I remember my first crush clearly: I was in davening (prayer service) in sixth grade, and I saw a boy a year older than I was donning his tefillin before the service officially started. I remember thinking to myself how gorgeous he was—it was, quite literally, a “tefillin turn on” (a phrase for when someone finds another person doing something Jewish to be attractive). In that moment, I was overcome with a debilitating fear that would stay with me until long after I came out five years later: I became afraid of my own sexuality, and I had no one to whom I could turn and share my fears. Growing up in the Orthodox community and attending Orthodox elementary and middle schools, no one ever talked about sex or sexuality, let along feelings of same-sex attraction.

The only time sexuality was ever brought up to the male students was when my seventh grade Bible teacher spent an entire class ranting about how Massachusetts’ legalization of marriage equality was wrong. Other than that, sexuality was never discussed. The assumption was that we nice Jewish boys would grow up to date and ultimately marry nice Jewish girls, and that our female counterparts would date and marry nice Jewish boys.

Two weeks ago, Josh Orlian, a 12-year-old Jewish boy from White Plains, New York, auditioned for America’s Got Talent as a stand-up comedian, where he told several very off-color sexual jokes. It raised eyebrows—as well it should have. There stood a boy in a kippah, not yet bar mitzvah, making jokes about fellatio to Howie Mandell and Howard Stern.

But at the same time, this shouldn’t be jarring: sex is something that most twelve-year-olds think about on a very regular basis. And, yes, the blowjob joke he made was fed to him by his father, and, yes, perhaps it might have been irresponsible of his parents to allow him to stand up in front of a live audience and make those jokes—but that doesn’t change the fact that twelve-year-olds are on the verge of puberty and are thinking about sex. Orlian’s Modern Orthodox day school has the right to be unamused, but that doesn’t change the fact that middle school students will always make crass jokes amongst themselves.

Funny or not, Orlian’s performance—and the controversy that resulted—forces us to confront the Modern Orthodoxy community’s squeamish attitude towards sex education. Just because we don’t talk about sex with our adolescents doesn’t mean that they aren’t thinking about it, in the same way that teenagers will have premarital sex whether or not we choose to talk to them about safe sex practices. Despite the fact that no one I knew ever really talked about homosexuality or sexuality in general, I still turned out queer, and came out of the closet before I had a chance to have any major discussions about sexuality and Judaism. Not talking to our kids about homosexuality won’t stop them from coming out: they’ll just live in fear—like I did—that their communities won’t accept them.

We should be fostering our youth’s sexual education and knowledge, not fretting over the fact that the public now knows that, yes, Orthodox boys and girls think and talk about sex. We can’t sweep these conversations under the rug until just before college, because sex and sexuality are all around us as we enter puberty. Instead, we need to give young, frum Jews the language and tools they need to make informed decisions when it comes to sexuality. For guidance, we can turn to our own rabbinic texts, which deal frankly with matters of sexuality—for example, the rabbis in the Talmud went to great lengths to understand when a woman becomes an adult, how to classify a person who does not fit into the binary of male and female, and to share wisdom about sexual pleasure. Our current repressive attitude towards sex actually runs counter to Jewish tradition.

Even Modern Orthodox day schools which do have more progressive sex education programs often wait until too late—ninth or tenth grade—to discuss sexual health and gender identity. This education needs to begin earlier, in middle school. It is time to stop being afraid of sex and sexuality, because when we are, we fail to give our adolescents the tools they need to lead sexually healthy and responsible lives. Arming teenagers with the tools and the language they need to lead sexually healthy lives must become a part of our Modern Orthodox value system—even if the endeavor sometimes makes us uncomfortable.

Ultimately, Josh is just like every other adolescent. The only difference between him and other twelve-year-old boys is that he wears a kippah while he thinks and talks about sex and sexuality. This only reflects poorly on the Orthodox community if we keep pretending that the way that we talk about sexuality and gender—and by this, I mean not talking about it until the very last minute—is just fine. We need to remove the taboo surrounding sex in Orthodox Judaism to give our kids the education they need, lest we continue to put them at risk.

Amram Altzman is a rising sophomore in a joint program with the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University. He is also a blogger for New Voices Magazine, a website for Jewish college students. You can follow him on Twitter @thesubwaypoet.

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As a child, celebrating Purim was about dressing up and making noise when our rabbi chanted Haman’s name during his reading of the megillah. But two different life-changing events during my adolescence have led me to understand the holiday in a more complex light. What was once a day of dressing up and acting out has become, for me, a call to social justice.

Unlike most of my Orthodox peers, I celebrated my bar mitzvah on Purim. I traded the usual weekly Torah portion read on a Saturday morning for the much longer Megillat Esther. Although my Hebrew birthday—the eighth of Adar—was actually six days prior to Purim, the holiday became the time that, according to Jewish tradition, I entered adulthood.

Back then, I read the megillah primarily as a coming-of-age story. Esther went from being a shy, sheltered child to a brave and courageous woman in a matter of chapters. I understood her hesitation when she invited King Ahasuerus and Haman to a banquet, but decided at the last minute to push off her revelation to a second banquet. Esther’s reticence echoed my fears about assuming the role and responsibilities of an adult man in Jewish ritual life. Here was I, a kid of thirteen, trying to take off the mask of childhood and become a fully-fledged member of the Jewish people. My own family was firmly modern Orthodox, but I was raised in an ultra-Orthodox community. Would I ever be able to live up to the expectations set out for me by those far to my family’s religious right?

Three years later, Purim was the holiday during which I came out to my best friends. Since middle school, I had worked to keep my true identity hidden from my peers. I refused to do or say anything that might be even remotely been seen as stereotypical and lead people to the (correct) assumption that I was queer. I refused to listen to any music that was seen as “gay” or to wear skinny jeans or brightly-colored clothing. I was sheepishly quiet, lest I slip up and say the wrong thing to the wrong person.

When I came out, the pretense finally began to fall away, though it happened gradually. Around a few friends, I began to open up and leave both the closet and the personal cocoon that I had set up to protect myself. As I came out to my parents (who were probably just as surprised to find out that I was queer as Ahasuerus was to find out that someone was planning to eradicate his queen’s nation) and to more of my friends, I began to feel more comfortable with who I was. I began listening to music that I genuinely enjoyed, stereotypes be damned. I fully embraced the phenomenon of brightly-colored skinny jeans, which were already popular at my Jewish prep school.

Coming out also led me to see a new dimension in the Purim story. It was not only Esther’s fear of taking responsibility that scared her: it was the peeling away of the false identity she had created to conceal her Judaism. As a child, I had read rabbinic stories of how Esther would light Shabbat candles and practice Judaism in secret, with only Mordechai and a few of her maids aware of her real identity. After hiding for so long, she feared the response to her true self. Would she be rejected by her husband, the king, who had approved Haman’s plan to exterminate her people? What if she couldn’t save her people? And what if the king decided that she, despite being queen, would not be spared?

Like I did when I was coming out, Esther shed her false identity in stages. Initially she does not mention her Jewishness, only that a nation is about to be exterminated. Later, she reveals her affiliation with Mordechai and the greater Jewish community. Ahasuerus  becomes angered not at the fact that the Jews are in danger, but that a single minority is in danger. In executing Haman, Ahasuerus sent the message that intolerance of any kind was unacceptable in his kingdom, which was known for its diversity (the beginning of the megillah tells us that the Persian empire included no fewer than 127 distinct nations). Megillat Esther is story about—and a call for—social justice, as much as it is about shedding the false identities we create so as to not be rejected.

Interpreting the story of Purim as a story of social justice has helped me identify my goal as an aspiring advocate for LGBT Jews. I should not only be fighting for the inclusion of those who feel excluded because they are queer. My goal is to create a community that encourages and celebrates diversity, a community that not only accepts LGBT people, but also other disenfranchised Jews. For me, the final goal is the creation of a stronger, more inclusive Jewish community: it is not only I, as a queer person, who benefits from this, but the Jewish people as a whole, which benefits from becoming more diverse.

Amram Altzman is a first-year student in a joint program with the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University. He is also a blogger for New Voices, a website for Jewish college students. You can find him on Twitter @thesubwaypoet.

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