Rivy Poupko Kletenik, JTNews Columnist
Dear Rivy,
I’m very disturbed by the “mikvah peeper” scandal in D.C. First of all, what is going to the mikvah about, and how does it work? Who is really in charge of the mikvah, women or men? Is there any chance a man/my rabbi would see me while I’m in there? And what are we doing locally to ensure women are protected?
The pain of this latest chapter of fantastical breaking Jewish news filling the headlines is almost too much to bear, hitting as it does so close to home.
The mikvah is a ritual bath. The symbolism and meaning connected to the use of the mikvah is profound and hearkens back, according to Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, in his work “The Waters of Eden” — our ongoing shared effort to a return to an ideal human state of faultlessness. One immerses in the water and emerges changed. A woman observing family purity is, after immersion, permitted to have relations with a spouse. An individual going through the process of conversion emerges as a Jew.
In this heinous case, a rabbi is accused of secretly installing a camera in the Washington, D.C. mikvah to peer illicitly at the women using the mikvah. This is a first. A mikvah is meant to be an exceedingly guarded and protected venue.
This is an isolated case involving what appears to be a deeply disturbed person. Because of this incident, checks have been made locally to ensure ongoing privacy and security. Plenty of material on the Internet explains more about mikvah and quite a few books, including the one mentioned above, detail the intricacies of its practice within Jewish law.
More compelling, however, like you and many others, I am outraged by this shocking revelation. How can we grapple with this alleged offense?
You most assuredly have heard of the popular quip that a Jew answers a question with another question. Well, here is a letter in answer to your letter.
Dear Barry,
If what you are accused of proves to be true, what were you thinking? And yes, I have dropped the “rabbi “appellation from your name. I repeat, what were you thinking? Clearly you were not, which is hard to believe. You are a scholar, a mentor, and a professor. So, wherever it is that one’s intellectual acumen “lives” in one’s being — we know yours was operational. You lectured, you wrote, and you taught. You were said to be a genius.
You had to know that what you are accused of doing was wrong. You had to have known that what you were allegedly perpetrating, if found out, would destroy everything that you hold dear: Relationships with family, congregants, students and colleagues, prestige, power and position. So what were you thinking?
And what about us? Just when we imagine that we have heard it all: Clergy abuse, teacher abuse, young people as victims, now we’ve found a camera in a mikvah!
Watching women: Conversion candidates, wives meticulously readying to go home to their husbands, college students trying it out? Practice dunking? Wow. We couldn’t make this stuff up. Is this about perversion or power? Abuse or control? These, perhaps, are unanswerable questions.
What’s the fix here? It’s a pretty big and unruly mess you will have to clean up. ’Cause, Barry you may have not only hurt the obvious victims; those you’re said to have peered at lecherously — you may have sinned grievously against every Jewish woman, every one who has ever used the mikvah, anyone considering the use of the mikvah, and anyone who ever will.
As Ahasuerus’s adviser Memuchan said, “Vashti has not offended the king only, but also all the princes, and all the peoples in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus.” You have sullied the pristine and polluted the place of purity. How can we return there without ugly thoughts of intrusion entering our minds? You violated each of us in our most vulnerable of moments.
Your ugly hypocrisy brings to mind the biting poem by Bialik, “In the City of Slaughter,” depicting the horrors of the Kishinev pogroms and his criticism of the community’s behavior in its aftermath.
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath The bestial breath,
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood!
Watching from the darkness and its mesh
The lecherous rabble portioning for booty
Their kindred and their flesh!
Crushed in their shame, they saw it all;
They did not stir nor move;
They did not pluck their eyes out; they Beat not their brains against the wall!
Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher had it in his heart to pray:
A miracle, O Lord — and spare my skin this day!
Those who survived this foulness, who from their blood awoke,
Beheld their life polluted, the light of their world gone out—
How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke?
They crawled forth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord,
They offered thanks to Him, the sweet benedictory word.
The Cohanim sallied forth, to the Rabbi’s house they flitted:
Tell me, O Rabbi, tell, is my own wife permitted?
The matter ends; and nothing more.
And all is as it was before.
You, the rabbi, the mentor, the protector — meant to safeguard the weak and protect the battered, you stand accused of having crouched and watched, preyed and plotted. Your purported actions sullied the sacred trust of the young, the idealistic and the noble who sweetly wanted to join the destiny of our people. How does this ever get fixed?
Your face is plastered everywhere. And here we Jews are, once again, trying to explain the value of how we live and why we have elected to preserve our sacred traditions passed from mother to daughter.
Parenthetically, though this dastardly deed of which you are accused is yours and yours alone; we must all ask ourselves, as do the communities that lie equidistant from a corpse found between them — “Have our hands a share in the blood spilled?” What responsibilities of oversight, supervision and checks and balances need to be put in place to prevent this sort of demagoguery and cult of personality from going rogue? What kind of institutional changes and policies must be initiated to safeguard community members? Let’s set up those committees, those meetings, and learn from this awfulness.
Here’s the burning question now: Who has caused a greater Chilul Hashem — desecration of God’s name — Bernie Madoff or Barry Freundel? Most say you.
Because you, Barry, are a rabbi. We expect more of you. The defenders say, “He is a person like everyone else. Every professional caste has among its denizens the aberrational anomalies. Rabbis are no different than any other profession — there are bound to be offenders — rabbis are, after all human.”
But here is the difference, Barry, between you and the Peeping Tom gynecologist whose case is being cited to demonstrate “see other professionals do inappropriate things to women” by way of defense of the suspected rabbi-voyeur. No, no, no. You appear to be not just a freakish pervert, a one-of-a-kind scoundrel among saints — you are a proud promulgater of the Torah of apologetics in the service of controlling women through Halachah. You, even as you allegedly set the camera and peered at the women — you set about preserving their modesty and protecting their dignity. Therein lies the rub.
Rivy Poupko Kletenik is an internationally renowned educator and Head of School at the Seattle Hebrew Academy. If you have a question that’s been tickling your brain, send Rivy an e-mail at rivy.poupko.kletenik@gmail.com.