https://www.torahmusings.com/2010/12/reacting-to-scandal/ Dec 16, 2010
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.
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?
