A Response from a Second Wave Feminist to a Jewish Leader

The following is a response to a Jewish leader who has from a spiritual leader and teacher holding the voice of the sacred feminine.

Dear Rabbi X,

You ignored virtually every point we made in our letter. We stated clearly that the relationships formed between gafni and the complainants were not initially formed in teacher student or employer employee contexts. They were relationships between powerful women and a powerful man. This objective facts recorded in the documentary material make this crystal clear.

Second, you speak rudely and condescendingly about our intelligence. As a second wave feminist I know exactly what sexual abuse, harassment and abusively deployed power dynamics actually are. I experienced it, wrote about it and fought against it my whole life. And as we said in the letter that is simply not what happened here. The documentary material indicates this abundantly and is not merely “loving” as in your reduction of what we wrote to you.

In stating your ‘ethical position,’ you seem to take for granted that women in relationship to powerful men have no capacity for choice. Has it occurred to you that this assumption profoundly condescends to women–even demeans them? Have you any idea how clearly a smart woman–and all the women in this story are smart and powerful–sees through male authority? Do you imagine that a woman in a sexual relationship with a teacher is simply a lovestruck victim with no personal power? On the contrary, women enter such relationships with complex motives, which nearly always include some desire for status, some desire to acquire some of the powerful man’s manna, and more than a little desire to equalize what they perceive as the power differential between them. And in these relationships Gafni was not a teacher. There were people who worked with him, who were his close friends. And to suggest that the email record which clearly indicates full mutuality expresses a period of time when they were under his sway and domination is absurd. It is flatly contradicted by the emails themselves.

These complaints as reported in the press were false. Period. You and your community supported these complaints as reported in the press instead of seeking healing.
You were driven in large part as is clear to all of us, by masculine shadow. Fear, jealousy, power needs and you hid -as patriarchy so often does behind the skirts of women – pretending to be righteous defenders of the feminine. We were not fooled.

Your vicious attack on a colleague who was more beloved, popular and learned then yourselves and actually incarnates care and compassion in his very being, casts a dark stain on you and your movement.

In the process you dis-empowered the women and set feminism and it’s important gains back forty years relegating women once again to the realm of the powerless.

Power however does not reside exclusively with the man.

In fact, the man in such a relationship makes himself as vulnerable as the woman, and in laying himself open to a woman’s intimate actually dis-empowers himself as an authority.

Of course you also forget the reality of love and affection and the dignity of mutual desire.

This is not to say that abuse cannot possibly happen in such relationships. Of course it can, and does. Abuse also happens in marriages. It happens in families. It happens in offices. Abuse takes many forms, including the verbal abuse that bullies heap on those who disagree with them. I refer, of course, to the bullying tone of your letter to me, which I can fairly say was the rudest and most verbally violent communication I have ever received.

In suggesting a dialogue, I was standing in the assumption that as a religious leader you would be able to discuss different perspectives non-violently. You have convinced me that you are not.

Sadly it is seems clear to many of us that you and portions of your community are unwilling to own your own shadow which is so clear to everyone else. The words “frenzy” and “domination” which you project onto gafni describe well the tenor of your letters and of the general discourse in your community around this issue. Only recently an inner circle person in Jewish renewal told us how she was “quashed and threatened” two years back when she wanted to speak a perspective which supported Gafni and demanded that facts be checked.

All the key Jewish renewal leaders who at ages similar and more advanced then Gafni engaged in far more questionable sexual praxis then him, are all forgiven. Only Gafni is to be demonized and exiled. Only Gafni do you refuse to talk with. Only with Gafni do you take public positions and seek his spiritual murder without even considering his perspective through the simple act of talking to him before you take action. Talking to both sides, compassion, justice, perspective taking, forgiveness, holding a healing container for all sides and for the community – none of these concern you because you simply do not want Gafni around. All of the good he might do for hundred if not thousands of students do not interest you. You are far more concerned with self righteously defending your egoic position even if that means inflicting enormous abusive cruelty on someone else and depriving your own community of one of its most precious hearts.

All of us know Gafni well. To say that he is an abuser is simply absurd. All of us can speak to his consideration, kindness and goodness in a hundred different moments, all authentic and real moments far from the eyes of the camera or crowd. That you cannot recognize his goodness or greatness together with his complexity says far more about you then about him. When you are willing to hold some complexity both about yourself, your community, your motivations and about gafni, and about the women involved then this conversation might go somewhere. As long as you deny the complexity your own motivations and shadow and those of the women, you are right. This conversation is fruitless and an affront to integrity and spirit.