When I was a little girl, I never spoke with strangers. Strangers would hurt us. Strangers were capable of great evil.
In the ultra-Orthodox world of Borough Park, friend and stranger were simple words to define. A friend was anyone who looked like us, religious Jews who wore traditional Orthodox garb, had beards and covered their heads with large black kippas. A stranger was anyone who did not. You could never confuse the two. Most importantly, strangers did not fear God.
The garb made the world a clear and safe place and taught us everything we needed to know about right and wrong. If you wore the garb you were right, if you did not you were wrong. As children, we always knew how lucky we were to be living in the insular world of Borough Park. In Borough Park, we could trust everyone. In Borough Park children could not be hurt.
Orthodox Jews were good; they were trustworthy and moral above all. If such a man offered you a ride home, you could always hop in and go. If such a man gave you a drink, you knew it was safe.
It was a good world, if only an illusion. It was a warm and secure place for a child to grow, except when it wasn't. Because in a world where trust was so total, so blind, it was that much easier to get hurt.
Three weeks ago, in Borough Park, 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky walked home from day camp. He got lost. He asked a man for directions. The man seemed safe. He wore a kippa. He did not wear jeans. One day later, the police found Leiby's feet in the man's freezer; his body was somewhere else.
The ultra-Orthodox world of Brooklyn came to a terrifying halt. Tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews froze in horror. They recoiled in shock. They gathered together, bound in their mind-bending grief, people weeping in the streets, asking the questions again and again.
How does such a thing happen? How does a Jew do such a thing? How, God, how?
For the hundreds of victims of sexual abuse who have lived through childhood in fear and silence, this is not a new question. They did not know the words sexual, abuse or molestation, but lived day after day through the raw horror of it, leaving old scars still bleeding like open wounds. How does a teacher, a counselor, an uncle, do such a thing? And why did nobody warn us about it, they ask.
I accidentally learned what the words molestation and rape meant at age 23, after telling a therapist I met about something I had witnessed happening to a friend when we were children. Suddenly I realized I had been talking to strangers all my life. After I started meeting with victims and speaking with therapists, I began to encounter the community's wall of denial. These are things Jews don't do, I was told. It was easy to say it was all a lie or just faulty memories of childhood.
When I first tried to write about abuse in our community, to use the words needed to describe what was happening to so many children, I was firmly told not to.
Some subjects are better left in silence, the rabbis said. Orthodox Jews did not need such words. Those were words for gentiles. We had built walls and had built them high; the outside world could never enter. But as the walls grew higher and wider, we forgot look inside, to see that the most dangerous enemy always grows from within.
The abusers, trusted men wearing traditional garb, had not killed their victims, after all. But they did not need to. Some victims, driven to despair by years of enforced silence and secret shame, killed themselves.
"What will it take for them to listen?" one young man, a victim of horrific abuse, once asked me. "What will it take for them to finally realize what they're doing to their own children?"
It took something unspeakable, something none of us even knew could happen: a murder so brutal, so uncomprehending, we still wake up each morning wondering that life dares go on. What do we teach our children now? How had our walls failed to protect us?
But things haven't come to this. They have always been like this because of that misplaced blind trust. Perhaps now it is time to see it, to crack wide open the secret box of words and give them to our children as weapons, as a promise that they will always know what is happening to them, and be able to describe it so they can ask for help. A world without words is not a safe and warm place; it is a dangerous one, where children become mute victims of torture.
Six months after my book, "Hush," came out, my publisher and I began receiving threats in the mail intended to intimidate us for daring to expose these unspeakable truths about my beloved community. The message was clear: I had violated the rule that said victims must protect the community from their own crimes. Now, I would pay.
For too long we have tiptoed around our flaws with fear and caution, pushing them into the shadows in hopes they will disappear. For too long, victims have been made to be the villains, and abuse was called loshon harah, evil talk. For too long, we have refused to honestly discuss the horrific possibilities, and in doing so allowed our children to fall victim to them. And for too long, I have allowed my own fear to make me part of a wall of silence -- guilty for what I had seen, guilty for what I had written.
I refuse to continue to allow that fear to force me into hiding over a book that should have been written long ago. I no longer want to be known only as Eishes Chayil when my name is Judy Brown. I must find the courage to stand with the victims who carry the burden of our silence for the rest of their lives.
I originally wrote my book under a pseudonym to protect my family and friends from community retribution, but so far we have only hurt ourselves. Maybe now, because of Leiby's tragedy, things will change. Maybe now, we will finally teach our children what we should have taught them years ago: morality has no garb.
Children have always gotten hurt in our world -- sometimes quickly, walking home from school, sometimes slowly, piece by piece, over years of abuse and terror. Perhaps we live in a world that is black and white, perhaps we want to keep it that way, but we must at least know that there is still a whole lot of gray in it, strangers live among friends and that such words, after all, are very complicated to define.
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Rather than being a gentle culture, feudal Tibet was a brutal and unforgiving place if you tried to assert any self-liberty.
I've met ultra-orthodox Jews who were living appalling double lives.
Highland Scots into the 20th century, the Catholic and Mormon Churches, the list is virtually endless. One thing they all had/have in common is their isolation. Another was their need to do their own damage control in the face of the outside world discovering 'weaknesses' under the utopian mask.
It's another variation on the "Us vs Them" mind-frame. And the sooner we can exorcise that way of thinking, the better.
Why would anyone teach a child that clothes, hair, jewelry or anything external reveals character?
It came out today that Ted Bundy's DNA has linked him to 30 more homicides. He didn't go after ladies of the night, either. He knew exactly how to fool "nice" middle class families into trusting him with their daughters. He was the perfect "fine boy" the "greatest generation" wanted their daughters to bring home...clean cut, button down oxfords, short hair, "Yes, sir, I'll have her home by eleven."
Children in India were entrusted to sex-traffickers dressed as holy men after the last earthquake. How diabolical is that?
Doesn't every real scripture say to Never, Never, Never judge by externals!? This horror here is another warning for all. If it saves one child, it breathes meaning into this tragedy. Amen...
I'd recommend reading:
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer (Jun 8, 2004)
Shine the Light: Sexual Abuse and Healing in the Jewish Community (Northeastern Series on Gender, Crime, and Law) [Hardcover]
Rachel Lev (Author)
However, it is much worse in the Catholic church. If you heard one story a day about a child sexually abused by a Catholic priest, it would take 30 years to go through all the stories in the United States alone, and that doesn't even include the ones that aren't reported.
Every one of them should be put to death, and anyone who hid them should also be put to death.
I congratulate you for your bravery in stepping out from behind the pseudonym. Now, work on bringing light to your community. Try showing your community that it will not destroy you to open your doors and windows. But not just one way....it is not only that others might learn from looking into your community, and those who would do evil would be accountable to the wider world for their crimes, but perhaps more importantly, those inside your community might learn about what resources they have available, even if it is outside their community, where they might find help...and perspective. Sometimes, close communities lack distance and perspective to see the problems inside themselves....
There is no stratified society with wide separations where sadistic abuse does not occur. It is just the way that societies work. Witness the results of the prisoner/guard experiment that occurred years ago in CA. Witness the long term problems that the catholic church is facing on a continuing basis to this day. Witness the behavior of KBR employees in Iraq. As long as societies are hierarchical, this is inevitable and there isn't any cure. The only prevention is to make societies as equal as possible.
If there were more influence and assimilation, there would be less systemic tolerance for this type of abusive behaviour.
Fear, on the other hand, is a very easily understood concept. Children know fear before they know language, as self-preservation is the first step of individuation. I can't help but wonder if the pervasiveness of "fear" is overshadowing the amorphous concept of "G-d" when a community is built upon "G-d fearing" ideology and expecting its children to understand what is meant. To think that any confusion isn't carried into adulthood would be naive at best. We know that fear stops us in our tracks and compels odd and frequently dangerous behavior. Perhaps it is time to stop teaching the relationship of "G-d" to "fear" and instead focus on the self-empowerment that is innate, allowing adult and child, alike, to look danger right in the eye and confront it with every ounce of their being. It is All G after all.
but i am going to teach my children to fear and love G-d, because that is what
This brave blog is not about pedophilia. Pedophiles are, unfortunately, sprinkled throughout all strata and segments of all societies.
Rather, this blog is about the CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE among a community of people who claim to be morally superior because of their adherence to a strict religious code.
It's structurally equivalent to what has been exposed for some time now within the Catholic church. The real problem is not the individual pedophiliac priest. The problem is the selfsame CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE.
Anyone who lived through the Knapp Commission hearings, or saw the movie Serpico, saw the same phenomenon in the NYPD. The real problem wasn't the occassional rogue cop, but the CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE in the whole police force.
It's not that pedophilia happens BECAUSE of religion. That's a false charge, to be sure.
It's that religious communities, like the police, have their own agendas for self-preservation that belie their stated commitment to righteousness, justice and ethics. That is the great shame.
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Of course they can be called religious, because they ARE religious.
What you are asserting is a well known logical fallacy called NO TRUE SCOTSMAN.
"No True Scotsman is a logical fallacy by which an individual attempts to avoid being associated with an unpleasant act by asserting that no true member of the group they belong to would do such a thing. Instead of acknowledging that some members of a group have undesirable characteristics, the fallacy tries to redefine the group to exclude them. Sentences such as "all members of X have desirable trait Y" then become tautologies, because Y becomes a requirement of membership in X."
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman
I hear this given all the time here by apologists for various religions: No true Christian would do this, no true Muslim would do that, etc etc etc.