Posts Tagged ‘rabbis’
Mesirah: The Earliest Form of Gaslighting?
[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.
The Urgency of Rabbinic Regulation
- Here is a post that was published last week (in almost exactly this form) in the Jewish Chronicle online. Predictably, it’s had a fair amount of reaction, positive and negative. Someone this morning asked why it wasn’t on the Sceptic Blog – so now it is.
- Here we go again: another rabbinic scandal to sweep under the extraordinarily capacious carpet of Anglo Jewry. Whatever we do, this must be hushed up as quickly as possible and, in particular, let’s hope it doesn’t get into the national press, because the Eleventh Commandment of Anglo Jewry over the decades has been “thou shalt not wash dirty linen in public”.
- The problem is that, as we have seen time and again, private laundries don’t wash.
- It is true that instances of financial or sexual misbehaviour by the Anglo-Jewish Rabbinate are relatively rare, although less rare than one would hope given the nature of the vocation. But looked at in the round, the rabbinic cadre is for the most part mediocre at best and significantly under-performing at worst.
- While there are a number of community Rabbis who are extraordinarily inspiring in their dedication to their community and tireless in its service, they are the exception rather than the rule. The perception held by some that the quality of the communal rabbinate is in general superb rests largely on the low standards expected of them, and the lack of transparency and accountability around their role that encourages a culture of flourishing mediocrity.
- Sometimes when I am being told how wonderful a communal rabbi is because he visited somebody in hospital or gave thorough attention to a family wedding or funeral, I point out that this is precisely what they have been paid for: and with many rabbis on remuneration packages amounting to actual or full-time equivalent salaries that many of their communities can only dream of, when one calculates an hourly rate for their performance, the heroism of spending several hours a day visiting their parishioners in hospital suddenly appears in context to be nothing more than simply performing their job in the way that the rest of us have to do without the compensation of uncritical adulation.
- In part this is because the expectations of communities have become matched to their experiences over time. And perhaps because it is “public money”, synagogue boards are less rigorous in determining what value for money they are getting day by day from their rabbi than they would be in other professional circumstances.
- But the main reason why rabbis can perform poorly and get away with is because there simply are no properly regulated standards for the rabbinic profession. While contracts have become more detailed and, to some extent, restrictive than they used to be, there is no systematic method of regulation or enforcement to support the greater detail on those contracts.
- If I am unimpressed or offended by the performance of my doctor, my lawyer, my dentist or any other trained professional, there is a clear method by which I can complain. And that applies to simple under-performance as much as to rarer cases of misconduct or impropriety.
- What can I do if I feel that my local rabbi did not give proper attention to a particular family funeral, did not bother to find out enough about the family before addressing it, and was possibly insensitive or even improper in the comments that he made? The answer is that there is nothing I can do that is likely to achieve any constructive results.
- There is no professional body that regulates the rabbis in a transparent and accountable way and investigates complaints. In extreme cases I can of course complain to the Chief Rabbi – whose dedication and commitment to the community and to the quality of the Rabbinate is well-known – but there is no mechanism for him to make a transparent and accountable investigation and produce publicly identifiable results.
- This is simply unacceptable in today’s world. Even judges are now subject to an accountable and public investigatory mechanism for misconduct or significant under-performance (such as unreasonable delay in producing written judgments) and the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, far from diminishing the reputation of the judges, ensures that they can be seen to earn the respect that the system requires them to be accorded.
- Exactly the same is true of the rabbis; and in order to preserve the reputation of hard-working, honest and decent rabbis, it is now overdue that we have a proper mechanism for dealing with those who underperform or misbehave.
- Over the last few years a number of UK rabbis have behaved improperly and in some cases have left behind victims suffering from their behaviour in a number of different ways. The reaction of the community has been to enjoy a passing scandal, but beyond that the establishment has raced to cover up the wider picture and the mechanisms of reputational damage-limitation have taken precedence over thoughts about support and care for victims and imposing enforceable standards.
- We have no right to regard ourselves as a religious community if we do not establish a mechanism for dealing with abuse within the rabbinate, and accountable and transparent ways for people to address inadequate performance, so that we can go back to respecting the rabbis as a group knowing that those who deserve respect will receive it and those who don’t will be dealt with appropriately.
- (For those who have asked how my suggestion would have helped in the case of a rabbi who behaves improperly and then leaves his position and the country, the answer is that by having a central licensing process from which he could be formally removed, it would draw a line under the issue and hopefully help direct or indirect victims of his behaviour to feel some closure and public acknowledgment.)
Knocking the Rabbis … Into Shape
1. A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking part in a Shabbos afternoon panel at Alei Tzion shul in Hendon, chaired by its Rabbi Daniel Roselaar, and consisting of Dayan Lichtenstein, Rabbi Michael Pollack and myself. The subject was whether rabbinic authority is damaged beyond repair by recent events in the UK, Israel and America.
2. You can see an account of the discussion here: http://youandus.theus.org.uk/communities-focus/alei-tzion-hosts-summer-debate-rabbinic-authority-in-the-21st-century-damaged-beyond-repair/.
3. I see from that account that I called for an independent regulatory body to work across all Botei Din.
4. And so I did; the idea had been wooffling around in my mind for some time, but the event somehow crystallised it into a simple thought.
5. The catalyst was something that Rabbi Pollack said: in a helpful attempt to keep the event peaceful and constructive he observed that most rabbis of course do a good job. In an unhelpful attempt to keep the event provocative and constructive I disagreed, and said that by and large our rabbis do a fairly mediocre job, and that we have come to expect so little from them that our expectations are easily exceeded by very moderate performance.
6. How often is a rabbi commended as wonderful for having visited a parishioner in hospital when that is no more than precisely what he is paid a hefty salary for doing? I am all in favour of rabbis and other workers being commended for performing beyond the call of duty, but that should be tested against a reasonably exacting and challenging initial threshold of what that duty should be.
7. We do have some wonderful and inspiring rabbis in the UK community today; and we have very few really bad ones; but we have a fair number of unimpressively mediocre ones; and with the system as it stands there is little impetus for them to strive to improve themselves as a profession.
8. Recent events have shown the lack of a disciplinary body, such as other professions have, for dealing with misconduct by rabbis that is not, or may not be, criminal in nature. But on reflection I see that there is an equal need for a body that can deal with issues that are not about misconduct, but merely poor performance (along the lines of the Medical Professional Performance Act that I drafted in 1995).
9. The more I think about the idea, the more useful I think it could be; and it really need not be very complicated to establish.
10. We need a group of communal activists who are prepared to act as an unpaid disciplinary body for rabbis, including a chair with experience in employment law and a panel of unpaid rabbinic advisers. Hopefully nobody would be called on to act very often, and the body could sit in separate panels (as do many professional regulatory bodies) each consisting of perhaps one person with employment law experience and two or three lay-members, with a rabbi in a purely advisory capacity.
11. Complaints about poor performance and misconduct could be referred to this body in accordance with its rules.
12. Now comes the simple bit – every new contract offered by any congregation would include a clause providing for all complaints about poor performance or misconduct to be considered by the disciplinary body in accordance with its rules. The rabbi and the employing organisation would agree to be bound by the body’s decisions.
12. There are one or two more details that might need to be thought through – but that is the essence. (Halachic enforcement considerations are significant but not insurmountable.)
13. One result would be to provide real protection for the community from misconduct and inefficiency by rabbis – much more importantly, however, the system could serve as the basis for new professional standards that rabbis could set for themselves, and therefore as a mechanism for restoring trust in, and the moral authority of, the profession that is meant to be the backbone of our religion.
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