All week long my e-mail inbox and the comment threads on many of the frum blogs have been melting down with irate comments from frustrated members of our community expressing their justifiable anger at the horrible treatment my dear friend and colleague Dr. Benzion Twerski has received at the hands of askonim (activists) and kanoim (extremists). I actually think of them as baryonim (destructive fanatics; see Gittin 56a).
Reb Benzion’s “sin,” for which he and members of his family were subjected to verbal harassment and threats, was that he accepted an invitation from Assemblyman Dov Hikind to chair a panel of frum mental health professionals and educators who were to make recommendations to protect our children – in a Torah-appropriate manner and in consultation with leading rabbonim – from abuse and molestation in our schools and homes.
I have had the privilege of interacting with Reb Benzion many hundreds of times over the past 11 years as I’ve sought his guidance in dealing with the abuse cases that have come my way. I would like to inform those who do not know him that he is a genuine talmid chacham, a true chassid, and an osek b’tzarchei tzibur b’emunah (one who selflessly devotes himself to communal needs) in every sense of the word. I am proud to call him a friend and I am inspired by his devotion to the children of our community.
In a period of thirty-six hours I fielded several anguished calls from Dr. Twerski describing the pressure he was facing and the harassment his family members were undergoing as a result of his courageous efforts to make meaningful improvement in the arena of abuse and molestation. I must admit that after hearing Reb Benzion describe the threats he and his family members were receiving, I advised him to resign from the position he had assumed. I felt he virtually had no choice under the circumstances.
It is painful to note that history is repeating itself, as Reb Benzion’s father, Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski, one of the great visionary leaders of our time and a prolific writer of more than 40 books, was the subject of death threats and required police protection a generation ago when he began writing and lecturing about spousal and child abuse in our community.
Just imagine how many abused children’s lives would have been saved over the years had we collectively protected Dr. Abraham Twerski by reporting the individuals who threatened him and sent clear, unequivocal messages to our elected leaders and police officers to arrest and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.
Just imagine how much of the chillul Hashem we are now suffering through in the secular press on the matter of child abuse would have been avoided had we taken his sage advice seriously and adopted reasonable, Torah-appropriate guidelines to keep our children safe.
What an olam hafuch (upside down world; see Bava Basra 10b) we have created. We sit silently by when decent, caring mental health professionals who have devoted their lives to helping Yiddishe kinder are terrorized while alleged and convicted pedophiles live peaceful lives in our communities.
I am certainly not calling for vigilante violence directed at pedophiles, but it just boggles the mind that none of the child molesters in our community have ever, to my knowledge, been subjected to anything remotely resembling the harassment directed at both Drs. Abraham and Benzion Twerski.
(And if you have any question as to whether or not there are convicted child molesters living in our community, go to http://criminaljustice.state.ny.us/nsor/index.htm and do a search of the zip codes of our heimish neighborhoods. Warning: you will probably lose your lunch.)
This incident with Reb Benzion is just another sorry example of the Chinese Water Torture we have suffered through over the years as we gradually have ceded the moral high ground to the extremists who have increasingly over the past decade or two shredded the kind, beautiful, spiritual, tolerant and moderate haredi society I was raised in with their anger, intolerance, pashkevilin (unsigned and/or fraudulent kol koreis), threats, intimidation and, often, violence.
Make no mistake about it. We – the vast majority of haredi moderates who have been bullied into submission by these immoral, violent people purporting to represent Torah values – are in a struggle for the very soul of our Torah society. And thus far we have been losing this battle.