Welcome back to Part 2 of
“Dassi Through the Looking Glass”. If you have not read Part 1,
please do.
In this portion we will
review the Facebook
post that Dassi wrote about Harav Mendel Shafran Shlita on
March 10, 2019. I intend to point out that, not only does the
plague of consumerism spread the symptoms of the Tochacha – shigaon, ivaron,
and timhon levav, but it also foments hostility and outright
wickedness.
Dassi’s words will be
in dark red and I will stay in
default black. Here we go:
This past Friday we met
with Rabbi Shafran in Bnei Braq to discuss why he was publicly supporting
Leifer by asking the court to release her under his care.
Comment:
I have written in the
past about superfluous
adverbs. They are usually the first giveaway of a distorted perspective
since they are distortions of the facts.
The adverb “publicly”
is out of place. Rabbi Shafran wasn’t supporting Mrs. Leifer publicly or privately.
He was supporting her – period. If proceedings are held publicly and he
participates, it makes his participation public. And if the proceedings are
held privately and he participates, it makes his participation private. Rabbi
Shafran did not choose the venue of the proceedings. He just participated in
them where they were held. He did not make any public rallies
or statements.
That said, the only
reason there is so much publicity about this saga is because Dassi Erlich and
her sisters and supporters want it. They are generating the publicity, not
Rabbi Shafran. In short, they are prosecuting her publicly. So, he is standing
up for her in public because this is the place where Dassi and her sisters are
prosecuting her.
Now, let’s ignore the
word “publicly” and look at her leading sentence again:
This past Friday we met
with Rabbi Shafran in Bnei Braq to discuss why he was [publicly] supporting
Leifer by asking the court to release her under his care.
Comment:
In short, the Sapper
sisters arranged a meeting in Bnei Braq because they could not understand why a
Jew who does indeed observe mitzvos is willing to support a religious Jew who
is being prosecuted in contravention to Halachic standards and who is being
held in jail without being convicted of anything.
Our meeting was right out
of the text book I am studying regarding abusive arguments.
Comment:
I would love to know the
name of the text book, who wrote it, and is it available on Amazon (second hand)?
All kidding aside, this
is one of the most despicable and belligerent statements in this post. I will
explain.
What is Dassi Erlich
saying with the term “abusive arguments”? What are abusive arguments and what
kind of a “textbook” describes them?
Sure enough, there are
volumes of books and papers about criminology and personality disorders and
abusive behavior by people who engage in crime and
abusive behavior. We can call these people “abusers”. These
“textbooks” and papers go to great lengths to analyze the “arguments” and
justifications that “abusers” present to rationalize their behavior.
Whose behavior?
Well, that of the abusers,
of course.
And, I suppose Dassi’s
favorite current pastime is to study such a text book.
But, unbeknownst to Dassi
and her cronies, Rabbi Shafran is not an abuser. Nor is
Rabbi Grossman nor Rabbi Litzman nor am I. We are all Torah observant objective
people who are evaluating a situation without prejudice of either side. We can
see both sides as victims, both sides as aggressors and
both sides as Jews. And we are all interested in protecting the rights of the
accused regardless of who the accused is. And we do not live in an echo chamber
and we do not have tunnel vision. We can see and hear both sides of the issue.
It is hard to believe
that Dassi is studying any textbooks about community leaders (or bloggers)
who are not abusers. I tend to doubt there are any such
textbooks.
That said, these “abusive
arguments” are coming out of an ancient textbook. They are the textbooks of the
Rambam, Shulchan Aruch and Chofetz Chaim. And you can bet your bottom
Australian dollar that Dassi Erlich is not studying those.
What makes this statement
so utterly despicable is that, in order for this statement to make sense, we
must say that Dassi is equating the Torah scholars with actual “abusers”! As
consumers, Dassi and her lynch mob cannot tell the difference. They are in
total denial that there are other “textbooks”. They are in total denial that
HKBH has other methods of dealing with these things. Most of them are in denial
of HKBH altogether.
I now understand why we
were so deeply pained after leaving this encounter with him.
Comment:
If it was out of the
textbook, why are you so pained? Isn’t it what you expected to get? After all,
it’s in the textbook that you are studying to be a post grad! What were you
expecting???
In my Post Grad Degree in
Domestic Violence
Comment:
“Domestic” as an adjective to “Violence” means at the hands of family members.
Anyway, it looks like Dassi is trying to make a career for herself as a
professional practitioner of domestic violence. As far as I know the best
practitioners of domestic violence never went to school. The skills of domestic
violence came naturally to them. In any case, I do not wish her success.
I am learning that
abusive arguments usually have the following four characteristics:
Comment:
My primary objective in
this post is to deal with these “four characteristics”. Here we go:
1- Denial in refusing to
believe us. "I did not say I believe you, I will not say I believe you. I
will not come to court to support you. I will not take sides".
Comment:
Dassi is certainly a
post-graduate in denial. She is in total denial of the fact that she –
Dassi Erlich (and her sisters) – is currently an accuser,
prosecutor, aggressor and pursuer and her goal is to hurt, destroy and punish
Mrs. Leifer. She justifies her actions by proclaiming that she is trying to
protect potential future victims (and change the future). It is questionable if
there are potential future victims at risk, but it is not questionable that she
is harassing and pursuing (rodef) Mrs. Leifer.
Dassi Erlich is not
saying “believe me that I was molested” so she can get therapy and help for
herself to rebuild her life. She is also not saying “believe me that Mrs.
Leifer molested me” so that she can get some legitimate restitution from Mrs.
Leifer. She is not even saying “believe me that Mrs. Leifer is not safe with
young women” so that she should be disallowed to be a teacher anymore. She is
saying, “Believe me that Mrs. Leifer is an irredeemable fiend and should be
punished without mercy”.
This is what a Torah
observant Jew such as Rabbi Shafran has to look at. Dassi is an accuser and,
at this stage, she is the rodef. What are the rules of
believing an accuser?
Well, our Torah and
Halacha give us clear rules of “neemanus”. And I elaborated on them in my
post Thinking
Like a Jew. The obvious rule is that nothing can be
accepted as a fact if it cannot be corroborated by a second person. We are
allowed to be choshesh (suspect) to implement protective measures
but not to believe for the purposes of
punishment.
Plain and simple.
Rabbi Shafran knows this,
Rabbi Litzman knows this, I know this, and I wrote it. Dassi and
her fellow consumers knew that I wrote it when I wrote it 2 ½ years ago, but
they were in denial then and are in denial still. To some it just isn’t there
and to others, it must be “misguided”.
But don’t all victims
need to be believed?
We have a principle
called פלגינן נאמנות – dividing the
credibility. This means that we can believe what an individual says for what affects
themselves but not for how it affects anybody else. For example, if a woman
claims that she had extramarital relations so her husband must divorce her, and
there are no objective witnesses, we believe her to invalidate her ketuba,
but we do not believe her to force her husband to divorce her or to render her
child a mamzer.
If somebody says they
were molested, we should absolutely fully believe them that they were molested
and do all we can to help them out. But when they say they were molested by "Abe",
we can suspect "Abe" but we are not allowed to believe that part.
This is Torah, but the
consumers want no part of it.
2 - Excusing of ones
beliefs." Leifer taught my two daughters and nothing ever happened to
them".
Comment:
Like I said, this phrase
is to me incoherent. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how this is
different from the previous “characteristic”.
In any case, I wonder if
this was said by Rabbi Shafran. He certainly did not have any daughters
studying in Australia. Perhaps he did say it and it refers to when Mrs. Leifer
was teaching here in Eretz Yisrael before she went to Australia.
Regardless, if somebody
says something like this, they are saying that they themselves have had some
level of interaction with the accused person and there was nothing about this
interaction that supports the accusations of the accusers. Yes, it can be used
as basis to be skeptical about the allegations, but it is quite a rational observation
being made by a rational person. Again, we are talking about a non-involved
person who must make a personal judgment. It does not prove the accuser wrong,
but it is meant to tell the accuser that they need to furnish some objective
evidence to support their claim.
Note that Dassi does not
even pretend to claim that she presented any objective evidence to Rabbi
Shafran. So if the score is that Rabbi Shafran brings the weight of his
observation, as limited as it may be (give it a value of 1) and Dassi Erlich
brings absolutely nothing (value of 0), the nay-sayers win by a 1-0
shutout!
So, I ask Dassi, why is
such a comment worthy of criticism??
3- Minimisation of ones
worth as a Survivor.
"You were abused already, somebody else hurt you".
Comment:
Although Dassi, at the
receiving end may feel that such a statement minimizes her worth as a survivor,
she cannot claim that this is the intent of the one who said it. To me, the
clear implication of this line is to minimize the worth (i.e., impact) of the
alleged abuser. The message is that you cannot honestly claim that all of
your tzaros are a result of this alleged abuser since, by your
own admission, you have repeatedly acknowledged that you underwent 15 years of
real domestic abuse before encountering the one you are accusing.
And we notice that you
did not walk into the Victorian Police station and file any charges against the
initial abusers.
Again, Dassi is in total
denial that she is not petitioning to be recognized as a victim. She is petitioning
to have Mrs. Leifer branded as an abuser. As such, any statement that is made
by Rabbi Shafran relates to how he views the perceived culpability of Mrs.
Leifer, not the victim [survivor] status of Dassi Erlich.
4-Justification. Writing
a letter to the Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and turning up at court to
support Leifers bail, "It's my duty as a rabbi to support a fellow
Jew".
Comment:
I got a good chuckle out
of this one. Her keyword is “Justification” and her definition is “Writing a
letter to the Justice Minister”. Cute.
Again, we see that Dassi
is in denial that she is pursuing and prosecuting another Jew. From Dassi’s
temperament and those of most of her commenters, they are in denial that Mrs.
Leifer is a Jew and must be treated like one. And these people find it so very
abhorrent that a non-consumer wants to do just that.
Once again, they are in
denial of the Halachos of mesira and extradition. Dassi does not recount in her
post a hint of asking Rabbi Shafran about Halachos. But, isn’t this what people
go to rabbis for?
When asked why Leifer's
Jewishness deserved his sympathy over our own??
He refused to answer us.
Comment:
Such a question does not
deserve an answer. The question itself is a display of total arrogance,
immaturity and narcissism.
It is clear to people
like me and Rabbi Shafran that there is no need for us to prosecute or harm
(destroy) Mrs. Leifer in order to be sympathetic to Dassi. We onlookers can
afford to be sympathetic to everyone involved. They are not mutually exclusive.
Thus, if in Dassi’s eyes, another Jew (a Shomer Mitzvos one, at that) needs to
be harmed as a show of sympathy to her, then based on the Mishna in Pirkei Avos
(5:18), there is something inherently malicious about her. Dassi is playing the
spoiled child that demands from the loving parent to “choose” between me and
the rival sibling. “If you love him/her, then you don’t love me!” or “If you
won’t help me send her down the river, then you love her more than me”.
I think this is utterly
detestable!
Let’s first note that the
issue at hand here is not that Rabbi Shafran or anybody wants to condone any
sexual misbehavior that Mrs. Leifer may have committed more than a decade ago
and it is certainly not an effort to enable her to resume these activities. The
Sapper sisters are going ballistic over the prospect of Mrs. Leifer being
released from prison to house arrest so that she can continue a semi-normal
family life and to live like a human being and a Jew – i.e., keep Shabbos and
Yom Tov and Pesach Seder – as all Jews who are religious and observant of
mitzvos are entitled and required to do, while all the proceedings are going on.
This does not interfere
in the lives of these saintly sisters nor does it put children at risk once she
is being watched.
Still and all, these
saintly sisters cannot countenance allowing Mrs. Leifer to live like a human
being and must fight tooth and nail to prevent it. Then they even confront
people like Rabbis Grossman and Shafran for "asking the court to release
her under their care".
How dare Rabbis Grossman and Shafran ask that this unconvicted
monster should be treated like a Jew and a human being? Or, as these paragons
of virtue put it (publicly):
“What kind of G-d are
they praying to that protects abusers?” (Haaretz March
7, 2019).
Our G-d does not want
anybody to languish in prison. But, evidently, these sisters (two of whom
abandoned observance) don't worship the same G-d. They worship a god who would
not allow such compassion. A god of Vengeance!
As I said, I think this
is utterly deplorably wicked!
Let’s add to this that, I
have previously speculated, based
on JCW’s own statistics, that it is more than likely that Mrs. Leifer is
herself a victim of abuse and, if so, should be entitled to some measure of
sympathy (which does not need to be construed as coming at the expense of the
alleged victim). Of course, to acknowledge this likelihood is such a
game-changer to the consumer lynch mob that their denial is absolutely
deafening. When I brought this up to a woman emailer from Australia who claimed
to be a victim of Mrs. Leifer, she refused to answer me.
It goes both ways.
An immature narcissist
can only see their personal interests. To a narcissist, there is no such thing
as looking out for the interests of all sides. It is either “you are on my side
or you are against me”. A narcissist is in perpetual denial that it is possible
for an objective bystander to be out for the welfare of both sides. This is
because they are in denial that anybody else’s wellbeing matters. Only
theirs.
Dassi stated publicly at
the JCW event on
Nov. 25, 2018 (3:12-3:26), “We continue to be told that
we are doing this for revenge or some sort of victim fame, which I don’t
understand, but nothing could be further from the truth. We are here for
nothing else than to try and change the future.”
Well, if it’s not a
personal vendetta or a quest for revenge, why does she take it so personal if a
renowned Talmid Chacham is looking out for both sides and
doesn’t think that being moser Mrs. Leifer to goyim in Australia is a positive
step in changing the future?
I see no small measure of
hypocrisy here.
In any case, I clearly
wrote in my post in June 2017:
...contrary to all
appearances, I really do have a lot of ahavas Yisroel. I don’t want to see
Malka Leifer destroyed and I don’t want to see Dassi Erlich destroyed. There is
no need for it. As far as I know, they are both victims. I think it's a better
idea to try to fix wounded people than to try to break them. But I have yet to
hear a single voice echo mine!
The lynch mob consumers are in denial that people such as I and Rabbi Shafran
may actually be sincere and want what is best for all sides. They have no clue
what sincerity is. My claim to “ahavas Yisroel” was ridiculed publicly without
it being substantiated. Just like what Dassi is doing to Rabbi Shafran in her
post.
He did explain the
importance of supporting the abuser because he saw them as the underdog.
Comment:
I wonder what the real
words were. I thought Dassi wrote that he didn’t believe her that she is an
abuser. Anyway, what he obviously meant is she (Mrs. Leifer) is the pursued and
accused. She is entitled to all the rights of an accused person.
Dassi denies this. She is
a victim-for-life, so even when she is the aggressor and pursuer, she has to be
the underdog. It’s just not fair that anybody can think that the person she is
pursuing to destroy is an underdog.
This is tunnel vision.
I looked at him
incredulously and asked him if he had ever been to court when an Ultra-Orthodox
predator was the accused. On which sides was the court swollen with supporters?
Comment:
I believe he was to court
when an Ultra-Orthodox predator was the accused back on February 18,
2019. It seems that the court was swollen by supporters of
the accusers and the accused was undeniably the underdog.
But Dassi can always deny
it. This is why she was incredulous.
Again he refused to
respond.
Comment:
It’s clear that Dassi,
who has left observance, is not now and never was interested in the Halachic
viewpoint of accusations. She was not too receptive of this viewpoint when I
wrote it and she has shown no inclination to be receptive now. Dassi’s response
to Rabbi Shafran (about if he had ever been to court…) along with her
incredulous look was a disputation of his statement, not a sincere request for
him to qualify it (as in “What do you mean by that?”).
When people contact me
with the sole intention of disputing what I have said and with no intention of
trying to come to terms with it (the vast majority), it does not pay to try to
respond.
Rav Shafran is heralded
as the Rabbi who instructs complainants to report to the police. He shared an
example of a woman who called him up recently. "Go to the police", he
told them, "know though your children will expelled from school, you will
be barred from your synagogue and you life will be ruined".
Comment:
This paragraph doesn’t
flow. In our language we say: קשיא רישא אסיפא (the first segment
contradicts the second one) or מעשה לסתור? (do you bring a case
example that is contradictory?). But, as I already wrote, I do not give
Dassi a medal for coherency on this post.
Anyway, it is not
possible to comment on stories like these because their brevity leaves way too
much to the imagination. We have no clue exactly what the recent woman in
question was complaining about and what, and whom, she wanted to report.
I need to reiterate that
way before I knew about Malka Leifer or Dassi Erlich, I wrote a summary of
Hilchos mesira called the 3 Ps (and 3 Cs).
The 3 Ps basically said
that there are three incremental steps to dealing with suspected molesters –
(1) Prevention (Protection), (2) Publicity,
and (3) Police (Punishment). The steps must be taken in that
order. If step 1 resolves the issue, it is forbidden to advance to step 2. If
not, then step 2 is indicated, but it is still forbidden to advance to step 3
unless even step 2 does not resolve the issue. Hence, going to the police is
only permissible if it is absolutely necessary in order to resolve the problem.
And even that is governed by the 3 Cs.
The case of the woman who
called Rabbi Shafran is unclear. If she had other options (P1 and P2), she has
no business resorting to P3 and should be subject to the consequences. Perhaps,
this was what Rabbi Shafran was telling her. If she had no other recourse than
P3, these consequences are uncalled for. I do not condone them and I very much
sympathize with this woman.
Well and good, but all
this is chit chat. The Sapper sisters met with Rabbi Shafran “to
discuss why he was publicly supporting Leifer by asking the court to
release her under his care.” The Malka Leifer case does not qualify for P3. And
even if it did, there is no reason to oppose, and every reason to support house
arrest. Specifically, if there was no violence in the alleged abuse as is true
in this case.
Imagine how hard it is
for survivors of abuse in his community to speak up. This man is considered a
standard bearer on these issues. What hope do these people have?
Comment:
In a sense, Dassi does have a point in her closing paragraph. It
isn’t easy to speak up. But much of it depends on who do you want to speak up
to. What do you want to achieve by speaking up? Are you doing it to protect
somebody who is currently in danger or to prosecute somebody for what he did
yesterday (or a decade ago)? Are you trying to fix a specific problem in the
here and now or trying to make a public spectacle to do “nothing
else than to try and change the future”? Are you doing a kiddush Hashem or a
chillul Hashem???
Before one can answer these questions, they must be able to hear
them and see the different angles. But you’ll never hear them in an echo
chamber and you won’t be able to see them if you have tunnel vision.
Post Script – I would love to
be able to enter a link to this post on Dassi’s Facebook page, but alas, Dassi
Erlich does not allow comments from any dissenters, only from supporters, and
so I am blocked!
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