I don’t know the situation in the various places across the world the WebYeshiva reaches, but in the Northeast where I live, it is increasingly common to meet people who classify themselves as Orthodox Jews, but whose views on human sexuality are shockingly at odds with those of the Torah. To call some of that into question, I thought it worth reminding ourselves of a few basic facts.

The attitudes to which I refer have an extreme and a moderate version. The extreme one says that people’s sexuality is their own private matter–as long as it does not hurt anyone else– and is therefore not really any of our business. In this perspective, homosexuality is fine, open marriages into which the parties enter of their own free will are fine, and the only problems with pedophilia and bestiality are the presumed negative effects on the child or animal involved (children are assumed not to be able to give informed consent to such activities).

The moderate version, so common in certain circles as to be almost rampant, recognizes that the Torah does not allow for such an ethic, but makes one or both of two points: First, that we live in societies that do not base their values on Torah law, so we cannot impose our views on others, and, second, that while we may disagree with these choices and see them as wrong, it is not our place to do anything about it, since these actions are private and therefore a matter purely between the participants and God.

For the first, I think it important to note that the Torah does not condone such sexuality—homosexual or adulterous—for Jews or non-Jews (premarital sex is only a problem for Jews, but my impression is that the people whose attitudes I am critiquing would see that as a private matter as well). If so, it seems impossible for a Jew to muster a sanguine attitude when the society around him or her condones conduct Torah law sees as a capital crime. Jews’ definitions of right and wrong are supposed to be shaped by the Torah’s perspective– to the extent that the Torah expresses what it sees as a universal value, applicable equally to all human adults, an observant Jew would be obligated to advocate, in whatever legitimate ways, for the actualization of that value within whatever society that Jew inhabits.

That would be true of all forms of conduct which the Torah prohibits. Sexuality has the added issue of the Torah’s seeing its wrongful expression as damaging not only to the participants, like all sin, but to the society as a whole. In the story at the end of Parshat Balak, the Jews’ copulating with the daughters of Midian was a national crime, not a personal one, and the plague stopped when Pinchas demonstrated the community’s opposition to such acts.

Similarly, the Torah tells us that the Land of Israel spewed out the Canaanite nations for their wrongful sexuality, a sign that these sins affect the whole ecology (the physical environment in addition to the society). Finally, the majority of the sins for which the Torah ascribes karet, excision from the Jewish people, are sexual, meaning that wrongful sexuality impinges on our right to see ourselves as members of the community in good standing.

Living in exile—including those who live in a State of Israel where Western values still reign supreme—we must always ask ourselves which of the values of the surrounding society are consonant with those of the Torah, which might enrich our understanding of what the Torah was trying to tell us, which are in tension with the Torah, and which are contradicted by the Torah.

The Western view of sexuality as a private matter between consenting adults which generally does not hurt others is, to my mind, one of the prime locations today where Jews mistake a value that is diametrically opposed to what the Torah wants for one that is consonant with Torah. We need to remind ourselves, here and elsewhere, that the values and ideal of the world around us are not always ours, that as עובדי ה’, servants of God, we sometimes need to walk a separate and lonely path. The advantage of that path is that it brings us closer to our Creator, and lets us partake in perfecting the world in the Kingdom of Holy One.