I recently introduced my eldest to the dark comic songs of Tom Lehrer. He particularly likes the Irish Ballad
which is about a girl who brutally murders her family. The song includes the lines: "And when, at last, the police came by, her little pranks she did
not deny. To do so she would have had to lie and lying she knew was a
sin." At one point, my son came over to me and in a very serious voice
explained to me that he understood what was so funny about the song. "She
knew that she should not lie but did not know that she should not kill her
family."
Humor is a very difficult art
to master even for smart kids because to be funny requires that you have a
baseline understanding of social expectations and how they may be illogical or
subverted. For example, familicide is something so horrific that it should not
be the subject of jokes. Part of what makes Lehrer funny, though, is precisely
his transgressiveness in violating such a taboo. We find ourselves laughing
because we know that we should not laugh. This is such an incredibly difficult
balance to strike that no consistent rules can be given for doing so. Sometimes jokes are funny because they strike at a truth that we may not wish to admit to so we laugh and pretend that it is a joke. The power
of the girl caring more about honesty than murder lies in the fact that it
strikes at a real hypocrisy where the petty rules we use to instruct children
can come to outweigh actual crimes.
I bring this up because we are seeing this routine play itself out in the case of Chaim Walder (may his name and books be erased). For those unfamiliar with what has transpired, Walder was a popular children's author within the Haredi community until he was revealed to be a serial abuser. Rather than face judgment, Walder committed suicide on his son's grave. In this final act, Walder displayed a diabolical genius. He was a masterful writer and I confess that I liked his books and had been reading them with my son. As such, Walder understood the importance of an ending for giving readers an emotional body blow and affecting how they think of the entire story. By killing himself before the full extent of his crimes could be publicized, he got to end his story as the "victim" driven to kill himself by his accusers. Did his strategy work? One of his victims committed suicide herself and the Walder family was visited by many prominent rabbis during their period of mourning. By and large, the Haredi press chose to report on Walder's death as we might have expected them to before his downfall.
One gets the sense that for many in the Haredi world, Walder's accusers, by going public, committed an even graver sin than Walder's abuse. There have been jokes circulating about how if only Walder had only touched girls to ordain them as rabbis then we could have had a real scandal. This joke stands on the shoulder of an older joke of how if activists wanted to get people's attention they should have lied and claimed that Haredi abusers were really handing kids candy without a good kosher certification. It needs to be understood that, underneath these jokes, lies the frightening truth that a large part of the Haredi leadership is not simply naive or lacking in empathy but honestly believes that speaking out about abuse really is worse than the abuse itself.
This sounds absurd until you realize that there is a perfectly logical argument to be made here that speaking out about abuse, unlike actual abuse, undermines the entire community. The practical conclusion from this is, of course, utterly monstrous but if you are willing to accept the argument on its premises then you should be willing to bite the bullet and truly believe that it is worse to speak out about abuse than even to commit it.
To start,
we have to understand that Haredim, like most traditional societies, lack a
category for a sexual abuser. Instead, what we have are the categories of rape
and adultery. Walder clearly was not a rapist in the sense of jumping his
victims in dark alleys. This means, that we are left accusing Walder of
committing adultery with his victims, who were his "willing
accomplices" and not victims at all. Obviously, what is being left out is a category to describe
middle-aged men in positions of power who can intimidate and manipulate
emotionally vulnerable teenagers, destroying their lives even to the point of
causing them to commit suicide.
One would still hope that adultery would be treated
as a serious offense as it is in the Ten Commandments. The truth is that
adultery, particularly when practiced by men, is treated as a
minor sin. What needs to be understood is that adultery is a private sin and,
as such, it can be left to the individual as they bang their chests on Yom Kippur.
As long as the adultery takes place behind closed doors and does not reach the
general public, the sin, in no way, threatens community authority and, by
extension, the survival of the system.
Not only do male adultery and
even rape not threaten the system, but they can even actually help strengthen it. Rape
sends girls the message that it is their responsibility not to be in certain
places or behave in certain ways otherwise "bad things" will happen to them and
it will be their "fault." Traditional societies have long tolerated prostitution
on the logic that turning a blind eye to men sleeping with strangers made it
more likely that they would consent to staying in loveless marriages and not
divorce or have affairs with their neighbors and cause a scandal. Instead of
prostitutes, what we have are vulnerable teenagers, who can be relied upon to stay
silent knowing that they really "wanted it" and they will only destroy themselves and embarrass their families if they speak up.
In contrast to the adulterer
who has only committed a "minor" private sin, the abuse victim who speaks
out has committed the ultimate "sin." Their action is public and
directly threatens the survival of the system. Make no mistake, there are going
to be teenagers who will read up on scandals like that of Walder and find the
strength to tell their parents that they do not want to be religious and the
parents will find themselves silenced because they are too ashamed to speak up
for their faith. One thinks of the example of Ireland, where there has been a
mass exodus from Catholicism among the youth because of abuse scandals within
the Church.
It should be recognized that
the truly deadly scandal with clerical abuse scandals (whether Jewish or
Catholic) has not been the fact that religious figures abused children. The
real scandal has always been the wider coverups and the fact that the system
cared more about its reputation than helping actual victims. The rabbis who
gave Walder the funeral he desired, have likely done more damage to Judaism
than Walder ever could. Even with this being the case, those rabbis clearly
cannot shake the idea that if only Walder's victims had remained silent the
"real" problem would have been solved and the Haredi world would be
able to show itself to the world and its members in a desirable light
.
