Reacting to Scandal

I. The Problem

The leadership of the Orthodox Jewish community is heading for complete collapse. Disgraces, accusations, indictments and convictions — who can trust them? Here’s how they can save themselves.

The Torah sets a nearly unreachable standard of conduct for community leaders, requiring them to avoid all appearance of wrongdoing (see Shulchan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah 257:1-2). But in this cynical age, a leader can never satisfy all onlookers. Too often, the frustrated leader gratefully if regretfully abandons the delicate balancing of the requirement to satisfy the public’s suspicions with the guarantee of swift and fierce criticism, exchanging it for a general apathy to public response.

This solution is unsustainable in the long term, as the public’s distrust in its leadership is compounded by repeated episodes of misunderstanding. Add to that genuine moral failures and the problem becomes explosive. When the public doesn’t know whom it can trust, it trusts no one. The result is anarchy, which we are currently experiencing, followed shortly by chaos as the institutions can no longer provide services.

This is not, however, inevitable. I believe that there is a way to avoid the complete collapse of our communal structure. The Rambam shows us the way out of our cycle of cynicism, but it won’t be easy.

II. Revealing the Problem

In her recent book Confronting Scandal: How Jews Can Respond When Jews Do Bad Things, Dr. Erica Brown explores the negative impact on individuals of the seemingly endless array of scandals among our leaders. A master pedagogue, Dr. Brown helps readers place the problem in proper context. We need to shed our cynicism and give leaders the benefit of the doubt. And if they act badly, we need to determine whether their acts rise above understandable error to the level requiring dismissal. Above all, we need to demand honesty and accountability from our leaders. Our community and our religion deserves better than the fiascos that we keep witnessing.

Dr. Brown is largely writing for the non-Orthodox and therefore defends the faith as she scrutinizes the faithkeepers. In doing so, she hits all the right notes but keeps her outrage below the surface of her thoughtful and even-keeled prose. I think this stylistic choice was a mistake. Measured responses will not change our communal culture. They are key for instituting change but unlikely as its catalyst. We need outrage. We need to get mad as heck because otherwise we will continuing taking this.

A new book by Dr. Daniel Eidensohn, Child & Domestic Abuse: Torah, Psychological, & Legal Perspectives, displays a different balance between thoughtful response and outrage. The first volume contains essays by an assortment of professionals — rabbis, psychologists, social workers, lawyers. Each, in his own way, lashes out at the community’s response to sexual abuse of children and attempts to explain the proper response according to the Torah and/or their professional training and experience.

Dr. Eidensohn writes that we will not change the attitude of our rabbinic leaders by providing Torah sources and arguments, even from someone as respected as R. Moshe Sternbuch, who advised Dr. Eidensohn on the publication and personally reviewed the Synopsis section. The only way to spark change is to dramatically describe victims’ pain. When community leaders recognize the extent of the problem and its effects, they will join the cause. “To the degree that the rabbis and community leaders can be convinced that abused children suffer horrible lifetime wounds, you will discover that the legal objections disappear” (p. 12). The same, I believe, applies to the problem of corrupt and unethical practices. When leaders realize how much this damages the community, how deeply this disrupts the basic functioning of our community, they will respond seriously.

Eidensohn’s first volume provides an interesting contrast to another recent book, Breaking the Silence: Sexual Abuse and the Jewish Community, edited by Dr. David Pelcovitz and David Mandel. This book also contains essays by rabbis, doctors and lawyers, and contains victims’ accounts of abuse and its aftermath. The experts writing in this book are top notch, many of whom are household names in the Orthodox community. They provide statistics, guidelines, and concrete advice. The book is edited and typeset in a much more professional way than Dr. Eideonsohn’s. It is nothing short of a communal guidebook for best practices.

Yet, Dr. Eidensohn’s book is what really makes me want to do something. It inspires the passion that is necessary to change our communal practices. It elicits the appropriate level of outrage. It is a J’accuse against the bumbling efforts of Jews unwilling to make hard choices to save our children, incapable of admitting mistake, and failing to learn from the collapse of the Catholic Church over precisely this issue.

Dr. Eidensohn’s second volume is a remarkable encyclopedia of Jewish sources related to issues of abuse. He collects and translates hundreds of post-talmudic texts, organized by subject or author. In particular, his chapter on wife abuse puts to lie the canard that Judaism allows such treatment. Overall, this book is an indispensable guide to the halakhic sources on abuse.

These books, along with speeches and blogs, serve an important purpose. They alert the public to dangers and provide guidance on managing them. More importantly, they clearly confirm the existence of the problem, something our communal leaders have slowly done over the past decade only with great reluctance and after the application of tremendous pressure. These books demonstrate, not that any further proof was necessary, the disconnect between leadership and laity that has caused such great distrust. How can the leadership regain this trust?

III. The Four Step Process

The Rambam (Hilkhos Teshuvah 2:2) list four steps to repentance: 1) recognizing that you have sinned, 2) abandoning the sin, 3) deciding to never sin again, 4) confessing the sin (to God). While these steps consist of a personal path of repentance, the community leadership can use them as a guide to restoring its prominent position, to regaining public trust.

The first step is acknowledgeing that there are significant communal problems that require immediate attention (I am ignoring the Rambam’s change in order, on which see R. Soloveitchik’s explanation in Al Ha-Teshuvah). If our communal leaders do not recognize the problems that we see, if they cannot step outside their world and look at things from the layman’s perspective, then the destructive disconnect will remain. If they do not acknowledge the criminals in their midst, except (sometimes) post facto those who are convicted, they they will never regain our trust. They need to recognize that even if their organization is squeaky clean, a marvelous embodiment of Kiddush Hashem and everything we love about Judaism, other organizations within their community are not.

The second is resolving the problems. Leaders must immediately take steps to remove from position anyone who is corrupt. Thieves, abusers and other sinners cannot be tolerated. The public will remain cynical of all institutions if any of them retain personnel who break the law. It is not sufficient for one organization to clean house and seriously make sure that its leadership is totally honest. All organizations must do so. Every yeshiva must kick off its board and stop honoring at dinners crooks and adulterers. Strong-armers and money launderers must be removed from every communal organization.

The third step is creating a zero tolerance policy for the future. We need to be serious about self-policing because firing someone after he is exposed on the news does not solve the perception problem. When the public believes the leadership is serious about maintaining integrity, it will begin to trust again.

Only after all that does confession time arrive. When leaders speak publicly about problems without their having done anything to stop them (step 2) or prevent them (step 3), the public is understandably skeptical. Don’t get me wrong. It is a step in the right direction. But it’s the wrong step at the wrong time. Words, after all, are cheap. Act first and only afterward confess.

The process I’ve outlined is just a dream because it requires many financial and political risks. Some institutions will probably collapse fom those risks. Why would a leader take that chance? Only because he has no other option. We, the public, need to demand nothing less than a radical change in our culture. But we won’t, because we are too cynical to believe it can happen. Only when enough of our leaders are revealed as having committed enough outrageous misdeeds will we finally reach the boiling point. I only hope it arrives before our cynicism and apathy destroy our communal structure.