Sinas Chinam VIII(a) – Innocence Lost

 

Also see this previous post:  Sinas Chinam III - Surviving Malka Leifer

I generally prefer to not expose correspondence that happens behind the scenes, but this is much too important. It’s Kalman again. Kalman sent me another email. He writes:

In all seriousness , I strongly suspect that you are a sexual abuser 

I took your posts and entered them in a psychological profile data bank and it came up that you are very disturbed individual and a probable abuser

I suggest you get help asap 

 

I am totally amazed at the extent that he echoes Reb Yid from my post in 2018. Reb Yid also had similar suspicions. I doubt Reb Yid entered my posts into a psychological profile data bank, but to be frank, I highly doubt that Kalman did it either. Where does one obtain a psychological profile data bank anyway?

The similarity between them is uncanny, to the extent that I wonder if they may even be the same person. I went so far as to ask Kalman if he was ever abused (like Reb Yid was) and he wouldn’t answer me. Let’s review what Reb Yid wrote in 2018.

I have very serious doubts and suspicions of what it is you are hiding from, avoiding and trying to cover up, Hashem Yeracheim. Perhaps the time has come to open an investigation into your past and history.

My response to him at the time:

Sorry to disappoint you. Go ahead if you like. Start with the autobiography in my book. Rated PG (for Holocaust stories and a few violent incidents in Eretz Yisrael).

This response works for Kalman, as well. Nothing much has changed in eight years.

That said, I can agree with Kalman’s data bank about one thing. This is the claim that I am: “[a] very disturbed individual”. There is truth to this but not the way he means. I responded to Kalman:

It is right about one thing, though. I am very disturbed about a lot of things. As I have written.

What am I disturbed about? Why am I so outraged about the players in this episode?

We can start with all the sinas chinam, zilzul Eretz Yisrael, mesira, nekama, and chillul Hashem. That ought to do it right there. But there is something else that I have complained about post after post after post. This is the blood lust, lynch-mob mentality, and universal automatic presumption of guilt that almost everyone on Earth seems to suffer from.

In one of my earliest posts, I wrote that this is because the Human being craves drama. It’s very easy to accuse people of doing nasty things, and a lot of fun to boot. And, since it happens so often, it must always be true. It’s so standard that even Reb Yid and Kalman can level “suspicions” at someone they have never met. This is because everyone seems to carry around their handy-dandy psychological profile data bank. It’s science, how can it be wrong?

Of course, these guys don’t know, or don’t care to know, where I am coming from. I mentioned it sparingly in a few of my posts, notably this one (HERE), but it hasn’t sunk in. So, I will say it again more directly.

I have never molested anybody and I have never been molested, but where I have been is in the thick of a case of false accusation. B”H, I was not the one that was falsely accused but it was somebody I had a very close connection to. It taught me how people who cannot think, think. It taught me how rumors fly and how the lynch-mob works. It taught me everything I need to know about how much to trust accusations.

The case in point happened over 35 years ago. But since then, I have seen a number of similar incidents. Once you pick up the pattern, it becomes easy to recognize.

There are two levels of false accusations – total and partial. A totally false accusation is exactly as it sounds. The “crime” never happened at all or it did not happen at the hands of the accused. The accused is totally innocent.

A partial false accusation means that a minor event is being overblown into a major event. The accused may not be totally innocent but is not as guilty as they are being made out to be. In all cases the accuser is trying to achieve a certain goal and they are aware that being truthful is not the way to get there. So, they resort to bending and stretching the facts. I see such patterns in the Malka Leifer case.

This plague is not only chronic, but it is also contagious. רבים חללים הפילה.The casualties are many. Among those I was distressed to find on the casualty list is Rav Zvi Gluck of Amudim.

I first heard him out on a Halacha Headlines podcast in 2016 – yes, those ten long years – and I was very impressed by his interview. I quoted him in 2016 and sang the praises of the organization. I did it again in this post in 2022. I wrote:

 

Amudim looks to be an upstanding and dedicated Jewish organization that specializes in crisis intervention and case management. From their website, it looks like they deal with all types of traumatic situations including domestic abuse, substance abuse, other addictions, depression, eating disorders, self-harm, mental health issues, and of course, sexual abuse…Clearly, their goal is to help individual people deal with their problems. They are not interested in “changing the world” and saving it from wicked people. They seem to understand that “wicked” people are created by the same G-d who created the righteous ones – for whatever reasons. We need to coexist with them.

I was trying to say that I did not see the vigilante lynch-mob mentality in Amudim. In his March 15 interview in The Struggle, Zvi Gluck said what I wanted to hear. He said (14:26):

I'm very much in the sense that my focus is more on the victims, helping them, getting them the proper help. Right? I'm very anti-abuse, don't get me wrong. I'll do whatever it takes to stop it, but our focus isn't the abuser. Our focus is the victim. Very often by dealing with the victim you're dealing with the abuser and you have to take a stand which I have no problem doing but that's not our focus.

I took this to mean that he is a “champion of victims”, to do what he can to help them. Okay, if he needs to deal with an abuser to “stop it”, it’s part of helping them. But I hoped that he hadn’t crossed the line to be a “crusader of justice” and an “avenging angel” after the fact, when it doesn’t help the [former] “victims”. I thought he was different than the herd.

Until last March.

This is when Zvi Gluck appeared on the two broadcasts and showed me that he is just as vulnerable to the groupthink as are most others. One was his appearance at the Beis Medrash Ohr HaChaim in Monsey on March 8, 2026. The second was his interview with Joe Farkas on his podcast The Struggle exactly a week later on March 15, 2026.

It disturbed me to discover that Zvi Gluck is one of “them”, one of the lynch mob. I always thought better of him. To his credit, he is more moderate and level-headed than some others, but he peddles the same misconceptions that I listed among the consumers in my Kalman the Konsumer post.

But it’s more than that. Zvi Gluck is a very popular, charismatic, sincere, and influential person. He truly does want to do the right thing and his heart is in the right place. When someone like him catches the “let’s-destroy-all-the-perps” sinas chinam disease, he doesn’t just succumb to it, he also spreads it around.

Case in point, throughout both his talks, he uses two terms with complete finality - abusers and victims. In both talks, there is one word that never came out of his mouth: alleged.  In his talks, he never once mentioned the word alleged. In his world, every abuser is a total confirmed abuser from start to finish. Every victim is a total confirmed victim from start to finish. In his world, there is no such thing as an alleged abuser and no such thing as an alleged victim.

This is how Zvi Gluck can so cynically pronounce (19:00): 

the number one tool used to silence victims is the Torah.

Sounds pretty damning, no?

But let’s revise it just a bit:

the number one tool used to silence alleged victims – or, those who claim to be victims - is the Torah.

Owing to the fact that this situation (non-confirmed accusations) is what is happening in most cases that Zvi Gluck is complaining about, it is not nearly as damning.

And here is something that I am convinced Zvi Gluck would never admit to. It’s a two-way street.

Let’s go back one minute earlier in his talk (18:04). Zvi Gluck said as follows:

But what made it even more complex, more difficult, and even worse in some ways is the communal failure. The collective communal failure, quoting the Torah, quoting Rabonim, misquoting Rabanim, misquoting Gamara in an effort to silence people.

I hate to say it, but the number one tool used by advocates such as Zvi Gluck to silence and to mahser accused people (alleged abusers), is also the Torah. Quoting the Torah and misquoting the Gemara and misapplying the concepts such as Lo Taamod, Rodef, and Pikuach Nefesh. Quoting and misquoting and misrepresenting Rabbanim such as Rav Elyashiv (1:27:50) and the Tzitz Eliezer (24:12).

As Zvi said on March 15 (41:25): It's okay for the goose. It's okay for the gander. 

All told, from his own words, there is every indication that he has sold out to lynch-mob. But, wait!

Toward the end of his talk in Monsey, Zvi tells us a heart-wrenching story which effectively negates everything he was preaching until then. And he doesn’t even realize that he is doing it. Strangely enough, he tells it for all the wrong reasons. He says he is telling the story “to prove a point”. In my opinion, (1) it does not prove his point and (2) it proves several points he was not trying to make. In some ways it redeems him from his misguidedness, but in some ways it doesn’t.

On the side, I was indeed very impressed with how he dealt with the situation and see him as a hero in this particular story.

I was spellbound by the story because it is so similar to the event that happened over 35 years ago, mentioned above, that “taught me everything I need to know about how much to trust accusations”.

Here is the story (1:28:11):

Now I'm going to share a story, if I may, just to prove that point. Many many years ago, not so many because Amudim was open already, a person who I knew growing up came to me and said, "I need your help. I was falsely accused of molesting somebody."

A false accusation? Really? Is such a thing possible?

Well, there’s a lot more to this story and a lot to unpack from it. I can’t do it in this post. The rest of the story and what it says to us will have to wait for the next post. Stay tuned for it.

To be continued…