Relationships

The Torah's stance on homosexuality is unambiguous and brutal: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death" (Vayikra 20:13).

This isn't a metaphor or a suggestion—it's a death penalty. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 54a) discusses the specifics of this prohibition in graphic detail.

For LGBTQ+ people raised in the frum world, these texts are weapons of psychological warfare. Gay and bisexual men especially carry the weight of knowing their holy books prescribe their execution. Lesbian relationships, while not explicitly addressed with the same severity in the Torah, are prohibited by the Rambam and later authorities.

The reality: Sexual orientation is not a choice. It's not a test from God. It's not something to be "cured" through prayer or conversion therapy. Love is love, and you deserve to experience it fully and openly.

Organizations like Eshel provide support for LGBTQ+ Jews navigating faith and identity.

In the Orthodox world, marriage isn't primarily about love—it's about building a Jewish home (Bayit Ne'eman b'Yisrael). The matchmaking system (shidduchim) treats marriage as a transaction:

You deserve a relationship where you are seen, valued, and loved for who you actually are.

The shidduch system is often presented as a beautiful tradition — a community effort to help young people find their match. In reality, it is one of the most psychologically damaging institutions in the Orthodox world.

How it works: A shadchan (matchmaker) proposes a match based on family reputation, yichus (lineage), level of religious observance, and financial standing. The families investigate each other — often calling references, asking neighbors, even checking into medical history — before the two people are allowed to meet. Meetings are brief, supervised or semi-supervised, and the expectation is to decide on marriage within weeks, sometimes after as few as 3-5 dates.

The Talmud in Kiddushin 12b records that Rav would punish anyone who betrothed a woman without first meeting her, citing the concern of violating "love your neighbor as yourself" (Vayikra 19:18) — the worry being that after marriage the husband might find her unattractive. Even by the Talmud's own standards, the modern shidduch system often falls short of this minimal safeguard, since meetings are so brief and controlled that genuine compatibility is nearly impossible to assess.

The damage is real:

- Strangers marrying strangers. Young men and women with no dating experience, often with no unsupervised contact with the opposite sex in their entire lives, are expected to make a lifelong commitment based on a handful of stilted conversations. The Rambam in Hilchot Ishut 3:19 discusses the importance of a woman's consent, but the social pressure of the system makes genuine free choice an illusion for many.

- The "shidduch crisis." The community openly acknowledges that the system produces a surplus of unmarried women, particularly in the Yeshivish world, because of the age gap between husbands and wives. Rather than questioning the system itself, the response is more pressure, more anxiety, and more blame placed on single women for being "too picky."

- Shidduch résumés and references. Candidates are reduced to a checklist — hat size, tablecloth color on Shabbos, which seminary or yeshiva they attended. Mental health history, family "issues," and anything that deviates from the narrow ideal becomes a disqualifier. People with disabilities, ba'alei teshuva, geirim (converts), and anyone from a divorced home face systematic discrimination.

- The obsession with tznius (modesty) as market value. Women are judged on appearance while being told appearance doesn't matter. A woman's dress size, hair color, and how she carries herself are scrutinized by shadchanim and prospective in-laws, all while the community insists that inner qualities are what count.

- Emotional devastation. Being "in the parsha" (of marriageable age) and watching peers get engaged while you remain single is treated as a personal failing. The Gemara in Kiddushin 29b says a man should marry by 18 (or 20 at the latest), and the pressure this creates is immense. People who don't marry young are pitied, whispered about, and treated as incomplete.

- Rushing into marriage, paying for it later. The system's speed and pressure lead directly to mismatched couples trapped in unhappy marriages. But because divorce carries devastating stigma and affects the "shidduch prospects" of siblings and children, people endure years of misery rather than leave. The Gemara in Gittin 90b says "even the altar sheds tears" when a man divorces his first wife — a statement weaponized to keep people in marriages that are destroying them.

There is no halachic source that mandates the shidduch system as it exists today. The Torah describes marriages arising from personal encounters — Yitzchak and Rivka, Yaakov and Rachel, Moshe and Tzippora. The formalized, family-controlled, shadchan-driven system is a minhag (custom) that evolved primarily in Ashkenazi communities over the last few centuries. It is tradition, not Torah — and it is a tradition that causes enormous harm.

If you went through this system — whether you married through it or were damaged by it — your pain is valid. You were not a product to be marketed, and your worth was never determined by a shadchan's phone call.