The latest issue of the journal Dialogue (with which I’m associated editorially) has just been published and its appearance could hardly be timelier. Under the rabbinic aegis of Rav Aharon Feldman Rav Moshe Meiselman and Rav Shlomo Miller the journal includes a broad range of articles from halachic analyses to explorations of Jewish thought and history and the intersection of science and Torah. But a primary function of Dialogue is to fill the role that the now-defunct Jewish Observer once did by providing a forum for talmidei chachamim of stature to express Torah views on critical — and often controversial — issues of the day.

Several articles in the current issue are devoted to a topic that is very much in the news: same-gender relationships and the efficacy of reparative therapy for those afflicted by same-gender attraction. TheCaliforniastate legislature recently passed the nation’s first ban on administering such therapy to minors and after conflicting district court rulings on the law a federal circuit court will soon hear arguments on its constitutionality. InNew York an ultraliberal advocacy group is currently assisting several plaintiffs in pursuing a civil suit against a Jewish organization that provides some form of such therapy.

Rav Aharon Feldman appears in Dialogue’s pages with a magisterial essay on why the Torah regards such relationships as so deeply abhorrent and damaging. The Rosh Yeshivah writes that “[g]enerally considerations of modesty militate against discussion of [such] matters in a public forum” but that “in a period when the media and advertising are suffused with the promotion of [this form of degenerate behavior] and the surrounding culture has embraced it these considerations must give way to the more urgent need for a compelling Torah response … and a clear exposition of what it is that the Torah finds so deeply harmful about [such behavior].” The issue also includes a brief but illuminating letter from Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky addressing this topic.

And for those who might wonder whether this topic is really of relevance to the Orthodox community an article by Dr. Elan Karten an Israel–based psychologist with an almost-exclusively frum clientele makes a compelling case not only for the efficacy of at least some forms of reparative therapy but also that the need for it certainly does exist in the Orthodox community. Particularly fascinating is the account of his efforts to publish his research despite the attempts of a deeply politicized psychological establishment to squelch all dissent to the reigning anti–reparative therapy orthodoxy.

But there is yet another aspect to this topic’s relevance and that is the effort underway in certain Orthodox quarters to work for the incremental acceptance of such relationships within our community. Astounding as it may seem regarding behavior that receives the Torah’s unqualified opprobrium there are those who under the guise of tolerance and understanding for individuals struggling with this issue are prepared to justify and ultimately legitimize that which cannot possibly be legitimized.

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg’s riveting article traces the way in which this creeping intra-Orthodox legitimization tracks an earlier process in American society at large which over the past several decades has traveled from uniform moral recoil from such behavior to an acceptance of it as a normal alternative to the point we are at now where to voice any qualms at all with such behavior results in being branded an irredeemable morally and mentally deficient bigot.

Events subsequent to the publication of Rabbi Goldberg’s article only underscore that the process he describes continues to unfold apace in our community. Following November’s elections an Orthodox-ordained congregational rabbi inMainetook to the pages of his local newspaper to celebrate the success of a statewide voter referendum recognizing same-gender relationships. Just one paragraph should provide a sense of the whole: “This Hanukkah as I light my menorah I think of our modern battle that was won inMainefor equal rights. We have witnessed a miracle as a small group of people of faith won victory over strongly entrenched wrong beliefs.”

And should one wonder how a nice Orthodox boy ends up supporting this cause his answer is that after “conversations with friends inMaine” including apparently some heterodox clergyfolk the “truth of their hearts helped me overcome my wall of religious textual evidence that helped justify arguments for the other side.” But now after strumming “We Shall Overcome” with his new friends he has scaled and conquered — or simply dynamited? — that imposing wall of evidence professing “with complete faith” that these relationships “should be respected as equal by society.”

And his ordaining institution? If it has issued any sort of statement disavowing his column let alone rescinding his sheepskin I’ve missed it. Just last week the same institution held a symposium at aManhattansynagogue on being Orthodox and same-gender-attracted before a standing-room-only audience.

I wonder what was said there.

TO CONFIRM OR NOT TO CONFIRM Chuck Hagel and Jack Lew nominated in the same week — what an ironic juxtaposition. Personally having the president pick cabinet members who are Jewish even Jewishly observant as Lew is doesn’t do much for me. I’ve simply got too much unlearned Torah to cover too many middos that need tending to in the garden of my personality too many opportunities (most missed a few taken) to grow spiritually for such ephemera to mean anything to me.

But there are sadly a whole lot of my brethren whose Jewishness is an empty container that they know not how to fill other than with such trivialities as the latest exploits of a Jewish-in-name-only celebrity or the fateful discovery of an anti-Semitic phrase scrawled in a high school bathroom somewhere in Louisiana. Check out the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Forward for a daily and weekly litany of same.

And for them this wonderful opportunity to celebrate Mr. Obama’s selection of Lew the Jew was serendipitously marred by his pick three days prior of Chuck Hagel. Now Barack Obama ought not to need any confirmation that he bears no animus toward Jews; no one in his right mind who has followed the man would ever think he did (his many years spent nodding off in the pews of controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright notwithstanding). It has often occurred to me that indeed the problems Mr. Obama poses for Israel stem ironically from his actually having had too many Jewish friends only of the wrong persuasion; ultraliberals like David Axelrod and Chicago clergyman Arnold Jacob Wolf from whose cup of strange “love” for Israel he drank deeply.

And so the problem with the Hagel nomination isn’t what it tells us about Mr. Obama’s secret prejudices but about what it tells our society about who can and cannot be a respectable public figure. There is of course much that is deeply disturbing about Hagel’s record from which he is now furiously backpedaling in one of the speediest “confirmation conversions” on record. His complete moral blindness to the evil that is Iran Hamas and Hizbullah; his visceral hostility to Israel; his readiness to cut the defense budget down to a size befitting the post-lone superpower status that his would-be boss thinks suits us — all are troubling beyond words.

But they’re not the real reasons the Senate ought to vote down a presidential cabinet choice for only about the third time in over half a century. No the reason why no decent senator ought to confirm this man is because as Elliott Abrams put it Chuck Hagel “seems to have some kind of problem with Jews ” and for Mr. Obama to put him at Defense would be crossing a very bright — and dangerous — line. It would be saying that a man can be chosen and confirmed to lead our government’s largest and most crucial department who was the only one of 100 senators to refuse to sign a letter protesting Russian anti-Semitism; who was palpably hostile to his own Nebraskan Jewish constituents; who spoke of the “Jewish lobby intimidating a lot of people” and how he “isn’t a senator from Israel”; who sought to defund the Haifa USO port with the words “Let the Jews pay for it.”

But it won’t happen. After much posturing as agonizing Hamlets the Jewish Democrats who are pivotal to the confirmation the Schumers and the Cardins will fall in line and vote to confirm. Nothing can permit one to say “no” to the One.