Excommunication and you
Jul. 21st, 2009 02:53 amOne of the most impressive bits of Jewish learning I've experienced in a month that sets a very high standard is a public lecture by R Landes on Herem, or Jewish excommunication. In 90 minutes, he covered technical background on how excommunication works, a very interesting Talmudic story about the excommunication of R Eliezer, one of the biggest name rabbis who got arrogant because he had Divine sanction for his opinions and refused to accept being outvoted since God was on his side, a historical overview of how excommunication has developed through Jewish history, and a whole bunch of other thought provoking stuff.
For me, the point that really stood out was a piece of Talmud which deals with the excommunication of a sexual predator. It's really incredibly topical, this stuff, the way R Landes taught it made it quite clear that the Talmud was dealing with the same issues we are and not just presenting some quaint, esoteric legal discussion. There's the problem that you can't excommunicate the guy because he's a scholar and the community needs his knowledge. There's the problem that you can't impose such a harsh punishment on him when you don't have evidence meeting normal judicial standards (because after all no predator takes advantage of teenaged girls in front of two kosher witnesses!) The guy in question complains about how he's been treated so harshly, and insinuates that it's all a personal grudge on the part of the senior rabbi who condemned him to excommunication. And later that he's been living as an outcast (a person under a ban of excommunication basically can't participate in normal life at all, and has to follow quite harsh mourning customs indefinitely, including not bathing or grooming himself) for many many years now and he's just a harmless old man and how unfair it is to continue the punishment indefinitely and he's totally changed his ways. He even tries taking his sob story to Palestine in the hope that the rabbis there will be unaware of what he did in Babylon. In the Talmudic tale, the rabbis all stand firm and he remains excommunicated; they even manage to get word from an older sage who had been in Babylon at the time of the incidents. But you can totally see how there might not have been such a happy ending, the rabbis would have been entirely forgivable if they'd relented and softened his punishment.
And R Landes only needed to sketch out the analogy to our situation. We're nice liberals, we don't believe in excommunicating people or other harsh punishments, we want our community to be open and welcoming and tolerant and such. And we want to give people the benefit of the doubt, and make sure we have an absolutely just legal process with a presumption of innocence and really high standards of proof and so on, and we're religiously committed to the idea that a person can repent and change their ways. Equally, we absolutely cannot get away with showing any tolerance towards community leaders who use their influence to get access to vulnerable people to victimize.
Apart from being a completely wonderful class, this reminds me of something. It reminds me of the surprisingly high quality of discussion that arose out of my post on rape last month. I really want to follow up on that, because so many people gave me fantastically honest and thoughtful responses, and I think I could really get somewhere with this. But it's a difficult topic, and perhaps it's foolish to embark on it again when I don't properly have time to work through it. Still, let me try some initial thoughts, and I'll see if you guys come up with wise, profound responses again.
( what do we do when it's too late for prevention? ) Ok, this is more questions than answers. But I really do want to think about this. I want ideas for reasonable, effective responses to the prevalence of rape. Not ideas about protecting women from this pervasive evil, I've already explained why I hate that kind of rhetoric. Not ideas about treating entirely hypothetical rapists in the harshest terms we can imagine. Particularly since I don't have quite enough time for this discussion I am going to be pretty severe about screening unhelpful comments. But I really do want to know, if you suspect someone you know may be, or may have been in the past, oblivious to sexual consent, what might be the most morally desirable reaction?
For me, the point that really stood out was a piece of Talmud which deals with the excommunication of a sexual predator. It's really incredibly topical, this stuff, the way R Landes taught it made it quite clear that the Talmud was dealing with the same issues we are and not just presenting some quaint, esoteric legal discussion. There's the problem that you can't excommunicate the guy because he's a scholar and the community needs his knowledge. There's the problem that you can't impose such a harsh punishment on him when you don't have evidence meeting normal judicial standards (because after all no predator takes advantage of teenaged girls in front of two kosher witnesses!) The guy in question complains about how he's been treated so harshly, and insinuates that it's all a personal grudge on the part of the senior rabbi who condemned him to excommunication. And later that he's been living as an outcast (a person under a ban of excommunication basically can't participate in normal life at all, and has to follow quite harsh mourning customs indefinitely, including not bathing or grooming himself) for many many years now and he's just a harmless old man and how unfair it is to continue the punishment indefinitely and he's totally changed his ways. He even tries taking his sob story to Palestine in the hope that the rabbis there will be unaware of what he did in Babylon. In the Talmudic tale, the rabbis all stand firm and he remains excommunicated; they even manage to get word from an older sage who had been in Babylon at the time of the incidents. But you can totally see how there might not have been such a happy ending, the rabbis would have been entirely forgivable if they'd relented and softened his punishment.
And R Landes only needed to sketch out the analogy to our situation. We're nice liberals, we don't believe in excommunicating people or other harsh punishments, we want our community to be open and welcoming and tolerant and such. And we want to give people the benefit of the doubt, and make sure we have an absolutely just legal process with a presumption of innocence and really high standards of proof and so on, and we're religiously committed to the idea that a person can repent and change their ways. Equally, we absolutely cannot get away with showing any tolerance towards community leaders who use their influence to get access to vulnerable people to victimize.
Apart from being a completely wonderful class, this reminds me of something. It reminds me of the surprisingly high quality of discussion that arose out of my post on rape last month. I really want to follow up on that, because so many people gave me fantastically honest and thoughtful responses, and I think I could really get somewhere with this. But it's a difficult topic, and perhaps it's foolish to embark on it again when I don't properly have time to work through it. Still, let me try some initial thoughts, and I'll see if you guys come up with wise, profound responses again.
( what do we do when it's too late for prevention? ) Ok, this is more questions than answers. But I really do want to think about this. I want ideas for reasonable, effective responses to the prevalence of rape. Not ideas about protecting women from this pervasive evil, I've already explained why I hate that kind of rhetoric. Not ideas about treating entirely hypothetical rapists in the harshest terms we can imagine. Particularly since I don't have quite enough time for this discussion I am going to be pretty severe about screening unhelpful comments. But I really do want to know, if you suspect someone you know may be, or may have been in the past, oblivious to sexual consent, what might be the most morally desirable reaction?
