A friend of mine recently posted a link to this blog post about a screening of an Israeli film titled Six Acts. I found the post profoundly disturbing, not only because the facilitator of the discussion whose point was to reduce rape, apparently had very little awareness of the facts of sexual violence, or even because of the comments made by organizers and audience members. I felt disturbed as well because we see such a great deal of sexual violence in our society and we are inclined to write it off in various ways.
As a human being, and as a citizen, it should be enough to disturb me. But as a Jew, I feel that there is a great deal more to be said, and I fear that we are not having these conversations in our community at least in part because in the Jewish community, we struggle with modernity in more than one way:
First, because many liberal Jews wear our “Jewish lenses”—our framing of the world in Jewish terms- too lightly, and we don’t take seriously the idea of sex as a form of intimacy and holiness, whose performance echoes the divine unification of God. And we do not teach sexuality as a sacred act, which is private and precious, rather than an act which is “for fun.”
And second, we also struggle with the reality that in Jewish culture itself, there is a deep inequality between men and women built into our halachic (legal) system. Even though we in the liberal Jewish communities give lip service to egalitarianism, in reality we have not achieved it, neither in our institutions, nor in our personal lives. A cursory examination of the leadership of our institutions (overwhelmingly male at the top) inequality of pay among not only clergy but also the extreme levels of low pay for traditionally female jobs (including regular airing of news stories in various iterations of Jewish press showing preschool teachers and social workers on welfare).
While these items don’t even begin to match the horror of the situation described in the blog post, they are reflections both of our schizophrenic attitudes towards women, and of the unresolved tensions in our two cultures in dealing with women.
Certainly, the secular culture, too, is deeply invested in not examining its attitudes towards sex and sexuality and women. However, as a Jew and a rabbi, I believe that we are failing our communities in not speaking—yes, explicitly speaking—about sex, violence, and sexism, and about how Jewish tradition talks about all of these matter—both for good and in ways that we should find disturbing- and in what ways Jewish tradition can offer a better way.
**In the DC area, the excellent organization JCADA offers resources for victims of domestic violence. Jewish family services also often offer counseling services. The (secular) organization RAINN can help the victims of sexual violence find a variety of support services, and all RAINN affiliates offer 24 hour crisis hotlines. If you or someone you love has been a victim of sexual or domestic violence, please contact someone who can help you.
halachic
Pronounced: huh-LAKH-ic, Origin: Hebrew, according to Jewish law, complying with Jewish law.
