexual should remain solidly nailed on that belief till the bitter end of time, and not learn to relate to women as Rabbi Akiva from the Roman era learned how to be a Torah scholar. For somebody who disgracefully accuses the congregants of dehumanization, has it ever occurred to him he's dehumanizing women? No joke. And as I've said before, "homophobia" should be a badge of honor.

“When did Judaism become this way?” Mandel said. “I’m thinking, the Nazis prevented my grandparents from davening. And now Orthodox Jews are preventing me from davening.”

And this is decidedly more victimology, and if he's drawing analogies, that's offensive too. What if he were allowed to rejoin on the condition he abandon his homosexual ideology and lifestyle, and learn how to relate to women, and marry one too? Predictably, this paper won't bother to ask if that's a worthy idea. And nobody's preventing him from davening. They just want him to climb off his high horse. Yet he remains so hung up on the whole notion he absolutely must remain stuck on a practice that's caused only so much untold damage to western society, and will take ages to repair. And all because somewhere along the way, some leftists had to come up with the belief that overpopulation's really such a worry, seeing how many of these ideologues are going miles out of their way to even destroy people's ability to bear children with transsexual surgery.

In some ways, I feel sorry for him, but in the context he and his "spouse" refuse to abandon their ideology/lifestyle learn to relate to the opposite sex and seek out a decent woman whom they can marry. And why don't they think heterosexuality is something to be proud of? Again, a terrible shame what far-left mentality's led to.

Labels: Israel, Judaism, lgbt cultism, Moonbattery, msm foulness, New York, United States