Making t'shuvah

There have been a bunch of stories recently about whether a Carlsbad church should welcome a repentent child molester or bar him from attending. In compiling these stories and a few others, GetReligion invokes the story from the Gospel of John in which Jesus comes across a group that wants to stone a woman caught in the act of adultery. "If any one of you is without sin," Jesus says, "let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

"That’s why I find this story so interesting," Mollie Ziegler of GetReligion writes. "I assume that my fellow congregants are like me: we all have a lot of very dark and secret sins that we’re glad are not out in the open. I assume that each person has their own struggle but that the struggle is serious and profound. Maybe that’s why I wish some of these stories — though the ones I highlighted were far and away the best — had a bit more perspective on the general theological approach to sin."

Last Wednesday, LA Weekly published this story about what happened to Rabbi Juda Heschel after he "unwittingly downloaded" two photos of child porn:

Heschel’s nine months at Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution, one of which he spent in solitary confinement, were only the beginning of his downward spiral. Seven years after those fateful mouse clicks to illegally download child porn, Heschel has abandoned his last name (Heschel is his middle name) and lives an impoverished life in a tiny Venice apartment, decorated with the pictures of his three children who live on the East Coast. In Los Angeles, his potential employers and landlords usually assume that “registered sex offender” means rapist or child molester. He has been denied jobs and turned down for apartments. One of the most difficult moments came when a Los Angeles synagogue initially told him he was no longer welcome — even as a congregant.

As Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony becomes embroiled in new claims that he knew about — and failed to stop — sexual abuse by a California priest, a number of high-profile sex scandals involving rabbis here and elsewhere have created a simmering fear among believers.

“We in the Jewish community are recognizing that we aren’t immune from these problems,” says Rabbi Mark S. Diamond, executive vice president of The Board of Rabbis of Southern California — one of the area’s two main rabbinical bodies, along with the Rabbinical Council of California. “For too many years I’ve heard Jewish people say this is not our problem, it just affects other faiths and denominations. We’re seeing otherwise.”

Diamond was horrified, for instance, to see his close colleague Rabbi David Kaye ensnared last year on Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator.” (Kaye was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for attempting to seduce an actor who, working with Dateline, posed as a 13-year-old boy.) Around the same time, the principal of one of Los Angeles’ most popular Jewish schools, Rabbi Aron Tendler, stepped down amid allegations that he had sexually abused teenage girls. A few months later, Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, a popular leader in the Jewish Renewal movement, lost his chair at Los Angeles’ Stephen S. Wise Temple Elementary School after confessing to molesting several of his former female students.

The story ran under the headline, "To Forgive or to Shun," and writer Justin Clark quoted Rabbi Mark Borovitz, a convicted felon and spiritual leader of Beit T'Shuvah, an addiction recovery center for Jews in the Pico-Robertson area. (I was at Beit T'Shuvah for Passover Monday. It was nice to see, as I have before, how blending the 12 steps program with Jewish teachings can help some addicts recover and move forward.)

Borovitz credits Heschel with bringing nearly two dozen individuals into Beit T’Shuvah’s Sex Addicts Anonymous program.

“As with alcohol or drug addiction,” Borovitz says, “the best sexual-addiction counselors are those who are in recovery themselves.”

Nevertheless, Heschel says he misses having the rabbi’s pulpit, and regularly sends out his résumé — without success. “When I send my résumés, it’s my curiosity,” he says. “Is this group willing to accept someone who has made genuine t’shuvah?”