Our Gemara on Amud Aleph engages in a discussion to determine what occurred to a wife of a Cohen who was taken captive. Rabbi Dosa does not assume she was raped even though she may have been molested in other ways:

אָמַר רַבִּי דּוֹסָא: וְכִי מָה עָשָׂה לָהּ עַרְבִי זֶה? מִפְּנֵי שֶׁמִּיעֵךְ לָהּ בֵּין דַּדֶּיהָ, פְּסָלָהּ מִן הַכְּהוּנָּה?!

In explanation of this statement, Rabbi Dosa says: And what did this Arab do to her when he took her captive? Because he fondled her breasts he disqualified her from the priesthood? As long as it is not determined that her captors actually raped her, she is not prohibited from partaking of teruma.

This reminds me of a key issue regarding Rabbinic thinking and sexual abuse. When you think in a legalistic halakhic sense, sometimes you risk missing the forest for the trees. Decades ago, when there began to be more community awareness regarding sexual abuse, revered poskim and batei din made a tragic error. They applied halakhic reasoning to social and psychological situations. If a molester “only” touched a child inappropriately, since halakhically this was not as severe as sexual intercourse, it led to an unconscious minimization of the psychological and religious trauma. In fact, without naming names of certain notorious rabbinic molesters, they themselves were well versed in the halakhic distinctions, and perhaps rationalized their behavior, because they were not violating a cardinal sin. Similarly, because we have this generally valuable notion that people can repent, in the old days when there was naiveté about the patterns of abusers and the unbearably strong compulsion they experienced, it was thought that if somebody was sincerely penitent, they would no longer be perpetrators. These errors, while understandable in a certain sense, caused incalculable and unfathomable damage. Persons who experienced intense trauma felt belittled and minimized, because technically the perpetrator did not do what was considered halakhically a high crime.

Of course, today, there is much greater awareness and sensitivity. Most poskim and dayyanim are more respectful of the subjectivity of trauma, understanding that the halakhic lens which operates in terms of legalism cannot always capture the individual circumstances and terrible damage that a perpetrator can do, all within certain boundaries. In fact, I have worked with victims who were never even sexually touched but were clearly in some way being subtly groomed by teachers or mentors for some kind of vicarious gratification, all the while never technically violating a prohibition.

The lesson in all this is to be attuned to subjective distress. We simply do not know what will be the next crisis that we will look back a few decades later and say, “How could we have missed the boat?“. However, we can do our best to learn from the past.

Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation

Do you like what you see? Please subscribe and also forward any articles you enjoy to your friends, (enemies too, why not?)