Rabbis Can Help by Speaking Out
GREENBERG, IRVING
r Rabbis Can Help by Speaking Out IRVING GREENBERG With great courage and moral passion— and at no small personal cost—Dr. Sharon Lowenstein has brought into the ?pen sexual abuse and incest...
...Sharon Lowenstein has brought into the ?pen sexual abuse and incest among Jews...
...in their heart, they do not want to do it and they are grateful for help...
...Sadly, the victims typically blame themselves...
...Jews are like other people only more so...
...It wounds the sense of self, the intrinsic capacity for unique human dignity and value...
...The abuse of children—people who are weak and unable to defend themselves, often not even able to grasp fully what is being done to them—is a violation of the Torah principle that God is particularly concerned for the weak, the poor, the orphan, the widow, the vulnerable, (See Exodus 22:2ff...
...82:3ff...
...Both the Bible and the Talmud reflect the fact that Jews have all the flaws and commit the same sins as other human beings...
...Speaking out also brings healing support to the victims...
...Psalms H:7ff...
...Sexual abuse damages, if it does not destroy, the capacity for an intimate relationship because it attacks the trust that is so basic to such a relationship...
...In Deuteronomy, we are told that our chosenness and our claim to the land of Israel reflect neither our numbers (that is, some quantitative superiority) nor our righteousness (that is, some qualitative superiority) (Deuteronomy 7:7, 9:5-6...
...Resistance to admitting that this problem exists in the Jewish community apparently grows out of some mistaken claim that, morally speaking, Jews are intrinsically different, and better—our generations's version of the claim that Jews do not drink and Jews do not beat their wives...
...To speak out, to put the issue on the table, is also to help potential abusers...
...Accounts of survivors of incest powerfully remind me of Holocaust survivors...
...If we speak out and correct human evils such as sexual abuse, if we heal the victims and give them dignity and strength, that is how we establish our moral superiority...
...The Torah instructs us to die, if necessary, rather than practice idolatry, commit murder or participate in sexual abuse (incest and adultery...
...So fundamental is the integrity of the parent/child or close relative/child relationship that its abuse destroys the very hedrock of humanness, of what it means to be created in the image of God...
...I know Dr...
...To be silent then is to incur the grave guilt of accessory after the fact...
...In a way, mental anguish and moral degradation are worse...
...It is our prophets, our self-criticism, our commitment to teshuvah (repentance) and the creation of a judging and healing community that have enabled us to be mekadsftai hashem, those who sanctify God's name by living according to a higher standard...
...they are assured that indeed we are with them in their pain...
...Lowenstein tells us that we need not give our lives to stop this evil, but we do need to use our intelligence, our moral judgment, our capacity for public communication...
...In this article, Dr...
...Just as those claims have proved false—with the erosion of Jewish culture, drinking and wife beating made their inevitable appearance among us— so will any claim that incest is not a Jewish problem...
...If, on the other hand, in the name of Jewish moral standing, we suppress the record and allow the victims to continue to be tormented in their isolation, then we degrade the moral basis of Jewish life that has sustained us and strengthened us all these millennia...
...Spiritual leaders who ignore or even cover up the presence of sexual abuse, Jewish media that continue the conspiracy of silence by acting as if this does not happen in the Jewish community, those who cut off or isolate victims who dare to speak out, bring upon themselves the judgment that the Torah places on the accessory and the bystander: "Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor" (Leviticus 19:16...
...Our affirmation of their dignity and innocence will help restore them to wholeness...
...Thereby, we imitate God "who dwells with the oppressed and the humiliated in spirit" (Isaiah 57:15...
...Instead of blaming the aggressors and the abusers, these survivors often blame their own innocent selves...
...Just as the silence of the postwar Jewish community made the survivors feel more isolated and more rejected in their unwarranted guilt, so does the silence about sexual abuse imprison the victims in a torment that is a continuing crime against them...
...The accuracy and integrity of her exploration of the subject shines forth all the more because rt is tempered in the white heat of personal pain, although powerfully controlled and expressed with understatement and compassion...
...Lowenstein as ethical, scholarly, restrained in personality and a deeply caring Jew...
...Rabbinic tradition repeatedly makes clear that mental anguish and moral degradation are the equivalent of physical murder...
...Jewish moral superiority must be instilled by education and earned by action...
...The murder victim is released from further pain, whereas the incest and abuse victim is continually tortured by the memory and its residual effects...
Vol. 15 • April 1990 • No. 2
