No Personal Torah, Or, The Rabbi Should Not Have “Come Out”

“’Personal Torah.’ What a jarring phrase, at least to ears like mine,” writes Orthodox rabbi Avi Shafran, responding to a Washington-area rabbi’s now much publicized “coming out” and leaving his wife of twenty years. He had written his congregation that ““The truth is that like anyone else, I have no choice but to live with the reality, or personal Torah, of my life.”

No, says Shafran. He feels sympathy for Rabbi Gil Steinlauf’s pain, but does not think he should have found this way out.

Judaism for millennia has been predicated on the concept of Jews bending their personal wills to the will of God, of defying “realities,” not succumbing to them. The Orthodox world still hews to that foundational concept, given voice in our ancestors’ declaration at Sinai “We will do and we will hear” — which the Talmud understands as accepting the Torah’s laws even in the absence of our own understanding or our abilities to personally relate to them. . . .

[T]he Jewish response to challenge is to meet it. In the spirit of the Torah, the original one, not the “personal” one we might choose to write for ourselves.

And he, in fact, did that, by marrying, fathering children and being a loving husband and dad. No small accomplishment, especially facing what he did, and experiencing the pain he must have felt in denying a powerful predisposition. I cannot judge him; I cannot presume to appreciate another human being’s challenge (and have failed enough, if different ones, of my own).

But pain, in the end, is part of life, and each of us is challenged by any of a variety of temptations to pursue paths we know, or are taught by the Torah, we shouldn’t follow. What’s more, alleviating personal pain can cause others even greater pain. Sometimes, it must be acknowledged, the right path is the painful one.

The Jew, he continues, is called to make his inside and his outside correspond, but the way to do that is not to assert the inside — to live by the “personal Torah” — but to create the right outside and then strive to bring the inside into conformity with it.