Four Ejected in Cubs/White Sox Brawl.
We Ruttenbergs are Cubs people. My mother was a rabid, and I mean rabid, fan. To root for the White Sox, as far as I was raised to be concerned, was a little bit like committing avodah zarah.
(And yes, it’s midnight Jerusalem time and I am Wide! Awake! Sigh.)
For those of you who don’t know, there’s a glut of cases now regarding rabbinic sexual abuse. There’s the Renewal Guru, about whom rumors and more have swirled for years–suddenly, now that cases are being brought forward, his community of rabbinic peers is smacking their head and saying, “Oh, gee, if only we had known beforehand!” as though the mere possiblity of imporpriety was shocking, new information. (These are some of the same people that, rather than confronting the famous songwriting guru rebbe when he was a known abuser, simply didn’t hire him to their retreats, but let him continue on abusing others at other retreats). There’s the now-ousted head of the Orthodox organization who was having coercive sex with agunot who went to him for help–and the Israeli Rabbinate is backing him by casting doubt on the org’s conversions now. There’s the head of the yeshiva who hurt countless little boys. I am too angry to say anything productive about these specific cases or the phenomenon in general. JewSchool is covering all the stories pretty thoroughly, check there for more. Props to Mobius for trying to force the Jewish media to, like, cover all this. Thanks to Cole for compiling a list of resources for survivors, found here. (ETA: Oh, and there’s the Forward article now, here. The whole thing is beyond nauseating, the rabbinic apologetics so so so so so problematic and awful. This is not a game, people.)
I am past fed up with the conspiracy of silence in the Jewish community that keeps survivors ashamed, intimidated and afraid to come forward, and the way that we stigmatize people when they actually *do* try to talk about what’s going on. When we expose, say, the Enron guys, it’s brave and righteous. When we try to do the same to our own leaders, it’s all too often labelled leshon hara. I agree that gratuitous leshon hara is not helpful or reccomended, but that’s not the same as speaking the truth, of talking about what really happened, of trying to protect other people from getting hurt. That’s not leshon hara, that’s pikuach nefesh. (And it should be noted that the laws of leshon hara explicitly don’t apply when warning others is necessary to keep them from being hurt/swindled/etc. by the person in question. But I’d say that even given the tremendous health and psychological ramificiations that keeping quiet about abuse suffered can cause, that it’s critical to make a space for people to initiate these kinds of conversations.)
Why did so many of us grow up hearing the refrain, “Jews don’t drink, Jews don’t beat their wives,” from people who either were themselves or had close friends or family members struggling with alcoholism and/or domestic violence? Why do we organize, without hesitation, Shabbos meals for someone with some physical health problems and shrug awkwardly when we hear that someone is disabled by depression? Why is it OK for a woman to talk about the grief of losing a child but not having suffered rape or incest? There are stigmas in the Jewish community that go beyond even casting doubt on some powerful leader. What is it about our unwillingness to hear certain kinds of stories?
This is about a lot of things. There’s the cronyism, the guru-ism, the general tendency in the Jewish world to trust the man who’s been at yeshiva a bunch over the woman (or women, or sometimes younger or less prestigious men/boys). And no, I don’t mean that any rumor is grounds or firing somebody. But I think we need to take allegations seriously, much more seriously than we do, and, you know, investigate them. Even if an incident isn’t punishable by a court of law, or somebody’s choosing not to prosecute–for pete’s sake, people. We. Are. Working. For. God. Our standard of ethics and our demands of our leaders and teachers should be significantly higher than, “doesn’t have a criminal record yet.” Making sure that our leaders’ congregants and students are safe and comfortable around their spiritual leaders must be the first priority, and other considerations–including, yes, “how much Torah they have to give,” needs to be second. Sorry. If he’s that brilliant but can’t keep from hurting people, he can sit alone in his room and write a damn book. Our daughters and sons are not the sacrifical offerings to appease the fires of someone’s “excess of Hesed.” Not giving our children to Moloch is, you know, one of the commandments in the Torah.
In any case, it’s about all of the above, and it’s so so much about the culture of silence and stigma and shame that is so pervasive in the Jewish community. Whose Deity does this culture serve? Whose soul does it nourish?
Well, and whose power does it preserve?
I just learned that an old friend, Leigh Ann Hussey, was killed in an accident yesterday. She was a sweetheart, rapier wit, kickass sub-alto and nine hundred kinds of trouble with a fiddle. Baruch dayan haemet. I haven’t seen her in years and I can still feel her formidable presence missing from this planet.
This is one of the gifts that she left us, with her old band, Annwn.
Love and comfort to E., C., and everybody else.
lied lied lied.
Me? It kicks my butt hard in both directions. I’ve been here for almost a week and besides the borderline sick I’m rocking (sleep deprivation does that), I’ve just been exhausted and, well, laggy the whole time, particularly by mid-afternoon (coincidentally as it’s getting towards bedtime in Jerusalem.) But of course when I go back on Thursday, I will have been just enough on this time clock to be knocked six ways ’till Tuesday when I get back on holy city time. With three weeks to go and lots to do in the final exam department, whee.
And why it gotta be raining here on top of everything? Come on, now.
Am leaving tomorrow for a week in Chul (Chutz L’Aretz, literally “outside the land”, which all this time later I still find hillarious. Like my brother had this friend from high school for whom there were two places–Chicago, and everywhere else, which he decided was called “France.” When my brother came to visit from college in Boston, Mike would say, “So, how was France?” When another friend of theirs returned from a year in Japan, Mike would say, “Hey, so what’s new in France?” Chul is this mysterious, amorphous terrain of not-Israel.)
Anyway, I’m going to the part of Chul where they keep the truly worthy bagels and excellent art collections, as well as a bunch of friends and various types of work-ish things. Will try to blog while away, but if not, have a lovely week and see you on the other side.
Fabulous Hebrew poem in which no vorpal blades are raised, but lovely nonetheless. Your dictionary won’t help you here.
Fifty-six different versions of “Stairway to Heaven”.
I rather like the Gilligan’s Island version, though, I do have to admit. And Pat Boone just kind of rocks the house.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not a little frightened by the whole thing.
So I’ve now done one full pass on the biggest chunk of my Scary Talmud (Review Awfully Necessary) Graduation-Level Exam (STRANGLE) material–22 dappim (2-sided pages) of Pesachim, the full last chapter. I don’t have it perfectly–there are some things I didn’t totally catch (for some of them I needed a dictionary, and I was mostly doing this on the bus), and a few complex arguments I think I got, but was too lazy to go through and triple-check if they really made sense with my reading. I’ll have to do everything a million times, this is just the preliminary.
But I’ve got the first 9 dappim of ch. 3 of Moed Katan all xeroxed up and ready to roll. Anyone want to place bets on whether I have the oomph to start it over Shabbos?
(After that I’ll have 19 other dappim to review or learn whole cloth, mostly from Ketubot, Avodah Zarah, and Brachot).
I’m so happy and kvelling, and now can finally post about it, because the Jerusalem Post article on her is out today (though seemingly not online). My dear friend and teacher, Haviva Ner-David, has been granted smicha, ie traditional rabbinic ordination. A couple of other women have been ordained thusly (as Orthodox rabbis, technically speaking–though how one chooses to identify with the denomination or whatever is very individual), but Haviva’s the first to have been really public about it from the beginning, so this truly is a landmark moment.
My friends are rockstars. It makes me happy.
Now you all need to buy her book, Life on the Fringes, if you haven’t already. And if you have, buy one for somebody else.
ETA: The Jerusalem Post article is up now, here.
Breaking story! This just in! Traditionally undervalued work is actually worth quite a lot!
A full-time stay-at-home mother would earn $134,121 a year if paid for all her work, an amount similar to a top U.S. ad executive, a marketing director or a judge, according to a study released Wednesday.
A mother who works outside the home would earn an extra $85,876 annually on top of her actual wages for the work she does at home, according to the study by Waltham, Massachusetts-based compensation experts Salary.com.
Full story here.