BY ANGELA O’BRIEN

Tue Jun 05, 2012 15:21 ESTComments (22)Tags: Gay Marriage, Judaism, Yehuda Levin

WASHINGTON, June 5, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) — After leaders in the Conservative Jewish community voted to officially endorse gay marriage rituals, one leading Orthodox rabbi has said the move is “depraved” and “turning everything holy on its head.”



Last week, guidelines for performing same-sex “marriages” were voted on by the Jewish Conservatives’ highest legal body, the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards. The guidelines passed in a 13-0 vote, with one rabbi abstaining.

Rabbi Yehuda Levin

“We acknowledge that these partnerships are distinct from those discussed in the Talmud as ’according to the law of Moses and Israel,’ but we celebrate them with the same sense of holiness and joy as that expressed in heterosexual marriages,” the approved document says.



The approval by the Conservative branch of Judaism in the United States of gay unions follows on the prior support of the Reform and Reconstructionist branches.
But Rabbi Levin—an Orthodox Jewish leader who often functions as a spokesman for the Rabbinical Alliance of America and the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S. and Canada—told LifeSiteNews that he is ashamed of the “depravity” and “total cravenness” of the vote.



The decision of the Rabbinical Assembly, Rabbi Levin said, reveals that “the ultra liberal Jewish crazies - who have long since abandoned any semblance of their great grand-fathers’ religion - pursue every political zeitgeist and have to run to get in front of the wagon as it hurtles down towards Sodom.”



The new guidelines allow for two kinds of gay wedding, as well as outline stipulations on homosexual divorce. To Rabbi Levin, the fact that any kind of gay union should be endorsed in the name of Judaism, in unconscionable. “Even pagans in ancient times realized how inappropriate same-gender marriage was,” he declared.



According to the Rabbinical Assembly’s website, homosexual rabbinical students helped to draft the new guidelines. “As treasured members of our community,” states the Rabbinical Assembly’s website, “they are most directly affected by the proposed new liturgy and we sought their guidance.” http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/story/grappling-tradition



“We normal religious people have to see from all this craziness,” said Rabbi Levin, “that He [God] is sending us a message to look at ‘them’—the liberal crazies—and redouble our spiritual efforts to do proactively, loudly, and clearly, just the opposite.”
 
Originally posted on LifeSiteNews