The Absurdity of Waskow’s Claims About Gafni/Winiarz
Can there be any question that the organizations that hired Mordechai Gafni/Winiarz are not only morally culpable for failing to do a serious investigation into his previous acts of molestation, but for the very way that Gafni/Winiarz did religion?
The Jewish Renewal crowd, led by R’ Arthur Waskow (whose public letter on this topic you can read here) is now going through a soul-searching in which it wonders how the hell this happened.
But there’s been no confrontation with the fact that their rabbinically-led naked parties/orgies are in and of themselves essentially abusive. You cannot have a sexually-ecstatic, clergy-led religion that does not include a strong element of coercion. Gafni/Winiarz was the big red flag of abuse in that community (and it’s likely that their overvaluing of a sexual ecstasy religion helped them turn a blind eye to claims that he was abusive), but there needs to be another conversation about the sexual coercion that lay at the core of this movement.
In this way, it’s particularly worth noting that the place of the Jewish Renewal movement within Judaism is not one that is merely to be debated from the standpoint of religious standards, Orthodoxy/Heterodoxy, halacha, and so forth. From a moral standpoint of public sexuality and coerced sexuality, the Jewish Renewal movement is not simply out of the mainstream of Judaism; it is something entirely outside the realm of humanity’s sense of morality and justice. Polemics about the religion here miss the point.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Hi Steven.
You wrote:
>You cannot have a sexually-ecstatic, clergy-led religion that does include a strong element of coercion.
I assume you meant to write:
You cannot have a sexually-ecstatic, clergy-led religion that does not include a strong element of coercion.
Right?
May 15th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Uri - Indeed. Corrected; thanks.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Hi, Steven.
You wrote:
>But there’s been no confrontation with the fact that their rabbinically-led naked parties/orgies are in and of themselves essentially abusive.
I assume you meant to write:
How come no one evr invites me to any rabbinically-led naked parties/orgies?
Right?
May 15th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
>is now going through a soul-searching in which it wonders
>how the hell this happened.
They are doing no such thing. The leadership is still spinning and ignoring their culpability.
They chose to ignore all the warnings, not to speak to victims or rabbonim with relevant information.
They still talk about process and proof.
Look where it got them.
I guarantee you they are more careful with who they invest their money with than who they expose their students to.
Yori Yanover is a perfect example of the same arrogance that effected the leadership of Jewish Renewal … protect a friend/colleague at any cost. Total arrogance and a total inability to admit that they have lost perspective and can’t be impartial. A refusal to investigate or evaluate new information or ask outside help to investigate.
He called Rabbi Lipman’s victim’s allegations dubious at a time when the authorities had another victim and child porn from his computer and declared it a free-speech issue.
Yori’s posted Gafni defender Berman’s letters as the holy grail on his blog.
Yori is a great example of the same form of flaws which pervade the leadership of Jewish Renewal, our Jewish press and our religious institutions.
And he will never change. He’s just not capable.
They are dinosaurs.
They all just have to go.
May 15th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
Everyone should have a talmid like my JWB. Wherever I go - there he is. My very presence gives him life. I watched patiently in a previous posting on the Gafni story, and he was so lonely — he kept coming back, 14 consecutive times, dying to stir up something, dying to get anyone to disagree with him, so he could unleash on them his vast c-drive full of carefully copied and pasted dossiers - and no one did. I felt sorry for him, so I decided, after all, it’s erev Lag Ba’Omer, give the guy a break, let him have his Goldstein to shake his fist at.
Look at the relish with which he picked up the meager bone I threw him. At once, his complexion changed, his eyes brightened, he came back to life - Lipman, Berman, Gafni - ah, the joy of it…
As the years go by, I’ve grown to think of JWB as a kind of pet. Not very bright, but tenacious, and predictable. As the years go by, we grow attached even to our bed lice. In the end, they’re almost a part of us…
May 15th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
Yonover:
Evidently you’re one of those individuals who needs constant monitoring.
May 16th, 2006 at 12:11 am
Waskow is a flake. Or, perhaps more tactfully, should I say he’s spiritually and intellectually confused? He never understood that all adultry is off limits, that ALL sexual relationships outside of marriage are not permitted? Moral relativists always tie themselves in knots. Gafni is, at least, no moral relativist. He knew what he did was wrong.
May 16th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Mary Wilbur -
In GW’s America we’re all monitored. May I refer you to my essay, Power of the Misquote, published on Hopeways.org I think you might enjoy it.
...
May 17th, 2006 at 1:16 am
Yonover,
Thank you for the referral. Misquotation, misrepresentation, disinformation, stupidity and ignorance spin the web of the world.
Anyone who has ever used credit, opened a bank account, or been employed (unless their documents are forged, falsified, or stolen) was, is, and always will be monitored. Privacy was finished the moment the fed started to collect income taxes (Taft) and issue Social Security cards (F. Roosevelt).
May 17th, 2006 at 8:12 am
Mary Wilbur,
True enough. And so, credit card companies, for instance, have made it their policy to accept customer fraud claims first and ask questions later. As inconvenient, even damaging, as it is to vendors, they must accept this, or face the worse alternative, which is the loss of customers’ trust in their credit card companies and credit card purchasing.
Likewise, I believe, in the marketplace of ideas, because of the vast possibilities for fraud, we should believe the accused and not the accuser, as our initial response. We should suspect claims of misconduct coming from anonymous sources. We should discard such claims when they’re not swiftly followed by official complaints to the authorities.
As we’ve learned from the Gafni and the few other abuse cases currently in the news, complaints coming from real people, in real police stations, are being treated seriously. This is why we opened those police stations tro begin with. But when we encounter anonymous accusers, we should opt, out of hand, to discard the accuser and believe the accused. Otherwise we end up with renegade institutions like the so-called Awareness Center, which makes its living on publishing anonymous pornographic notes in an endless parade of shame and ruin.
Anonymity, like secrecy, has a way of becoming toxic and malignant with extensive, habitual use. Quickly enough, it becomes a powerful destructive weapon, instead of a means to protect the weak.
A 20-year veteran of the Internet, active in online publishing since before Al Gore invented it, I care a great deal about the cumulative effect of toxic anonymity. In my opinion, it has long since departed from the region of free speech and has entered the area of cowardly terrorism.