This Tisha B’Av, while Jews worldwide were mourning the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash, the Holocaust, and other historical tragedies, thousands demonstrated in the Holy Land for the most unholy of abominations.
LGBT activists chose to defile this holy day, on holy soil, by demonstrating against the government for passing a surrogacy law that did not provide surrogacy benefits to single men or same-gender “couples.”
The Jerusalem Post reported that the organizer of the protests across the country was Aguda – Israel’s LGBT Task Force. Youth, too, were also involved in this travesty. “Some of the fiercest voices at the march in Tel Aviv belonged to LGBT youth from Israel Gay Youth (IGY)…. Members of the group led the march, stopping to chant, cheer and dance along the route,” the paper reported.
Haaretz.com reported that the Israeli Army “said soldiers taking part in the protests around the country would not be punished, contrary to a prior statement in which the army said it prohibited soldiers from participating.”
Scores of Israeli companies and organizations also backed the protests, allowing their employees to take a paid day off to join them. Tel Aviv City Council member Etai Pinkas was actually quoted as saying: “For the first time we have the commercial corporations behind us, that’s never happened before.”
The head of the Histadrut union, Avi Nissenkorn, said on Thursday that the national labor federation would support LGBT members who wished to take part in the strike and called on unions and management to allow workers to take part in it “without infringing their rights.”
Companies supporting this rebellion against the Torah included branches of American firms such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and IBM and Israeli companies like Natural Intelligence, Playtika, Fiverr, MyHeritage, SodaStream, Teva, Saar Book Publishing, Comme il Faut, Shufersal, Cellcom, Pelephone, and Wibbitz.
The brazen support for this revolting Chillul HaShem requires an appropriate response. The world must understand that these people do not represent Torah or the Jewish People – not one iota.
They demonstrated for the legitimatization of sins branded as abominable by the Torah (Vayikra 18:22, 20:13). It is for these abominations that the Canaanite nations were expelled from the Holy Land. In fact, the sin of sodomy is so severe that it is listed as one of four sins for which earthquakes strike (Talmud Yerushalmi, Berachos 9:2). The very classification of this sin as “to’eiva” (abomination) means the Torah wants to instill in us an attitude of revulsion towards it.
These demonstrators sought to legitimize not only the act of sodomy, but even same-gender “marriage.” That agenda poses an existential threat: Vayikra Rabbah 23:9 states that the Dor HaMabul (Generation of the Flood) wasn’t annihilated until it recognized same-gender unions.
The demonstrators chose Tisha B’Av – arguably the most serious day on the Jewish calendar – to protest. They claimed the day was appropriate since the second Beis Hamikdash was destroyed due to sin’as chinam. What a ziyuf HaTorah (perversion of the Torah)!
However, the greater the darkness, the brighter light in it shines. May we merit the final redemption in the merit of properly and faithfully spreading the truth of Torah throughout the world.