A Handmaid's Tale
Written by Rabbi Binyamin Tabady (הרב בנימין טבדי) | rbtabady@gmail. com
My municipality, too, hung Pride flags throughout the city. In the name of liberty — we must not accept this.
**A. Not a Municipal Service — A Value Judgment**
I am often asked: Why do I react so strongly when I see the streets of the city in which I live filled with "Pride" flags? Is there an essential difference between these flags and the hundreds of cars that drive through those same streets on Shabbat, publicly desecrating the sanctity of Shabbat? Perhaps this is only a matter of habit: we have already grown accustomed to Shabbat desecration, whereas we have not yet grown accustomed to rainbow-colored flags.
In my eyes, the answer is clear: there is an essential difference here. To understand it, one must distinguish between three different levels.
The first level is private life: a private individual lives his life, and at times his way of life contradicts the Torah and the will of God. This is true with respect to Shabbat as well: when a person drives his car on Shabbat, it is very painful; and when it is done publicly, it also harms the Jewish character of the city. Nevertheless, it still remains the choice of a private individual.
The second level is more severe: when the municipality itself initiates, funds, or promotes public Shabbat desecration. Here, it is no longer merely a private person acting as he wishes, but the use of public funds to encourage a reality that harms the sanctity of Shabbat and the Jewish character of the city. This is very grave and painful. Yet here too, the discussion generally still revolves around a practical municipal question: the allocation of resources, services, events, budgets, and activities for different sectors of the public.
The third level is of a different kind of severity: when the municipality is not merely permitting, funding, or operating, but is making a value judgment in the name of all residents. Here, it is no longer a municipal service, nor merely a matter of resource allocation, but a declaration: this is a value with which we identify. This is a symbol we seek to honor, and this is the presence we wish to place at the center of the public sphere.
This is precisely the point of protest. Shabbat desecration by a private individual is a painful reality, and a municipal initiative involving Shabbat desecration is already a grave public harm. But the flying of Pride flags on behalf of the municipality is an additional step: an educational and value-laden declaration in the name of the entire city, on a question that is deeply disputed in relation to the human being, the family, sanctity, and Jewish life.
A municipality should be concerned with lighting, sanitation, roads, gardens, welfare, culture, and services for different publics. It was not asked to become the moral guardian of its residents, and certainly not to use the shared public sphere in order to re-educate us.
**B. Not Only a Value Judgment — Identification with a Political Movement**
In the case of Pride flags, there is an additional factor: hanging the flag does not express only a general value judgment, but an open identification with the symbol of an actual political-ideological movement. The "Pride" movement in Israel and around the world is not merely a movement for protecting the vulnerable. If that were the entire claim, it would be possible to discuss it in an entirely different language. In practice, it is a broad and organized ideological movement that seeks to reread the realms of sexuality, family, and gender through concepts of oppression, identity, inclusion, and liberation from traditional norms.
It is enough to look at the public struggles of recent years in order to understand that the flag is not merely a human gesture toward private individuals. Nationwide strikes, petitions to the High Court of Justice, struggles over surrogacy, adoption, education, municipal funding, and parades that are explicitly defined as demonstrations — all these show that this is a political-ideological movement demanding to reshape the public sphere, legislation, language, and education. It seeks to change the way society understands nature, masculinity, femininity, identity, and liberty.
Therefore, the municipality cannot feign innocence and say that the flag was hung as a sign of human solidarity with people who have been harmed or excluded. The flag is the symbol of a broad world of ideas that calls for the dismantling of foundational values, a change of language, and the re-education of society in all its layers.
This is a soft but deep form of secular coercion. No one is being forced here to desecrate Shabbat, and no one is being compelled to say a particular sentence. But we are being forced to live in a public sphere in which the local authority openly adopts the symbol of an ideological and political movement that acts in clear opposition to the value-world of many residents.
**C. "To'evah" — A Philosophy of Straying**
Moreover, even someone who is not aware of the full political-revolutionary meaning of the LGBT agenda understands that Pride flags do not stand in a vacuum. Publicly and culturally, they belong to a broader world of "sexual liberation" — a world in which sexuality does not remain private, sacred, bound to covenant and family, but goes out into the street and becomes identity, celebration, parade, and flag. This is also evident in the character of some Pride events themselves, and in the breaching of the boundaries of modesty in the public sphere, to the point of difficult scenes of exposure and demonstrativeness in the streets of Tel Aviv.
From here one must reach the root of the matter. The Torah does not see sins of sexual immorality merely as a forbidden act, isolated and specific. The Sages expounded on the word "to'evah" — abomination: "to'eh attah bah," "you stray through it" (Nedarim 51a). In other words, the severity of the act lies not only in the prohibition itself, but in the straying that it expresses: confusion and blurring with regard to the questions of what a human being is, what a man is and what a woman is, what a family is, and what the image of God in the human being is.
Sins of sexual immorality, and certainly when they are committed publicly, demonstratively, and in the name of "Pride," do not stand alone. There is no culture without a philosophy that supports it, and there is no ongoing public sin without an inner story that justifies it. When a society raises a flag of sexual liberation, it is not only permitting certain acts — it is telling a new story about the human being: about his body, his liberty, his identity, his family, and the image of God within him.
This is the straying within the abomination: the life-force, which is meant for covenant, building, sanctity, loyalty, and continuity, is uprooted. In its place, sexual straying, constant change, and non-commitment to the anchors of the image of God in which the human being was created are sanctified.
This is why, again and again, the Torah presents this realm as one of the identifying marks of corrupt cultures: the generation of the Flood, the deeds of the land of Egypt, the deeds of the land of Canaan, and every society in which the life-force descended from its stature and became licentiousness, desire, and the dissolution of boundaries.
The section on sexual prohibitions should not be viewed merely as a list of private prohibitions. It is a struggle against an entire cultural climate in which the life-force is detached from sanctity, covenant, and family. The Torah warns: "Like the practice of the land of Egypt, in which you dwelt, you shall not do; and like the practice of the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you, you shall not do" (Leviticus 18: 3). And Maimonides explained: "The Sages said: What would they do? A man would marry a man, and a woman would marry a woman, and a woman would be married to two men" (Laws of Forbidden Relations 21: 8). In other words, there are cultures in which sexual corruption is not merely the sin of individuals within them, but becomes a public climate, a language, a norm, and a way of life.
The danger in the spread of the idea of sexual permissiveness is the consciousness that the human being is a private creature, uprooted from context, whose purpose is merely to realize private pleasure. In practice, the more this ideology spreads, the more it weakens our collective identity. A people that desires life is not built from a collection of individuals detached from their familial and national continuity. It is built from families, covenants, loyalty, generations connected to one another, and the sanctity of life passed from generation to generation.
This is why the generation of the Flood was wiped from the face of the earth, and why Egypt and the peoples of Canaan lost their spiritual and moral strength and made way. This is not merely an external punishment, but an internal law: moral disintegration ultimately leads to social, economic, and national disintegration. This fact is prominent in our time in Western countries, which suffer from a deep demographic crisis and from the dismantling of social cohesion as a result of the sanctification of extreme individualism.
**D. A Handmaid's Tale: The Culture That Lost Its Freedom**
It seems to me that many of the mayors who ordered Pride flags to be raised in their cities are not aware of these deeper calculations. From their perspective, this is just another trend. If this is what is done in Tel Aviv, and if it reflects some supposedly social idea of freedom, why not join in?
But precisely this thought testifies to the acceleration of a process of cultural shallowness. In fact, it is to a large extent A Handmaid's Tale in reverse: a culture that speaks endlessly about liberation, yet loses its inner freedom because it is swept along by imported fashions, temporary slogans, and a language that places sexual identity at the center of public life. This is cultural servitude under the guise of liberation.
A healthy society raises flags of deep values: honoring parents and teachers, responsibility, loyalty, true freedom, social justice, kindness, national resilience, love of the people and the land, devotion, building, and continuity. These are values that build a person, a family, a community, and a nation.
But when, for an entire month, the street is filled with flags whose center is the sexual-gender identity of the human being, this indicates a value-vacuum. Instead of asking how to build a person of responsibility, sanctity, loyalty, and inner resilience, we are occupied with the question of how a person defines himself sexually or in terms of gender. There is something shameful in the fact that this has become one of the central preoccupations of public culture.
Before people take my words out of context, I will clarify: I educate toward understanding that there are human beings who struggle with deep tensions between their bodies, their inclinations, and their personal feelings. We have no right to be arrogant and say with certainty that we would withstand trials we do not know. I certainly reject any harm, humiliation, or insult directed at any person as a human being.
But this has nothing to do with a flag, a logo, a parade, and an entire month in which the city's residents are required to honor an ideology that contradicts their world. There is no reason for the public sphere of a Jewish city to become, in all our names, an official stage for a culture that advances the dismantling of the concepts of family, the blurring of identity, and a straying without anchor or purpose — and then presents all of this as a message of liberty.
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