What would Moses say? This is a good question with the recent creation of an “LGBTQ” café for teens — at a New Jersey synagogue.
The gathering spot, called Café Q and hosted by Congregation Beth Hatikvah in the town of Summit, will be open every third Sunday between 3 and 5 p.m., with October 21 having been its opening day.
The café, writes the synagogue at its website, “is a non-denominational meeting place for LGBTQ teens from Summit and surrounding towns where they can meet new people, listen to music, enjoy some snacks, and just hang out in a safe and comfortable environment. Café Q is staffed and chaperoned by adults who are gay or parents of LGBTQ children.”
It originated, says Café Q chairman Janice Masvidal, “during the synagogue’s Pride Month event,” where “people told their coming out stories, including one 17-year-old girl,” reports Summit Patch.
Rabbi Hannah Orden stated, the site continued, that “‘this event is nice and our support of the GLBTQ [sic] community is strong, but besides this and the displaying of a rainbow flag, what else can we be doing?’ Masvidal said.” (How about telling the kids the Truth?)
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The Patch further related, “Beth Hatikvah president Cindy Wetter said the Café Q arose out of her daughter’s [the aforementioned 17-year-old’s] experience. When a search for social opportunities outside of school for LGBTQ kids turned up nothing within a reasonable distance of their home in Chatham, Wetter suggested to her congregation that the synagogue offer something for local teens.”
Masvidal says that the idea was approved without hesitation.
The irony is that this is, of course, contrary to authentic Judaic teaching. As the Rabbinical Council of America stated in 2000 in response to “reform Judaism’s” kowtowing to the homosexual agenda, “The Rabbinical Council of America condemns the declaration of the Central Conference of American Rabbis that homosexual relationships are worthy of affirmation through Jewish ritual. As a timeless faith rooted in Divine revelation, Judaism’s laws cannot be abrogated by fiat or majority vote or redesigned to fit a current behavior pattern. Conferring legitimacy upon relationships, which our Torah and tradition specifically prohibit, is beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish teaching and practice.”
But Beth Hatikvah appears to adhere to “homosexualism” more than Judaism. A case in point: The aforementioned Masvidal claims to be “married” to a woman.
Note also that “LGBTQ” stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer” (not sure what the difference is between queer and the first two, but okay), reflecting our society’s latest but ever-shifting alphabet soup of confusion. For example, you can’t be “transgender” any more than you can be trans-species; the state of being doesn’t exist and the agenda represented is wholly unscientific, as I’ve explained in the past.
But this is just part of the fuzzy modernist “thinking” evident in the Beth Hatikvah affair. It’s reminiscent, in fact, of the recent proposal to include “LGBTQ” language in a Vatican Youth Synod document. As Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia said in response to that, “There is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’ as if our sexual appetites defined who we are.”
The same is true of Judaism, of course. Having faith means understanding that our “master status” — what we ultimately see our identity as being — is “child of God” or, maybe, “Christian” or “Jewish.”
This goes beyond sexuality, too. If you really believe in Judaism, you realize you’re not a “coffee-drinking Jew” who’s somehow different substantively from a “tea-drinking Jew.” Nor are you a “golfing Jew,” a “chess-playing Jew,” a “suit-wearing Jew,” a “textile-industry Jew,” or a “ticklish Jew.” You’re a Jew.
Conceiving it otherwise is akin to the hyphenated-American mistake. Do we see ourselves truly as one people when we’re ______-Americans (e.g., Polish, African, Italian, Syrian, Norwegian) as opposed to just Americans? As Christians may note, quoting Galatians, “ There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The very purpose of true faith is to unite us through Truth — not encourage division by participating in the creation of even more sub-groups.
Then there was the fallacy uttered by Cindy Wetter when she trumpeted Café Q as a “place where kids can be who they are or who they want to be.” What “they are” — what we all are — are members of a fallen race, sinners. Thus, the goal isn’t to be who we “want to be” but what God wants us to be. These are always, at least in certain respects, two different things.
Of course, the “who they are or who they want to be” talk is just that — talk. It’s rarely espoused when people want to be what the Left doesn’t want them to be, such as a believing Christian who balks at baking a faux-wedding cake. Then there was, I saw at Beth Hatikvah’s website, a statement “Rabbi” Hannah Orden made inveighing against the Charlottesville neo-Nazis. She should ponder how science finds that infants may be innately “racist” — and that we know people are tribalistic by nature.
While such a reality may be a problem for the Beth Hatikvah-types, people of faith aren’t too troubled. We understand that man is not governed by biological determinism and that there’s a name for a creature that is: an animal.
