"I’m sorry but you can’t contact me any longer. What you’ve said is disgusting and I can’t help you.”

With that, my 16-year-old son’s madrich (youth group leader) ended their call and that was the last time they ever spoke.

What had my son said to his madrich to provoke his appalled response?

Quite simply, he had asked him for help. He had reached out to a young adult he respected, a frum university student who had gone through the Orthodox school and yeshivah system and had told him that he was struggling with the knowledge that he was gay.

Instead of offering support and friendship, this young man had abruptly and unequivocally ended what was effectively a mentor-peer relationship, leaving my son feeling embarrassed, vulnerable — and full of self-loathing.

It was not long after this encounter that my son came out to me. He had been struggling with his mental health for some years and, despite the therapeutic measures that had been put in place, nothing seemed to be helping. Suddenly it all made sense.

Discovering your child is gay is a shock to most parents. A therapist once told my husband and I that being religious Jews didn’t really make that much of a difference to our journey as mother and father of a gay child — most parents will experience some challenges when coming to terms with the news.

But the therapist was wrong. As parents who are fully immersed in the Charedi community — from the shul we belong to, to the schools our children attend, to the organisations we work for —there is a very significant additional layer of challenge to navigate.

First of all, of course, there is the enormous issue of somehow reconciling deep belief in the Torah, which plainly states that male-male sexual relationships are forbidden, with one’s love for one’s child and longing to be able to accept them unconditionally. 

Less fundamentally but perhaps more immediately challenging is the way in which the Charedi community refuses to engage in an open and honest conversation about how to engage with LGBT people growing up within its ranks.

Many words have been written in this publication about the rumbling matter of RSE and British values education. Indeed, Eli Spitzer recently published a JC column based on the premise that homophobia is not an issue in the Charedi community. I laughed when I read that. My husband regularly finds himself cringing on the men’s side of the mechitzah at the shul kiddush, as homophobic quips are bandied about as freely as the herring and whisky.

As Eli Spitzer well knows, those with a stake in Charedi education in this country are falling over themselves trying to gain high level access to OFSTED and the DFE to ensure that children will never need to learn that some families have two mummies and some have two daddies.

But come Yom Kippur afternoon, those same children will all be sitting in shul listening to the reading of Leviticus 18:22, the Torah source for forbidding sex between two men. His claim that Charedi children are completely ignorant of these matters is disingenuous simply by virtue of this fact.

But quite apart from this, I can also assure him that on my commute to work each day I regularly see boys as young as 11 or 12 from the local Charedi grammar school flicking eagerly through the pages of the Metro – and not just the sports pages either. There is no way they are as naïve and innocent as he would have us believe.

The fact is that some six percent of the population in the UK identifies as gay (2015 YouGov survey). It is unlikely that the statistic would be much different in the strictly Orthodox community. But for a Charedi adolescent, educated in the Charedi system and living in a Charedi family, realising what the burgeoning feelings he or she is experiencing mean is an utterly terrifying experience.

These young people are scared to ask questions in school and are scared to speak to their parents openly at home; all they know is that to be gay is an ‘abomination’.  If we are never able to openly address the basic fact that there are LGBT children in Charedi schools, is it any wonder that many develop mental health problems, and in some cases end up tragically taking their own lives?

And those that do make it through the other side with their mental health intact — or after having been painstakingly put back together — rarely end up staying in the Charedi community. Who can blame them for cutting ties with those who are so doggedly determined to pretend they don’t exist?

After my son told me he was gay I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that I went through a period of mourning. I mourned the fact that I would never walk him to the chuppah to greet a bride in white, never welcome a daughter-in-law into my home.

I mourned that fact that ‘future me’ would have no ‘nachas rights’ within my community. If I were, in some hypothetical future, to tell my neighbour that my son and his male partner had adopted a new baby, for example, I would be looked on with a mixture of horror, pity and suspicion, rather than wished a hearty mazal tov on becoming a grandmother.

But most of all I mourned — and continue to mourn — the fact that, as my son has slowly begun to find himself, gone on to university and moved into his own apartment, he has lost faith not only in the Jewish community he grew up in but in Judaism itself. He has no interest in keeping kosher or observing shabbat and indeed has difficulty in spending time around people who do — including his own close family — because religion and all it entails is a reminder of the rejection — and indeed self-rejection — that he suffered during those difficult school years.

As the years pass, I am slowly learning to put aside the fact that ‘it’s complicated’ when it comes to squaring my religious belief with my belief in my own child; I am getting better at holding them both close at the same time, without one devaluing the other.

What isn’t complicated is the fact that I love my son with all my heart, I accept him for who he is and want nothing more than for him to live a healthy, fulfilling and Jewishly-connected life, surrounded by people who feel the same way about him.

I just wish that my community could find a way to follow a similar path.

 

Ahuva Yaldi is a pseudonym