“I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to radical Islam against the state of Israel.”

The Crisis Has Exploded

Today, the president of the United States told the prime minister of Israel he was reassessing America’s “options” with regard to Israel in light of remarks Benjamin Netanyahu made about potential Palestinian statehood and an election-day Facebook post urging Israeli right-wingers to go to the polls on Monday to counter a surge in Israeli Arab voters.

The crisis in the relationship we discuss in our new editorial statement has entered a new and potentially unprecedented phase.It may well be that the president is going to present American Jews with a choice over the coming months no American president should ask us to make—to become parties to and participants in his effort to create what, in 2009, he called “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel.

First, to the two-state issue. There’s simply no question Netanyahu was willfully and purposefully misunderstood late last week when hostile reporters announced he had withdrawn his support for a two-state solution. That was not true. What he said was this: “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to radical Islam against the state of Israel.” The key word is “today.” Today. He did not say never. He said such a state was impossible today, and that is simply a statement of fact. So when, in a television interview this afternoon, he told Andrea Mitchell that yes, he believed in the two-state solution, he was saying nothing new. Any minimally fair interpretation of Netanyahu’s remarks makes that clear. We are told Netanyahu reiterated the point in the phone call with the president, and that he was told Obama didn’t believe him.

[UPDATE: In response to this piece, some have claimed I distorted Netanyahu’s view because he replied “indeed” when an interviewer asked whether he was saying there would be no Palestinian state during his premiership. But that “indeed” is entirely of a piece with the “today” comment—one can support the two-state solution as the only theoretical answer to the problem and still be pretty sure no such solution is in the cards for another four years. 

It was the Palestinians who walked away from the table in 2013, not Israel; and Gaza’s ruling Hamas party wasn’t even involved in the talks. Netanyahu’s own stated principles for a Palestinian state—that it renounce terror, recognize the Jewish state as a Jewish, forego the so-called “right of return”—would have been the basis for any negotiation, even by the Center-Left coalition, and the Palestinians are so far away from any such acknowledgments the issue of statehood was barely raised during the Israeli election campaign.]

The fact that the president is using the twisting of Netanyahu’s words as one basis for a reassessment of the relationship is the purest evidence yet of his hanging-judge cast of mind when it comes to Israel and its prime minister. He is looking for any excuse to come down hard on the foreign politician Obama loathes the most—and to create that “daylight” for which he is so eager.

Now to the question of Arab voters. Let me stipulate for the purposes of this discussion that the Facebook post was a terrible mistake, since it has had deleterious consequences and was entirely unnecessary. It came only a few hours before the polls closed and, as we now know, the size of Likud’s victory on Monday was so decisive nothing Bibi said so late could have done much to boost Likud’s enormous 200,000 margin over the second-place Zionist Union coalition. 

Let me stipulate as well that concerned American Jews have every right to feel what Likud did was wrong, although I think it is important to note no effort was made to suppress a single Arab vote but rather to frighten potential Likud voters with the prospect of a strong showing by the state’s non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Arab parties—to get them not to waste a vote on a smaller right-wing party but to go with Bibi instead.

But fine. If you want to hate what Netanyahu said, hate it. Here’s the thing: How the prime minister of Israel talks about Israeli citizens who possess equal rights under the law and have their own means of redress under the law if they are mistreated should have no basis whatever in the “assessment” of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Israel. 

The president has spent years making very nice patter with Turkey’s Erdogan and other foreign leaders whose treatment of minorities do not deserve mention alongside Israel’s and whose suffering small sub-populations have no means of achieving redress.

So even those who are furious with Netanyahu should really take a breath and a close look and consider this point carefully: The Arab-vote business is a pretext. American presidents, this one especially, typically do not revisit special strategic relationships based on election-day maneuvers in a democracy, however unpleasant they might find them.

 In my view, Obama is hoping once again to use liberal Jewish disaffection in the United States with Netanyahu as a wedge to give him space to make a major policy pivot from the special relationship—one for which he has hungered since he came into office.

Hovering over and above and behind all this is, of course, the negotiation with Iran—and Netanyahu’s standing to criticize it as the most influential foreign leader outside the United States with a view of it.

 Pummelling Bibi now and compelling him to take whatever steps he can to mollify the president before Obama announces he will accede to moves against Israel in various international fora has the added advantage to the president of raising the stakes on further Netanyahu criticism of an Iran deal to a level Bibi may not be willing to risk.

We may be hard upon a great moment of testing for American Jews.

 Are they going to fall for this? Are they going to allow themselves to be used as a wedge against Israel in hostile territory like the United Nations? Are they going to provide more ammunition to the president and his effort to still his critics only weeks before the United States might be announcing its acquiescence to the gravest existential threat the Jewish people have faced since the Holocaust?

 https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/03/19/the-crisis-has-exploded/

 

Post by Roei Zack.

"Labeling as religious ritual an act known to be killing and maiming infants cannot make it legal. Mohels and parents who subject 8-day-old infants to the life-threatening practice of MBP could be charged — under existing statutes — with negligent homicide or manslaughter if the baby dies."

Metzitzah And The Safety Of New York’s Children

Wed, 03/18/2015

Ben Hirsch

Special To The Jewish Week

While reading the recent article in the Jewish Week (“Charedi Leader Opens Door On Metzitzah,” March 3), I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d fallen down the rabbit hole.

Here was Satmar spokesman, Rabbi David Niederman, executive director of United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg (UJO), acknowledging statistics showing that the vast majority of adults are infected with the herpes virus (if you’ve ever had a cold sore, you have the virus) and invoking science to argue correctly that testing mohels before allowing them to perform metzitzah b’peh (MBP) — wherein the mohel, or ritual circumciser, “cleans” the infant’s circumcision wound by sucking the blood from the baby’s penis with his mouth — would provide a false sense of security because someone can contract the herpes virus from one day to the next.

For once, we seemed to agree.

Yet, rather than conclude from this that the practice — which has been responsible for transmitting herpes to infants, causing serious health problems, including permanent brain damage, and death — must be stopped because of the risks it poses, Rabbi Niederman dug in his heels and insisted that MBP must be allowed to continue, unfettered by government regulation. 

Why? Because, according to the rabbi’s logic, testing will only prove what we already know to be the case — that most mohels are infected — and therefore lead to not having enough mohels to perform this dangerous ritual.

Following Rabbi Niederman’s lead, Agudath Israel of America’s Rabbi David Zwiebel says he is open to the concept of testing mohels for the herpes virus — but only if provisions can first be made to ensure an ample number of mohels to perform MBP.

Huh?

Frankly, I’ve long given up any expectation of hearing responsible statements from Rabbis Zwiebel or Niederman when it comes to child protection. After all, both have long advocated the position that rabbis must be consulted before sexual abuse can be reported to the authorities.

But I had hoped to feel differently about the mayor. Instead, however, it seems Bill de Blasio has become their enabler. 

The consent form rule enacted under former Mayor Bloomberg wasn’t much, but if adhered to, could have helped to identify infected mohels. Now, Mayor de Blasio says it is unenforceable. Why? Because, the mayor argues, the charedim are violating the rule and enforcement will result in the practice “going underground.” And besides, the city lacks the manpower to enforce the law.

This convenient logic allowed de Blasio to live up to his campaign promise made to the charedim that if elected he would rescind the MBP consent form rule.

Thus, instead of using the rule to prevent mohels shown to be carrying the herpes virus from performing MBP and harming infants, de Blasio is rescinding it and rolling back to a version of an earlier 2006 self-policing agreement between the state and rabbis and mohels — an agreement that was flagrantly violated by the charedim.

What other group could manage to get a law repealed on the basis of their refusal to comply?

De Blasio defends his proposal and argues that, given his new relationship of “trust” with the charedi rabbis, this time they will comply and identify to health authorities mohels who have infected infants with herpes. Our experience with rabbis protecting child molesters has shown the extent they will go to protect from secular authorities even the most reviled within the community. It is safe to say that — at a minimum — this same level of protection will be afforded prominent mohels.

On the issue of prosecuting charedi sex offenders, Rabbi Zwiebel, was quoted in an October 2009 New York Times article headlined “Orthodox Jews Rely More on Sex Abuse Prosecution” as saying that “prosecutors should recognize ‘religious sensitivities’ by seeking alternatives to prison, to avoid depriving a family of its breadwinner” and “should be careful not to be seen as making a power grab from rabbinic authority.”

Does de Blasio truly believe these same charedi rabbis who refuse to allow child molesters to be reported lest they be imprisoned and lose their jobs, will cause well-respected mohels to lose their livelihood by reporting them to the authorities?

If, as the mayor says, he “absolutely believe[s] in” the “very firm commitment” he received from these rabbis why hasn’t he asked — as a demonstration of good faith — that they identify the mohels already responsible for sickening 17 infants with herpes, killing two of them and leaving others with permanent brain damage? Why must we wait for these particular mohels — whom we know to be carrying the herpes virus — to sicken or kill more children before asking the supposedly newly cooperative rabbis to identify them? Oh, the siren song of the charedi block vote.

This issue needs to be depoliticized.

Labeling as religious ritual an act known to be killing and maiming infants cannot make it legal. Mohels and parents who subject 8-day-old infants to the life-threatening practice of MBP could be charged — under existing statutes — with negligent homicide or manslaughter if the baby dies.

And if their rabbis continue protecting them, they could be charged with obstruction of justice.

Rabbis and mohels have a high tolerance for injury inflicted on helpless children yet will have zero tolerance when they are the target.(Mohels will not perform MBP if they even suspect the infant may have an infection or disease that could potentially harm the mohel.) If prosecuted, rabbis would again declare the ritual unacceptable under Jewish law — as was done 180 years ago by the most prominent charedi sages of the era — and immediately authorize several medically safe alternatives already sanctioned under Jewish law.  

Mayor de Blasio has demonstrated a serious lack of leadership. He is either hopelessly naive or so cynical that he’s knowingly selling children’s lives in exchange for a bloc vote. Either way, the public needs to send him a clear message that we value the safety of New York’s children over his desire to win the next election.

Ben Hirsch is a co-founder of Survivors for Justice (www.sfjny.org), an organization that advocates and educates on issues related to child safety.

Ben Hirsch

http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/opinion/metzitzah-and-safety-new-yorks-children

Reading the oral law today forces Jews to reconcile repellent, outdated legal views with modern morals

Talmudic Rabbis Debated the Cost of Rape—In Terms of the Woman’s Market Value

Reading the oral law today forces Jews to reconcile repellent, outdated legal views with modern morals

By Adam Kirsch|

(Tablet Magazine)

Let’s Talk About Sex With Minors, Rape, and ‘Uncovering the Nakedness’ of Sisters

Talmudic rabbis, gladiators of the mind, sought glory and eternal fame—but also pondered the mundane side of being human

By Adam Kirsch

Close Encounters With Talmud

Seven months into a seven-and-a-half-year study cycle, book critic Adam Kirsch is hooked—and flummoxed

By Vox Tablet

Holding Our Tongues

Why aren’t more non-Muslim feminists decrying violence against women in Muslim-majority countries?

By Heather Rogers

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

In recent months, Americans have been carrying on an important national conversation about rape, especially on college campuses—whether it is the now-questioned Rolling Stone expose of rape at the University of Virginia, or the mattress protest at Columbia, or the new documentary The Hunting Ground. We talk so passionately about these issues because, more than most crimes, rape is both a profound personal violation and a deeply social act, one that involves large questions about gender, power, and privilege.

The rabbis of the Talmud, living as they did in the first centuries C.E., did not share our modern intuitions about these subjects. Under Jewish law, rape is indeed a serious crime, with penalties laid out in detail in the Book of Deuteronomy. But in this week’s Daf Yomi reading, as the rabbis explored the penalties for rape of a virgin, it became clearer than ever that rape was not the same crime to them as it is to us. Today, we consider it a crime of violence against an individual; for the rabbis, it was more significantly a crime against a woman’s reputation, which had serious effects on her social standing and her marriage prospects. Their remedy for rape, then, was not to imprison or execute the rapist, but to insist that he make reparation to the victim’s family—either by paying a fine or by offering to marry his victim.

The idea that a rapist should be punished by marrying his victim is likely to strike us today as outrageous, a travesty of justice. But that is because we are looking at the matter from the point of view of the woman who was raped, and imagining how she would feel spending the rest of her life living with her rapist. The Talmud, on the other hand, starts from the assumption that a woman’s well-being is primarily dependent on her reputation and her marriageability. Rape damages both of these, by depriving a woman of the major asset she brings to the marriage market, her virginity. Once a woman is known to be raped, the rabbis assume, other men will not want to marry her. It is up to the rapist, then, to make up for this injury by marrying her himself. As the mishna says in Ketubot 39a, “The rapist drinks from his vessel”—or as we might say, having made his bed he must now lie in it. Fortunately, the Gemara goes on to clarify that the victim has the right to refuse to marry her rapist.

For the Talmud, however, the repercussions of rape do not fall exclusively on the victim. Because a young woman is legally and financially under the control of her father, it is the father who stands to lose if she cannot bring as high a price in the marriage market. That is why the fine for the rape of a virgin, 50 silver shekels, is paid not to the woman herself but to her father, or if he is dead to her brothers. By the same logic, there is no fine for the rape of a woman who is presumed not to be a virgin. That is made clear in Ketubot 36b, where the mishna says that the fine is not paid by “one who has intercourse with a convert or with a captive woman or with a gentile maidservant.” Each of these women are presumed to have been unchaste, and so their reputation and marriage prospects can’t be further harmed if they are raped.

Things are complicated, however, by the fact that the word translated as virgin in this context, na’arah, can also be translated as simply “young woman,” a chronological rather than a sexual status. In fact, the rabbis define a na’arah very narrowly in terms of age. A girl can only be a “young woman,” legally speaking, from the age of 12 until the age of 12 and six months. Before that, she is a minor and ineligible for marriage; after that, she is a grown woman and out of her father’s control. It is only in the brief window of those six months, it seems, that the fine for rape would be paid to the victim’s father. This somewhat mitigates the paternalism of the law, though it also raises a new set of disturbing questions having to do with the rabbis’ ideas about when a girl is old enough for sex and marriage. (To us, of course, sex with a 12 year old would be child abuse.)

In addition to the statutory fine, the law holds that the rapist must pay compensation for his victim’s pain, humiliation, and degradation. (These penalties, too, are paid to the young woman’s father.) In discussing these penalties, the Gemara reveals more of its assumptions about what rape means. “For what pain” is the rapist obliged to pay, the rabbis wonder? According to Shmuel’s father, it is the pain caused when “he slammed her into the ground.” But as Rabbi Zeira points out, if this were the case then a rapist who “slammed her onto silk” would not be considered to have caused her pain. Surely it is not the type of bedding that matters, but the sexual act.

But is the sexual act painful for the woman only because she is a virgin? If so, couldn’t one argue that she is only undergoing the same pain that she would eventually have suffered when she lost her virginity consensually? This is the reasoning of Rabbi Shimon: “A rapist does not pay for the pain due to the fact that she will ultimately suffer under her husband.” What’s more, several rabbis’ wives are brought forward to testify that the pain of having sex for the first time is trivial: “Rav Pappa said: My wife, Abba Sura’s daughter, told me that it is like the feeling of hard bread on the gums.” But the rabbis reject this line of reasoning, pointing out the obvious truth that “One who has intercourse against her will is not comparable to one who has intercourse willingly.” The pain of rape, even speaking only of the physical pain, is not comparable to the pain of consensual sex.

What about the payment for humiliation? When the rabbis come to discuss this, in Ketubot 40a, they make clear that they are not talking about the victim’s subjective feelings of violation. Rather, they are once again weighing the loss of social standing, of public reputation, that goes along with having been raped in their society. (The idea that the victim of rape is disgraced, rather than the rapist, is one that sadly survives in many parts of the world today.) It follows that this humiliation is not the same for all women, since not all women have the same degree of social standing to lose. “Rabbi Zeira said: If one who engaged in forced intercourse with a daughter of kings pays fifty sela, does one who engaged in forced intercourse with the daughter of commoners pay fifty sela?”

To calculate the exact degree of damage to a woman’s reputation, the mishna lays down a very pragmatic rule: “One considers her as though she were a maidservant sold in the marketplace, and assesses how much she was worth beforehand and how much she is currently worth.” That is, Shmuel’s father explains in the Gemara, “One estimates the difference between how much a person is willing to give to purchase a virgin maidservant and how much a person is willing to give to purchase a non-virgin maidservant.” This is a completely “objective,” market-based way of valuing virginity as a commodity. If it strikes us today as an outrageous way of assessing the damage caused by rape, that is an index of how much our moral intuitions have changed—even, we might say, progressed—since the Talmud was written.

***

To read Tablet’s complete archive of Daf Yomi Talmud study, click here.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor for Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/189666/cost-of-rape-daf-yomi-120-kirsch?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=deb396f80a-Tuesday_March_17_20153_17_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-deb396f80a-206530521

A vote for Herzog is a vote for Obama. Is this what Israel wants?

Op-Ed: Thirteen Reasons To Vote For Netanyahu

The Likud and Jewish Home parties are the way to keep Netanyahu as Prime Minister. A vote for Herzog is a vote for Obama. Is this what Israel wants?

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Jack Engelhard

Jack Engelhard’s classic international bestselling novel Indecent Proposal,...

►More from this writer

As the result of his powerful speech before the United States Congress, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately surged to the top of the class. He became a World Leader and I agree with those who say that at the moment Netanyahu is the preeminent leader of the world.

Even if you do not agree with every comma, period and semi-colon of his leadership – a man like this does not come along every day.

To toss him out of office would be a terrible waste of a golden resource. Not since Golda Meir has Israel had a leader so admired throughout the world.

Netanyahu speaks, the world listens – can Israel afford to lose this voice?

To replace him with Yitzchak Herzog would be to replace him with a man nobody knows. Herzog would be starting from scratch.

Israel would be starting from scratch…so far as making Israel’s case before the nations.

So that’s reason Number 1 as to why it’s in Israel’s vital interest to keep Netanyahu (Likud) in office.

2. Netanyahu is a “worldly” leader. This means that he knows how the world thinks, how the world speaks – specifically when it comes to America. He knows our language, he knows our slang. He does not come across as some exotic potentate, but rather as one of us. This makes him readily identifiable as a man who shares our hopes and dreams. This is a man we can root for.

3. Like Theodor Herzl, he is “fit to meet with kings.” This is a prized virtue.

4. That he tends to be too worldly, as some argue, I would argue that with the eyes of the world so focused on the Jewish State, every step a minefield, an Israeli leader must know the skills of give and take – a time to be resolute, a time to relent. I too am not happy about Netanyahu’s building freeze or of some of his other concessions.

But I do not face the constant pressure coming from the international community. Netanyahu knows that what happens in Israel does not stay in Israel.

Next morning it ends up in The New York Times. See here for the big picture.

5. So Netanyahu understands how delicately he must maneuver to “bribe the devil” while keeping Israel safe.

Haaretz. This is the Israeli paper that ran an op-ed that mocked Elie Wiesel for his “thin elderly body” and referred to Netanyahu’s Congressional speech as an appeal that mined “all that Holocaust jazz.”
6. None of his concessions in word and deed are as wild delusional as those being proposed by the Left, the Herzog/Livni ticket.

That’s the Party (Labor) being supported byHaaretz. This is the Israeli paper that a few days ago ran an op-ed that mocked Elie Wiesel for his “thin elderly body” and that referred to Netanyahu’s Congressional speech as an appeal that mined “all that Holocaust jazz.” 

Who in Israel can cast a vote for that!

And be sure of this – a vote for Herzog is a vote for Obama. Is this what Israel wants?

7. The economy is strong. In most countries, that’s all it takes to get someone re-elected.

8. Netanyahu has omitted or at least toned down any talk of a two-state solution.

Establishing a separate state, an Arab state inside Israel – as the Left’s Amos Oz once again insists in Haaretz – is to invite ISIS inside Israel’s living room.

9. Instead, Netanyahu boldly proclaims Israel as a Jewish State and demands that the rest of the world, and Israel itself, recognize it as such.

10. No division of Jerusalem. To be honest, I do not know what he intends to do about the “West Bank” – Judea/Samaria.

11. But we know Herzog’s intentions. Along with his partner Livni, the wheeling and dealing has already begun.

12. I trust that there will be no drama about this from Netanyahu. Yes, I believe him when he calls Judea/Samaria a Biblical Trust.  

13. Netanyahu, as opposed to other Jewish leaders is not shy about connecting Modern Israel to her Biblical roots – the ultimate proof of her sovereignty.

Every time we vote we gamble. There is no such thing as a sure bet. But for a safe bet, Benjamin Netanyahu is the man.

Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. The new thriller from the New York-based novelist, The Bathsheba Deadline, a heroic editor’s singlehanded war on terror and against media bias. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. Website: www.jackengelhard.com

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16630#.VQhGPtLF--k

"It was now fourteen years since my third-grade rebbe thwacked my palms for my profane drawing, eight years since my ninth-grade rebbe slapped me for eating a bag of potato chips during a lesson on liabilities for digging pits in public places..."

Lessons of Crime and Punishment in New Square Yeshiva

How Beatings and False Reports Pass for Talmud Teaching in Hasidic Enclave

Anya Ulinich

By Shulem Deen

Published March 15, 2015, issue of March 20, 2015.

• Single Page

A young father in the insular Skverer sect, Shulem Deen took the one job available to him: teacher. In an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, “All Who Go Do Not Return,” which chronicles his painful journey from 18-year-old newlywed to being expelled from New Square as a heretic, he recounts how the need to provide for his growing family led him to practices he would later question.

Related

• Ex-Hasidic Writers Go Off the Path and Onto the Page
• The Misadventures of a Secular English Teacher in an Orthodox School
• Escape from Williamsburg

It was now fourteen years since my third-grade rebbe thwacked my palms for my profane drawing, eight years since my ninth-grade rebbe slapped me for eating a bag of potato chips during a lesson on liabilities for digging pits in public places. All that thwacking and slapping now came to mind as I tried to teach Srulik Schmeltzer’s sixth-grade class the laws of discarding leavened bread on the day before Passover. The boys chatted throughout the lesson, as if I weren’t there, some even getting out of their seats and strolling around.
“Chaim Nuchem Braun, can you please sit down and keep quiet?” I called to a skinny boy who had stood up to look out the window and shouted something to a friend across the room.

“Chaim Nuchem Braun, can you please sit down and keep quiet?” the boy mimicked, then grinned at his friends as he walked to his seat and the class burst into laughter. I could feel the blood rush to my head as my body froze. I could not process any thoughts beyond the feeling of humiliation. I felt a kind of physical weakness in my body, a tremor in my jaws, and I clenched my teeth to keep it from showing. It was the second day of a two-week job. I could not imagine how I would last two weeks. But how could I, a twenty-two-year-old man, be cowed by a class of ten-year-olds?

At 12:45, I walked the two blocks home for an hour of lunch, before I would return for the afternoon. Along Clinton Lane, near the site of a new home construction, I spotted a “wire” on the ground, at the side of the road. It looked almost exactly like the one my fourth-grade rebbe had used instead of a rod, a white length of round, hollow rubber. It was the perfect size, twice arm’s-length, just right to fold in half and hold at one end.

Halt arois di hant. I remembered the hundreds of times I had heard it. Hold out your hand. Without thinking, I picked up the rubber cord, wrapped it around my fingers, and then placed it inside my coat pocket. 

There were the usual bouts of shouting and laughter across the classroom that afternoon, and I began to grow accustomed to it. I would not use the wire in my pocket, I decided. I would deal with the boys as best I could and somehow get through it. The next day, however, the boys grew even rowdier; when I called to Berry Glancz to stop speaking to the boy sitting next to him, his response sent me over the edge.

“Ich feif dich uhn.”
 
He muttered it under his breath, not brazen enough to say it out loud, but the words were unmistakable. The language of defiance in the schoolyard, or among siblings in their rivalries, a child’s bluster. Ich feif dich uhn. I fife my horn at you. I do not care for you or for your orders or your requests or desires, and so I blow my whistle at you. I shoot a burst of hot air in your face. Because you are nothing to me.

But I was not nothing to this boy. I was his rebbe. I reached into the inside breast pocket of my coat, where the rubber cord lay coiled flat against my chest. In a flash, I stood over Berry. For a moment, I intended to order him to “hold out your hand.” Instead, as if my body acted on its own, I delivered a strike to the boy’s upper left arm, a hissing sshhwisscchh-thwack! that frightened even me with its violence. Berry’s hand flew up to cover the spot I had struck, his mouth forming a sudden, silent “AH!”

I could see the anger in his eyes but did not care. He could fife and fife, but I was the one with the authority to use force, to strike him, and I watched as this realization sunk in and he looked back at me, angry but silent. The rest of the class, too, was silent as I made my way back to my desk. They remained silent for the rest of the afternoon, and the day after and the day after that.

Silent and contemptuous. I had gained the boys’ obedience but not their respect. I had demonstrated not strength but weakness, and I saw in their eyes that they knew it. They had broken me, and I hated them for it.

In the teachers’ room down the hall, the rebbes would talk about changes. The rebbes in New Square were always more brutal than the rebbes in Borough Park. I had heard the stories. One rebbe beat a boy with his gartel mercilessly until the boy lay on the floor howling for hours. Another thwacked a boy’s palms several hundred times, until his welts began to bleed. One of my friends told me of a first-grade rebbe who had spanked his backside so raw that he couldn’t sit for days, all because the rebbe had accused him of taking a small bag of candies from his desk drawer, only to find the candies in a different drawer a few minutes later.

Now the punishments were more measured. Some only slapped the students, instead of using a rod. “Feel the sting in your hand,” one fifth-grade rebbe said to me earnestly. “If it hurts the child, it should hurt you, too.” Others thought the rod was acceptable but that strikes must be meted out judiciously. Whipping a boy until he howled for hours was no longer advisable. Berel Eisenman, a teacher for nearly two decades who was once known to be the most brutal of all rebbes, had done a complete turnabout. “I no longer use a rod. Now I use ice cream pops.” Instead of punishing for bad behavior, he rewarded for good. The other rebbes thought his approach too lenient. Even the principal shook his head. “Children need to be hit sometimes. That’s never going to change.”

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