I am writing about recent troubling sexual abuse allegations about a beloved and famous Jewish children's author.  There are newspaper articles quoting women who came forward claiming they were sexually abused and molested by him as young teenagers. 

I don't want you to look up his name because I don't want to be the cause of you finding out more information about a person whose guilt has not been halakhically verified. It is not my place to judge whether or not this occurred. My remarks are in response to the feeling we get when we read about something like this. We must contend with the feelings that are coming up, regardless of their veracity, since they certainly appear credible as reported.

There are experts who are advising you about how to talk to your children about this.  If they are qualified experts, by all means you should listen to their advice.  My goal is different. I want to discuss how to talk to ourselves about this because I found myself personally quite shaken by this news.  I am disturbed why I am so shaken. After all, sadly, this is not the first time we are going to hear about a revered rabbinic authority who ended up committing sexual crimes and being a sexual predator. Unfortunately, this is a part of modern life and the news cycle.  Human nature is the way it is and מיעוטן בעריות. There is always going to be a certain number of people who unfortunately end up committing terrible sexual crimes (Bava Basra 165a). No matter how learned one is, one cannot be completely protected from somehow or another falling prey to their own psychological weaknesses and their own challenges. That is just normal — in the sense that we're used to it — so why is this disturbing me so much? 

It is important to understand why something disturbs us. When someone experiences something that is so troubling and disturbing, even traumatic, the way to heal is to fully accept what happened and to fully feel what happened.  You might ask, why does that matter and why does that help?  I am here to tell you that it does not matter why.  It is like asking why do we need 6-8 hours of sleep daily to function, why do we need hugs, and why do we need to eat. None of those needs are intrinsically logical. Rather, this is the way human beings are made. When Human beings experience painful and disturbing events, the mind shuts down and doesn’t process. When the person fully feels, fully experiences and fully acknowledges what he went through, the healing begins.  This is not a logic thing.  This is just how human beings work.

Thinking and feeling out loud through this essay,  with all of you my friends, is my journey in trying to figure out why I am so disturbed about this news. I hope it will be helpful to others as well. I have two ideas about this.

Sadly, we are used to the archetype of a famous rabbi and powerful authority who ends up being a predator or molester. We can kind of understand how people who are less developed internally end up masquerading and using their charisma and other ways to be predators. However, there is something about this particular person who is alleged to have committed these crimes. This person became famous because he wrote about the deepest aspects of human nature in dozens of books! This is a person who knows how people feel, how children feel, and how adults feel from the inside out.  It is so troubling that somebody like that could have not cared enough or been overwhelmed enough by whatever was going on for him that he could have done this to these young victims. A part of a sexual predator’s process is that, on the one hand, they may have strong desires but there also has to be low inhibition and low empathy that goes along with it. There are people out there who have strong sexual and pedophilic predilections and yet they never ever act out because their inhibition is high and their empathy is high. Here we must wonder how can a man with so much empathy, who can understand the inner lives of children, have done this? We know unfortunately that he precisely used what he had in order to understand children and prey on them. 

Even more powerful, many of us have his books in our homes and our children read his books.  It is almost as if he knew our children!  It is as if he touched our children. His mode of thinking, his choice of words, the meter of his words and the emotions and values in his in his writings are banging around in our kids' heads as they are developing. I think that this is the most troubling thing of all. I think that it vicariously feels as if he touched our children and molested our children.

My friends, I cannot tell you what it will take to heal. I do not know how long. Everybody is affected differently. Knowing that this happened and feeling it fully is when the healing first begins. When the dirt hits the coffin, and you face the loss, is when you start the process of grieving to feel better.  I cannot tell you when we are going to feel better, and I cannot even tell you how true this is.  I only can tell you that this is what we are hearing about in the news and this is what we're feeling and it's awful.

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

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