I used to feel all uncomfortable and freaked out about bone, about having bones, about having a skeleton inside of me. But bones are intricate, minute little worlds and a skeleton is a recipe for function and possibilities.

After watching the show “Bones” for several seasons I have concluded that there is reason to love bones and to love being made of bones at my core. Living bones are not like skeletons. Living bones are alive, containing, enfolding, protecting, they make it possible for so much that we are capable of. Rarely do we question it or think about it. Bones are courageous. Survivors are like bones.

B is for ball. One of my brothers told me recently a ball is the most popular toy the world over. I told him, I know that. I read that in a book of children’s games and online as well. I showed him a small, tiny bouncing ball I had brought with me to California from Ohio and before that from Minnesota. I told him it is one of my favorite toys as well. I had been bouncing it out in the backyard earlier in the day. The ability to play is so tied up for me in playing with a ball. I have never lost the ability to play. We all need that. B is for ball.

B is for beauty. Survivors need beauty. We need to breathe in beauty, to soak it deep into our skin, to drink it down, to feast our eyes upon it. Survivors need beauty. We need every reason that we can find to have a reason for joy in this world. We need beauty like others need food or water. We need to have a reason to stay here, we need beauty, we need to find love, something to love, something for us to want, something for us to find joy and happiness with, something to make our hearts beat a little bit faster. Beauty is healing and we need all the healing we can find.

This article originally appeared in Kate1975’s Blog; reprinted with permission.

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He shows how even in love passages, Shakespeare’s choice of imagery contains allusions to rape narratives in classical and contemporary literature. The poem on which Romeo and Juliet is based, Arthur Brooke’s poem “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” casts a much dimmer view of Romeo’s motives.

These allusions help the audience understand that both Juliet and her families concerns about Romeo’s motives are more than just the modesty of young love or family prejudice. They reflect tendencies and concerns about rape in the surrounding culture. For example, Juliet’s second suitor is named Paris. In Greek mythology, Paris stole, and presumably raped, Helen of Troy. Watson further points out that forced marriages were recognized even by contemporaries as a form of socially sanctioned rape.

Though Watson does not use the term “rape culture”, Watson astutely observes its presence even in this most romantic of plays. He also makes a secondary observation that this juxtaposition of perfect romantic love and rape is intentional and meant to disturb.

Watson thinks that Shakespeare is challenging our tendency to force all male eroticism into two categories: romance and rape. He argues that resistance to this idea is

a the fantasy that there is nothing between the benign melting-together of angelic lovers (as in Donne’s “Air and Angels” and Milton’s Paradise Lost, devoid of any element of physical aggression or potential exploitation) and sub-bestial attacks (as on Lucrece and Lavinia)” and that we need to acknowlege (sic) a middle ground between the two. (pp. 31-32)

A middle ground between the two? Isn’t the confusion of violence and sex one of the most common ways of defining rape culture? Is Shakespeare arguing that rape culture is an acceptable reality? Or is there more to this?

Shakespeare is indeed deconstructing social expectations, but he is doing so to criticize the confusion of sex and violence, not to argue for a middle ground. He is deconstructing a society that recognizes certain forms of marriage and sexual aggression as rape and then condones them in the name of family rivalry and alliances – be that of ancient Greece or Renaissance Verona. The juxtaposition of rape and love in “Romeo and Juliet” serves to underline the difference between the two and the tragedy created by a culture that confuses the two. By declaring some sort of liminal space between rape and love, Watson’s conclusions in fact reinforce the very culture that Shakespeare is trying to call to task.

Portrait Partials (Carolee Shneemann)

Part of the problem is that Watson’s analysis of perspective only goes skin deep. A multiplicity of perspectives does not necessarily shift an event into some compromise zone of shared reality.

In fact the failure to give up one’s own reality in favor of an irreconcilable opposing view held by a weaker, vulnerable party is at the heart of many of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Macbeth loses the loyalty of his nobles because what he sees as royal strength his subjects see as tyranny. When the witches, quintessential symbols of marginality, tell him he will certainly die, he effectively denies their prophesy by concluding there is no such thing as a threat from a man “not of woman born”. His subject Macduff knows otherwise and Macbeth’s naive belief leads him straight into the hands Macduff and death. Othello’s refusal to believe in his wife’s chastity leads to both her death and his own. King Lear’s refusal to believe either his fool or his youngest daughter, lead him to madness and death. Tarquin’s lavish insistence that Lucrece’s hospitality, beauty and terror implies passion lead to his death and the end of the Roman monarchy.

Rape and love co-exist in Romeo and Juliet for the same reason that filial love and betrayal coexist in King Lear – they create the polar opposites around which themes of perception, deception and power revolve. Rape happens when a stronger party refuses to accept the will and perceptions of a weaker party. One calls it love. The other insists there is no reciprocal desire. What better forum to discuss the confusion of rape and love than a tragedy that juxtaposes perceptions of love and rape?

In the processing of rape both now and in the Renaissance there are many different stories to be told: the story according to the survivor, the story according to the rapist, the story according to the rules of evidence, the story later on as life experiences give perspective on earlier life experiences.

Checkmate (Ramon Borges)

Not all of these perspectives are reconcilable. Sexual intercourse is not merely a set of physical acts. Our perceptions of meaning and intent are key to the experience and meaning is inherently subjective. It is entirely possible for one person to see the event as rape and another person to see it as love. Shakespeare is surely aware of this. His poem “The Rape of Lucrete” is a superb study of the contrasting perspectives of rapist and victim. As a survivor of rape I found his depiction of the differing perceptions of victim and rapist so on the mark I felt I was reliving my own rape.

A perpetrator will often try to convince himself that force shows the strength and sincerity of love. But for the victim, force vitiates love. Compromise for ulterior motives, for example, family honor or future economic security, should not be confused with a middle ground between love and rape. It simply means that human beings have always had and always will be driven by more than one agenda.

But there is yet another reason why we should be wary of the idea that Shakespeare is exploring some sort of shared liminal truth. In almost every instance where differing perceptions reconcile into a shared conception of reality, the play is either a comedy or madness is a pervasive and dark theme hanging over the play.

Romeo and Juliet ends in neither laughter or madness. We have only the sorrowful realization that “For never was a story of more woe, Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” Romeo and Juliet die never understanding the truth about one another. Montague and Capulet continue to misperceive the true source of their loss. Both in her perceptions of love and rape, Juliet is the powerless truth bearer that each character in turn refuses to recognize.

Romeo’s hanging around Juliet’s balcony could be true love or it could be stalking or casual interest or even a deliberate attempt to humiliate her family. Juliet insists that Romeo marry her if his intentions are true, because she knows a dalliance with a young man that does not end in marriage will likely take her out of the marriage market all together. She cannot afford to make a mistake. Furthermore, deflowering your enemy’s virgins was a common form of humiliation. Given the enmity between the families, she had special reason for concern. In fact, the opening of the play begins with such a threat against the house of Montague from her own house, the house of Capulet:

Sampson: …women, being the weaker vessels,
are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push
Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids
to the wall

After they marry, differing perceptions of love and rape, honor and violation, and life and death intertwine and lead to the final demise. When Tybald, Juliet’s cousin, challenges him to a duel, he refuses. Romeo cannot tell his cousin Benvolio that Tybald is now family, so Benvolio thinks Romeo is merely being a coward. These conflicting perceptions lead Tybald to fight in Romeo’s stead. When he is killed, Romeo has no choice but to seek vengence and kill Tybald. This in turn forces him to flee town without Juliet.

Meanwhile Juliet’s father wants to make an alliance with the family of Paris and tries to force her into yet second marriage. To Juliet this is rape. Her heart and now her body belong to Romeo. To the family the marriage to Paris is the beginning of joy and love. Her father even advances the marriage day thinking that Juliet would welcome such an alliance to distract her from grief. She has no power to choose and is too fearful to tell her father that she is already married. To escape a forced marriage, she takes a sleeping potion that makes her appear to be dead. When Romeo hears that Juliet is dead he returns. Not knowing that the death is faked, he despairs and kills himself. When Juliet awakes and sees her “true love” dead, Friar Lawrence offers to hide her in a nunnery. These key moments, the death of Tybalt, the announcement of her planned marriage to Paris, and the offer to hide in a nunnery are bound together by the use of the words “dispose” or “disposition”. These are the only times these words are used in the play. Rather than acquiesce to the culture that lead to her sorrow, she too kills herself.

Although Montague and Capulet reconcile with one another at the end of the play, the cultural context that lead to their demise will continue. Marriages will still be made for the sake of political alliance. Young women will continue to lack social recognition for their right to choose a mate and will go to extreme measures to escape forced marriages. Young men will continue to die in duels fighting for family honor. Montague’s offer to build a golden statue of Juliet may honor Juliet but it will not change the culture that lead to her death. “For never was a story of more woe, Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

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The mystery of hope. Sting’s version of this eerie medieval carol for Christmas and the Feast of the Annunciation celebrates Mary, mother of Jesus. But old songs can have new interpretations. Its haunting music and dark images mixing innocence and awe celebrate the potential of any woman who has lived through horrible circumstances and stills finds ways to bring hope into the world.

In these words we can see not just Mary, but all women:

For know a Blessed Mother thou shalt be,
All generations laud and honor thee
Thy Son shall be Immanuel, by seers foretold.
Most highly favoured Lady! Gloria!

Immanuel means “God with us”. The wisdom of a woman who has survived her circumstances is a wisdom as deep as life itself. She brings life into the world through this wisdom, both in the way it shapes her actions and the way it shapes her words and all future choices. This wisdom goes beyond the wisdom of her own generation, because it touches all those she nurtures. They in turn carry it forward to those they touch, like angels carrying God’s message of hope into the world.

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Threesome (Felix Nussbaum)

When I was a child I loved to read Holocaust stories. My parents were preoccupied with themselves and their dissolving marriage. I got teased a lot at school. The stories of young people who lived during the Holocaust reminded me of how much worse life could be. They helped me understand that no matter how frustrating my life was, I had the option of growing up and escaping.

At thirty, in the middle of the night on Rosh HaShanna, everything changed. The rape took only a half hour or so, but in those moments my understanding of the Holocaust changed forever.   It put me face to face with an evil I had never imagined.

Up until that point I had never noticed how easily we take the sacredness of human beings for granted. Even in our most selfish moments we still understand that another’s body and life are their own. If we do not like a person we keep our distance. Or we plot revenge but stop short of acting. Or we act out but we stop short of destroying. Something stops us, but we never think what.  We do not attempt to take their life or violate the boundaries of their body.

The man who raped me did both just for fun and just because he could. He took delight in treating a human life as lightly as one might take a candy bar. He casually tore away at my clothes as if they had no more meaning that the paper that wraps a candy bar and is quickly tossed into the garbage. He toyed with my life, strangling me until I had no choice but to choose between death and rape. He tore my body from my soul, and for the first time I understood that a human body could be owned by someone other than the soul that lived within it. Even after I chose rape over death, I did not know if I would leave that night alive or dead, because he strangled me once again for fun.

Nothing in my childhood prepared me for this. The misery of my childhood was the ordinary misery imposed when all too limited people conflict with one another. The rape was an evil of an entirely different sort. I was too frightened to be sad or angry or even afraid. Everything I had was devoted to staying alive, just in case it was an option. In ordinary misery we trip over boundaries we don’t even notice are there. This evil sought out boundaries just for the joy of violating them.

As much as we like to theologize the Holocaust and place it on a plane above all other evil, it isn’t. The horror of the Holocaust was built upon millions and millions of moments like the one I experienced that night. That night I learned that the evil that fueled the fires of the Holocaust and each of its daily indignities was alive and well, experienced by thousands each day around the world. We can only shoot at babies in the air and bodies standing naked in ditches if we loose our sense of sacredness and allow babies and bodies to become as insignificant as litter skipping across the street. Without the capacity for depersonalization, intolerance could never have created the Holocaust. Tyranny would be impossible.

The enormity of the Holocaust makes evil easy to see, but we must never see it as an evil apart. The capacity for depersonalization exists in us all, to a greater or lesser extent. But even worse, if we allow enormity to make suffering distinctive, somewhere there is a Holocaust victim whose suffering we have made insignificant. Six million did not suffer. One suffered six million times.

In Jewish thought to save a single life is to save the world. Because we are each in the image of God, the desecration of a single human is an infinite crime. To multiply the death of a single person by six or even eleven million is simply to multiply infinity by millions. No person should ever have to live through what I lived through that night. Not one. Not six million.

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Slobodan Milosevic

Idi Amin

Saadam Hussein

Chairman Mao

Augusto Pinochet

Joseph Stalin

Adolf Hitler

The photographs to the left are part of a photo essay titled “Potency” by Nina Maria Kleivan. Its intent is to question how innocent children become pinicles of evil. The photographer is the daughter of a a member of the Norweigian WWII resistance who eventually was captured and placed in a German concentration camp. As a child her anger at what her father suffered was so intense that she carried around the name of one of her father’s prison guards in hopes of one day killing him. As a new mother she was struck by the innocence of children and then by the seeming innocence of dictators. “When all you see is a picture, Stalin could’ve been anyone’s kind grandfather. You can’t see the millions of people on his conscience or what a paranoid, dreadful human being he was.” she tells HaAretz.

Evil doesn’t always “look evil”. We come to associate the dress of Hilter or Mussilini or Idi Amin or Sadaam Huessein with evil because of a life long chain of choices. Those choices lead to personal actions and even world events that define a person. The actions and their outcomes, not the clothes make a dictator or a rapist.

Yet when we as a society finally acknowledge evil, we tend to look at the outside. The characteristic dress of the perpetrator becomes the symbol of evil and the process by which evil comes to be is lost. We forget that any of us, making the a certain chain of choices in a certain social context could be perpetrators of evil. In Klevian’s words to HaAretz:

We all begin life the same. We all have every opportunity ahead of us. To do good, or inexplicable evil. You need to be conscious that your actions have consequences that impact on your fellow human beings. The people I let my daughter portray didn’t give a damn about the human cost, the casualties, their thoughts caused. The responsibility is yours alone. You can’t throw it away – as a parent, as human beings – and say that you just followed orders.

Klevian raises important questions: where does evil come from? How does innocence become a symbol of evil? Unfortunately, much of the on-line debate has centered on whether a mother should or should not dress her child up in the clothes of dictators. When all one sees is a picture of a baby, it appears that all one sees is the baby. The child succeeds as a symbol of innocence, but fails as a symbol of choice.

We lose the tension between the grandfatherly picture of Stalin and the mass graves of the Stalinist purges carried out on his direct command. The clothes of an adult Hilter or Milosevic represent their choices because adults are actors in control of their life. Infants do not choose their clothes. At best their clothes represent the choices of their parents and the influence those parents will eventually have over the child’s life.

So is this an essay on the role of a parent in shaping a child’s moral identity? No, because at some point children become adults. They become moral agents in their own right and responsible for their own choices. The evil that so apalls us is the product of adult choices. Evil parents don’t always raise evil kids. In fact, childhood experiences of evil can bring out the best in human beings rather than the worst.

Dressing the child in the clothes of despot also fails as a symbol of the danger of following commands. Childhood in fact represents the one stage in life where following commands may lead to more rather than less morality. Most of society sees a child’s ability to follow commands as an essential step in moral training and development. How many times does a child share food or toys because their mother or father insisted that they do? Some children are naturally generous and outgoing. Others need to be encouraged.

Furthermore, the despots portrayed in Klevian’s photos were the ones who issued the commands. They were in full control of their moral agency and chose to use it to draw lines between friend and foe. All who supported them lived. All who opposed them were candidates for death. Of course they looked like kindly grandfathers. To the people they saw as friends, they were.

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Like PG and R movie ratings, its purpose is to mark difficult material. The phrase “trigger warning” comes from literature on trauma recovery. Anything that symbolizes or reminds someone of a past painful experience has the potential to reawaken or “trigger” vivid memories and strong feelings associated with that experience.

Trigger warnings are meant to be like the highway signs warning of S-curves. They are meant to give a reader time to prepare themselves for emotional jolts. However, if we are not careful, they can start looking a lot more like an NC-17 movie rating.

Movie ratings are all too often used to express social judgments and exclusion. G may officially stand for “general audience”, but in most peoples minds it also means good clean family friendly fun. A movie with too much “bad” language is marked PG. Producers often prefer to release movies unrated rather than risk an NC-17 rating because many advertisers and theaters refuse to promote or show NC-17 movies as a matter of policy.

Sometimes this judgment may be merited. Often sex and violence in movies are gratuitous. It does nothing to push the message of the movie forward. It is added to increase sales or win artistic kudos for being “edgy”. It seeks to titillate and entertain and impress.

But what happens when the violence is not gratuitous? What happens when the violence is just real life? What happens if lessons learned from violence gave a person reason to dedicate their lives to seeking social justice? Should we be marking the lived experience of human beings with warnings? Are some experiences, however difficult, transformative and healing?

Isolation and even shame is a huge part of the pain of trauma. Stories of trauma and the lessons learned from them are not merely stories, but lived experiences. By marking lived experiences as triggers, we are essentially quarantining a part of that person. We are saying “This part of your life is so horrible that you are forbidden to talk about it unless you surround it with signs and rituals.”

So horrible? Or so sacred? We can also look at the signs and rituals, and see them as a demarcation of the sacred. When Moses tried to approach the burning bush, God said “Do not come closer…this is holy ground”. Then follows hell and hope: a recitation of the horrors of slavery, but also God’s promise to personally deliver Moses’ people from those horrors. (Exodus 3:1-8). God effectively gave Moses a trigger warning. But this was not to turn Moses back, but rather to empower Moses to play a role in God’s mission.

When Moses met God face to face on Mount Sinai, his face was so touched by the glory of God that his own people told him to cover his face – they could not look at it. How did Moses feel when he was effectively shunned by his own people, even his own brother Aaron (Exodus 34: 30-31)? There are times when we need to keep even holiness at a distance. None the less, the people continued to listen to Moses and include him. In fact his power grows. Though Moses was at a distance, he was not alone. The difference between feeling awe and passing judgment is found in our willingness to listen.

When a survivor of violence has found wisdom and hope, their experiences become sacred ground. They are a burning burn that speaks of hell, but also of hope. We can never share the experience of a survivor, but we can join in their mission. There is a limit to how close we may come, but that doesn’t mean we are without response. Moses took off his shoes to become more connected to holy ground. Moses’ people stood and listened. They acted even when they didn’t fully understand. Do we?

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Roethlisberger’s fans were not too happy about McNulty’s claims in July and they took their wrath out on the accuser. But with this second allegation, the fans are focusing their anger on the alleged rapist, Roethlisberger. Tom Smith at the Bleacher Report wrote: “”I was willing to give Ben the benefit of the doubt after the first allegation, but this second one stinks. At this very least, Ben is a world-class idiot who should lose his sponsors. At worst, he is a sexual predator who should be locked up.” Hampton Stephens in the Atlantic sums it up this way: “When you are the quarterback of that team, your job is to lead. Even assuming Ben is innocent of any wrongdoing … his life outside the stadium is clearly interfering with his ability to lead in it.”

Why the switch? In an interview, CBS legal analyst Jack Ford explains that the March accusation has a higher “index of reliability”. Andrea McNulty never reported the case to the police. When she finally did decide to seek justice she went through the civil courts rather than the criminal court. The college student sought treatment at the hospital and reported the alleged rape immediately after it happened.

It sounds reasonable enough at first glance, but is it?

In the McNulty case, McNulty did in fact report immediately – to her hotel’s Chief of Security. Her legal complaint isn’t merely or even primarily about Roethlisberger. The legal complaint includes her hotel’s senior management as defendants and charges them with failing in their duty to preserve evidence and investigate employee complaints of mistreatment. She filed in civil court because these issues are outside the scope of criminal prosecution and could have only been handled in civil proceedings.

Credibility is not the issue here because McNulty’s allegation is over her employer’s failure to investigate or preserve evidence crucial to establishing her credibility. She alleges that hotel had room cameras that should have recorded the incident, but even after she made her complaint to management, they made no effort to preserve evidence. Presumably this would include any evidence that might have been captured by those cameras.

The core issue should have been “How much responsibility does management have when an employee complains they were assaulted by a customer?” Yet the employment issues received short shrift outside of feminist media. When McNulty made her accusation in July, 2009, her credibility rather than interference in her ability to establish it became the sole focus. Even more troubling are the reasons used to impeach her credibility. They would have made Kafka proud.

When the court of public opinion discovered that McNulty was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD), blogs in the celebrity sphere argued that the PTSD made her unreliable. Apparently if a victim is sufficiently traumatized to develop PTSD, the trauma can’t be proved because the victim is too crazy to be a valid witness to that trauma. Next the media discovered that McNulty had been duped by someone impersonating a soldier in Iraq. Did sports blogs care that impersonating someone is a form of fraud? No. Did they question the impersonator’s morals? No. Did they say “wow, this women gives others the benefit of the doubt to a fault and is unlikely to misread good intentions as foul”? No. Apparently, the more likely you are to believe people are well-intentioned, the less reliable you are when you finally conclude that some one is playing foul.

Annie Shields, at the Ms. Magazine blog, might be a bit closer to the truth when she observes that the victim has all but disappeared from the latest commentary: “”As it turns out, the classic approach of discrediting or blaming the victim doesn’t play as well the second time around, so, instead of maligning the quarterback’s 20-year-old accuser, many in the media have simply ignored her.”

But was the victim ever present in the commentary on the allegations in July? Superficially, yes. In reality no. The substance of McNulty’s civil suit was ignored. The vast majority of the media only cared that the suit included Roethlisberger as a defendant. The criticism of McNulty wasn’t about McNulty the victim but McNulty as a threat to the cherished hero Ben Roethlisberger.

Whether it is Mike Tyson, Roman Polanski, or Ben Roethlisberger, the real issue is that we don’t like fallen heroes. We crave heroes. In school, we teach them in Greek and Roman myths. In church and synagogue, we study them in the Bible. We make them up in comic books. We build TV shows around modern myths like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Smallville. We devote countless electronic bytes and airwave minutes to the latest sports heroes, Holliwood stars and popular singers. And we grieve hard when they fall.

Sean Conboy of the Pittsburgh magazine sums it up this way:

How ironic is it that NFL organizations spend millions of dollars on public relations and media training in order to tell the fans what they should think, yet they don’t seem to spend much effort teaching their own players to think. To act like men…in the throes of the crusty, pulsing hangover from Ben’s Dudes Night Out, I feel that same strange/ashamed feeling I get whenever I look back and actually watch old WWF clips. What the hell was I watching? Who was I rooting so hard for?…These are my boys, and deep down inside I want to believe in them.

Perhaps we are looking for the wrong heroes? Why do we work so hard to convince ourselves that Roman Polanski and Ben Roethlisberger are innocent? These heroes fall because we expect to have moral triumph and star power in one single neat bundle. We want outward signs of an inward grace. Star power is easy to see. Moral courage is hidden. It can only be observed through a long pattern of action in difficult circumstances.

Moral courage is Andrea McNulty pursuing her court case despite intense media pressure and then offering to drop Roethlisberger from the list of defendants if only he will admit to the crime and make restitution via a donation to a women’s advocacy group.

Moral courage is the unnamed victim of the second alleged rape who took the risk of being laughed at when she reported her crime to a police officer who only a few hours earlier had posed for a photograph with Roethlisberger. Who could have missed the public drubbing that Roethlisberger’s first accuser got?

These aren’t Sean Conboy’s “boys”, but maybe they should be?

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(Jehosuah HaLevi)

Why is it that advocating for one cause sometimes makes us blind to another?

In November, 2009 the Huffington Post reported that insurers in 8 states and the District of Columbia permitted denial or cancellation of coverage due to a history of being a domestic violence victim. There was a huge PR storm in the general media lamenting how wrong it was to punish innocent victims.

Two blogs focused on disability issues protested: Three Rivers Fog and FWD/Forward, which cross-posted the Three Rivers Blog post. The post and both blog discussions argued that there is something outrageous in the idea that people would think that denying coverage to a survivor of domestic violence is more heinous than denying coverage to a purely medical pre-existing condition.

Both blogs have an important point to make. In the public zeal to protect the innocent, someone seemed to have forgotten that those living with chronic health problems are no less innocent than domestic violence survivors. No matter who you are or why you need coverage, making insurance too expensive to pay for or denying coverage outright is a terrible thing. The US medical system’s price scales presume insurance coverage. A person who does not have medical coverage is penalized twice, first for the lack of coverage, and second because what medical costs he or she can pay for are priced on the assumption that the average payer is an insurance company with deep pockets.

Who should live and who should die should not depend on who has enough money to pay for medical care. We should be equally upset about this whether the person is denied coverage for acme, asthma, AIDS, a genetic disease, or domestic violence. Life is sacred and all society is responsible for maintaining it.

Unfortunately the two blogs went a bit further and insisted that the outrage was outrageous because denying insurance to an asthma sufferer and domestic violence survivor were morally equivalent. The post concludes “What justification is there for acting as though these practices are any worse than the practice of denying coverage to women who have lupus? There isn’t any that isn’t rooted in a deeply ableist bias.”

Hurling accusations of bias and saying that denying coverage for an inherited disease or domestic violence are morally equivalent fails miserably in respecting the trauma and moral significance of violent crime. Asthma, acme, AIDS, and a genetic disease are no-fault disabilities, unless we want to blame fate or God. On the other hand, domestic violence, is anything but no-fault.

First there is the choice of the abuser to abuse. If we argue that the abuser is a product of his circumstances and didn’t know better, then we shift the burden on society. Society failed to do enough to change the circumstances. Government and charitable institutions, as agent of society, must therefore be responsible. Whether we blame the abuser, the government, or charitable institutions, there are human agents that are responsible for what happened.

Domestic violence does increase health costs, particularly for women. As long as insurers are expected to make a profit on their risk pool, they will have to exclude or charge high premiums to high risk individuals. The moral offense isn’t that it costs more to insure a domestic violence survivor. The moral offense lies in who is expected to pay for that increased cost. Charging a person for a purely medical pre-existing condition is charging an innocent. Charging a victim of domestic violence for the extra cost isn’t just charging an innocent, it is charging the wrong person.

This is the kind of injustice we ought to recognize from elementary school days. From the time we are very little we are taught to take responsibility for our actions. If we spill milk, we clean it up. If we hit a baseball through a window we pay to repair the window. The one person who is not responsible is the victim. Yet in the case of medical insurance in the USA, the victim, the one person not responsible, is the only person being charged.

When insurers charge high premiums or deny coverage to the victim, they are making the victim pay twice for the abuser’s crime: first with bodily injury and second with having to pay for the increased risk posed by the abuser’s violence.

After the bru-ha-ha, the Democratic party pledged that the current medical reform bill would ban insurers from denying coverage based on crime victim status, but a simple ban, doesn’t solve the economic problem. The insurers still need a way to pay for the increased cost of coverage. Once again we have a case of one cause blinding us to another.

Unfortunately we have no mechanism for making the abuser or even the government pay for the economic costs of medical care due to domestic violence. Insurers therefore charge the easiest target: the one actually needing medical care, rather than the one morally responsible for the increased medical risk. They will provide coverage, but at a higher cost to the victim.

Victims of domestic violence aren’t the only people that suffer increased premiums due to another person’s wrongful behavior. People with black lung from their workplace have successfully sued their employers. People whose mobility were permanently impaired from an auto-accident can and have sued for lifetime medical costs.

In theory, a victim could sue her attacker in civil court. However, a lawsuit is useless if the defendent doesn’t have funds to pay the judgment. Employers and drivers have liability insurance that cover the cost of any financial damages. Spouses don’t usually carry liability coverage in case their abusive activities get them into trouble. Unless the abuser is especially wealthy, he isn’t likely to have the funds. Furthermore, domestic partners often have children, so suing a domestic abuser with limited resources takes funds from the same pool as child support.

Even if the defendant has money, not every lawsuit is the gold mine portrayed by the media. All too often negligence and personal damage suits are settled out of court for much smaller sums. After lawyers and out-of-pocket legal expenses are paid, there is little left from the settlement but vindication.

Only one state in the USA, Illinois, has a law requiring that convicted abusers and criminals pay lifetime medical costs for their victims, The Michelle Eppel law (Public Act 94-397) . But even this law has its limits. The state does not step in if on-going medical expenses are beyond the ability of the offender to pay. Additionally, the law only covers the actual cost of treatment for the injuries inflicted by the abuser. It does not compensate the victim for higher overall insurance premiums.

Justice is not just about focusing attention on a cause or the avoidance of victim blaming. Justice first and foremost is about creating a right balance in the world. We cannot achieve justice by looking at one cause to the exclusion of others.

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Four months ago (November, 2009) a young woman, Nofrat Frankel, was arrested because she prayed wrapped in cloth that had knots and tassels on each corner. Like any living religious tradition, there are a variety of subgroups in Judaism, each with its own understanding of what the tradition is. Not all Christians are Catholic; not all Jews are ultra-orthodox; not all Muslim are Sunni. The woman was arrested because one group of Jews decided for all others, that women can not pray in this cloth.

Women wearing tallitot, reading Torah (Yael Katzir, from the documentary: Praying in her own voice)

In Jewish tradition the cloth, known as a tallit, is a symbol of God’s protective presence (Psalms 91:1). At each of the four corners hang knots and tassles that remind us of our responsibilities to act with mercy, justice, and humility in the world. (Micah 6:8). In Judaism, prayer stands between action in the world and relationship to God in our hearts. The cloth fittingly wraps and embraces the body, the tool we use, both to act in the world and to bend and flex in prayer to relate to heaven.

Once upon a time, this cloth, the tallit, was worn only by men. In the last thirty years, women have become more and more insistent on finding ways to pray that connect body and soul, belief and the practicalities, public life and personal responsibility. Jewish women from both liberal and traditionalist communities have begun adopting the tallit as their own. The traditional male version of the tallit is a white strip of cloth with either black or dark blue stripes at either end. Although some women wear the traditional men’s tallit, many women have experimented a great deal and opt for either colorful and rather feminine versions or a simple white on white striped cloth.

Clearly the group doing the opposing thinks they are in the right. They do not see themselves as denying the value of women or their prayers. In their eyes, the women wearing the tallit simply weren’t praying!

In the news articles and comments immediately after the arrest, one could read many such excuses: they wear tallitot as a fashion statement; they are ignorant; they can’t really mean it. But it isn’t just the rabble that gather around the comments of on line news that say this. Even the esteemed Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, former Chief Rabbi of Israel, discounts the sincerity of the women’s prayers at the wall: “These are deviants who serve equality, not Heaven. They must be condemned and warned of.” A month later, when women gathered again for Rosh Hodesh services, some of whom were wearing tallitot, a group of ultra-orthodox hurled accusations of “Nazis” and “not Jews”

Selichot - Night prayers (Anna Kocherovsky)

Doubting the sincerity of a woman’s prayers is nothing new. In the biblical book of Samuel, Eli himself had similar things to say about Hannah, accusing her of being drunk, when in fact she was pouring out her heart to God. But Eli merely rebuked Hannah. When she explained herself he listened with compassion and told her “Go in peace and may the God of Israel grant your petition”. Hannah’s answered prayer was the birth of her son Samuel. When grown, Samuel anointed David as king. Year later, Samuel rebuked David when, as king, David abused his power to make love to Bathsheba. Hannah’s “drunken prayer” gave birth to courage, justice, and empowerment.

Unlike Eli, Ovadiah Yosef and those protesting in news article comments did not listen with compassion. Hannah is considered the true model of prayer by both traditional and liberal Jews. Judaism loves to take lofty ideals and capture them in ritual actions, but there is no formal rule of conduct in Judaism that prohibits women from praying with a tallit. The inability to listen with compassion therefore must come from something deeper and far more concerning: a hardening of the heart of one person against another.

A hardening of the heart. Judaism is a religion built around trauma and recovery: the trauma of slavery in Egypt and the joy of rescue; captivity in Babylon and the rebirth of Jerusalem and the Temple under Nehemiah; the fall of the second Temple and the rise of a rich rabbinic culture in Europe and North Africa; the Holocaust and the re-establishment of a Jewish state.

In each of these stories a hard heart plays a central role. The hard heart of Pharaoh brought 10 plagues on Egypt and the loss of his own first born son. The hard heart of Jews towards the widow and orphan caused Jews to lose the first Temple. Baseless hatred, a hardened heart of one Jew towards another, caused Jews to lose the second Temple.

The Garden (Hannah Frank, 1932)

At the heart of all trauma, for Jew and non-Jew is a hard heart. The world over, when we value power and privilege over compassion we, like Pharaoh, can become self-destructive. When we ignore other’s needs because we ourselves are comfortable, we, like the ancient citizens of Judah, destroy our societies ability to defend itself against outside threats. When we place certainty in our own rightness over respect for honest differences of opinion and the sincerity of our peers and neighbors, we lose the center of holiness, the Temple, within our own lives.

At the heart of injustice to women is a refusal to learn the lessons of person-on-person trauma. At the heart of injustice to women is a hard heart. The lure of privilege overwhelms compassion. The satisfaction of having our own needs met makes us blind to the vulnerable and needy. At the heart of injustice to women is certainty: certainty that all women’s needs are met; or failing that, certainty that all women who suffer are either rare tragic victims of chance or else ultimately to blame for being inadequate daughters, wives, or mothers.

The tallit symbolizes the transformation of heavenly respect into day to day action. It is the bridge between the heart and the world. There is no better symbol to fight over when it comes to the matter of justice for women.

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In mid March, 2008 media personality and rising model Katie Piper began dating a man she had met through Facebook. He seemed like a wonderful match, and she even called her mother to tell her how happy she was. But two weeks later when they finished a night of partying in London in a hotel room, he beat her, raped her, and held her hostage for 8 hours.

She managed to persuade him to release her by promising that they could continue to see each other. Like many women, she decided not to report, fearing that the police would discount her story since she voluntarily went to a hotel room with him. Even when she had to go to the hospital to get stitches for a head wound, she made up a story to explain her injuries to emergency room personnel.

Once home, she refused to leave her apartment. He continued to contact her and eventually persuaded her to go out to a local internet cafe to check her email. On her way to the cafe she saw a beggar with a cup. As she reached in her purse to put money in the’s beggar cup, he threw the cup at her. It was full of acid.

In 2009 Channel 4 in the UK used her story as its “Alternative to the Queen’s Christmas Message”. The six part documentary can be seen here: 1 2 3 4 5 6. Titled “My Beautiful Face”, it chronicles both her medical and emotional journey towards healing. It closes with her reflections fourteen months after the attack: “I want to break free and be my own person. Obviously I have days, weeks, months where it is really hard and I don’t see a future. But then I have this inner thing, where I say, no, I’m going to do this, get back to normality. I did have these terrible attacks. I do look totally different physically, but I want to be the woman that got through that and is now living.” She is a woman on a journey, but clearly the journey has only begun.

Katie Piper, before and after (ABC News)

In the documentary, the beautiful face is backwards looking.   The documentary begins with slides and videos of her former career and face. Early on she looks through pictures and jokes about how she feels like a 60 year old woman reminiscing about her younger days when she was a sexy young thing. She laments midway through the documentary that the scars on her face make her feel “owned” by her attacker.

Two months after the close of “My Beautiful Face” she is interviewed by Sky TV and “My Beautiful Face” appears to have taken on new meaning.  She says:  “The title of the documentary is ‘My Beautiful Face’ and I think my face is beautiful and tells a story and I’m very happy with it.”

My face tells a story… there are few statements more compelling. Each of our faces tells a story. Our beauty comes not from the features of our face, but the way we wear them and the story they tell.

Katie Piper’s willingness to share her story is an important counterbalance to media’s incessant focus on perfect complexions, perfect curves, sexy poses, and near weightlessness. This is not joyous sexuality, but driven sexuality. Sexuality driven by money, fear, and a deep sense of unworth. In 2007, the APA put out a report examining how the media’s focus on sexual attractiveness affects the development of girls. It found that rather than generate joy and self-confidence, it was producing depression, low self-worth, and eating disorders.

Its primary recommendation to parents was to teach their daughters to value themselves for who they are and not how they look.   Parents can make a huge difference, but it isn’t enough.   To be whole we need to look beyond parents, out to society and backwards through the generations. We need stories both past and present to remind us that beauty can come from within as well as from without.   Looking out to society it is important to see women like Katie Piper who can find beauty in the story their faces tell. Looking back in history we need stories like the story of Purim, a Jewish holiday celebrated every spring.

Vashti sent away (Marc Chagall)

The Purim story tells of two women: Queen Vashti who based her life on beauty defined by men and Queen Esther who based her life on a beauty within her. Vashti bargained for love by agreement and sexual compliance with the men around her. One day she had enough. When her husband asked her to dance naked not only in front of him, but also the entire court, she balked. But since her relationship was based only on compliance and the king had all the power, she was banished for her refusal. Vashti’s story is the story of every woman who has believed she had no value of her own and can only win love by bending to the needs of others, including their sexual needs.

After her death, the king sought a new wife and sent out a call for virgins to be brought to his household. Among the virgins was a certain Esther. Esther wasn’t willing to be measured only by her external beauty. She worked on creating a relationship with the king. She consulted with the head of the concubines to understand what the king needed and was willing to give. She asked for no more than he was willing to give and payed attention to what he needed. The king fell in love, chose her first among the virgins, and made her his Queen. Even after this she continue to build the relationship based on her intelligence and sensitivity to others. When there were whispers of a coup, she told him the names of the instigators.

Queen Esther revealing her true identity (Lilian Broca)

What a difference building a relationship based on one’s personality rather than one’s looks makes! Eventually a political leader, Haman, arises that sees Esther’s uncle and Esther’s entire ethnic group, the Jews, as a political liability and he sets out to destroy them. He even convinces the king to pass a decree to kill all the Jews. Her uncle sends a message to Esther asking for her help.

Esther is in a predicament. The king has not asked for her presence in 30 days and approaching the king unbidden could mean death. Esther approaches him anyway. The king is so in love with Esther that he cares nothing for protocol and offers her anything up to half the kingdom. For three days running Esther invites the king and Haman to a banquet. On the third day she reveals that Haman’s death decree will include her.   The king nullifies the decree and kills Haman instead.

Esther was beautiful within and without. She could be bold and break the rules because she understood that her real power was not in her face or her naked body but in her soul: her sensitivity to the needs of others, her connections and intelligence, even her boldness.

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