New York – In many ways, Mike Moskowitz is a typical haredi Orthodox rabbi.
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He wears a black suit and black hat. He sports a thick, curly beard beneath a closely shaved head. He peppers his speech with liturgical Hebrew and Yiddish words. He quotes from Jewish legal texts.
Moskowitz sometimes closes his eyes when he talks, swaying back and forth and rubbing his fingers together as if he’s engaged in deep Talmud study. He spent years upon years studying at traditional haredi yeshivas. Today he lives in Lakewood, a New Jersey shore town of some 100,000 residents well known for its largely haredi population.
On a recent weekday afternoon, Moskowitz is sitting in a Jewish study room at this city’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in front of shelves filled with tractates of the Talmud. But the rest of the setting is decidedly, um, unorthodox. The bathrooms around the corner are gender-neutral. A memorial plaque in the sanctuary pays tribute to those who have died in the AIDS epidemic. The prayer book, published specifically for this synagogue, includes a special prayer for the weekend of New York’s Pride Parade. Four rainbow flags hang in the lobby.
Most haredi rabbis probably would not take a job at a synagogue that serves New York’s LGBT community. Standard Orthodox interpretations of Jewish law strictly prohibit not only same-sex relations but gender fluidity and cross-dressing. But Moskowitz says his new job as CBST’s scholar-in-residence for trans and queer Jewish studies is a perfect fit.
Moskowitz, 38, says serving queer Jews is a fulfillment of his duty as an Orthodox rabbi, not a contradiction. To him, this job is simply the best way to help those in dire need.
“The religious community has a unique responsibility to provide sanctuary, a literal sanctuary for people who are searching,” he says. “How can we broaden the tent to allow people to feel communally engaged in and taking responsibility for their unique relationship with God?”
Moskowitz knows what it’s like to be an outsider. He grew up in a secular Jewish family in Virginia and encountered religious observance through USY, the Conservative Jewish youth group. He went on to study for four years each at the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem and Beis Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, two prestigious haredi institutions, and work as a kosher supervisor and leader of a Torah study program, or kollel, back home in Richmond.
Despite Orthodoxy’s clear boundaries around gender and sexual orientation, Moskowitz says compassion for people, no matter who they are, was built into his traditionalist education. His rabbis advocated “people being themselves in relationship with God.” That idea led him, in Richmond, to reach out to intermarried couples, despite Orthodoxy’s prohibition of interfaith marriage.
Moskowitz started counseling transgender Jews three years ago when he worked with Columbia University students on behalf of Aish Hatorah, an Orthodox outreach organization. He also met queer Jews while serving concurrently as rabbi of the Old Broadway Synagogue, which draws a diverse crowd as one of the only synagogues in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood. Around the same time, a close family member began transitioning genders, giving Moskowitz close personal exposure to the transgender experience.
In December 2016, Moskowitz presented a sermon to the synagogue advocating acceptance of trans Jews — using an obscure 16th-century Torah commentary to make his point. At about the same time, he wrote a letter urging a Jewish day school not to expel a transgender student. Shortly after he was let go from both jobs — neither gave his LGBT advocacy as the official reason.
“It’s the holiest among us that are often the most vulnerable because their light is the brightest,”’ he said in the sermon, referring to the symbolism of the menorah’s candlelight. “To such an extent that some aren’t even aware that darkness exists. Are we going to protect that light?”
Moskowitz believes that Orthodox communities have much work to do in accepting LGBT members. While they claim to be warm, accepting places in theory, he says, they often fail to make space for Jews who are the most vulnerable or on society’s margins.
“There are absolutely ways that religion can be a system for oppression like all others,” he says. “When it comes to the theoretical, they’re quick to say ‘of course we should be inclusive.’ When it comes to the practical, there’s a huge gap between the ideal and the way in which it actually manifests.”
Moskowitz also says that normative Orthodoxy gets Jewish law wrong when it comes to transgender identity. He says, for example, that the biblical ban on cross-dressing is actually a prohibition on misrepresenting one’s gender identity — no matter what it is — through clothing.
And he says the Orthodox community places undue emphasis on gender and sexual prohibitions because of social norms. Instead, he says, the Jewish religious community should worry less about biblical injunctions and more about how to embrace transgender Jews so they don’t succumb to the transgender community’s high suicide rate.
“Transgender as an awareness is just a presence of understanding,” he says. “There’s no prohibition to acknowledge the reality of something when it comes to one’s identity. If a person says about themselves ‘this is who I am,’ it’s not a space of choice.”
After leaving Columbia, Moskowitz served as senior educator for Uri L’Tzedek, an Orthodox social justice group. He also began blogging for Keshet, a Jewish LGBT organization, and even shaved his beard for a time so he could fit in better with a more liberal crowd.
He became connected to Congregation Beit Simchat Torah when he met its senior rabbi, Sharon Kleinbaum: Both were arrested in January at the U.S. Capitol for protesting on behalf of immigrants. Hired by the synagogue on May 1, Moskowitz serves a dual function: He connects the Jewish LGBT experience to the traditional Jewish texts he has spent decades studying, and counsels Orthodox LGBT Jews and their families.
On the day he spoke to JTA, he also had phone conversations with three parents of transgender youth.
“He’s already working overtime,” Kleinbaum said. “The demand is like a floodgate has opened. People are reaching out to him for pastoral help. Their kids are trans, they are trans, they haven’t had an [observant] rabbi to talk to who hasn’t said to them something besides ‘you’re going to …’”
Moskowitz still faces tension between his professional and personal lives. Living in Lakewood, he receives hate mail due to his work, and has been ostracized from synagogues and other institutions there.
But the rabbi appears to take it in stride. There is still a synagogue where he and his family are welcome. And the animosity he experiences, he says, is just a sliver of what transgender people have to deal with every day.
“Do the right thing, you end up in the right space, but it’s not geshmak,” he says of his Lakewood experience, usually a Yiddish word that means “delicious.” “But again, this is what trans folks feel going to the grocery store.”
It should be noted that the senior “rabbi”, Sharon Kleinbaum came from a frum background
Fake Torah ! How sad
Yes we need to accept all Jews . That includes those that commit all kinds of sins whether it’s LGBT or infidelity . But just like we don’t identify someone as an ” infedilty Jew” you can’t be identified as a gay Jew . It maybe your struggle in life the same way one who commits infedilty struggle with tavious for women , so too one who struggled with a gay Tava that maybe his struggle . But there is no place in our Torah to identify someone as gay . It’s not accepted and you most fight your instinct
Can’t wait to read the comments.
Feh! (No further comment).
Are they going to publicly remove his smicha?
awkward……do they have urinals in their bathroom ……
Hashem, we need Moshiach today! After 2000 years of a horrible galus, justifiably there are so many lost, confused neshamos.
So discriminating against trans brings suicides? If thats the case how come blacks who have been discriminated for century’s have the lowest suicide rate?
This is more Fake News the the lgbtq lobby is spewing out. They are taking emotionally confused souls and instead ofgiving them the help they deserve, brainwash them into “gender fluidity” and t when they figure out what happened to them, commit suicide out of sheer hopelessness and depression.
Its all of those sick doctors that have the blood of those confused souls on there hands.
Help them is one thing that means getting them to stop perverted sex roles and properly pray to haShem.
Ministering to them as a rabbi who OK’s their perverted action is another thing that is as perverted as the LBTQ’s themselves….
I wish him the best of luck. He has a difficult job dealing with congregants with these issues and the so called frum, mainstream Jews that hate him and those he ministers to.
The world has gone mad or its business as usual “fake news”.
From the article it sounds like he is providing Torah and hadracha to LGBT Jews, without condoning nor condemning anything. Is that bad?
Modern Orthodoxy – Open Orthodoxy -LGBT and all similar Perversions of Kedusha
– the new face of Vosisneias – You have found your place on the Band Wagon
Lesbians are not committing any sin. (Perutzes at worst) Many frum woman in BP, Flatbush, Lakewood etc wear long Wigs is much more worse Prutzes than beeing a Lesbian
Transgenderism is a mental disease and society forcing us to accomadate these seriously mentally ill people instead of getting them the mental health help they need and to accept them as normal is insane
So a guy thinking he’s Napoleon is mentally ill and needs professional help but a guy thinking he’s a woman and getting his dìck chopped off to look like one is normal and we should be forced to accept that as normal?
This guy is messed up.
To those going on about how lesbianism is not against the Torah lgbt includes gays which is against the Torah
I can also be metaher the sheretz in 150 ways.the main polnt is that anyone who promotes a new understanding of halacha that goes against accepted tradition on the basis of contemporary western thought needs to be called out.and BTW the rambam writes specifically that lesbians get מכות מרדות
Feh! this should make all of us puke.
Next there will be a rabbi for Jews who cant resist eating pork.
Sifra 9:3: Lesbian act is forbidden because of chukas hagoyim.
Rambam, Issurei Bi’ah 21:8: Lesbian act is forbidden and subject to makkos mardus.
How come you guys are all so homophobic yet so gay for Trump?
He got educated by the best I’m sure he knows what he’s doing
I think you should all stop criticizing the fellow. Is this any worse than a Chabad House in Cambodia catering to pedophiles. You have to be mekarev every Jew and hope to slowly bring them to true Teshuva. If not, Shalom AL Yisroel (excuse the pun).