Post Gafni Erotica

There are many notes that come to mind following the public humiliation of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni and the many good and decent people who have supported him. I’ll list them without any particular order.

For the longest time I’ve been troubled by the fact that nearly all the rabbis targeted by the Vicki Polin crowd have been egalitarian men of faith, whose mission has been to bring women into the synagogue. My thinking used to be that the kind of accusations Rabbi Mordechai Tendler and others have received were par for the course they had chosen. You spend time with women, married and otherwise, you’ll end up giving someone the wrong impression, and before you know it, your animal spirit gets the best of you. It makes no difference whether you did or did not do what you’re accused of. You exposed yourself by the very mission you’ve undertaken.

In the lexicon of the sex-victim cartel, there is no difference between a gang rape in some back alley and a liaison between a mature woman and her rabbi

But I think this is too pat an explanation, which is why I like this other thought I saw online someplace: Charismatic holy teachers have giant evil inclinations. Our Talmud teaches that anyone bigger than his friend has a bigger sex drive, too. It’s not easy, bringing people closer to the transcendental and not getting turned on by it. It revs you up, you become free of the set of moral codes which guide most of us – not because you consciously choose to drop them, it just happens.

The hasidic masters of the 18th and 19th Centuries guarded themselves with an ascetic lifestyle, many refusing to even look at a woman, much less permit one into their chambers. Indeed, when hasidic tales mention a master who went out of his way on behalf of a woman, his act is considered a brave thing, because he dared risk his piety to help a fellow human being, even a woman.

Alas, our pro-woman modern-Orthodox and New Age rabbis do not have this shield to guard and protect them. They permit and encourage women to come closer, and, like I said, they expose themselves to harm.

There’s only one device which can protect them under these dangerous conditions, in which their own resolve is being tested, and in which they stand to become objectified by men and women they’ve inspired: No secrets.

Secrecy is the source of all evil. Secrecy is a manifestation of fear and self loathing. Secrecy is the foundation of addiction. When we say to our children, “Don’t tell Mommy,” or “Don’t tell Daddy,” we imbue them with the seed of addiction. When a spiritual teacher says “Don’t tell anyone,” he has just substituted addiction for intimacy. That lies and other self-destructive actions follow is only to be expected.

Still, I cannot help but wonder about the blurring of the notion of personal responsibility as it is posited by the victimization crowd. In the lexicon of the sex-victim cartel, there is no difference between a gang rape in some back alley and a liaison between a mature woman and her rabbi. The term “predator” is assigned by these folks to, basically, any male who’s been accused by a female of sexual misconduct. It is an effective term, bone-chilling in its imagery, bringing to mind a wily puma flexing its powerful muscles to leap at an unsuspecting antelope. This image is so powerful, it automatically assigns the role of antelope to the female accuser, bypassing our critical evaluation. In many cases, unfortunately, it empowers the accusing woman into a puma, but one so wily and muscular, she destroys her prey irredeemably.

Behind the attempt to shame rabbis for their misjudgment lies a medieval urge to suppress our liberated spirits

I cannot shake the disturbing feeling that by elevating the liaison between a grownup woman and her rabbi to the status of rape we’re absolving women of sexual responsibility. Of course, women in the workplace, or in any other setup in which the man has the power advantage, are in a different predicament. In their case, being forced to consent to sex is a violation of their civil rights. But is it rape? Is the injury of having sex with one’s boss in some seedy hotel room equal to a physical rape in some dark alley?

When we lose our capacity to recognize degrees in evil, we run the risk of losing our capacity to avoid being evil. This is why the “Awareness Center” has destroyed so many innocent lives, with its ritualized pornography and its abandon of judgment and hesitation. This is why the few rabbis who are still affiliated with this center frighten me with their taste for the “guilty until proven otherwise” approach to conflict resolution. One of them, a Rabbi Blau from YU, even accused me of harassing him, because I criticized his actions online. Imagine that. I dared write that the great inquisitor was wrong. Ah, the things his Excellency must endure…

But recognizing degrees in evil is crucial to our development as individuals and as a society. And demanding personal responsibility of all grownups who are not feeble minded is also crucial to our public mental health. And magical thinking, by which we assign overwhelming powers of sexual suggestion to this or that rabbi, serves to infantilize us as a society. Just as no one can be hypnotized against their will, or made to do anything under hypnosis which they loath, so is the notion of irresistible sexual suggestion ridiculous and puerile. It is fine for a child to claim the candy made him eat it – but we expect grown men and women to exert more introspection and personal responsibility.

Alas, having been forced to live in the vicinity of Christians and Muslims these many centuries, we’ve absorbed these two cultures’ warped approach to eroticism and sexuality. It is mind boggling to me how the erotic sanity of our Talmudic sages, never mind our Biblical prophets, has been so eroded, to the point where we find the abhorrence of sexuality so appealing. In a regime of fear, with our phones and emails under scrutiny of government agents, we are being robbed of the eroticism which is so essential to our mental health. We need touching, we need looking, we need hugging and kissing, or we go crazy. And every time some sexual misanthrope celebrates the demise of a rabbi so addicted to his erotic needs he hurts others, we as a society lose another bit of our entitlement to a carefree erotic consciousness.

When examining the bloodthirsty charge of a few insane individuals to punish prominent spiritual leaders who supported Gafni, I urge you to weigh not just the civil rights of Gafni’s accusers, but also the future of our civilized and sane sexuality. Remember, behind the attempt to shame rabbis for their misjudgment lies a medieval urge to suppress our liberated spirits.

Now, as often is the case, I expect the cabal of sexual hysteria to quote this article out of context, email it around and altogether employ their typical crass methods to confuse what should be a gentle and complex discussion. As always, this cannot be avoided, and all I can do is express my profound gratitude at being me and not them.