Communal Rebuilding after Sexual Abuse: Beyond the Limits of Teshuvah

Dec 1

PRESCRIPTION

Participants:

Meirav Jones, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University

Joshua Ladon, Director of Education at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America

Elana Stein Hain, Director of Faculty and Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America

Claire Sufrin, Senior Editor at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America

Sarah Wolf, Assistant Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary

Like so many other communities, the Jewish world has been rocked over the last few years by revelations of sexually predatory behavior, ranging from harassment to abuse to rape. Significant institutions have investigated and reported their own histories of enabling their leaders to engage in such behavior. But how might a community heal after accusations of sexual harassment and abuse become known and are substantiated? How can things be made right again? Often, communities respond to sexual assault by expelling the perpetrator. Should such expulsion be permanent, or can an abuser return to that community—or join another one? Can such a person assume a leadership role again?

Some cases of sexual assault and abuse lead to police investigation, to arrest and conviction, and ultimately to punishment by the judicial system. When this happens, communities may find themselves recovering in the wake of a criminal process. Often, however, sexual harassment and abuse fall short of a crime; there may not be the sort of evidence the judicial system demands; or, for various reasons, a victim might prefer not to approach the police. Regardless of whether a case advances through the court system, the community in which the abuse happened must respond. Community members must determine the truth of a situation, and when abuse is found and accusations are substantiated, they must determine how the perpetrator(s) should be punished and under what circumstances they may be considered rehabilitated.

In response to evidence of sexual misconduct in professional organizations like the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and the Association for Jewish Studies; synagogues such as Kesher Israel in Washington, DC; confederations of synagogues such as the Union for Reform Judaism; seminaries or yeshivot such as Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion; summer camps, schools, and other Jewish youth organizations; and outlets of the Jewish media, we often hear calls for individual and institutional teshuvah, usually translated as “repentance.”

But what might such teshuvah might look like? How might we judge if and when a perpetrator has done sufficient teshuvah?

The conversation that follows emerged from the work of Created Equal, a research group at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Kogod Research Center, in 2022. We address the "afterlife” of sexual scandals in light of rabbinic, medieval, and contemporary sources. This is not a how-to guide, but rather a starting point for Jewish communities that find themselves in acute need of guidance on how to respond—with respect for the dignity of victims of sexual abuse, with respect for the abuser’s potential for change, and with communal tikkun, repair, as a guiding principle. We argue that a typical understanding of teshuvah as an individual’s internal process of repentance is inadequate. We emphasize the need for the setting and maintenance of better norms around sexuality through public, communal teshuvah and education, and we suggest some means by which individual perpetrators might—with some limitations—rejoin our communities.

We do discuss some specific cases below; while sexual abuse knows no geographic bounds, our focus is on widely publicized North American cases in which accusations have been substantiated, as well as some relevant events in Israel.

I. Teshuvah

Sarah Wolf: Let’s start with some examples where people write that perpetrators of sexual assault may be reinstated to a former high-status position if, and only if, they have done teshuvah.

In her 2017 New York Times op-ed, Danielle Berrin used this logic to argue that because her abuser, journalist Ari Shavit, had not yet fulfilled the requirements of teshuvah, he was not yet deserving of forgiveness, and thus should not be invited to speak at public events.[i]

In March 2021, the Rabbinical Assembly (RA) issued a statement calling upon “Jewish studies scholars, researchers, sociologists, and those who support their work” to avoid working with sociologist Steven M. Cohen, arguing that he had not engaged in a process of teshuvah for his sexual misconduct, which had first become widely known in 2018.[ii]

Likewise, in October 2021, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) published an article about a newly released list of rabbis who had been expelled or suspended from the RA for sexual misconduct. The president of one congregation claimed that everyone in the synagogue was looking forward to their rabbi’s reinstatement, as the rabbi had “engaged in a process of teshuvah” for his sexual misconduct. [iii]

The Morgan Lewis Report of Investigation into Allegations of Misconduct at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion from November 2021 closed with a recommendation that the seminary as a whole “engage in the process of teshuvah,” but this was followed by another, separate recommendation that the seminary “take proactive steps to prevent such behavior from occurring.”[iv] Should we think of these processes as distinct?

Claire Sufrin: I think people often turn to teshuvah because it’s familiar. Any Jew who has been to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur knows about teshuvah. I think what we are seeing is that teshuvah has, as a result, become the only thing many Jews (and non-Jews, for that matter) think Judaism has to offer in reacting to wrongdoing.

Meirav Jones: As the phrase is usually used, “doing teshuvah” or engaging in this process presumes that the perpetrator knows they have done wrong and undergoes a process of reflection and change. But what this process is and who gets to judge whether it has taken place remains exceedingly vague, as does the relevant timeframe. To be specific: what sort of evidence could convince Berrin that Shavit has gone through a process of changing his treatment of women?

Claire: Strikingly, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, in her recent book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, which is based on Maimonides’s laws of teshuvah, is clear that whether or not a victim forgives a person who has harmed them “is independent of the question of whether [the perpetrator] has done real, meaningful, important repentance work.”

Sarah: Rabbinic sources present teshuvah as one of several mechanisms by which a person achieves atonement or expiation of their sins. Consider this passage from the Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael:

R. Matia b. Heresh came before R. Elazar HaKappar in Lydda. He said to him: My master, did you hear the four types of expiation that R. Yishmael taught? He responded: One verse says “Return [shuvu], rebellious children” (Jer. 3:14); this teaches that repentance [teshuvah] expiates. One verse says, “For on this day you will be expiated of all of your sins” (Lev.16:30); this teaches us that Yom Kippur expiates. One verse says, “Surely this iniquity will not be expiated by you until you die” (Isa. 22:14); this teaches that death expiates. And one verse says, “I will punish their transgressions with the rod and their sins with plagues” (Ps. 89:33); this teaches us that sufferings expiate” (Yitro Debachodesh 7).

According to this text, teshuvah is one method by which a person can clear their personal debts to God, and it is analogized to personal (as opposed to interpersonal) experiences such as death or the Yom Kippur rituals. Repentance in this classical text is thus primarily about the relationship between a person and God, rather than a person and their community. It is therefore separate from the determination of what role a person may play in the community and how that community might prevent future harm.

Joshua Ladon: With cases of sexual assault by a leader in the community, I would argue the damage is not limited to the immediate victims. The leader has also damaged the community as a whole by destroying a public good: trust. The leader’s teshuvah for actions against an individual cannot repair trust within the community as a whole.

Sarah: Yes, and in rabbinic literature, expiation of one’s sins before God is not considered a factor in determining penalties or other forms of societal judgment of criminals—in fact, they are clearly viewed as separate. According to Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:2, people who are sentenced to death are nonetheless offered the opportunity to repair their relationship with God through confession before they are executed for the societal harm caused by their crimes.

Meirav: Joshua’s point that the process of individual teshuvah does not provide a communal corrective is well taken. I would suggest we approach this gap by expanding our view of teshuvah to include examples where it is, in fact, communal. In the confessional prayers repeated throughout Yom Kippur, such as the Al chet and the Vidui, we literally call out sinful behaviors by collectively confessing them. They are called out in the plural form as “our” sins, even if we are not individually perpetrators. It is as though the fact that they occur in our midst makes us complicit.

Elana Stein Hain: Perhaps through communal teshuvah, we can set new standards for behavior around sexuality and social power and thus create safer spaces for us all as past, current, and potential victims of gender- or sex-based violence.

Meirav: Sexual sin appears in the communal prayers of Yom Kippur, so there are grounds from within the tradition to consider communal teshuvah relevant to sexual abuse, even though older ideas of sexual sin do not match our 21st century definition, which includes rape, other forms of sexual assault, and sexual harassment.

The “Al Chet for the #MeToo Era,” written by Danya Ruttenberg, Shira Berkovits, S. Bear Bergman, and Guila Benchimol, is an example of a collective teshuvah through prayer that could help reform Jewish communal life, alongside individual teshuvah for the repair of person-to-person and person-to-God relationships. The prayer reads, in part:

For the sin we committed through inappropriate use of power.
For the sin we committed by inappropriate sexual advances.
For the sin we committed by putting people in power without oversight.
For the sin we committed by not taking seriously the complaints of a colleague.
For the sin we committed by not believing victims when they spoke up.
For the sin we committed by not being aware of our own power or privilege when making an advance.
For the sin we committed by pushing forward when we should have waited and listened.
For the sin we committed by believing that sexual victimization does not happen in the Jewish world.
For all of these sins, God, help us rectify the evil we have brought about, help us to restore justice through the hard work of repentance. Only then, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

For the sin we committed in choosing to think a person who is appropriate with us is appropriate with everyone.
For the sin we committed by choosing our own comfort over the safety of others.
For the sin we committed by focusing on our intent rather than our impact.
For the sin we committed by prioritizing reputations and money over safety.
For the sin we committed by ignoring sexual victimization as a problem until #MeToo.

Elana: Two things strike me immediately about this. The first is that it is a prayer! Having liturgy that speaks about these issues is powerful. It definitively declares that these behaviors are sinful and forbidden. The second is that the list of sins includes both direct and indirect participation in sexual abuse. So often when it comes to scandal, we ease our minds by making the perpetrator the focus of our approbation, but this formulation pushes us to take on the responsibility as community members.

Claire: Some people might ask whether sexual misconduct is the only sin that deserves such an expansive Al chet. I imagine we could write an extended list of all the ways we collectively fail to prevent theft or otherwise participate in a small way in any of the other sins listed in the traditional Al chet. But the #MeToo movement has highlighted sexual misconduct as an especially important issue of our time, one we must address.

I also want to acknowledge that being harmed in a sexual way is a violation of a different sort than a crime like theft. Material objects that are stolen can be replaced. In contrast, sexual crimes violate a person’s sense of self, and that is not so easily replaced. It must be repaired, and that is slow and hard work; one’s sense of self will arguably never be quite the same. The philosopher Jill Stauffer uses the term “ethical loneliness” to describe what victims of torture and other horrific injustices suffer after they have been “abandoned by those who have the power to help.”[v] It should be a sin for victims of sexual abuse to be left in a state of ethical loneliness.

Being sexually harassed or abused by a rabbi, a cantor, a teacher, a mentor, or another leader can cause a person to question their spiritual worth or their capacity for learning and professional development. Their sense of self is shot through with doubt. In Stauffer’s words, “ethical loneliness begins when a human being, because of abuse or neglect, has been refused the human relation necessary for self-formation and thus is unable to take on the present moment freely”—or is denied what we might term a “sovereign self,” unable to act with confidence and autonomy.

As a community or society, we set boundaries to define what constitutes appropriate behavior because such lines protect our sense of who we are, each of us as individuals, and our community or society as a whole. When others act against us in violation of those boundaries, they threaten our sense of who we are, who we know ourselves to be. When boundaries are repeatedly violated, the entire structure of a community is at risk. But when abuse is publicly recognized, and perpetrators are removed from the positions of power that allowed them to abuse, boundaries are reinstated and individuals are again safe, allowing those harmed to begin the work of self-repair.

When abusive behaviors are publicly known but not condemned, they are implicitly condoned. The result is a culture of danger, one in which women whisper to one another about dangerous men and instruct their friends to “avoid being alone in a room with person X.” It is a culture in which parents keep their children out of youth groups lest they attract the attention of the director. Calling out abusive behavior and ensuring that there are negative consequences for it makes clear to everyone that sexual misdeeds are not permitted, helping both the community as a whole and the individuals within it.

Meirav: While harm may not be undoable or fully reparable, there may be some comfort in the calling out of the behaviors that caused the harm, because of the transformational potential of setting new norms in the Jewish canon. Doing so should honor the memory of what happened, not erase it. It is specifically not teshuvah in the sense of returning to a clean slate. Perhaps this is the key difference between personal and communal teshuvah: with an act of communal teshuvah like the Al chet or Vidui, violations are not put behind us but are constantly spoken and repeated.

Claire: And yet, even when the Vidui is seen as an act of communal norm-setting, it still does important work on an individual level. As Alan Lew writes about the selichot prayers that precede the High Holidays—prayers that include confession—“sitting there with the prayer book in our lap, we begin to become aware of the things we have been trying to avoid; we begin to see things from which we have been averting our gaze; unconscious material begins to make its way toward the surface of our consciousness. So…one of the times we can use to examine ourselves… is the time spent in communal prayer.”[vi]

II. Can a perpetrator of sexual assault return to the community?

Joshua: Most of the examples with which we began used teshuvah as a yardstick for knowing when a perpetrator could be reinstated in some way to their former status or, at a minimum, be accepted as a full member of the community. The assumption is that some period of isolation is necessary. But how might our emphasis on communal teshuvah as a way of repairing the past and moving toward a better future help us to know when, if ever, a perpetrator can again be part of the community in which they perpetrated harm?

Elana: We know of cases in which perpetrators were reinstated to positions of power on the understanding that they have “done teshuvah,” only to re-offend.[vii] The rabbinic sages were not unaware of this risk. The Mishnah’s Tractate Yoma 8:9 states: “One who reasons, ‘I will sin and then repent’ will be unable to repent; ‘I will sin and Yom Kippur will atone for me’—Yom Kippur will not atone.” Simply put, the rabbis are concerned that people will assume they can sin freely because they can always do teshuvah afterward. It would be tragic to find sexual abusers exploiting teshuvah as a mechanism to continue harming others.

Sarah: Tosefta Sanhedrin addresses the question of preventing future sin with the idea of chazarah, rather than teshuvah.[viii] These terms are distinct, but they bear a close relationship, not least in that they both use imagery of physical return. The sins they discuss—gambling, lending with interest, and the displaying of animals (likely for staging races or fights between them)—are not sexual misdeeds, but they are serious enough to make a person unsuitable to serve as a witness in court, according to the rabbis. This text, which offers a road map for reinstating someone who has been deemed not worthy of the community’s trust, is potentially instructive:

One who plays with dice and one who plays with nutshells and pomegranate rinds: they can never return [lachzor] from this until they break the dice and [thus] do complete repentance [chazarah gemurah]. One who lends with interest cannot repent from this until he tears up his documents and [thus] does complete repentance...The same is true for one who exhibits pigeons and one who exhibits any kind of domestic or wild animal or bird: they can never repent from this until they break the scenery they use for their exhibitions and [thus] do complete repentance (tSanhedrin 5:2).

Here, the rabbis present a form of repentance that takes a concrete, measurable form: destruction by the perpetrator of the tools that enabled their transgression. Only in doing so is the perpetrator permitted to return to a status of social and legal trustworthiness.

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What might this model look like if it was applied to contemporary scenarios of sexual assault? Would the analogy be that the perpetrator must voluntarily give up any position of power, one of the “tools” through which the assault might have been perpetrated? What about power differentials that cannot be so easily altered, such as those that fall along gender, class, or educational axes?

Elana: I’m not sure that the perpetrator of sexual abuse should be the one to decide whether or not to remove themselves from a position of power. What if we think of sexual abuse as a chillul Hashem? The rabbis describe chillul Hashem, the desecration of God’s name, as a category of sin that cannot be expiated.

Maimonides was once asked about the reinstatement of a town’s kosher slaughterer (shochet) after he had been caught both stealing meat and lying about the kashrut of the meat he sold to the public. He responded:

It is already well known among the Gentiles that we would only appoint the most appropriate among us to perform slaughter, and also as our judges and prayer leaders…And [in regard to] a person like this: it is prohibited for one who believes in the Torah of our master Moses, and who cares about the honor of their Maker, to allow this person to perform ritual slaughter for the masses, even if he did full repentance, due to the desecration of God’s Name. It is, however, permissible for him to perform ritual slaughter for individuals who wish him to in his own home (Rambam, Responsum 173, Blau Edition).

Maimonides argues here that the Jewish community should only hire the most appropriate— he uses the word “kosher”—people as its leaders. He goes so far as to argue that Jews should be known for having appropriate leaders! In the case he is addressing, he describes a public shochet as akin to a judge or a someone who leads prayer services: they are all people the community depends on for fulfilling their religious needs and obligations. Thus, even if the shochet in question has done complete teshuvah, he may not return to his former post, for he has committed a chillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name, and there can be no return from that.

I would argue that we can see sexual assault by a leader in the Jewish community in the same way: because the community depends on its leaders for members’ religious and spiritual needs, it is a desecration of God’s name for a Jewish leader to commit sexual assault, and it should be treated as such.

We should note that Maimonides does not deny the repentant shochet his livelihood but allows people to employ his services privately. This introduces an important distinction between public and private leadership roles. What is our attitude today towards the difference between a public role and a private one for leaders who have committed sexual abuses of one form or another? Is there a difference? Reasonable people have been divided over this question. From a survivor-centered orientation, the distinction between public and private may not hold water, because any engagement with that person’s previous communal services—even in private—may feel like a betrayal. That is certainly what we saw in negative reactions to private research meetings between Steven M. Cohen and other scholars and leaders.[ix]

In general, there is a real tension in Jewish law about how someone should be treated once they have been punished for their sin. The verse in the Torah (Deut. 25:3) that describes the giving of lashes as punishment refers to the defendant as “your brother” because, as the rabbis explain, “once he has been lashed, he is [again considered] your brother” (bMakkot 23a). This is a case where a sinner can again be seen as a good person and as a full member of the community.

Ultimately, what we are suggesting here is that one can see the humanity of a transgressor and allow them to be a full member of a community, but they should not be reinstated into a position of power or prominence.

Sarah: How can we know when a community can accept a perpetrator back as a member? Here, we might consider the way that rabbinic literature imposes penalties for shaming another person, a category that, for the rabbis, is also explicitly connected to certain types of criminal sexual behavior, as in the case of rape, which requires a special “shame payment” as part of the penalty (mKetubot 3:4-5). To avoid perpetuating a cycle of shame, the rabbis institute a severe financial penalty for acts that shame another person:

One who shouts into his fellow’s ear must give him a selah [four zuz]. R. Yehuda says in the name of R. Yosi ha-Glili: a maneh [one hundred zuz]. If he slapped him, he must give him two hundred zuz. If he split his ear, pulled his hair, spit and the spit got onto him, took his cloak off him, or uncovered the head of a woman in the marketplace—he gives four hundred zuz. All is according to the victim’s honor. R. Akiva says: even the poor people of Israel, we regard them as though they were free people who had lost their property, for they are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (mBava Kamma 8:6).

According to this text, and particularly in R. Akiva’s view, any person who commits a physical act that shames any other person must pay a set fine of up to four hundred zuz, an amount of money that could be equivalent to a family’s yearly income. A community today might use this text to insist that a perpetrator pay significant monetary restitution before being restored to full membership in the community.

Importantly for our context, the rabbis also highlight the importance of avoiding victim-blaming when assessing punishment for perpetrators. The text goes on to include a story in which a man tries to weasel his way out of paying the fine for uncovering a woman’s hair in the marketplace on the grounds that this particular woman can be tricked into publicly uncovering her own hair. Nonetheless, R. Akiva is adamant that the full penalty must be paid:

It once happened that someone uncovered the head of a woman in the marketplace. She came before R. Akiva, and he declared the man liable to pay her four hundred zuz. He said to him, “Rabbi, give me time,” and he gave him time. He spied her standing at the gate of her courtyard, and he broke a vessel in front of her with an issar of oil in it. She uncovered her head and started wiping up the oil and putting it on her head. He had set up witnesses to watch her, and he came before R. Akiva. He said to him: “Rabbi, to such as this, should I give four hundred zuz?” R. Akiva said to him, “You have said nothing. For one who injures himself, even though he is not permitted to do so, is exempt, but others who injure him are liable” (ibid).

Here, the Mishnah, or at least R. Akiva, explicitly de-emphasizes any personal or interpersonal considerations. The woman’s willingness to expose her own hair does not change the punishment the man faces for having himself exposed her hair. He must make restitution to the victim. This is one possible rubric that communities and institutions could, I think, pretty easily incorporate as a Jewish model for how to respond to cases of sexual assault.

III. Dealing with the past

Sarah: We can find a different perspective on the reinstatement of a perpetrator by thinking about cities of refuge. Aryeh Cohen has used these cities in thinking about a contemporary ethical model in his book, Justice in the City. According to both biblical and rabbinic law, one who kills unintentionally flees to a city of refuge for asylum but does not stay there permanently. The Mishnah explicitly addresses what is at stake for a society after that person returns:

If a manslayer was exiled to the city of refuge and the people of that city wished to honor him, he should say to them, “I am a manslayer.” If they say to him, “Nonetheless…” he should accept it from them…And [when released from the city of refuge], he returns to the position of authority that he had, according to R. Meir; R. Yehudah says, he does not return to the position of authority he had (mMakkot 2:8).

In this text, the onus is on the person who committed a grievous harm to remind potential bestowers of honor that he has a blot on his past. If the community insists, only then may that person receive the honor. The Mishnah also raises the question of whether such a person should be permitted to hold a position of power. While the Mishnah does not settle on a definitive ruling, it does frame the question as a matter of general principle rather than individual penance: either it is good to reinstate such a person, or it is not. Such a framing could provide communities with a way to formulate this question, even if it does not provide them with a definitive answer.

Meirav: But the cities of refuge exist to address the crime of manslaughter, or accidental killings. That makes me question how appropriate cities of refuge are as a parallel for sexual assault that is done with intent. (If a person stumbles upon a woman, brushing against her breast, there is generally no harm done, especially in comparison with a person purposely groping a woman’s breast without her permission.) Still, I wonder whether it may also be worth considering that sometimes sexual harm is unintentional, in the sense that perpetrators are sometimes unaware of appropriate boundaries at the time of transgression.

I am thinking back to a men’s gathering that took place at Habima in Tel Aviv in August 2020, under the title, “I Offended Too.”[x] The gathering was triggered by a shocking case in which a teenage girl was exploited and raped by multiple men. Some of the perpetrators claimed they were unaware that an intoxicated woman could not be considered a party to consensual sex, as they were products of a culture that generally did not call out sex with intoxicated persons as rape. The rally was organized by a man who publicly reflected on his role in rape culture and found his earlier behavior deplorable. He encouraged other men to gather with him to call out their own past behaviors, specifically times when they had objectified women, not sought consent, or not stopped at “no.” The event was to be a space in which men came together and publicly declared those behaviors intolerable, and the organizer was the first to speak. In this event, to which 1500 people responded on Facebook, men bore witness to—or dare I say confessed—their own past offenses, and with all eyes on them, in a public space, acknowledged harm they themselves had inflicted. This did not absolve them, but it did contribute to the setting of new standards of behavior that could create safer space and transform culture. Such an event could be like a temporary “city of refuge,” or a secular form of the Vidui, as we transition toward a future in which boundaries around sexuality are better recognized and enforced.

The fact that the organizer of this event was interviewed more than a year later and spoke of the work that still needs to be done towards change perhaps speaks to the need for space and ritual—even prayer—that is not reactive to particular events, but ongoing.[xi]

IV. Conclusion

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, we know more than we ever have before about the reality of sexual abuse in Jewish communities around the world, and the harm that this abuse has caused and continues to cause. Many communities are struggling to recover after discovering cases of sexually predatory behavior by their leaders. Unlike “thou shalt not steal,” which is found in the Ten Commandments and sets a clear boundary around material possessions, “thou shalt not take advantage of thy position of power in making sexual advances” is not part of our Jewish or even our Western tradition, and there are no clear instructions for how a community might recover after discovering that a leader has engaged in sexually predatory behavior.

By looking at categories of sin, repentance, and punishment in Jewish sources, we can consider teshuvah and other ways that a Jewish community might begin to develop a process of recovery rooted in Jewish tradition. In particular, we suggest the following:

Individual teshuvah can be a critical element of a perpetrator’s rehabilitation. But communities should also explore what we are calling communal teshuvah as a means of establishing boundaries and norms for the future. Communities should not focus on measuring to what extent an individual perpetrator has repented.
Punishment of a perpetrator may be a necessary step in a community’s healing process. The rabbis’ discussion of shame offers the example of financial payment to the victim as a model; we see from attitudes toward cases of public shaming that, at a minimum, the penalty should be significant and uniformly imposed. Victim-blaming should specifically be prohibited.
We suggest framing sexual abuse as a type of chillul Hashem. This would mean that although a perpetrator may repent for their actions, full expiation is not possible. Maimonides argues further that a person who has committed chillul Hashem may not serve as a spiritual leader. Such an approach would allow, though, for a person to be an ordinary member of the community.
Finally, we explored the idea of the biblical “city of refuge” as a metaphor for creating spaces in which people who committed sexual wrongs at a time when the culture or community failed to make explicit that such acts were unacceptable can process behavior that is now seen as transgressive. Ultimately, the consistent assertion and teaching of sexual behavioral norms should eliminate the need for such spaces.

This article appears in Sources, Fall 2022 and received First Place for Excellence in Writing about Jewish Thought and Life from the American Jewish Press Association (AJPA).