Get the Ricochet app
Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.
Today’s world seems to have ended privacy. Every special pronoun is an exercise in not only displaying a person’s sexual desires, but also forcing everyone else to recognize them, and applaud the deviant for their own special interests. We went from “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to requiring public use of special pronouns that reflect internal desires. Somehow that which is supposed to be private is now unavoidably, endlessly, in your face, and in the public sphere.
That private/public divide is not a new issue. The prophet Balaam praises the Jewish people: “How Goodly Are Your Tents” – the walls that surround a family, that provide privacy and discretion, separating the nuclear unit from society at large.
The walls of these tents are what make the Jewish people special. Those familial tents in turn form the bricks that combine to make a good society.
When Balaam advises his clients to send in their women to seduce Jewish men and lead them astray, he was demonstrating that breaching holy relationships also constitutes idolatry against G-d. But was he really doing much more than that?
In this case, a specific sinning couple decided to engage in view of the entire camp, in a fully public display. It was the very antithesis of the “Goodly Tents.” That couple moved what belongs in the privacy of an intimate relationship, behind the walls of a tent, and they brought it out as a public display.
Is the lesson of this story that the Achilles heel of the Jewish people is the same thing as that which makes us strong? The exclusive marriage within a tent comprises the essential building block for the national relationship with G-d. If we eliminate the exclusivity of the marriage (by engaging in adultery/idolatry) and eliminate the tent altogether by bringing what is meant to be reserved for intimacy into the public square, then G-d realizes that man is irredeemable, and our society utterly fails?
When we are forced to embrace the pride someone has in their sexual choices, it feels to me as if every privacy screen has been removed, and we are being told to watch and cheer as people act like animals.
I contend that today’s "pride" culture represents the same threat to Judaism as the attack from the daughters of Moav.
Discussion (2)
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
And not only to Judaism.
Back when I was young, pride went before a fall. Pride was a deadly sin. And, that's still true on both counts, no matter what sort of pride.
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
There was a time here in Ireland when the argument was that two individuals should be entitled to do as they please “in the privacy of their own bedrooms”. Fair enough. Now the Revenue Commissioners (equivalent to the IRS) are adorning their Tax Demands and other correspondence, with a combined Rainbow/transgender flag, instead of the traditional - and completely neutral- harp.