Rabbi Moskowitz, a Strictly Orthodox Jew, is Scholar-in-Residence For Trans and Queer Jewish Studies at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York. His support for accepting LGBT Jews is tied to their experiences in his heavily Charedi home community in Lakewood, New Jersey.
When gay men come out to their rabbis in the frum community, they are pressured to marry a woman and have children under the argument that “this is what God wants from you,” Rabbi Moskowitz says. When the truth comes out it is destructive, leaving family members feeling angry and betrayed.
There is, he concludes, “a catastrophic mess of people’s lives” as a result of rabbinical advice, leading people to seek “new conversations about how to answer these questions.”
But that can be difficult within this community’s strict parameters, creating the situation where “if you have certain questions, it’s almost not so safe to ask them,” says Adina Sash, better known as the social media personality “Flatbush Girl”.
Having been ostracised for speaking out against censoring women in the religious media, she knows first-hand the struggle of being a more progressive Jew that still identifies with the Strictly Orthodox community.
“It’s still so unusual for a female to be outspoken from within,” Ms Sash says. “We haven’t had this female empowerment wave yet. And I just feel like I’m doing the work that matches what the secular world is doing, but within the religious community.”
Nearly 40,000 people follow the mix of fashion photography, politics and religious commentary offered by Flatbush Girl on Instagram.
One recent post shows her in a white wig wishing her followers an easy fast ahead of Yom Kippur. In another, alongside a photograph of herself in a summer dress and high heels, she writes candidly about suffering multiple miscarriages.
She argues it is better to learn about being online as a frum Jew than simply assimilate into the new world: “I think it’s very important to start setting up Judaism that doesn’t operate out of fear [of the outside world].”
It is often said that the Strictly Orthodox is one of the fastest-growing of Jewish communities around the world — but this may in fact be helping to fuel progressive trends.
Rabbi Moskowitz believes that in Lakewood, where the yeshivot are full and the community is rapidly growing, “there are many people who feel like, you know what, Ultra Orthodoxy, we’re doing pretty well.”
He says the assumption is that even if some leave, the community’s birth rate means the vast majority of world Jewry will at some point be Strictly Orthodox — making the community more comfortable about opening up.
“If that’s true, and in the minds of many people it is, there is a certain sense of comfort about being less afraid of being out in the world. People have smartphones, people work.”
For Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, who created the Torat Chaim group of progressively-minded Orthodox rabbis, the mission is not to change the core of the Strictly Orthodox community.
“This fear-based approach of moving towards greater stringency and building higher walls has a limited lifeline,” he says. “We see a grassroots uprising against that. People realise that the far-right political and far-right religious agenda is only going to cause more pain than liberation.”
For him, the solution is to offer such people a progressive place that remains recognisably Orthodox.
“We are building a strong base of those who don’t want to leave Orthodoxy. They want to be Modern Orthodox, and they want to be progressive.
“We’re not trying to change ‘Ultra Orthodox’ Jews [into] progressive Orthodox Jews — that’s futile. We’re merely trying to provide another option.”
