Lecture by Rabbi Aharon Bassous in response to a lecture by Rabbi Joseph Dweck on sexual liberation being "a fantastic development" - first half

Rabbi Bassous tells us of the tears he shed before speaking out against Rabbi Dwek and asks forgiveness if he becomes too emotional.

The Torah is never out of date. Items in a shop have a sell-by date. The Torah has no sell-by date. If we add one letter to the Torah, if we subtract one letter from the Torah we are destroying the world. The Torah is perfect. It doesn't need us to add to it, and it doesn't need us to subtract from it.

He quotes Rabbi Sacks:

It can hardly be said that there are few aspects of Judaism more out of step with today's radically individualist culture than his view on this subject. To be a Jew has always involved being willing to challenge the idols of the age - whatever idols of whatever age. One of the idols of our time is the idea of the sovereign self: navigating the world with no binding commitment beyond personal inclination and private desire. Today's secular culture resists the idea that there may be boundaries to this life that we may legitimate pursue. It finds it difficult to understand that the logic of "I ought" is quite different to that of "I feel" or "I want". At such time Judaism's ethics become counter-cultural. To live by the call of the Torah is no easy undertaking. At times it is nothing short of heroic.

We don't have to look around us, to the nations of the world, to learn from them how to behave. When the nations of the world were primitive peoples, the Jewish nation had already received the Torah. The values of the nations of the world, they changed according to fashion, according to the whims of human ideas.

We are the light to the nations, we have to lead the way and lead by example how a Jewish family bring up our children. I remember very clearly a policeman asking the rabbi why there were so few delinquents from our community. I asked him if the police were understaffed. He said the police were always understaffed. I told him the criminals watched how well the police were staffed before planning their crimes, but with us our police is always watching us. 

The Torah viewpoint Rabbi Bassous read out that he totally agreed with:

I think we should declare in very plain and explicit terms indicating that our society has violated some of the norms of the divine law and the natural law and that as a consequence we pay a price - an exceedingly heavy price. I need hardly spell out to an informed audience, certainly one that is likely to know the rudiments of Jewish teachings, that any form of sexual gratification outside marriage cannot be condoned by Jewish law whether this is premarital, extramarital or whether it is altogether unnatural in the form of [Hebrew]. We utterly disapprove of this as an abomination. It is treated by Biblical law as a moral aberration that we cannot come to terms with. 

The late Chief Rabbi Lord Immanuel Jakobovits (1921-1999) said this, Rabbi Bassous reveals.