This week Gabrielle Union caused an uproar when she tweeted about Rihanna’s recent video Man Down.
Unfortunately in all of the uproar, Gabrielle Union rather than her message became the focus. Her message was this: we need to talk about rape and Rihanna’s video is getting the conversation going. She expressed understanding but not approval for the solution to rape portrayed in Rihanna’s video, “Man Down”. (more…)
Although If She Cry Out intentionally represents the view points of many religions, its purpose and conception has been deeply influenced by the values of one particular religion, Judaism.
In Judaism the sanctity of life is paramount. Anything that preserves the sanctity of life demands our utmost respect. Anything that violates the sanctity of life deserves deep and thoughtful consideration. It must be uprooted from our lives and our society. Furthermore this uprooting must involve human choices and changes in society. We cannot sit back and wait for divine redemption to make the world better but must join our will to God’s to fill the world with justice, compassion, and mercy.
The notion that even the smallest of us has something to say or do to make the world a better place permetes Judaism and even finds its way into Moses’s final farewell speech.
For this commandment which I command you this day, it is not hidden from you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it, and do it.” Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say “Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it, and do it?” Rather the word is very near to you, in your mouth, and in your heart, so you may do it. See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; in that I command thee this day to love the LORD thy God , to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statues and his judgements: then thou shalt live and multiply; and the LORD your God shall bless you in the land into which you go to possess. (Deut. 30:11-16).
Lest there be any thought that “keep his commandments” means purely ritual or religious activity, the prophet Micah has this to say in the middle of a long diatrabe about God’s disappointment when religion is reduced to ritual:
What does the LORD require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8).
Our obligations to one another and our obligations to the created environment are close to our hearts. We don’t need to be experts on climate change, nor professors of ethics. We don’t need to be popes, or imams, or rabbis. Our contribution lies somewhere much closer: in our mouths, and in our hearts, and in all that we are able to do.
Tonight will start the most holy day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur. It is a day when Jews reflect in depth on what it means to be partners with God, what it means to promote justice and mercy, and what our own individual roles are in that effort.
But I pray tonight not just for myself, but also for the world, that each of us finds the wisdom in our hearts and mouths. It is there for all of us, Jew and non Jew alike because each of us carries within us the sacred breath of life. Each of us was created to make the world new again with justice and compassion, with words and action.
Ken Yehi Ratzon (May it be Your Will)
Beth Frank-Backman
Editor and founder, If She Cry Out.
Unity monument at Bennet Place State Historical Site (Anne Rubin)
My life has been shaped by two crises: my upbringing in a traumatic household and the rape. I have distilled two core values out of these experiences: the sacredness of humanity and the importance of choice and responsibility.
For some reason these two notions: humanity and responsibility feel like two pillars defining a door. They seem to complement each other. Respect is an attitude of the heart. Responsibility requires observation of the world outside ourselves and how we affect it. Respect for humanity is a precursor of action. Responsibility for our choices takes care of the aftermath.
We seem to have a built-in understanding of the fundamental value of human life. With the exception of the worst sociopaths there are some things most human beings just won’t do to each other. To a certain extent respect just happens and we take it for granted. Only the extremes of respect and disrespect seem to require a great deal of intentionality. On the other hand, responsibility can never happen without a conscious choice. For some perverse reason our natural inclination seems to be to shift responsibility away from the source: onto others when we are at fault,onto ourselves when others are at fault.
After the rape the notion of sacred humanity was burned in my consciousness. The rapist intentionally profaned the sacredness of human life and the body that contains it. The severe absence of respect for the sacred enabled me to see clearly something so fundamental to day to day living that it is almost invisible. No experience in life taught me about the sacredness of life like rape did. No book or tradition either.
The situation in my family taught me forced me to think deeply about responsibility, but unlike the rape, its lessons have revealed themselves slowly over time.
In my 20′s my family situation forced me to wrestled with the question of how life could be at once both so wonderful and painful. Since my 20′s, responsibility and choice has formed the cornerstone of my approach to the problem of evil, which I see rooted in God’s odd and paradoxical idea that love is only possible in a world that has free will. It is paradoxical because many of things that happen as a result of free will are in fact the antithesis of love. However we cannot love without free will, because love is not love if it is not a choice.
In my 40′s this was not enough. I began to realize that the pain in my family had created life long insecurities that seemed to flow from one generation to the next. As I reflected further on the causes of pain in my family, I began to see that something was missing in my understanding of choice. To truly understand choice we need to see both sides of choice: its necessity for love and the price of disowning it.
My conclusions in my 20′s grew out an assumption that choice was a given, a fact of life from which we could not escape. As I’ve reflected on my family’s history of hurt, I realize that while choice is a given, awareness of choice is not. My family history was built around a pervasive denial of responsibility for hurtful actions that made victims responsible for their own suffering. This denial not only made it hard for hurt to heal, but allowed it to perpetuate from one generation to the next.
As much evil in the world comes from the way we disown our choices as the way we make them.
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. More »
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.
One of the things that is most wonderful about watching Shakira belly dance is the raw joy. It is the dance of a woman feeling completely safe in her sexuality, able to share its beauty without fear or reprisal or attack. More »
Gregg Milligan and his mother
In the first two weeks of February, Oprah Winfrey decided to focus on child sexual abuse. She aired two shows. The first interviewed four perpetrators. The second show interviewed a 40-something year old man, Gregg Milligan, who had been sexually abused by his mother.
Judging by the reaction on Oprah’s website, blogs and on self-help discussion boards that include male survivors, the interview with Gregg Milligan has done untold good. It has opened up discussion on this difficult topic. Even more important it has given survivors a chance to hear someone like themselves tell a story they identify with strongly. Male survivors of childhood sexual abuse often suffer in silence, afraid that no one can possibly understand their story.
In both interviews Oprah seems bound to a commonly believed but highly questionable idea: that abusers go on to abuse others. In the interview with perpetrators, she asks two of them whether or not they had been abused. One answers yes and it the statement goes without comment. One answers “no” and Oprah expresses surprise. There is an unstated assumption that abuse somehow causes abuse.
This assumption reappears in the middle of the interview with Gregg Milligan. Oprah and Gregg are discussing why Gregg’s mother treated him this way. Oprah tries to explain Greg’s abuse in terms of his mothers own suffering. Then at the end of the show she describes Gregg’s excellent parenting as “breaking the cycle”. She concludes the interview observing that his choice not to continue the cycle is a choice too few people make. This implies that abuse is a default choice and non-abuse requires positive and exceptional action.
We talk so easily about a “cycle of violence” but what is the evidence for it? One of the most frequently cited studies used to support the cycle of violence (Widom, 1989) in fact found that the vast majority of abuse survivors did NOT go on to abuse. Something can’t be a “cause” if it fails to produce the expected result in the majority of cases. The author herself stressed the variety of responses to abuse, but that hasn’t stopped people from using her study over and over as “proof” that abusers go on to be abusers.
Later studies that have broken down adult behavior by type of abuse find that among all forms of abuse, sexually abused individuals are among the least likely to themselves become abusers. In fact, it is possible that the reverse is true: those who have been abused this way often exhibit higher levels of altruistic behavior. Many of the people working in low-status and low-paying jobs in rape crisis centers are survivors of sexual abuse. Gregg Milligan sacrificed himself and his relationship with his mother to protect his sister.
The Golden Rule, mosaic designed by Norman Rockwell and donated to the UN in 1985
The altruistic behavior of survivors should hardly be surprising. One of the most basic rules of human relationships east and west is the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have others do to you”. Across centuries and cultures, this rule has taken many forms: For millenia doctors have been vowing to “do no harm” when they make the Hippocratic oath. The Hebrew Bible commands “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus, 19:18). Rabbi Hillel in the 1st century B.C.E. told his students to “Do not do to others what is hateful to yourself.”. Jesus told his disciples “Love your neighbor as yourself”. Confucius teaches a similar lesson to Tsze-kung:
Tsze-kung asked, saying, “Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?” The Master said, “Is not RECIPROCITY such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”Analects 15:24
No matter how we word the Golden Rule, the Golden Rule presumes the existence of empathy. We need to be able to see and know what harmful, hurtful, unloving behavior is. Survivors don’t have to play guessing games about the injury caused by abuse. Some live it every day and others have spent long hours and many tears overcoming it. But all survivors know first hand how much abuse hurts. They are in fact in a better position to live the Golden Rule than those who have no personal experience of suffering.
The counter argument is that people do not act based on moral choice, but conditioning. We do as we see. Furthermore, some victims are so damaged psychologically that they lack the interpersonal skills to avoid abuse. This state of affairs can only be changed with extensive therapy.
Child survivors of Buchenwald leaving the camp
There is something deeply disturbing in this logic. By this reasoning children growing up in concentration camps during the Holocaust should believe that starving people and sending them to gas chambers and crematoria is proper behavior. Initially, their behavior after rescue from the concentration camps was wild – they would rage and insist on foraging for food. They were considered beyond redemption. After a time they began to settle down, and most moved onto foster care or job training within a matter of months, barely enough time for any sort of serious therapy. And yet, among this group of survivors include three rabbis, one of whom was the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Others grew up to be doctors, medical directors, children home directors. One, Eli Wiesel, even won the Nobel Peace Prize. You can read more about child survivors of concentration camps here.
Of course, the only solution to argument and counter argument is research. It may also be possible that neither thesis is right. It may be that trauma pushes human behavior to the extremes, producing both high morals and angry disregard of others. Unfortunately, there are few, if any, studies to test the hypothesis that abuse leads to higher levels of moral behavior. We have only theories and unanswered questions.
No recent song has captured both the hopes and sorrows of peace of Israel like the song Shir L’shalom (Song for Peace).
This was the song that Yitzak Rabin, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was singing moments before he was shot to death. The blood stained song sheet is in the Israeli national archives.
Ironically, the song was composed and first performed in 1969 by an Israeli military band. Israel is probably the only country in the world that considers the longing for peace proper material to motivate soldiers but this oddity has a long history in Jewish tradition where war is viewed as grim necessity rather than a sign of power or triumph. According to Jewish tradition, King David was a powerful leader but he had too much blood on his hands to build the temple in Jerusalem. That task was left to a later more peaceful ruler, the wise Solomon.
It may seem strange to talk about a song like Shir L’Shalom in connection with rape. After all rape is a crime involving two individuals. War is a crime between two peoples. And yet…
The relationship between war and peace is not simple. In rape, as in war, we are made to make tough choices: to fight for our lives or freeze and retreat. Individuals and peoples under threat both make hard choices. For some odd reason we seem to have a double standard: we judge countries for fighting, and people who are raped for not fighting. Why? Why do we judge individuals for freezing, or even for giving the rapist what he wants?
We say that war is collective aggression and rape is private aggression, but how clear are the lines really? An individual soldier, not society, pulls each and every gun trigger in a war. The rapist does the raping, but in many cases, he has a belief that he is entitled to ignore another person’s wishes and even use force. Society tells him that sex is OK unless the woman aggressively stops him. His peers and even the legal system allow him to believe that alcohol or a woman’s dress or a no that isn’t loud enough is somehow carte blanche to do whatever he wants.
By treating war and rape as separate problems, we lose ethical integrity. Rape is about power, not sex. A society that tolerates rape has confused notions of power that go way beyond the problem of rape itself. We cannot have one standard for individuals and another for countries. We need to make peace by gaining a right understanding of the use of power at all levels, beginning with the personal.
Let the sun rise and light up the morning
Prayerful pleading will not restore us
She whose candle was snuffed out and buried in dust
cannot be brought back with a bitter cry.
None can answer us from the well of deepest dark
Neither joy in victory nor songs of praise will be effective.So let us only sing songs of peace
Don’t whisper a prayer, better to sing a song for peace with a great shout.Let the sun penetrate through the flowers
Don’t look back, let them go
Look up in hope, and not out through rifle sights,
Sing songs of love, and not of war.
Don’t say “it will come one day, bring us that day”
Because this is not a dream.
Raise a loud cry for peace in all the city squares.So let us only sing songs of peace
Don’t whisper a prayer, better to sing a song for peace with a great shout.
When The Goddess looks down on me what do I want for Her to see?
Do I want Her to see a person full of hate or of confusion and pain…perhaps resentment and distrust?
Is my wish for Her to look upon the face of betrayal and fear…a person with no hope of redemption or healing?
A figure hopeless and broken…defeated beyond measure by the hurts life heaps upon them and their refusal to let go?
Or do I want Her to see a being of hope, love, trust, forgiveness, healing, redemption and beauty?
Although those who have hurt me need to be held accountable, I need to learn how to do so without losing my warmth, love and humanity.
Can I learn that even though people have hurt and betrayed me, I still need to trust?
Not blindly, but with wisdom and understanding tempering my decisions.
Can I learn to forgive in the way in which I’d wish to be forgiven?
Can I learn to accept that people change…even those I have long believed completely evil?
Can I accept apologies from those who betrayed me at the worst possible level and give them permission to grow and change?
Do I have a right to forgiveness, growth, redemption and change if I cannot grant it to another?
Can I find the courage within to stand up to the challenges of life and not let them defeat me?
Can I come to terms with the truth that my choice is to either live life to its fullest or to hold onto hurt, resentment, anger and pain and therefore die…at the very least spiritually if not physically?
Can I come to realize that I cut off a piece of my own soul every time I cut into another’s through a spiteful or careless word or deed?
So I can only come to the conclusion that my question truly is:
When The Goddess looks down on me, do I wish for Her to see Life…or Death?
Brook Hill
הַעִידֹתִי בָכֶם הַיֹּום אֶת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת הָאָרֶץ הַחַיִּים וְהַמָּוֶת נָתַתִּי לְפָנֶיךָ הַבְּרָכָה וְהַקְּלָלָה וּבָחַרְתָּ בַּחַיִּים לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה אַתָּה וְזַרְעֶךָ לְאַהֲבָה אֶת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לִשְׁמֹעַ בְּקֹלֹו וּלְדָבְקָה בֹו כִּי הוּא חַיֶּיךָ וְאֹרֶךְ יָמֶיךָ לָשֶׁבֶת עַל הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַּע יְהוָה לַאֲבֹתֶיךָ לְאַבְרָהָם לְיִצְחָק וּלְיַעֲקֹב לָתֵת לָהֶם פ
I have born witness to heaven and earth concerning you:
I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse
Choose life that you may live, you and your descendants,
To love the LORD your God, to hear God’s voice and cling to it
For God is your life and the measure of your days
To dwell on the earth which the LORD promised to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Issac and to Jacob – Deut 30:19-20
To be a victim….
To be a victim is to believe that my actions make no difference, that however I choose the outcome will be nothing and mean nothing. I can choose neither life nor death. That choice has been stolen from me by the one who attacked me.
To be a victim is to see the open door and refuse to walk through it. It is to believe that the current reality is better than risking any new reality because taking risks can only lead to more of the same or worse.
To be a victim is to confuse reality with truth. To be a victim is to see the surface effects and the context of our actions and to assign to them the most soul destroying meaning possible. To be a victim is to refuse to question this hurtful hermeneutic because questions are just illusions and alternatives are mere excuses.
To be a victim is to believe that our choices don’t matter. To be a victim is to believe that acknowledging the role of choice in an interpretation makes that reading untrue. To be a victim is to believe that the only truth is a reality that is forced upon us.
To be a survivor…
To be a survivor is to believe that truth can only come from the way we respond to circumstance and reality. Reality by itself can never be the final word. It is incomplete: it is a book without a reader, a song without an audience. To be a survivor is to believe we are responsible for being that reader, for being that audience.
To be a survivor is to believe that our choices matter. Regardless of outcome, they have an intrinsic value because they define who we are. To be a survivor is to believe that who we are and who we are becoming matters.
To be a survivor is to believe that the worth of our choices is not dependent on their outward expression or the immediate results of our actions. To be a survivor is to understand that if our outward choices looked like they were in agreement with the rapist it is only because we had chosen a good that was more important than anything the rapist wanted. To be a survivor is to understand that our outward compliance was in fact a profound rejection of everything the rapist wanted. Where the rapist wanted to hurt and maim, we wanted to save and protect. Where the rapist devalued life and all that was sacred, we sought to preserve life and honor what was most essential and holy.
To be a survivor is to understand that the truth lies in the way we respond and why and not just in the visible reality of our actions. To be a survivor is to refuse to confuse reality with truth.
To be a survivor is to open doors and walk through them joyfully. To be a survivor is to know that the end of the journey is not in our hands. To be a survivor is to understand that we are only responsible for walking through the door and for each door that follows, one choice at a time.
To be a survivor is to take the long view, to understand that our actions may have impacts we can never fully know and understand. To be a survivor is to trust that the choice that seemed to have no impact at all may lead to a set of changes remote from us, in lives and worlds far away from anything we will ever know. To be a survivor is to let go of the need to always connect the dots and to act in faith one step at a time.
To be a survivor is to believe that our story is not just for us alone, but also for all who went before us, all who travel with us, and all who travel ahead of us.
Elizabeth Grace Frank-Backman
