Whoops!

Remember that post about Yeshiva University?

It’s the one I wrote in the middle of last week, all about Judaism, Orthodoxy, and sexuality. I valorized the leadership of Yeshiva University in New York City for credentialing an LGBTQ+ group on campus that has been working for years to make itself legit. Yeshiva resisted until it could resist no more. Rather than pressing its case before the Supreme Court, it decided to back down from the confrontation. Hareni, the LGBTQ+ group in question, would be allowed to operate on campus and identify the nature of its diverse constituency. It would also be allowed to run its own program. Glory Be to God, Most High.

As of today, you can forget all that.

In one of those reversals that has set heads spinning, the president of Yeshiva, Rabbi Ari Berman, publicly apologized to the University community for the way the announcement was “rolled out” to the world. Without exactly terminating Hareni, he insisted that there was nothing for traditionalists to worry about. Litigation would end, but students would be expected to operate within the four walls of the halacha (Jewish Law). In that sense, Hareni was simply an iteration of the fix that Yeshiva, itself, instituted in 2022. No word yet from the student activists. But just as they rejected the original “solution,” they will likely reject this most recent version.

The law, of course, is hotly contested. Traditionalists believe that Leviticus means business: male homosexuality is a to’evah, an abomination. Progressives believe that Leviticus is the starting point for a conversation that continues to this very day. It needs to be taken into reverent consideration, but its harshness belongs to the world that created it.

Apart from that, its purpose is unclear: was it meant to apply to the sacrificial cult, or was it intended as a dictate for society as a whole? And if that’s the case, what about David and Jonathan? The Torah describes the “surpassing love” between them. Sounds like an affair of the heart to me.

Berman’s about-face is equally interesting. Every community with traditionalist claims dreams that it will be credentialed by the group to its right. My own community of Conservative Jews has spent years imagining that if it wrote the right documents, issued the right fatwas, and otherwise operated within the realm of the halacha, it would earn the respect of Orthodox practitioners. Big surprise: it never worked. The group to the right is highly incentivized to denounce its competitors as charlatans and pretenders.

That’s exactly what happened last week with Berman. A traditionalist media outlet called Yeshiva World News (no relation to the University) immediately denounced Yeshiva’s decision as the “final nail” is the coffin of its blasphemy. If Berman had simply kept his eyes wide open, he would have understood from the start that he could not win at this game.

But maybe he thought that he could tough it out. Who was that rabbi at the Trump inauguration? Rabbi Ari Berman of Yeshiva University, who blessed the incoming president in January and may very well share his War on Woke. But even if that is not the case, he certainly knows something about doubling down.