Here is an excerpt from Rabbi Andy Bachman’s powerful reaction to the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers University. It is a direct address by the Rabbi of Park Slope’s Congregation Beth Elohim, to the  youth of this community (and other communities around the world). You can read the rest at his blog Water Over Rocks.

I’m your Rabbi.  As such, I am occasionally asked to share a few words or thoughts when bad things happen to good people.  In this case, I want to write some words, directly to you, about Tyler Clementi’s tragic suicide last week.  If you haven’t read about it, you can read the story here from today’s New York Times.

Tyler was secretly filmed having a sexual encounter with another guy on the Rutgers campus and that scene was broadcast on-line, to his own humiliation, which authorities think was the major factor in deciding to take his own life.  Rutgers University, where Tyler was a talented, quiet and kind student, and the local police, are in charge of an investigation, the results of which we’ll keep reading about in the coming days.

But I want to address you directly, whomever you may be.  If you’re gay or straight or bi or transgender or you just don’t know, as a Rabbi in the community, I care about you as a person made in the Image of God.  It really truly doesn’t matter what other people think about your struggle to be who you are in the process of becoming.