There's a widespread perception that fundamentalist faiths are incompatible with the LGBTQ identity. And for the most part, that's true — with a few exceptions. Rabbi Mike Moskowitz is one of the few ultra-Orthodox Jewish rabbis who not only support, but actively advocate for, LGBTQ individuals. He tells Here & Now's Robin Young that despite his stand on these issues costing him his congregation and his job at Columbia University, he's proud of the work he now does with New York's Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. "The rabbinic voice I don't think has been loud enough in creating a safe space," Moskowitz says. "That a sanctuary should be a sacred space, a sanctuary, from persecution. And unfortunately, religion now often excludes people." Interview Highlights On calling his choice to become an LGBTQ advocate a "holy decision" "I think we're all put in this world for a specific purpose, and for me, I've found clarity in the invitation to kind of expand the space that religion I think is meant to provide, as a container to help support relationships with God. There's just a huge segment of society that is being told, 'There's no room for you here,' and as a fundamentalist, I believe that God is everywhere, all the time. We need some restorative religion to heal for some of the trauma that has been meted out by those who want to constrict the space that God occupies. "I think that God isn't some sort of prefabricated, mass-produced space, and each person needs to ask themselves, 'What does God want from me, being who I am, in this relationship?' "

"The rabbinic voice I don't think has been loud enough in creating a safe space." Rabbi Mike Moskowitz

On what "ultra-Orthodox" means to him "I find it helpful to borrow language from the queer community about my own religious identity, because I think there's a huge parallel there. I was assigned secular, and then kind of came out as orthodox in high school, went on a right-wing trajectory for the next 20 years, learning in the largest seminaries in the world, and really living in that very far right-wing Lithuanian, yeshiva world. And now, [I] identify as religiously nonconforming. I have very progressive values, which are very much a part of who I am. I also am deeply religious. "We all have to express ourselves with some sort of dominant physical form. And so for me, living in an ultra-Orthodox community, dressing the way in which rabbis in my community dress, is helpful in that it expresses to the world who I am at my core. If we force somebody to choose between a gender identity and a religious identity, or a sexual identity and a religious identity, there is only one out of those three which is a choice, and so people leave religion because they're told that there is no space for them to be who they are." On this new "holy" understanding coming to him as a result of personal experience "Actually two different personal experiences that really led me in this quest to try to uncover and discover the divine will. First, someone in my family transitioned, and said, 'I'm not a girl, I'm a boy.' And that led me — I was a rabbi at Columbia University — to explore gender studies for the first time. "And then when one of my students was really struggling as a trans individual, I felt a calling to really come out very publicly as an ally."

"When we have rabbis getting in between a person's relationship with God, it gets crowded. If a person is genuinely and sincerely on a quest to discover the divine intention, that struggle for truth is as holy as it gets." Rabbi Mike Moskowitz