Jews for Allah

[Guest]

Joseph and the Question of Sexual Misconduct
Rabbi Melanie Aron

December 15, 2000

If you read your Notes, then you are expecting me to talk about "Reflections on the Zohar". Actually Jewish Mysticism has never been my area of greatest knowledge or enthusiasm but I know it is of interest to many of our members and so this fall I took a distance learning class on the Zohar through the Jewish Theological Seminary's continuing education for rabbi's program. I can't say that I've become an expert, but at least I have opened my mind to further exploration, and I hope to speak at some later date about that study.

Tonight, though I would like to speak about something that has weighed heavily on my mind for the past ten days. It is a subject I approach with some trepidation, as it is neither pleasant nor tasteful. In addition it is a topic that many people feel should not be discussed in public, and one that our movement has suggested that rabbis not address, lest we fall into speaking richilut and lashon hara, gossip and slander. However, in that articles on this subject have appeared in the Cincinnati Inquirer and then subsequently in the New York Times and in papers around the country including our own Northern California Jewish Bulletin, it feels to me like the "elephant in the living room".

For those who have not heard, on Thursday December 7th Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman resigned as president of the Hebrew Union College after being suspended by the Central Conference of American Rabbis for two years for having entered into personal relationships in the past that the organization said violated its ethical code.

This is very painful for our movement and for me personally.

Several years ago a member of the congregation came to talk with me about some feelings she was having subsequent to the sudden resignation of Rabbi Robert Kirschner who had been accused of sexual harassment. Rabbi Kirshner was a dynamic and intelligent rabbi, who had been appointed at a young age as the senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco. He had published an outstanding book on Responsa of the Holocaust period and was well regarded. This member of our congregation had felt very positively about her interactions with Rabbi Kirshner who had been her mentor through the conversion process and was now quite upset to find that her teacher was not in fact, what he had seemed to be.

I guess my feelings about Rabbi Zimmerman are similar. He was my teacher at the Hebrew Union College in New York, where as a pulpit rabbi he came and worked with us on our senior sermons. He was a gifted midrashist, a rabbi's rabbi. At a time when congregations were hesitant about hiring women, he had hired one of my friends, three years ahead of me, as an assistant rabbi at Central Synagogue in New York, and she has benefited throughout her career from his mentoring. At various conferences, I had been impressed when he got up to speak and I had heard, on the whole, good things about what he had done as President of the College. Shelly Zimmerman and his wife, a licensed family therapist, were among the first to urge the Jewish community to face the issues of alcoholism and substance abuse in our midst. Perhaps because Rabbi Zimmerman seemed like such a mensch, his fall from grace has been more difficult for me than that of other rabbis who have been similarly censured.

As in the case of President Clinton, there are those who have questioned how these allegations against the president of the Hebrew Union College came forward, and wondered if they reflect opposition to Rabbi Zimmerman's leadership in other areas.

In addition with President Clinton, there are those who have argued that the issue here is not so much the failing of the leader, but the change in community standards. Past Presidents of the United States have had affairs that were not reported to the press, and for which they suffered no consequences. In the not so distant past, people accepted it when a previous President of the Hebrew Union College married a woman with whom he had a relationship while she was married to another man. Ironically Rabbi Zimmerman was in the leadership of the Central Conference of American Rabbis at the time when new and more severe standards of sexual misconduct were drawn up and enforcement made much more aggressive.

On the whole we do not talk about incidents such as these because of our discomfort and because we don't see a value in discussion. This is the way of the world, someone said to me. This is the result of American Puritanism, said another, though in this case we are dealing with traditional Jewish not Protestant values. Someone else commented on the announcement of two speakers on sexuality on the front page of the most recent Jewish Community News: Rabbi Boteach who will be speaking at the South Bay Institute in January, and Dr. Ruth, who will be speaking at the Federation's annual dinner. "They'll think Jews are obsessed with sex," a member of the congregation commented to me.

Perhaps a little more talk about sexuality and sexual temptations wouldn't hurt. In next week's Torah portion we will be reading about the incident between Joseph and Potiphar's wife. The tradition asked, what caused Joseph to resist Potisphar's wife's advances. After all he was a young man and she was a beautiful woman. One explanation was that Joseph was afraid of the consequences, of being punished: another, that he did not want to betray the trust that Potiphar had in him and repay him in this way for all his kindnesses. A more involved midrash has the face of Joseph's father Jacob appear before him at the moment that Potiphar's wife disrobes, acting as a physical superego.

In this connection the rabbis tell another story, which we actually studied last night in our Bar and Bat Mitzvah family group. Why do we wear a fringed garment? the rabbis ask. They answer with a Biblical text from the book of Numbers: "So that we might look at them, and remember God's commandments, and not turn aside after the desires of our hearts, or let our eyes lead us into lust." Does it really work? the rabbis ask. Yes, says one rabbi, who tells the story of going into the home of a beautiful courtesan, who lies on seven silk couches covered with silver and gold. But as he climbed up the ladder to approach her, the fringes of his tzizit flew up into his eyes and he was not able to continue. The woman, we are told by the Talmud, was so impressed by his piety that she left her life as a courtesan, and after giving a third of her money to charity, converted to Judaism and became his legal wife.

This story from the Talmud holds out the hope that there might be something that does stop us when we are about to violate our own morals. It reminds us that it is the context of sex and not sexuality itself, which has moral value. Fear of consequences, the desire not to hurt those who have put their trust in us, and an internalized set of moral values: these are the mechanisms we depend on today, as in Joseph's time to prevent the kind of sexual acting out, which has been the Achilles heel of so many of our religious and political leaders.