The Sceptic Blog

[Update – 30 May 2025: someone whom I respect highly has questioned the veracity of the reports below of what Rabbi Schachter has ruled about pre-scrutiny of complaints of abuse: I have written to Rabbi Schachter to ask him to be kind enough to confirm or clarify his ruling and will further update this blog on receciving a reply.]

In one of its earliest formal rabbinic applications, the rabbis expounded the biblical prohibition of taking disputes between members of the Jewish community to secular courts, and turned it into an expanded set of rules of “mesirah” that is applied with apparently ever- increasing vigour to this day.

Never mind that the original purpose appears to have been to prevent arbitrary and vicious systems of local punishment and oppression from being turned into a weapon between members of the Jewish community, so that the one with the greater influence “at court” could defeat the legitimate expectations of Torah Justice by informing on and framing another Jewish person for treason, fraud or some other crime to an innately hostile system with antisemitic predilections.

Never mind that the Torah also imposes Biblical requirements on rabbis and all those in positions of communal authority to pay particular attention to the need to protect widows and orphans; a category which does not require much common sense to expand into all those who are vulnerable in one way or another, being without the kind of protection that is available to most people.

Without apparently any thought to the origins of the concept or to what its enduring purpose should be taken to be, this has been turned into a technical set of laws that inherently favours those in authority against the vulnerable, resulting effectively in blanket permission for financial depredations or domestic or sexual abuse.

Rabbi Hershel Schachter – Rosh Yeshiva at Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS, YU) – is without doubt the most prestigious of the guests for this Mizrachi Weekend of Inspiration in North West London.  I will not be attending to hear him at either of the two London shuls to which I belong, because I find his public views on mesirah in the context of allegations of abuse so abhorrent that I prefer not to hear any words of Torah from him, despite his undoubted encyclopaedic knowledge of Biblical, Talmudic and other texts.

The weekend of inspiration has, however, not been wasted on me: it has inspired me to write this instead of attending his addresses.

We corrupt and pervert Jewish values when in their name we deny access to the justice system to a vulnerable person who asserts that she or he has been sexually abused by their teacher, their rabbi or anyone else in a position of communal authority until their claims have been affirmed or checked by rabbis, scholars or other members of the orthodox establishment.

Saying “no, you cannot go to the secular criminal courts or open or support a police investigation”  would be bad enough.  And there are many rabbis around the world who say exactly that.

But Rabbi Schachter goes one stage worse: he says we will not stop you from going to the police and indeed you should go to the police, living in a world where the religious authorities do not have criminal jurisdiction or other ways of punishing and deterring criminal wrongdoing. We will encourage you to go, but only if you first convince “us” that this is not a malicious libel, but an allegation with real grounds that make it “legitimate”.

(https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2013-03-20/ty-article/yeshiva-university-rabbi-sex-abuse-reports-imprison-innocent-jews/0000017f-dc6d-db5a-a57f-dc6f0d000000; https://www.thejc.com/news/world/yeshivah-teacher-shame-over-schvartze-remark-mnxcitxf?reloadTime=1652832000011; https://www.timesofisrael.com/yu-dean-warns-against-reporting-unproven-sex-abuse-claims/)

To go to the police otherwise, says Rabbi Schachter, would be mesirah.  It would be the Biblical prohibition of handing a Jewish person over to the gentile authorities; and young people in the Jewish community are generally encouraged to believe that the spiritual punishment for this in the afterlife will be sufficiently extreme to make them unlikely to want to do it.

In modern parlance, we call this kind of invocation of mesirah: gaslighting.  “You, oh quite possibly abused vulnerable person, are possibly the real problem; and therefore we will not allow you to endanger “us” until “we” have satisfied ourselves that your allegations are “legitimate”.

And who are “us” and “we” in this context?  We are a selection of the very class of person to whom you recognise your alleged abuser as belonging.  You will look into the same kind of face, wearing the same kind of clothing, talking the same kind of language, that you last saw when you were being violated.  They may not be your alleged perpetrator’s family or friends (although they may be) but they will be someone in his or her image, infinitely more likely to believe them than you (or so, at the least, you will inevitably fear).

This examination will tend to make you doubt yourself, and to wonder whether you are the real enemy of the cosy Jewish community, not your alleged abuser.

Forget the fact that this behaviour by any “panel” of rabbis is quite likely to amount in UK criminal law to perversion of the course of justice.  It is tampering with a witness if nothing else.  From a simply human perspective, how is it that brilliant and learned Torah scholars have become so blind to human frailties and vulnerabilities that they cannot see the vast number of Biblical prohibitions that they commit in subjecting vulnerable people to this kind of ordeal, in the interests of maintaining what is ultimately a rabbinic (male rabbinic) creation designed to prevent the washing of dirty linen in public?

That private laundries do not wash is a fact that can be attested by hundreds or thousands of community victims of abuse who cry themselves to sleep every night and wake shortly after in traumatic distress knowing that nothing but an ordeal of gaslighting will await them should they seek redress within the community.

So let us all be inspired by the presence of Rabbi Schachter in our community this weekend to emphasise to all our leaders that they have the right to lead us only when they stand for justice, decency and truth, and only when those values underpin their Torah learning. We and they must stand up for real justice for the victims of abuse in our community.  And real justice can mean one thing and one thing only: unrestricted, encouraged and facilitated access to the criminal courts, in the knowledge that in a rule of law country today there is no genuine reason to prevent the machinery of justice from being allowed to take its course.  And that the damage that is done to our community by abuse is the abuse itself, and the abusers and nobody else are to blame. 

If we cannot protect the “widow and orphan” – the wide class of vulnerable people – we become a mere self-indulgent and corrupt sect that cannot claim any pretensions to be the continuation of the values and traditions of Abraham and Sarah.