The disposable jew: reflections on child sexual abuse and religious culture



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The following passage, recently circulated by an Orthodox organization, unwittingly catches the flavor of this attitude in medias res:

Rav Reisman [a prominent American Orthodox rabbi] related that while in Yerushalayim [Jerusalem] this past summer, during the Israel-Terrorist War [in Lebanon], he heard a shiur [lecture] from HaRav Druk, Shlita [may he live long]. HaRav Druk noted that people on the street were blaming the war on many things. One blamed it on cell phones. A second on lack of tznius [modesty in dress]. A third on improper use of affluence. A fourth on the irreligious.58
The Israeli army was raining bombs on Lebanon in a pointless war, as retaliatory missile strikes claimed civilian lives at home. . . . And in the thick of it, a random sampling of pious Israeli Jews blamed it all on women’s hemlines, “the irreligious,” even “cell phones”! No word from any of them – apparently none was expected – about the possible effects of bigotry or xenophobia on the senseless carnage, though these are things for which religious Jews might conceivably bear some responsibility. To me, this represents more than a failure of ethical perspective. It is a kind of deliberate infantilism. Note that three of the four “reasons” for the war cited in this little sermon were tied to one another with the crimson thread of illicit sexuality; it is particularly interesting that the sexuality suggested in each case was immature and voyeuristic. An uncovered woman’s knee or elbow is supposed to lead Orthodox Jews (so say our law books) into lubricious fantasy. Orthodox Jews reflexively identify “the irreligious” with a sexual permissiveness tempting by its propinquity. Cell phones are the most recent targets of rabbinic wrath because they can now be used to access the Internet – hence pornography. It is as if our minds were frozen at the earliest stage of sexual curiosity, unable or unwilling to grow up to the point of making our own sexual judgments. Can such minds – the natural victims of a Lanner – insist on the integrity of intimate boundaries? Can they fully take sides against a rabbi whose manipulations include sexual abuse?
Conclusion

(Reform) Rabbi Drorah Setel has written:

As a people, Jews have a history arising out of our own oppression and we have the capacity to respond to that history by being outraged and angry and sensitive to injustice done to ourselves and others. But the flip side of our history of oppression, a side we don’t like to talk about is that the experience of suffering also teaches us how to inflict suffering. The experience of injustice teaches us how to be unjust.59
At some level, the Orthodox Jewish victims of sexual abuse who have become my clients know that the religious culture they were trained to regard as both ideal and alembic has, for them, proved to be the exact opposite, attacking their integrity as human beings. This knowledge comes so hard that some abuse victims prefer to avoid the memory of abuse altogether rather than encounter its harsh concomitant, the tainting of all they have learned to value. When we discussed his history of abuse, Michael told me, “Just to talk about this again, or to think about this again, and then to realize that nothing is going to change, is very hard for me.” Another client explained why he had never told his parents how Mondrowitz abused him: “It would have destroyed their religion. They trusted this rabbi so much. They looked up to him . . . Even then, I understood that they couldn’t face the betrayal. I had to face it. But I couldn’t make them do it.”

A powerful inhibition is at work here. Child sex abuse victims of rabbis, and those who support them, already face so much suspicion from their religious community that they are understandably reluctant to provoke more hostility by naming the community as an accomplice. Still, the inhibition must be overcome. We can never reach the bottom of the problem until we acknowledge our own share of the guilt, in all of its aspects: the cult of silence; the acceptance of children’s emotional exploitation; the unrealistic exaltation of the rabbinate; the fear of sexuality; and the exaggerated dependence on our rabbis that too often characterizes the Orthodox community today. Even beyond this, we must recognize the interrelatedness of these things, how they all play a role in the promotion of child sex abuse and the failure to support its victims.

Maybe I am asking too much. But at least we must stop claiming that child sex abuse among Jews is merely an aberration, an irruption of pathology into an otherwise sound moral structure. Avi Shafran, writing for Agudath Israel, exemplified this fallacy when he described abuse as a failure of self-discipline:

To be sure, there will always be observant individuals who sometimes fail the test of self-control . . . But that no more indicts Jewish observance than the fact that there are corrupt police or drug-addled doctors renders law enforcement or medicine suspect.60


Reducing the evil of child sexual abuse to a question of “self-control” does more than minimize the scope of the problem. More fundamentally, it betrays abuse victims by treating sexual assaults as mere lapses, to be corrected by stricter adherence to the existing code. The subtle correlative is that abuse victims have nothing to teach the community; the message thus simultaneously reassures Orthodoxy of the perfection of its creed and reminds the victims to hold their peace. I have shown that this basic error has deep roots in traditional Jewish thought. But that fact only underscores the urgency of rethinking our approach. To the extent we continue to use Shafran’s diagnosis, we are simply refusing to hear what the victims are telling us, and we cannot claim to care for the victims while being so indifferent, so willfully deaf, to the meaning of their experience.

This essay’s epigraph quotes the last lines of a poem in which John Berryman, that virtuoso of loss, mourns a friend (presumably Delmore Schwartz) as “a soul that has not died and refuses to come home.” I know how he felt. Those words could have been written about the men who have come to me, decades after being abused, craving some sort of resolution to the pain (vague or acute, inert or galvanizing) that still haunts them. Their religious community would like to believe that whatever they suffered has long since faded into oblivion. It has not. However etiolated their religious lives (and abuse by a clergyman saps the faith at religion’s core), their outrage is still fresh because – as one of the victims sadly told me, and as I sadly repeat – it is constantly renewed. Ignored, denied even the comfort of grief, the victims hang in a thickening cloud around our collective conscience, unable to leave, refusing to come home.

You need not take my word for this. A decent Orthodox rabbi who treats troubled Jewish youth has described the enduring trauma of child sexual abuse in these words:

It leaves the victims confused and filled with rage. It shatters their self-esteem and destroys their ability to pursue their hopes and dreams. Sadly, the effects of abuse, especially when left untreated, usually follows children into adulthood – complicating their marriages and their relationships with their children.61


Until we start to heed the victims and the implications of what they say, as I have tried to illustrate in this essay, these are – and must be – the last words on the subject.

1 See Rashi to Genesis 22:12, “al tishlah” et seq.; B’reishith Rabbah 56:7.

2 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, Penguin Books (New York, 1947) (originally 1903), pp. 437-438.

3 Amy Neustein and Michael Lesher, “Does the Jewish Community Sacrifice Victims of Sexual Abuse?” Jewish Exponent, May 30, 2002, p. 37.

4 Before and after I began speaking publicly about this case, I have been approached by Orthodox Jews who were victims of other rabbis as well. Their stories closely parallel those of my clients, and some of their comments will appear in this essay alongside those of my clients. Of course, their identities remain confidential.

5 An extradition request for Mondrowitz was finally delivered to the government of Israel in September 2007. See Matthew Wagner, “US Wants Extradition of Prominent Ger Hassid Accused of Sodomy,” The Jerusalem Post, October 23, 2007 (Jewish World section). At this writing, Mondrowitz is still contesting his extradition in a Jerusalem court. See Aviva Lori, “’I Planned To Murder Mondrowitz,’”Ha-aretz Magazine, December 6, 2007. The steps leading to these developments, both public and behind the scenes, are beyond the scope of this essay. The final legal result of the extradition request – and of the criminal trial in Brooklyn that should logically follow – remains to be seen.

6 See, e.g., Nathaniel Popper, “Victims Press Brooklyn D.A. To Seek Abuse Suspect’s Extradition from Israel,” Forward, July 28, 2006, pp. 1, 7; Jennifer Friedlin, “Hynes Mum on Mondrowitz,” The Jewish Week, October 20, 2006, p. 3. See previous note regarding more recent developments.

7 See Stephanie Saul, “Tripping Up the Prosecution,” Newsday, May 29, 2003, p. A6.

8 Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayyim 551:18, Turei Zahab ad loc. Rashi, at Babylonian Talmud Makkoth 8a, “ha-ab ha-makkeh eth-b’no,” actually appears to say a father has an obligation to strike his son in order to compel the son’s obedience to his will, though the implication is softened somewhat by the emendation of Bach, ad loc.

9 Hosea 2:12.

10 Ezekiel 16:37-39. This passage, and the preceding one, are cited in David Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God, Westminster/John Knox Press (Louisville, 1993), p. 241.

11 Yehuda Amichai, “The Real Hero,” from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (trans. Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell), University of California Press (Berkeley, 1996).

12 In personal communication, Rabbi Jeremy Rosen, Ph.D., an Orthodox rabbi who has worked in the rabbinate and Jewish education for more than forty years (in Europe and the U.S.), confirmed this point and suggested that “decisive influences leading to an attitude of ‘don’t talk about it’” may also be found in “a combination of Christian and Eastern European political and cultural attitudes.” Rabbi Rosen added that even if the “closed, reactive, authoritarian” style of contemporary Orthodoxy was a reaction against “excessive libertarianism” in its modern surroundings, “the pendulum has swung so far towards enclavism that some counterbalancing is essential.”

13 Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, from a posting on his web site, Rabbi Horowitz.com, December 14, 2006, “Keeping Our Children Safe.”

14 Id. [emphasis mine].

15 Id.

16 See, e.g., Shaul Wagschal, Kedushat ‘am yisrael (Gateshead, 1987). This book (written in Hebrew) compares masturbation to murder and contains strong language regarding homosexuality – but one would not know from reading it that any man had ever sexually abused a child of the opposite sex, let alone that any steps might be taken to prevent it.

17 Frederick C. Grant, “Psychological Study of the Bible,” included in Religions in Antiquity (Jacob Neusner, Ed.), E.J. Brill Publishers (Leiden, 1970), p. 122.

18 In Jewish literature, this commandment is actually numbered fifth; but Christian and therefore Western literature generally refers to it as the fourth.

19 Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum), Farrar, Straus, Giroux (New York, 1984), pp. 163, 158.

20 Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horeb (trans. I. Grunfeld), Soncino Press (New York, 1962) (originally 1837), p. 412, para. 554 [emphasis mine].

21 Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Pentateuch (trans. Isaac Levy), Judaica Press Ltd. (Gateshead, 1999), Vol. 5, p. 409. The verse translates as, “You will see among those in captivity a woman of beautiful appearance, and you will desire her; you may take her to yourself for a wife.”

22 It is only fair to mention that not all traditional authorities have taken so crude a view. See Rashi, Babylonian Talmud Qiddushin 22a, “shelo yilhatzenah b’milhamah”; Ramban and Or ha-Hayyim to Deuteronomy 21:11-14.

23 Mishneh Torah, Issurei Bi’ah 12:10 and Kessef Mishneh, ad loc. This view does not appear to have been adopted by any later authorities; however, I have not found a traditional text explicitly repudiating it.

24 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche (trans. Walter Kaufmann, Ed.), Viking Press (New York, 1954), p. 654.

25 Kathryn Rogers, “Rabbi calls embarrassment a good thing for intimacy,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 6, 1993, p. 6D. The theological basis of Rabbi Friedman’s statement about pedophilia appears to be his conviction that the notion of a “natural” good or evil cannot coexist with reliance upon divine law. If an act were not forbidden by Jewish law, it would be “good.” It follows that pedophilia cannot be shunned as “evil” or “abnormal”; it is wrong simply because God’s law says it is. Clearly, such a fundamentalist approach to Orthodoxy has radical implications.

26 See Amy Neustein and Michael Lesher, “The Silence of the Jewish Media on Sexual Abuse in the Orthodox Jewish Community,” in Sex, Religion, Media (Dane S. Claussen, Ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (New York, 2002), p. 86.

27 See, especially, Babylonian Talmud Baba Qamma 116b-117a; Gittin 7a.

28 Arukh ha-Shulhan, Hoshen ha-Mishpat 388:7 [my translation; emphasis added]. The writer’s tribute in this passage to “our lord the Czar” as an exemplar of just government was doubtless intended for the censors rather than for Jewish readers; however, his argument in principle for limiting the application of m’sirah is both clear and convincing (at least in my opinion).

29 Excerpts of a Hebrew pamphlet containing these rulings (Kunt’ras dam rei’echa, edited by Tzvi Gertner) are in my possession.

30 Rabbi Yosef Blau, posted to Canonist.com, September 19, 2006.

31 A recording of Rabbi Salomon’s comments at the annual convention of Agudath Israel of America, November 23, 2006, was available on the blog Canonist.com, from which I downloaded it.

32 E.g., in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1986: “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

33 This pattern was apparently repeated when the Baltimore Jewish Times published an article in April 2007 describing decades of sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated by one Orthodox rabbi (“Rabbi, Teacher, Molester – Ephraim Shapiro’s Mark on the Baltimore Jewish Community,” by Phil Jacobs, April 13, 2007). Just after the article appeared, Rabbi Moshe Heinemann, one of Baltimore’s most influential Orthodox rabbis, reportedly banned the newspaper to all local Orthodox Jews. And this despite the fact that he had just signed an open letter, along with dozens of other Baltimore rabbis, insisting that charges of child sexual abuse in the Orthodox community would no longer be hidden, but conveyed to secular authorities! (Nathan Guttman, “Baltimore Roiled by Abuse Charge Against Late Rabbi,” Forward, April 27, 2007.)

34 Exchange of emails between the author and forjerusalem@gmail.com, December 31, 2006 - January 1, 2007. As noted above, I ultimately obtained a recording of the speech.

35 September 2007.

36 Robert Kolker, “On the Rabbi’s Knee: Do the Orthodox Jews have a Catholic-Priest problem?” New York, May 22, 2006, pp. 28-33, 102-103.

37 Avi Shafran, “A Matter of Orthodox Abuse,” Jewish Week, June 23, 2006.

38 Marvin Schick, “Children at Work,” posted on mschick.blogspot.com, February 10, 2003.

39 “Conspiracy of Silence: Child Sex Abuse Case Still Haunts,” reported by Cynthia McFadden, October 11, 2006.

40 Email to the author from Chaptzem DotCom, September 24, 2006, after learning of the planned broadcast [emphasis mine].

41 Babylonian Talmud Yoma 69b (“Said Rab Hanina, ‘. . . the seal of the Holy One, Blessed be He, is truth’”).

42 Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayyim 4:18; Mishnah B’rurah ad loc.

43 Rabbi Eliyahu Stern, posted to Virtual Talmud, June 7, 2006 [emphasis mine].

44 Avi Robinson, “Rabbi Willig Apology Stirs Campus,” The Commentator, March 6, 2003.

45 Fred Keene, “The Politics of Forgiveness: How the Christian Church Guilt-Trips Survivors,” On the Issues, Fall 1995.

46 Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 99b.

47 Official statement released December 14, 2006.

48 Rabbi Avi Shafran, posted to Canonist.com, December 8, 2006.

49 Haim Apelboim, Shahor ‘al gabe lavan, Moah-Shivuk im Koah (Ramat Gan, 2000), pp. 91-92 [my translation].

50 E.M. Forster, Maurice, New American Library, Inc. (New York, 1973) (originally 1914), p. 15.

51 Dr. Isaac Schechter, in personal communications (September 2007), has argued on very similar grounds that early education in “sexual identity and comfort with one’s body” (taught appropriately), far from undermining religious norms of modesty, is “rather an affirmation of it.”

52 Avi Shafran, “A Matter of Orthodox Abuse,” The Jewish Week, June 23, 2006.

53 Herman Wouk, Inside, Outside, Little, Brown & Co. (Boston, 1985), p. 31.

54 George Orwell, 1984, New American Library (New York, 1961) (originally 1949), p. 111.

55 Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (trans. Goronwy Rees), New Directions Publishing Corp. (New York, 1971), pp. 181-182.

56 Public Summary of the Report of the NCSY Special Commission, December 21, 2000, p. 12.

57 Id., p. 51.

58 Hakhel MIS email distribution, September 14, 2006 [emphasis mine].

59 Rabbi Drorah Setel, “Can Justice and Compassion Embrace?” in Embracing Justice: A Resource Guide for Rabbis on Domestic Abuse (Diane Gardsbane, Ed.), Jewish Women International (New York, 2002), pp. 53-54 [emphasis mine].

60 Rabbi Avi Shafran, “A Matter of Orthodox Abuse,” op. cit.

61 Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, op. cit., Rabbi Horowitz.com, December 14, 2006.




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