Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Rabbi Hirsch, an upstanding and well respected member of the community – so while some officials were working tirelessly to assure parents of their children’s safety, others harboured the frum fugitive and arranged for him to board an Israel-bound El-Al flight before the police could charge him for the alleged abuse.

 

Abomination

 

While much global attention has focussed on the failings of the Catholic Church in relation to child sexual abuse, one Australian case has shone a dark light on another religious community. This is the case of Malka Leifer, a teacher at an ultra-Orthodox Jewish girl’s school in Melbourne, who in 2008 was accused of multiple counts of child abuse. But before anything could be done, she was assisted out of the country and found asylum of sorts in Israel, where she was protected by the ultra-Orthodox community there. In 2021, Australian authorities finally extradited Leifer and she will stand trial in 2022. It is not necessary to know all of this background in order to read Ashley Goldberg’s debut Abomination, which has a fictional version of this case running in the background and driving some of the plot, but it does help contextualise it.

Apparently, allegations of sexual abuse had been made by a student against Rabbi Hirsch earlier in the week, but unimpressed by the responsiveness of the police, the student’s family sought the attention of the media. Once the story broke, school officials acted fast, cancelling classes and announcing Rabbi Hirsch’s immediate termination. Rumour had it, though, that Hirsch was connected – an upstanding and well respected member of the community – so while some officials were working tirelessly to assure parents of their children’s safety, others harboured the frum fugitive and arranged for him to board an Israel-bound El-Al flight before the police could charge him for the alleged abuse.

The main characters of Abomination, Yonatan and Ezra, both attended the school where the offences took place, but neither knew of the abuse at the time. Ezra’s family were less strict in their religious practice, which made Ezra almost an outcast at the school, with the exception of his friendship with Yonatan, the son of a rabbi. Ezra’s parents use the incident as an excuse to move Ezra to the local public high school.

Yonatan’s parents respond by forbidding their son to talk about the incident and forbidding him from having any further connection with Ezra once he has left the fold. The main action of the novel, however, takes place 20 years after this, when Ezra and Yonatan are reunited by the campaign to extradite their old teacher.

The novel charts both Yonatan’s and Ezra’s struggles with their faith. Yonatan, deeply embedded in the ultra-Orthodox community – he is now a teacher at the school he attended and married to the rabbi’s daughter – has the furthest to fall. This fall starts when he attends the protest headed by Avraham Kliger, the brother of one of the abused boys. Due to the controversy, the whole Kliger family have been ostracised by the community:

His brother suffered, his family suffered and how did the community respond – denial, refuge for your tormentor, ostracism from the only way of life you’ve ever known.

Yonatan’s engagement with Kliger and his protest leads him to a deeper understanding of what has happened, and he starts to question his community. Meanwhile, Yonatan’s growing renewed friendship with Ezra and Ezra’s non-Jewish girlfriend, Tegan, open him up new ways of thinking. But when these connections – anathema to his community – are discovered, there are impacts on his teaching position and his standing. The fact that both his pregnant wife and her brother effectively endorse the community’s position makes the situation worse for him.

Ezra finds himself going in the other direction. Unable to really connect with Tegan, but also unable to tell her the truth about how he is feeling, at one point he turns back to his religion to see if he can find answers there:

It was months until Yom Kippur. Months until the Torah said Ezra could atone for his sins, have a clean slate, be forgiven for every bad thing he had ever done. He couldn’t wait, but did it matter? Would God have heard him anyway? The sinner, the lapsed Jew … Across the road, the iron gates of South Caufield shule, imprinted with Magen Davids, stood open … He was out of time and out of options. Prayer couldn’t possibly make things worse.

Abomination is an angry book, and there is good reason for this anger. The insular ultra-Orthodox Jewish community did harbour and support a suspected child abuser and excommunicate the family of the victim. But in focussing on this case and these characters, Goldberg provides a very narrow view of a very small subset of the Jewish community and Jewish experience. And while he delves into to the many hypocrisies among the most pious, he provides little balance to explain why people continue to commit to the community.

Those who have seen the Netflix series Unorthodox will know that there are plenty of members of the ultra-Orthodox community who have fallen out with their faith. The story of Yonatan is a similar one, pushed not only by his reconnection with Ezra and a better understanding of the Hirsch case, but other life-changing realisations. While Ezra is being pushed in the other direction, his choices need not be so stark. The idea that after all these years, the only option for him is to dive back into ultra-Orthodoxy is itself a limiting one.

The Malka Leifer case is an important one to explore. Prompted by events surrounding the Catholic Church, the protection of child abusers by religious organisations has been the subject of numerous major inquiries worldwide, including the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse here in Australia. The Leifer case shows that any religion is susceptible to its organisations being exploited by predators.

But the details of that case, the why of the behaviour of both the abuser and her protectors, are not the drivers of this narrative. So while readers are given information that will allow them to better understand the real world situation and its context,, they do not  get additional insight into the particulars of the Leifer case.

Goldberg delves into a small corner of Australian society that will be unfamiliar to many and uses two engagingly flawed characters to tackle some thorny religious and philosophical ideas. And the novel importantly has the capacity to raise awareness of the Leifer case and its ongoing impacts. But it also gives a view of the Jewish community, and of Judaism itself, that is likely to be a long way from the experience of the majority of Australian Jews. So, while it needs to be read with some caveats, Abomination is overall a brave, challenging and important debut.

This review first appeared in Newtown Review of Books.

Friday, May 27, 2022

“I was absolutely shocked at how many rabbis I was hearing about,” Sztokman says. “Rabbis are supposed to be the ultimate safe space, we entrust our most sacred and vulnerable moments to rabbis, and we trust them to be our communal leaders, to teach us and enlighten us.


‘It’s a Spiritual Earthquake’: When Rabbis Become Sexual Abusers

 

Based on interviews with 84 victims and survivors of sexual abuse, Elana Sztokman’s new book examines how Jewish communities often turn a blind eye to abusers – and even support them

 

 

Author Chaim Walder, Rabbi Barry Freundel and School Principal Malka Leifer.
Barry Freundel

When reports first surfaced that a prominent D.C. rabbi had been secretly filming his female congregants in the synagogue’s ritual bath, Elana Sztokman says she felt physically ill.

“For about a week, I couldn’t get off the couch,” recounts the prominent feminist activist who grew up in New York and immigrated to Israel nearly 30 years ago.

Barry Freundel, an Orthodox rabbi who served as the spiritual leader of Kesher Israel Congregation, was eventually arrested in 2014 and served six-and-a-half years in prison after confessing to 52 counts of voyeurism.

What was causing Sztokman so much angst wasn’t just what the rabbi did. It was also the responses she was hearing. “A lot of people were brushing the whole thing off and saying it was nothing because he hadn’t touched the victims and there hadn’t been any physical contact,” she says. “That was really mind-bending for me.”

The exploits of the so-called “peeping rabbi” would become the trigger for her seven-year investigation into high-profile cases of sexual abuse in the Jewish community. The fruits of that endeavor, “When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture,” is set to be published next month by Lioness Books and Media, the publishing company Sztokman founded to promote women’s voices.

Based on interviews with 84 victims and survivors of sexual abuse, as well as Jewish communal professionals and volunteers, Sztokman says she set out to answer one basic question: how can this be happening?

Personality traits

The 400-page book explores the personality traits that abusing rabbis share and analyzes their grooming tactics, some which are uniquely Jewish – such as using codes that identify “insiders” (words in Hebrew, for example, or Jewish ideas). It documents how Jewish communities often turn a blind eye to abusers and even support them. It explores the effects of sexual abuse on the victims – especially insofar as their connection to Judaism is concerned – and on the Jewish community as a whole.

Sztokman, a trained anthropologist, found, for example, that the prevalence of sexual abuse in Jewish culture deters women from entering the rabbinate.

The book delves into some of the more shocking and well-known cases of sexual abuse in the Jewish community as well. These include the cases involving Rabbi Chaim Walder, the popular ultra-Orthodox author who committed suicide after he was exposed in a recent Haaretz investigation as a serial abuser; Malka Leifer, the principal of an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school in Australia who is about to stand trial on charges of sexually abusing her students; Michael Steinhardt, the prominent Jewish philanthropist who was accused in a New York Times investigation of engaging repeatedly in sexual harassment; and Baruch Lanner, the Orthodox youth movement leader from the United States who was convicted of child sexual abuse in one of the first cases of its kind to make headlines, about 20 years ago.

But Sztokman says the main reason she set out to write the book was to provide the victims – many of whom have requested anonymity for obvious reasons – with a platform to share their stories. As she writes in the introduction: “It is about bringing a megaphone to the voices of the victims who have been too long ignored.”

She began her research in 2015, a few years before the #MeToo movement gained prominence. As growing numbers of victims and survivors of sexual abuse began sharing their stories, identifying subjects for her research and persuading them to open up became much easier.

Sztokman did not initially plan to focus on rabbis. Rather, she was thinking of a broader study on sexual abuse and harassment in the Jewish community as a whole. “Rabbis Who Abuse” does, indeed, look at abuse among Jewish donors, Jewish academics, Jewish institutional leaders and even in Jewish camps. But it was among rabbis that she discovered the problem was especially acute.

“I was absolutely shocked at how many rabbis I was hearing about,” Sztokman says. “Rabbis are supposed to be the ultimate safe space, we entrust our most sacred and vulnerable moments to rabbis, and we trust them to be our communal leaders, to teach us and enlighten us. And to think that some of the people who are doing that are also doing the absolute worst thing that can be done from one human being to another – ‘shocking’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s a spiritual, cultural and social earthquake.”

‘Massive problem’

Rabbis, in many ways, are no different from other clergy who engage in sexual abuse and harassment. They tend to exploit their positions of power and authority, as well as the opportunity to provide counseling during moments of vulnerability, to target and manipulate their victims. But many abusing rabbis, as Sztokman discovered, have something else in common that sets them apart from their counterparts in other faiths.

“Jews have a tendency to revere rabbis with charisma – the rabbi who plays guitar, the rabbi who delivers a great sermon, the rabbi who knows how to tell a joke,” she notes. “It’s a very performance-oriented sort of charisma. And this particular type of charisma has a lot of overlap with narcissism. So, what often happens in Jewish culture is that we tend to confuse charisma, and especially an ability to perform, with good character and trustworthiness – and that’s a massive problem.”

Contrary to popular belief, Sztokman also found that sexual abuse among rabbis cuts across denominations and is not limited to one particular movement.

“It’s fascinating how everyone thinks it’s happening somewhere else,” she says, noting that Orthodox Jews tend to believe it’s more prevalent among the non-Orthodox because the non-Orthodox do not adhere to the same rules of modesty and gender segregation as they do. Non-Orthodox Jews, meanwhile, tend to believe it’s more prevalent among Orthodox Jews because they see them as sexually repressed.

“They’re all wrong,” says the author. “It’s everywhere. Gender segregation and body coverings do not protect anyone, and neither does a very sexually open, hugging culture. Each one has its own dangers, but the biggest danger is thinking: No, no, it doesn’t happen by us.”

Just as her book was going to print, Sztokman, who was raised Modern Orthodox, “came out“ with her own story of abuse. After nearly a decade of silence, the author went public with the abuse and harassment she had suffered while serving as executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. She named her abuser as sex therapist Bat Sheva Marcus, who had been the group’s board chairwoman. In coming forward, Sztokman wrote that she was “inspired by the courage of others who had done the same in similar situations.”

Is sexual abuse more common in the Jewish world than elsewhere? A precise answer to that question would require a comprehensive cross-cultural study, says Sztokman, and that was not something she attempted to do in her book.

And, she adds, does it really matter?

“How the Jewish community fares on this issue compared to other faith communities may be not only irrelevant but also an effort to stymie change,” she writes. “The question itself may be a deflecting tactic, an opportunity for people to say, ‘See, we’re not so bad!’”

“When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture” is released on June 14 and published by Lioness Books and Media.

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Rabbi Moshe Yazdi is suspected of raping, sexually assaulting and sodomizing women while fraudulently obtaining their “consent” by telling them these were religious acts and therefore they had to submit to his demands. He is also suspected of exploiting them financially.

 


Rabbi Moshe Yazdi

 

Rabbi to Be Charged With Rape, Allegedly Targeted Newly Religious Women for Years

 

10 women from his community have filed complaints against Rabbi Moshe Yazdi who is suspected of obtaining their 'consent' to his sexual assaults by telling them these were religious acts

A community rabbi from Jerusalem will be indicted on Thursday for repeated sexual crimes against newly religious women.

Rabbi Moshe Yazdi is suspected of raping, sexually assaulting and sodomizing the women while fraudulently obtaining their “consent” by telling them these were religious acts and therefore they had to submit to his demands. He is also suspected of exploiting them financially.

So far, 10 women from his community have filed complaints against him. Police found that he presented himself to them as one of the 36 righteous people who, according to Jewish tradition, ensure the world’s continued existence at any given moment. He then told them the sexual acts were a form of spiritual rectification. Some of the crimes were committed against brides on their wedding day, police said.

At a court hearing on Tuesday, a police officer said the evidence revealed “a man who controlled his victims highhandedly and with an iron fist, separating them from their families and even demanding that they separate from their spouses.”

Yazdi provided various justifications for having sex with them, including by saying “the sexual acts were meant to save Jewish lives and even prevent terror attacks,” the officer said. “It’s impossible to call his actions and character anything but pure evil.”

The crimes continued for years, police said, with some committed more than 10 years ago and the most recent a year and a half ago.

Yazdi’s attorney, David Halevi, said the police were “demonizing” his client. He noted that the statute of limitations on some of the alleged crimes has already expired and accused the complainants of being motivated by “financial interests.”

Nevertheless, Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Amir Shaked refused to release Yazdi on bail, ordering him held for another three days.

The first police compliant against Yazdi was filed in 2007. Three years earlier, evidence of his sexual behavior had reached a rabbinical court, which responded by barring him from meeting with, advising or teaching women. Nevertheless, the crimes continued, according to police.

In 2016, Yazdi was convicted of misdemeanor charges under a plea bargain for trying to flee the country despite an order by the bailiff’s office barring him from leaving. He did this by buying a ticket from a student who went through passport control for him and then gave the rabbi the slip showing that passport control had approved his exit. He was given a suspended sentence and a fine.


It would require that in the aftermath of one of the most devastating sexual abuse scandals in the history of Orthodoxy, the mainstream rabbinic response wasn’t recommending that victims go to rabbinic courts for justice instead of the police.


What will it take for Orthodox Judaism to hold sexual abusers accountable?

 

As other denominations attempt to address institutional sexual misconduct, Orthodox leadership remains notably absent

I’m a survivor of abuse in the Haredi community and the director of a survivor advocacy organization. Seeing the results of investigations taking place in various religious denominations feels a lot like being an “older single” at a wedding. You sit there wondering if it will ever happen for you while well-meaning friends and relatives assure you that it will, with pitying looks in their eyes. 

With the release of a 288-page report of the investigation by the Southern Baptist Convention into its mishandling of sexual abuse cases, I am once again left feeling frustrated. While more and more denominations are conducting investigations —notably Reform and Conservative Judaism—Orthodox Judaism continues to actively resist accountability. 

Following the 2018 release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, then-New York Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood launched an investigation into institutional responses to sexual abuse. I was attending a marketing conference when the news investigation was announced and I ran into a bathroom crying with relief. I’d been hoping for something like that to happen in New York so the extent of the problem of sexual abuse coverup in the Orthodox community could be revealed. What I didn’t know at the time was that the attorney general’s investigation was solely into the Catholic Church. Three years in, that investigation has gone nowhere.  

Over the years there have been several attempts to study the prevalence and extent of the problem of sexual abuse in the Orthodox community, but such efforts have been resisted both by leadership and by community members terrified of the consequences of speaking about their experiences, even anonymously. 

Part of the problem is certainly the fact that Orthodoxy is much more decentralized than Southern Baptism, or even Reform or Conservative Judaism. That becomes even more true on the religiously rightward end of the Orthodox spectrum, where there are only loose central institutional coalitions like Agudath Israel. However, even within the centralized institutions of Modern Orthodoxy, we see this resistance. 

In 2000, following numerous accusations of child sexual abuse against former National Council of Synagogue Youth leader Rabbi Baruch Lanner, the Orthodox Union released a partial report of an investigation conducted about the case. The OU had received a steady stream of complaints over the years about Lanner and had continued to allow him to retain his position at NCSY, and continue working with children.  The portion of the report that was released failed to mention any of the names of the people responsible for the coverup in the Lanner case, but conceded that “profound errors in judgment were made.”

To date, the OU has yet to release the full report. 

Agudath Israel and the Orthodox Union could, if they wanted to, conduct investigations into their own organizations and the organizations in their respective networks to examine how they’ve responded to institutional coverups of sexual abuse, but that would first require Agudath Israel to change its policy requiring survivors to ask permission of rabbis before reporting sexual abuse to police. It would require that in the aftermath of one of the most devastating sexual abuse scandals in the history of Orthodoxy, the mainstream rabbinic response wasn’t recommending that victims go to rabbinic courts for justice instead of the police.

So here I am reading about the Southern Baptist Convention’s investigation, and the announced release of a list of hundreds of known abusers within the SBC, wondering when it will happen for us—when will Orthodoxy finally have its reckoning. 

At ZA’AKAH, an organization dedicated to advocating for survivors of sexual abuse in the Orthodox community, of which I am the director, we receive dozens of contacts a month from survivors in need of assistance, most of whom fear the consequences of even disclosing the abuse they’ve suffered to the people around them, let alone reporting to the authorities. Among the survivors we work with who have pursued cases, many still face extreme backlash. And lest anyone think this is an exclusively Haredi problem, many of the survivors we work with are from mainstream Modern Orthodox communities and have experienced similar retaliation.

The problem in our community is systemic and it deserves to be investigated, but given the level of complicity of Orthodox leadership in the problem, it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Frankly, we as Orthodox Jews should be ashamed of ourselves for how we’ve handled sexual abuse, and how we continue to deny survivors the resources they need to feel comfortable reporting in our communities. We should be ashamed that we’re so afraid of the truth getting out about the decades of coverup that we’re complicit in that we won’t even investigate it to realize the extent of the problem. 

We consider ourselves a light unto the nations, and Orthodoxy, in particular, considers itself the most authentic form of Judaism. But if Reform and Conservative branches are investigating themselves, and the Southern Baptist convention is releasing a report into their own malfeasance, along with a list of known perpetrators within their ranks, and we’re sitting here doing less than nothing, what right do we have to call ourselves moral?

Asher Lovy is an abuse survivor and director of ZA’AKAH, which raises awareness about child sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community, advocates for legislative reforms and operates a Shabbat and Yom Tov mental health peer-support hotline.

https://forward.com/opinion/503666/what-will-it-take-for-orthodox-judaism-to-hold-sexual-abusers-accountable/

Wednesday, May 25, 2022

It’s the Theology, Stupid: As the report says, “the primary focus was on avoiding the risk of legal liability, sometimes to the exclusion of all other considerations.”

 

It’s the Theology, Stupid: Why the Shocking SBC Report is Anything But Surprising

 

 

On Sunday, an investigation firm called Guidepost Solutions released a 300-page report recounting a disturbingly familiar pattern of abuse and cover-up in the Southern Baptist Convention, the mostly white, evangelical Protestant denomination that accounts for over 5% of the adult population of the US. The report, which includes numerous examples of sexual abuse in SBC churches, notes that “senior SBC leaders appeared to excuse abuse and/or support accused abusers… while at the same time survivors were ignored or treated poorly.” 

To put it mildly, we were not surprised. Nearly four years ago to the day, an RD headline read: “SBC’s #MeToo Problem isn’t a Rotten Apple, It’s a Rotten Tree.” 

In addition to its handling of individual cases, the report is also highly critical of the SBC Executive Committee’s failure to adopt relatively modest reforms over a twenty-year period, concluding that “very little was done to address sexual abuse within SBC churches.” And, according to the Washington Post:

Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private list for years.

As the report says, “the primary focus was on avoiding the risk of legal liability, sometimes to the exclusion of all other considerations.”

Bringing these shocking misdeeds into the light may be a good first step, but what’s next? How do we—or they—ensure that it won’t happen again? 

The truth is, while a report like this one may be excellent at demonstrating the existence of a problem, and even at showing us why the problem persisted, that doesn’t make it diagnostic. If it doesn’t tell us why the problem arose in the first place, it doesn’t provide the best chance to address it effectively. 

Below, RD Senior Correspondent Chrissy Stroop and contributor Jessica Johnson discuss the SBC’s scandalous failure in ways the report doesn’t—isn’t, in fact, designed to—highlighting some of the ways in which the problem has been hiding in plain sight, and even connecting it to other violent products of a Christian nationalism growing in power.

***

Chrissy Stroop: So, Jessica, did anything in the new Guidepost Solutions report about the scale of sexual abuse and cover-up in the Southern Baptist Convention over the last couple of decades surprise you? I’ve been writing about this topic since the first big abuse story broke in 2019, when the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News released their investigation documenting 700 victims of sexual abuse over a 20-year period. At that time, I published a piece for Playboy called, “Why the Southern Baptists Won’t Solve their Abuse Problem,” so, as you might guess, I’m not surprised the scale of that problem turned out to be as massive as it was. As I wrote then: 

“Evangelical subculture is pervasively authoritarian, and any time an arbitrary social hierarchy is imposed and defended, violence follows. Authoritarianism is inherently abusive, and where it reigns, abuse—physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual—will be pervasive.”

Of course, the particular hierarchy imposed by the SBC and many other evangelical churches is explicitly patriarchal. In the SBC, belief in “male headship” and “complementarianism”—that God created men and women to fulfill distinct and “complementary” roles, and that women’s role is submissive—is non-negotiable. 

When only men are empowered within an institution, clearly, women and children are going to suffer. To borrow a turn of phrase, it’s the theology, stupid. And so long as the SBC’s leadership is unwilling to revisit these doctrines, as I predicted in 2019, it will never solve its abuse problem. Would you agree?

Jessica Johnson: I concur with your assessment, Chrissy. I was unsurprised by the report’s findings, but also by the fact that theology is unexplored in Guidepost’s “key solutions.”  

While I appreciate the comprehensiveness of the report, Guidepost Solutions advertises itself as an investigative body that “protect[s] facilities” (and provides crisis management), so it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that I found their suggestions for systemic improvement wanting. For example, “Create and maintain an Offender Information System to alert the community to known offenders. Make the OIS available to churches on a voluntary basis.” Given the scope of their findings, it seems the OIS should be mandatory, not voluntary, and available to anyone considering membership in an SBC church. 

In my ethnographic research on Mars Hill Church, complementarianism—thank you for breaking it down so well—is the foundation for the kind of systemic sexual abuse we see evinced in the report. So is purity culture, the confinement of sexuality within heterosexual, Christian marriage. Women are expected to be submissive to their husbands at home and in the bedroom, according to the ways in which complementarianism and purity culture operate in tandem. 

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to see how damaging these teachings can be when men are considered the “heads” at church, too. Women are trained to submit to male leadership, no matter how harmful, in the church, workplace, and home, making it easy for them to be sexually exploited by men who abuse their power over them in these spaces. Female sexuality is severely regulated, and women are often blamed for “tempting” men who simply cannot help themselves, which comes up in the report. 

But, I think we can also see how the findings of large-scale sexual abuse are structural in other ways that intersect with the SBC’s history of racism and endorsement of white supremacy; its “anti-CRT” stance; its stance against LGBTQ rights (which sadly includes a strong opposition to recognizing hate crimes against LGBTQ identified people); and its stance on “abolishing abortion” (which is just another way to regulate women’s bodily autonomy and sexuality). All of these issues are intersectional (to use a critical race theory term maligned by the SBC that’s actually quite useful in this case), or interlocking. You need to address them holistically. 

What do you think would be a good next step for the SBC, or members within SBC churches, Chrissy?

CS: Some of the recommendations in the report are good, but I’m with you on it not going far enough, Jessica. The suggestion that SBC structures stop using non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in connection with sexual misconduct settlements (unless requested by the victims) is a good one—it’s also currently the law in the state of California, and I wish we’d make it the law nationwide.

I’m not quite sure what the recommendation that the OIS be made available to churches “voluntarily” means, and I personally feel that it should be available to everyone, including the laity and the general public. The notion that individual SBC churches might become the gatekeepers to access to this database doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. 

Meanwhile, it’s hard to disagree that “enhanced background checks” would be a good thing—but it’s unfortunate, to say the least, that this recommendation is still needed. I highly doubt that the use of “Letters of Good Standing” and the adoption of new “Codes of Conduct” (why either term is capitalized in the report is a mystery to me) will have much impact. Under the white supremacist patriarchy that still shapes so much of the American experience—not least in the SBC and similar churches—predatory white men will always be able to find people willing to attest to their “good character.” I’m reminded of Supreme Court “Justice” Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in this connection. 

And you don’t change a culture overnight like the one created by the SBC after its 1970s-1990s fundamentalist takeover—particularly when you refuse to consider how the theology that shapes that culture is of a piece with the protection of white male leaders over all “others”—women, children, people of color, and queer people, as you note. I don’t see any serious stakeholders in the SBC willing to consider how patriarchal theology and attitudes are the root of the abuse problem. 

After all, both major architects of the power grab and purge of moderate and liberal actors from SBC institutions that SBC partisans euphemistically call “the conservative resurgence”—Paul Presser and Paige Patterson—now stand credibly accused of sexual misconduct and cover-up. And this was known before the new report dropped. It seems to me that leaders pursuing a politics of moral panic are certain to be power-hungry, and almost certain to be hiding something. Moore still doesn’t see the connection, or pretends he doesn’t, and certainly no influential figure who remains in the SBC is about to admit it exists.

Guidepost’s suggested reforms, if they are implemented, may help to mitigate abuse to a certain degree, but I’m confident that pervasive abuse and coverups will persist. We’ll have to wait for the SBC’s annual meeting, happening in Anaheim, California in mid-June, to find out which reforms they adopt and how exactly they decide to implement them. Of course, only men can vote on SBC resolutions.

JJ: Exactly. For a corporate body that seems to revel in lengthy “resolutions” about so-called “secular” issues (as I noted above), the SBC’s 2021 resolution “On Abuse and Pastoral Qualifications” is remarkably short. Thanks for looping in white men of “good character,” those who can separate themselves from “evil” one way or another, through their own testimony or that of others speaking on their behalf. 

When I was reading Russell Moore’s response to the Guidepost report in CT, I was struck by the headline, “This Is the Southern Baptist Apocalypse.” The subheading reads: “The abuse investigation has uncovered more evil than even I imagined” (emphasis added). He continues in the opening lines, “They were right. I was wrong to call sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) a crisis. Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse” (author’s emphasis). 

While I understand the logic of his distancing himself from the report’s findings, and the use of theological lexicon like “evil” or “apocalypse,” as I read it I found myself critical of the use of this language because what he’s actually responding to are the actions of white men—not deities, not Satan—and they’re not surprising given white Christian patriarchy and the way it subjugates “others,” as we’ve both noted. He’s been privy and party to that subjugation himself, as you’ve noted. He’s profited from that complementarian system. 

Also, as we both are alluding to, there may not be much substantive change after all is said and done despite the report’s findings, which hardly warrants an “apocalypse.” It’s an indirect way of saving face for the SBC itself, in light of all the abuse uncovered. An apocalypse would mean destruction (and potentially, resurrection). We’re not there yet. Not even close. 

It’s like, our [Christian] way of doing “it,” no matter how wrong or harmful, is still more redeemed somehow, so therefore we don’t need to regulate who leads our churches, or how people decide whether or not this church is “safe” for them. “Evil” is individualized through sin. So long as “bad apples” are excised, we’ll be ok; so monitoring systems like the OIS are seen as part of the solution, when the root cause runs far deeper. 

Systems in place—be they theological, institutional, cultural—are somehow more “pure” when they’re Christian, even when they subject people within “the flock” to spiritual, emotional, financial, and/or sexual abuse. And especially so when they subject non-white, non-“masculine,” non-cisgender, non-heterosexual, non-Christian, people to harm. 

I think that unless Christians (whether “conservative” or “progressive”) start to act like they aren’t that special after all, that they actually are both in and of the world, nothing will change for the better in the SBC or otherwise (e.g., when it comes to voting for the likes of Trump or his minions within the GOP). 

With that, I don’t understand why more Christians who oppose Christian patriarchy or sexual abuse within churches don’t start to speak out against extremist laws against women seeking abortions (with no exceptions for rape or incest). In some states, rapists will have more rights than survivors seeking abortions.

No matter how amorphous the belief system, this vague notion of “Christian nationalism” based on “Christian values” still upholds white heteropatriarchal supremacy, with the potential to do violence inside and outside of churches. I’m worried about these amplifications in the kind of theological language that Moore uses in his piece, even if that’s not his intent there. Does that make sense?

CS: Mapping concepts like “apocalypse” and a battle of “good vs. evil” onto secular events, including politics, is certainly a dangerous thing, and I say this as someone who was raised and educated through high school in a Christian nationalist environment. Abortion was a “holocaust” we were “called” to stop, the Rapture was always just around the corner, and “spiritual warfare” was happening all around us. 

I can see why Moore might use the rhetoric of “apocalypse” for an internal critique of the SBC’s practice of Christianity, and on some level I appreciate his candor—though obviously not his advocacy of what amounts to “benevolent sexism” on theological grounds. Moore’s refusal to consider that some of his theology is toxic leaves in place the Christian supremacist understanding that “real” Christians—socially conservative Christians—are better than “secular” people. That sense may coexist uneasily with his rhetoric about “evil” within the SBC, but it’s clearly still there.


https://religiondispatches.org/its-the-theology-stupid-why-the-shocking-sbc-report-is-anything-but-surprising/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=its-the-theology-stupid-why-the-shocking-sbc-report-is-anything-but-surprising&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=its-the-theology-stupid-why-the-shocking-sbc-report-is-anything-but-surprising

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

For all of these, one needs sensitivity and the ability to truly understand another person. To what extent have you acquired the tools, the training and the education that will enable you to analyze such matters as they really are?

 

Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner

" Rav Hutner added in his thunderous voice: "Did you hear this? 'Any talmid chacham who lacks 'da’at''. Consider this - we are not discussing an ignoramus who lacks 'da’at', but rather specifically a talmid chacham. A talmid chacham, who has 'filled his belly' with Talmud and the responsa literature, who is an expert in the 'Ketzot HaChoshen' and 'Netivot HaMishpat'. But if he lacks 'da’at', which can direct and guide him so that he will act with understanding towards others, and interact with them in a civil fashion, he is worse than a putrid animal carcass."

 READ ALL OF IT:

http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/faxes/daatTorahLichtenstein.pdf

Monday, May 23, 2022

A Page Right Out Of The Agudath Israel/ Lipa Margulies Playbook! After reading through the report, Brown told The Associated Press that it “fundamentally confirms what clergy sex abuse survivors have been saying for decades.”


Report: Top Southern Baptists stonewalled sex abuse victims

 


FILE - This Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011 file photo shows the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tenn. Leaders of the SBC, America's largest Protestant denomination, stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over almost two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations, according to a scathing 288-page investigative report issued Sunday, May 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)

Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over almost two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations, according to a scathing 288-page investigative report issued Sunday.

These survivors, and other concerned Southern Baptists, repeatedly shared allegations with the SBC’s Executive Committee, “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within the EC,” said the report.

The seven-month investigation was conducted by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm contracted by the Executive Committee after delegates to last year’s national meeting pressed for a probe by outsiders.

“Our investigation revealed that, for many years, a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC’s response to these reports of abuse ... and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC,” the report said.

“In service of this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy – even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” the report added.

The report asserts that an Executive Committee staffer maintained a list of Baptist ministers accused of abuse, but there is no indication anyone “took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches.”

The most recent list includes the names of hundreds of abusers thought to be affiliated at some point with the SBC. Survivors and advocates have long called for a public database of abusers.

SBC President Ed Litton, in a statement Sunday, said he is “grieved to my core” for the victims and thanked God for their work propelling the SBC to this moment. He called on Southern Baptists to lament and prepare to change the denomination’s culture and implement reforms.

“I pray Southern Baptists will begin preparing today to take deliberate action to address these failures and chart a new course when we meet together in Anaheim,” Litton said, referring to the California city that will host the SBC’s national meeting on June 14-15.

Among the report’s key recommendations:

— Form an independent commission and later establish a permanent administrative entity to oversee comprehensive long-term reforms concerning sexual abuse and related misconduct within the SBC.

—Create and maintain an Offender Information System to alert the community to known offenders.

— Provide a comprehensive Resource Toolbox including protocols, training, education, and practical information.

—Restrict the use of nondisclosure agreements and civil settlements which bind survivors to confidentiality in sexual abuse matters, unless requested by the survivor.

The interim leaders of the Executive Committee, Willie McLaurin and Rolland Slade, welcomed the recommendations, and pledged an all-out effort to eliminate sex abuse within the SBC.

“We recognize there are no shortcuts,” they said. “We must all meet this challenge through prudent and prayerful application, and we must do so with Christ-like compassion.”

The Executive Committee is set to hold a special meeting Tuesday to discuss the report.

The sex abuse scandal was thrust into the spotlight in 2019 by a landmark report from the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News documenting hundreds of cases in Southern Baptist churches, including several in which alleged perpetrators remained in ministry.

Last year, thousands of delegates at the national SBC gathering made clear they did not want the Executive Committee to oversee an investigation of its own actions. Instead they voted overwhelmingly to create the task force charged with overseeing the third-party review. Litton, pastor of Redemption Church in Saraland, Alabama, appointed the panel.

The task force had a week to review the report before it was publicly released. The task force’s recommendations based on Guidepost’s findings will be presented at the SBC’s meeting in Anaheim.

The report offers shocking details on how Johnny Hunt, a Georgia-based pastor and past SBC president, sexually assaulted another pastor’s wife during a beach vacation in 2010. In an interview with investigators, Hunt denied any physical contact with the woman, but did admit he had interactions with her.

On May 13, Hunt, who was the senior vice president of evangelism and leadership at the North American Mission Board, the SBC’s domestic missions agency, resigned from that post, said Kevin Ezell, the organization’s president and CEO. Ezell said, before May 13, he was “not aware of any alleged misconduct” on Hunt’s part.

The report details a meeting Hunt arranged a few days after the alleged assault between the woman, her husband, Hunt and a counseling pastor. Hunt admitted to touching the victim inappropriately, but said “thank God I didn’t consummate the relationship.”

Among those reacting strongly to the Guidepost report was Russell Moore, who formerly headed the SBC’s public policy wing but left the denomination after accusing top Executive Committee leaders of stalling efforts to address the sex abuse crisis.

“Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse,” Moore wrote for Christianity Today after reading the report. ”As dark a view as I had of the SBC Executive Committee, the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.”

According to the report, Guidepost’s investigators, who spoke with survivors of varying ages including children, said the survivors were equally traumatized by the way in which churches responded to their reports of sexual abuse.

Survivors “spoke of trauma from the initial abuse, but also told us of the debilitating effects that come from the response of the churches and institutions like the SBC that did not believe them, ignored them, mistreated them, and failed to help them,” the report said.

It cited the case of Dave Pittman, who from 2006 to 2011 made phone calls and sent letters and emails to the SBC and Georgia Baptist Convention Board reporting that he had been abused by Frankie Wiley, a youth pastor at Rehoboth Baptist Church when he was 12 to 15 years old.

Pittman and several others have come forward publicly to report that Wiley molested and raped them and Wiley has admitted to abusing “numerous victims” at several Georgia Southern Baptist churches.

According to the report, a Georgia Baptist Convention official told Pittman that the churches were autonomous and there was nothing he could do but pray.

The report also tells the story of Christa Brown, who says she was sexually abused as a teen by the youth and education minister at her SBC church.

When she disclosed the abuse to the music minister after months of abuse, she was told not to talk about it, according to the report, which said her abuser also went on to serve in Southern Baptist churches in multiple states.

Brown, who has been one of the most outspoken survivors, told investigators that during the past 15 years she has received “volumes of hate mail, awful blog comments, and vitriolic phone calls.”

After reading through the report, Brown told The Associated Press that it “fundamentally confirms what Southern Baptist clergy sex abuse survivors have been saying for decades.”

“I view this investigative report as a beginning, not an end. The work will continue,” Brown said. “But no one should ever forget the human cost of what it has taken to even get the SBC to approach this starting line of beginning to deal with clergy sex abuse.”

 

https://apnews.com/article/baptist-religion-sexual-abuse-by-clergy-southern-convention-bfdbe64389790630488f854c3dae3fd5

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Kedusha/Holiness in Gur - The Jerusalem White Sox Vs. The Ashdod Dirty Sox


Gur Hassidic factions fight for second night in a row, clash with police

 
JERUSALEM WHITE SOX

ASHDOD DIRTY SOX

Fighting between factions of the Gur Hassidic sect have taken place at different cities over the past few nights as tensions rise in the community.

Officers intervene to separate two groups of Gur Hasidim; windows of yeshiva reportedly smashed


Dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jews protest in Jerusalem, May 21, 2022. (Screenshot: Twitter)
Dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jews protest in Jerusalem, May 21, 2022.
 

Clashes broke out on Saturday night between rival factions of the ultra-Orthodox Gur sect in Jerusalem, leading police to intervene and detain at least two people.

The fighting came a day after the factions, which have been at odds for years, scuffled in Jerusalem and the cities of Bnei Brak and Ashdod.

The turmoil began after Gur’s leader, Rabbi Yaakov Aryeh Alter, was heckled by members of the breakaway faction while visiting the grave of his mother-in-law on Thursday, according to the Kan public broadcaster.

In footage from Saturday night’s clashes, a police officer is seen tackling an ultra-Orthodox man from behind, putting him in a chokehold and dragging him from the area. Jerusalem in the past have been accused in the past of using excessive force against ultra-Orthodox protesters.

Other videos showed hundreds of people, including many children, on a city street, moving away from police vehicles.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/police-detain-at-least-2-as-rival-factions-of-hasidic-sect-clash-in-jerusalem/

 

NOW FOR THE HOLINESS IN GUR: 

 

 



https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54694fa6e4b0eaec4530f99d/t/552becece4b05cbf60ea3be9/1428942060277/Kedushah_-_The_Abstinence_of_Married_Men_in_Gur__Slonim_and_Toldos_Ahron-libre.pdf