Case of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni
(AKA: Marc Israel, Marc Gafni, Mark Gafni, Mordy Gafni, Marc Winiarz, Mordechai Winiarz, Mordechai Winyarz)
Marc Gafni (2008)
Zanzeon Zen Center of Salt Lake, Big Mind, Inc. - Salt Lake City, UT
Bayit Chadash Center - Jaffa and Poriya, Israel
Stephen L. Weiss Temple - Los Angeles, CA
Isabella Freedman - Falls Village, CT
Elat Chayyiim Center For Jewish Spirituality - Falls Village, CT
Edah - New York, NY
San Francisco, CA
Isralight Program - Israel
Aish Ha Torah / Discovery Program - Jerusalem, Israel
Boca Raton Synagogue - Boca Raton, FL
Stamford, Connecticut
JPSY (Jewish Public School Youth) - New York, NY
WARNING:
Marc Gafni Should Be Scene As A Danger to Women and Children. He is currently residing in Salt Lake City, UT
Marc (Mordechai) Winiartz was born in Pittsfield, Massachuestts in 1960 and grew up in an orthodox home. He is the son of Holocaust survivors. Once moving to Israel Marc Winiartz changed his last name to Gafni. Winiarz is also known as Mordechai Winiarz, Marc Gafni, Mordechai Gafni and or Marc Israel.
Gafni told Haaretz (March 4, 2004) "At age six or seven, I knew that I wanted to be a rabbi," "Because I really loved the world of the book, which I'd known since I began learning at age three."
From 1973-1977, Gafni went to Ohr Torah aka Manhattan Hebrew High School, which was overseen by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and run by Vancouver rabbi Pinchas Bak (who passed away on Purim 1977 at age 32).
After college he became a Rabbinical student at Yeshiva University, yet did not get his rabbinical ordination (smeicha) from YU. Instead, Mordechai Gafni obtained his ordination from Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. According to Winiarz/Gafni, he attended Yeshiva University for one semester around 1981. He attended Queens College for one semester. "I transferred all my credits to Edison College," says Marc. "It's one of those places that give you life credit. I got my degree from Edison College (circa 1985).
In 2004, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the spiritual leader of the Israeli community of Efrat, was going to revoke the rabbinic ordination he gave Rabbi Winiarz/Gafni many years ago when they had a close rabbi-student relationship. When Gafni heard of Rabbi Riskin's wishes, he wrote a letter "returning" his semicha to spare his former teacher any further embarrassment.
Winiarz/Gafni was 18, he was engaged to a woman, yet never married. According to various sources Winiarz/Gafni has been married three times. At age 20, Winiarz/Gafni married for the first time to a woman from Maine, which lasted two years.
In the early 1980's, when Mordechai was nineteen he sexually abused a thirteen-year-old girl in her home. It wasn't until many years later that Marc Gafni confessed to the molestation while being interviewed by Gary Rosenblatt, editor of the New York Jewish Week. Marc stated: "I was a stupid kid and we were in love," the rabbi said. "She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her"
In 1983 Mordechai Winiarz was married his first wife. During that time was also a youth leader for a group called "JPSY" (Jewish Public School Youth). The group involved working with at risk teenagers. It was during this time he was accused of molesting a fifteen-year-old girl and an attempted sexual assault of a young adult woman. At the time the rabbis accused him of cult like practices. Both women went to various rabbis looking for help, yet nothing was done except he was chased out of town, moving to Boca Raton, Florida. There was some sort of scandl and he fled Florida suddenly.
Marc Winiarz/Gafni was originally hired by Ellen Lieberman, when see needed someone to fill in for her while she was on a maternal leave. There have been reports of Gafni charming his way in and taking over Lieberman's positon. He renamed the organization "The Jewish Youth Movement."
JPSY was funded by Jewish philanthropists as Jeffrey Glick, Michael Steinhardt and Marc Belzberg.
In 1991 he left the Unitied States to start a new life in Israel, changing his name to Mordechai Gafni.
May, 2006 new allegations were made against confessed child molester Rabbi Mordechai Gafni . This time the allegations were made by three women who filed a complaint with the police in Haifa (Israel). The new claims were of professional sexual misconduct / clergy sexual abuse. The alleged offenses occurred during Torah lessons given by Gafni.
Immediately after the charges were filed Rabbi Mordechai Gafni confessed and fled Israel for the United States. He first landed in Boston, MA, where it is believed he stayed with one of his many female friends. There were rumors that soon after arriving in Boston he continued on to Boulder, CO and stayed with a colleague and then moved on to Salt Lake City, Utah.
Marc Gafni is involved with the Buddhist community of Salt Lake City. It is believed that he is in the process of trying to reinvent himself again as he did back in the 1980's after the first allegations were made against him of child molestation. Marc Gafni is considered dangerous to women and to both male and female children. Rumors are floating around that he is involved in BDSM community (Bondage, Discipline, Domination, Submission, Sadism, Masochism).
In July, 2008 it was reported that Marc Gafni married his forth wife and is the process of recreating himself and his web page. Marc Gafni's biggest supporter is Rabbi Gershon Winkler, founder of the Walking Stick Foundation. It has been reported by that Winkler shares many of Marc Gafni's philosophies including the one on having multiple "marriage partners".
Colleagues and Followers of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni who publicly spoke out on his behalf (Both former and current Gafni supporters are listed)
Disclaimer: Inclusion in this website does not constitute a recommendation
or endorsement. Individuals must decide for themselves if the resources meet
their own personal needs.
If you are a journalist doing a story -- The Awareness Center, Inc. asks that you mention our organization in your article if you found this web page helpful. The Awareness Center, Inc. is the international Jewish Coalition Against Sexual Abuse/Assault.
Timeline
1987
The New Orthodoxy The New Rabbi Of The Boca Raton Synagogue Expects To Make Waves (07/24/1987)
1989
Controversial Rabbi Starts Jewish Outreach Organization (01/05/1989)
1990
Letter by Rabbi Causes Flap in House Race (11/02/1990)
2000
Lessons From The Lanner Case (07/20/2000)
2001
2002
No Known Articles
2003
2004
Protocols Blogspot (05/05/2004)
Protocols Blogspot (05/07/2004)
Gary Rosenblatt (06/24/2004)
Update: Rabbi Marc Gafni (AKA: Mordechai Gafni, Marc Winiarz. Mordechai Winyarz, etc.) (10/03/2004)
Wisdom Chair - Jewish Studies at Stephen S. Wise Temple (09/21/2004)
The Re-Invented Rabbi (09/22/2004)
A Time to Publish? (09/24/2004)
Herscher: Gafni Still Welcome in L.A. (10/01/2004)
Articles on rabbi Gafni, born Marc Winiarz (10/03/2004)
Gafni has no PHD from Oxford (10/03/2004)
Stories From three Survivors of Rabbi Mordechai Winiarz (of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni (aka: Marc Gafni, Mark Gafni, Marc Winiarz, Mordechai Winiarz, Mordechai Winyarz)
Susan's Story (10/10/2004)
Rabbi Mordecai Gafni's Teachings to a Teenage Girl (10/13/2004)
If at first you aren't heard... (Judy's memories of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni) (10/17/2004)
Rabbi Yosef Blau On Mordecai Gafni (10/14/2004)
Letter from: Rabbi Saul J. Berman & Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (10/13/2004)
2005
Ways of Pleasantness or view it in Hebrew Maariv Article in Hebrew (10/15/2004)
Rabbi Marc Gafni andAndrew Cohen (01/01/2005)
Gafni and Walmart (03/01/2005)
Eric Yoffe regarding Marc Gafni (03/09/2005)
Why am I not a Buddhist? (06/02/2005)
CALL TO ACTION: UJA Federation of NY Sponsors Event with Rabbi Marc "Mordechai" Gafni (09/11/2005)
CALL TO ACTION: Rabbi Marc Gafni (Winiarz) - How can any paper publish an article by this man anymore? (12/05/2005)
CALL TO ACTION: Omega Institute (12/26/2005)
2006
CALL TO ACTION: All Rabbis and Rabbinical Organizations - Rabbi Marc Gafni (AKA: Rabbi Mordechai Winyartz) (01/16/2006)
CALL TO ACTION: Gafni and Worch Speaking in Chicago? (04/20/2006)
CALL TO ACTION: Jerusalem Post - Three days of purple haze (05/09/2006)
Gafni Strikes Again (05/11/2006)
Mordechai Gafni/Winiarz Accused of Rape (05/11/2006)
Rabbi Arthur Waskow issues a letter on Marc Gafni (05/14/2006)
Ken Wilber - Rabbi Marc Gafni and Sexual Improprieties (05/15/2006)
Letter from Mordechai Gafni to Aleph regarding the recent allegations of sexual assault (05/15/2006)
History Channel - Bible Code II: Apocalypse and Beyond (05/16/2006)
Rabbi Marc Gafni & Andrew Cohen (05/17/2006)
Faith and Values on TV - Marc Gafni (05/17/2006)
CALL TO ACTION: Rabbi Marc Gafni and the News Media (05/17/2006)
Rabbi Gafni accused of sexual assault (05/18/2006)
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni accused of sexually exploiting women (05/18/2006)
Rabbi dogged by sex scandal (05/18/2006)
Note From The Awareness Center Regarding the Articles from the Forward and the New York Jewish Week (05/18/2006)
Facing Up To Abuse (05/18/2006)
Bayit Hadash leader fired for sexual misconduct (05/18/2006)
Facts in Gafni case must be brought to light (05/18/2006)
Fiend Rabbi on Run: Victims in U.S., Israel (05/21/2006)
LA Gafni Event Canceled (05/25/2006)
Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi Speaks on Gafni (05/25/2006)
Rabbi Gafni Ousted for Misconduct (05/25/2006)
Rabbi Gafni's spiritual community still in shock (05/26/2006)
Helping Gafni's Victims (05/28/2006)
Campaign Against Edah - Justice for Survivors of Rabbi Mordecai Gafni (05/28/2006)
The new Sabbateans (05/30/2006)
Charisma's shadow Jewish Renewal community grapples with ethics in wake of Gafni affair (06/01/2006)
Charisma and its Dangers: Mordechai Gafni as Nazirite (06/12/2006)
Deconstructing The Gafni Case (06/09/2006)
Is Gary Rosenblatt reinventing history when it comes to the case of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni? (06/16/2006)
Deposition Of Mordecai Gafni's Third Wife (06/27/2006)
Nuns' accomplishments don't deserve ridicule (08/16/2006)
Call To Action: Locating Rabbi Mordechai Gafni and His Return To Israel (09/20/2006)
2007
Call To Action: Protect Women From Rabbi Mordechai Gafni (05/01/2007)
2008
Other Cases Connected to Rabbi Mordechai Gafni
Also see:
Rabbi Saul Berman - By Levi Ford
Background Information and The History of Rabbinical Ordinations
Rabbi Mordecai Gafni aka Marc
Winiarz
© (2003) By Levi Ford
The first story about Gafni/Winiarz's sexual escapades with
a minor was broken by Gary Rosenblatt in the September 24,
2004 issue of The Jewish Week. Many of the Gafni critics Gary spoke to
felt let down by his article. They say Gary either doesn't get it or he went
easy on Gafni to make Gary's own life easier. By focusing on sexual incidents
that happened 20 years ago instead of Gafni's ongoing creepy behavior, Rosenblatt
delegitimized his own article, not to mention the concern that Gafni is dangerous
to people today.
Here is my personal experience with rabbi Gafni: I heard him lecture (Gafni's a friend of UCLA Hillel rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller) for an hour at UCLA during Passover week 2002. I considered what Gafni had to say worthless. I read a long section of his book Soul Prints. I considered it worthless. Just New Age nonsense.
Gafni struck me as a charlatan.
I saw him hustle Dennis Prager to get a half hour on Prager's radio show the next week. I listened to the show. Neither Prager nor I could figure out what Gafni was talking about.
I have an ex-girlfriend who was deeply moved by Gafni's book -- Soul Prints. She said it was the best book she'd ever read on Judaism.
Rabbi Gafni's greatness as a religious teacher, such as it is, is not in coming up with original material, but in taking other people's ideas and restating them more clearly than the original thinkers. He's an excellent mimic and actor.
This is not a bad quality so long as one attributes one's sources. Dennis Prager is a popularizer of other people's ideas, but he attributes his sources. Rabbi Gafni frequently takes without attributing (as does Dr. Laura Schlesinger, who takes a lot from Prager without attribution). Many of Gafni's Renewal followers think he's a genius. He probably knows more Torah than 99% of Renewal Jews.
Winiarz's been to yeshiva. He's well read. He knows how to speak. He's charismatic. They're dying for a guy like him.
Rabbi Gafni's main problem is not his sexual philandering, say his critics. Those sexual sins are but a symptom of a larger problem -- he's a creep.
Rabbi Gafni, and Rabbi Arthur Green and his other supporters, are convinced that there is a small group of people who are destroying Winiarz's career. They are right. There is a small group of people destroying his career (well, he's destroyed his own career with his creepy behavior). They pushed Gary Rosenblatt to write that expose in The Jewish Week.
They are also the group of people who have known Rabbi Gafni best and longest.
If Rabbi Gafni has truly done teshuva, why hasn't he contacted the long list of innocent people he hurt and made restitution?
Gary Rosenblatt writes: "Avraham Infeld, now the president of Hillel, was heading an educational program in Israel called Melitz when he hired Gafni in the late 1990s, despite pressure not to do so. Infeld has said he had no regrets. Rabbi Saul Berman, who heads the Modern Orthodox group Edah, and Joseph Telushkin, the writer and ethicist, also defended Gafni, asserting that he is a gifted teacher and that they have heard no credible reports against him of improper behavior in the past 15 years or so."
On October 21, 2004, I left messages with Rabbis Berman and Telushkin on their home phone numbers to talk about their defense of Gafni and their attacks on The Awareness Center They've yet to return my call.
Rabbi Gafni has gone through more reinventions (not to mention name changes, marriages and relationships) than any rabbi I know.
When he was young (mid '70s), he saw himself as the next rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He was delivering rabbi Riskin's talks, word-for-word, better than rabbi Riskin. Rabbi Riskin didn't mind this. On the contrary, he was flattered to have a protege. Rabbi Riskin speaks personally, as if he is giving you some secret (with the way he uses his delivery and moves around the room). Mordecai imitated him exactly.
Winiarz wore a suit. His hair was cut short. He always wore a white shirt. He looked like a respectable Orthodox rabbi.
Then Winiarz graduated from Riskin and decided he was going to be the second coming of Rav Yosef Soloveitchik. He claimed to be the Rav's disciple. It's probably another of Winiarz's exaggerated claims. Perhaps Winiarz heard a lecture or two of the Rav's in person.
The Rav was completely out of Rabbi Gafni's range, but Gafni used his terms.
This didn't last long. Next (around 1980) Rabbi Gafni wanted to become the next Shlomo Carlebach (including Carlebach's creepy history of sexual abuse, including of underage girls).
In The Jewish Week article, Rabbi Gafni admitted to committing statutory rape. He said, "She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her."
He's been married three times. He was also engaged to a woman he never married. He walked out on his first wife when she was three months pregnant. His third marriage seems to be one of convenience. His current wife lives in San Francisco while Winiarz lives in Israel.
Winiarz ran an organization called JPSY (Jewish Public School Youth). It was funded by such major Jewish philanthropists as Michael Steinhardt and Mark Belzberg (who seemed impressed by Winiarz).
Winiarz was hired by Ellen Lieberman (who is now married to South African rabbi Ian Azizolohof). When Ellen left on maternity leave, Gafni took the organization from her. He seduced the board. She came back from leave to find she was out of a job.
Rabbi Gafni is insatiable for power and his predatory sexuality is just a part of his power thing. Some of his supporters, such as Mark Belzberg (from the wealthy Canadian family) have said, "Yeah, Mordecai has a yetzer hora."
Once in control of JPSY, Mordecai Gafni self-destructed. On his second marriage, he got caught molesting a 16-year old girl (called Judy in Rosenblatt's article). I understand that a similar problem broke up his first marriage.
When Mordecai was in high school, he was accused of various crimes and misdemeanors and illicit use of credit cards.
It's the people who know him longest and best who are most scared of what he can do. People he went to high school with. Today they are high profile Orthodox educators. They have made sure he can't get jobs in the Orthodox community, which is probably why he drifted out of Orthodoxy in the past four years and into Renewal, a place with loose enough standards to take someone with his history.
After he sexually abused this 16 yo Judy girl in JPSY a couple of times (and after that she turned him down), he hounded her for about a year. He went on a preemptive strike against her. He tried to destroy her life. He spread rumors that she was crazy. That she had a crush on him. That she was trying to destroy him.
Judy told her story to rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He chose to believe rabbi Gafni instead and discounted her story. Rabbi Riskin told her to stop bothering the good rabbi Gafni.
Judy told one of her counselors in JPSY, Susan. She confronted Rabbi Gafni. He tried to seduce her. She was appalled and rejected him.
A Beit Din was convenened in New York. Winiarz was told to quit his job and move from New York to some unsuspecting community and make a new life (that was how these things were handled until recently).
Around 1984, Rabbi Gafni had problems with the IRS.
Rabbi Gafni moved to Boca Raton around 1985. He did a great job in outreach. He was charismatic. He touched people deeply with Torah and other things. He built up the community (Boca Raton synagogue) that rabbi Kenneth Brander is leaving for YU. Rabbi Brander inherited the community from Mordecai in 1987.
Rabbi Gafni left the Boca Raton community suddenly. There were rumors that he'd had an affair with a married woman. There were a string of sexual allegations against him. He had to pick up in the middle of the night and move to Israel (and then took on the name Mordecai Gafni).
Before the scandal broke, he was considering moving back to New York to run for Congress going into politics. The guy is obsessed with power.
He also wanted to become a television anchor man. He knew he spoke well and he was just looking for ways to put his face before a lot of people.
He kept a scrapbook with clippings from every article he was in.
He kept coming up with various schemes for getting the most love.
There was a wealthy Jew in Boca Raton, the late Jerry Hahn, a big Aish Ha Torah donor who loved Winiarz
Gafni took the three day Aish Ha Torah Discovery seminar around 1987. He then went into the office and took all the original Discovery files. A week later, Rabbi Gafni started teaching the Discovery seminar in Israel.
Rabbi Gafni was confronted on this. He said to Aish -- you guys don't own this. It's Torah. Anybody can teach it.
Rabbi Gafni went around and taught the Discovery seminar for a year month or two. He was a great teacher. He started parroting the teachings of Aish Ha Torah founder Rabbi Noach Weinberg. Rabbi Weinberg, when he found out, was amused.
Rabbi Gafni decided to follow Rabbi Riskin's blueprint of becoming chief rabbi of his own town. Rabbi Riskin became chief rabbi of Efrat by creating his own town with his own community.
In Israel, to become a rabbi of a city, it takes a lot of political savvy and support. If you wanted to become the rabbi of Jerusalem, you'd have to hire a PR firm and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and have major support in political places. Major Torah scholarship won't be enough to make it happen.
Rabbi Gafni cut a deal with the contractor so he could become the rabbi of Beit Tzufim.
He got a job in the Israeli city of Kfar Saba. Every fourth Shabbatot, he was the guest rabbi. People loved him. He was charismatic. He made friends.
One man approached him for help with his 22 year-old daughter. She needed counseling. She was dating a guy the father considered inappropriate. Mordecai agreed to counsel her.
He shaved off his beard. He got up in front of the synagogue and said he had found the woman of his dreams. He was leaving the rabbinate. He was leaving his wife. He was going to spend the rest of his life with this 22yo.
His second marriage came to an end. The father of the 22yo went berserk. He contacted the Chief Rabbi's office and filed a complaint.
Mordy's relationship with the 22yo broke up quickly.
Mordy left the rabbinate for about a year. Rabbi Shlomo Riskin was still in Mordy's corner.
At this point, around 1992, no American or Israeli institution would take Rabbi Gafni. So Mordecai Gafni left for Australia. Rabbi Riskin had funding there. Rabbi Riskin wanted to spread his empire to Australia.
Rabbi Gafni was caught in some obvious lies and his credibility down under was shot.
Rabbi Gafni has no contact with his child from his first marriage. He has three kids from his second marriage. He's now married for five years in his third marriage and I don't think he has any kids this time around.
Mark Belzberg hired Mordy (they'd known each other from high school, Mark was a surrogate older brother for Mordecai) as a software salesman. Mark had a business partner, a wealthy lawyer baal teshuva who moved to Israel. He's reported that Mordecai used the company credit card for all kinds of immoral things on business trips (that he was made to pay back out of his own pocket).
Mordy walked into this guy's office and said he wanted to be president. The guy said Mordy would have to buy him out (Mordy doesn't have any money). The guy went away on a business trip for three weeks. He finds out that Mordecai Gafni had told everybody that he was president. So Belzberg's partner fired him on the spot.
Mordecai couldn't stay away from teaching Torah. He couldn't stay away from the limelight. Rabbi Riskin helped Mordecai get a job around 1996 with Rabbi David Aaron from Israel (Isralight).
Rabbi Aaron's web site uses a promo from that litigious, and in my opinion, nogoodnik Deepak Chopra (who successfully sued the Weekly Standard and the New York Post for saying he patronized hookers): "Inspirational, wise, warm and witty... David Aaron gives us a down to earth understanding of the Kabbalah, revealing the secrets to living a soulful, happy, and more meaningful life."
Rabbi Gafni had one or two flings with his Isralight students. Rabbi David Aaron won't speak about it. Rabbi Gafni got fired from Isralight.
He got a job with a group called Milah (Jerusalem Institute for Education). He became high profile in Jerusalem around 1998. He got fired because of money and power issues.
(A source writes: "Milah was an adult education ulpan for Americans and ethiopians who finished the regular ulpan and were still not comfortable in Hebrew. Gafni used this role as head of the organization, not to teach Hebrew, but to teach his theories of pagan Judaism and a parashat hashavua class.")
A rabbinical student at Hebrew University around this time had a moral dilemma. He worked for a famous rabbi as a research assistant. "I listen to tapes of other well-known rabbis. I write them up for him. Then he gives over their classes."
It was obvious the student worked for Rabbi Mordecai Gafni.
So whose tapes was he stealing these days? Rabbi Noach Weinberg among others.
Rabbi Gafni would often give over the teachings of other rabbis word-for-word, without attribution.
There was an eccentric, a Yaakov Fogelman, a Harvard-educated lawyer, who ran around the old city of Jerusalem. He swore by Mordecai. He publicized whenever Mordecai would speak. He thought Mordecai was a genius. 'He's the most brilliant educator of the past 500 years. I heard Soleveitchik. I heard this rabbi and that.'
So what genius things did Mordecai say? Yaakov would quote something that Mordy had stolen from some other rabbi.
Mordecai has great taste. He knows how to steal things from great people.
Another man had a moral dilemma. His wife had moved to Israel two months before him. He suspected that she had had an affair with a rabbi. Guess who he suspected of cuckolding him?
A lot of high profile Orthodox rabbis (until this Gary Rosenblatt article) did not know that Marc Winiarz was Mordecai Gafni. His name change worked. He succeeded in reinventing himself.
In the past four years, Rabbi Gafni had developed an effective new strategy of admitting he did some bad things when he was a kid. Confession gains credibility. "I've done teshuva. I have a good marriage. There are people who are stalking me." He turns the accusations around.
A healthy baal teshuva is one who can forgive himself for his sins. In this sense, Marc is very healthy. A part of me admires him for everything he's been able to get away with, like the Tom Hanks crook in Catch Me If You Can.
Rabbi Gafni is great at identifying people with big money. And what they believe, he will believe and preach. He's a purported TV star in Israel. It's paid television. He's paying (or his backers are paying, such Shari Arison, then the richest resident of Israel) for him to be on TV. It's like 6 a.m. for three minutes.
For a while, Rabbi Gafni defined himself as post-denominational. Let others fight these petty fights between Reform and Orthodox. Rabbi Gafni is beyond such things.
According to the recent Haaretz profile, it sounds like Rabbi Gafni's latest theology comes straight from the Da Vinci Code -- the best-selling novel that claimed that ancient Christianity believed in two divinities, Jesus and Mary. In Rabbi Gafni's enlightened theology, he claims the Jews have gotten rid of the erotic and chased away the female deity. He makes his brachot using the name of the shekhina to re-unite the male and female sides of God.
My sources tell me that the Master of the Universe mightily appreciates Rabbi Gafni's good works in this respect, and the Holy One, Blessed Be He and She, feels much more united and whole since Rabbi Gafni adjusted his brachot.
And what's a few molestations by Gafni compared to the Almighty's wholeness? Shall we talk of the things of girls or of the things of G-d?
Rabbi Gafni is mighty different in private than in public. In public, he's full of love and cheer and performance. In private, he curses and talks like a slob.
Rabbi Gafni is a terrific actor, and for that, I salute him.
I am, however, skeptical of his claims of credentials.
I believe that one of Gafni's biggest financial supporters is Israeli Jacob Davidson, whose wife (active in the protest group Women at the Wall) tried to get acceptance to Yeshiva University to become a rabbi.
In November, 2004, rabbi Gafni spoke in a tent in the Modern Orthodox German colony in Jerusalem. Gafni was surrounded by girls as he spoke about erotic Judaism. A source says that Gafni looks like a cult leader. He now wears long hair. He looks like a hippie.
Bayit Chadash
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, Spiritual Director
http://www.bayitchadash.org/staff.shtml
Reb Gafni is the Rosh Bayit of Bayit Chadash. His
primary affiliations include being a Visiting Fellow at the Hartman Institute
in Jerusalem and Senior Scholar at the Melitz Educational Institution.
Additionally, Reb Gafni was a fellow at the Oriental Institute of Oxford
University, he is currently completing the writing of a commentary on the
Hasidic text "Mei Ha'Shiloach." Reb Gafni serves as a contributing editor
to the American Tikkun magazine, a bimonthly journal critiquing politics,
culture and society from a Jewish perspective. He is also a contributing
editor of Chayim Acherim, Israel's leading spirituality magazine.
Together with colleagues, Reb Gafni is developing a new school of Jewish thought which is coming to be called "The School of Personal Myth". This proposes a marked shift from national to personal myth as the center of Jewish consciousness. Reb Gafni is reformulating and extending the core constructs of Post-Lurianic thought in a modern Neo-Hasidic context. Also the host and creator of a highly acclaimed national Israeli television program on ethics and spirituality, Reb Gafni's work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher: wise, deep, compassionate, accessible, and universal.
His English book, Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment was released by Pocket Books in 2001 and is accompanied by a national PBS Special of the same title. The book is a best seller and is now being translated into numerous languages. In Hebrew, his two volume set of New Jewish Thought -entitled Certainty and Uncertainty is published by Modan Publishers. Written in collaboration with Ohad Ezrachi, Lilith and Sacred Feminism is slated for release in 2005. The Mystery of Love was also recently released in English in the spring of 2003 by Atria books. Reb Gafni is married to Chaya Kaplan, his full partner in all endeavors, and he is the father of Eytan and Yair.
Board of Directors and Founders - Bayit Chadash
Founders
http://www.bayitchadash.org/staff.shtml
Jacob Ner-David - Board Chairperson. Social activist and entrepreneur.
Avraham Leader - Melamed-in-Residence. One of the founders of "Amiqa d'Bira" (also known as "The Leader Minyan"). Currently studies, teaches, and translates.
Haviva Ner-David - Educational Director, Author, feminist activist, teacher, and scholar.
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni - Rosh Bayit. Student, Rebbe, author, and scholar.
Board of Directors - US
http://www.bayitchadash.org/board.shtml
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni - Spiritual Director
Jacob Ner-David - International Chair
Suzy Rogovin - Israel Chair
Metuka Benjamin - U.S. Chair
Marcia Wexberg - Treasurer
Neil Markowitz - Secretary/U.S. Coordinator
Board Members at Large
Yosef Abramowitz, Alex Abrams, Michael Appel. Bruce Arbit, Erica Fox, Sam Fried, Jon Friedenberg, Stephen Friedlander, David Friedman, Chaya Gafni, Tamar Geller, Rabbi Micah Greenstein, Robert Jaffe, Gary Kaplan, Cheryl Kaplan, Avraham Leader, Jessica Korn Leibowitz, David Kunin, Patti Niehoff, Bradley Rauch, Shridhar Steven Silberfein, Barbara Silverman, Devin Sper, Rabbi Michael Zedek
Board of Advisors
Rabbi Daniel Abrams, Rabbi William Berk, Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein, Zivit Davidovitch, Martha Doty, Rabbi Leonid Feldman, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, Rabbi Arthur Green, Dr. Admiel Kosman, Arthur Kurzweil, Rabbi Rolando Matalon, Doctor Daniel Matt, Doctor Hannah Matt, Dr. Peter Pitzele, Chava Rimon, Rabbi Jeff Roth, Rabbi Joe Schonwald, R Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Rabbi Daniel Siegel, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Rabbi Avi Weiss, Elie Wurtman
195 words, BOCA RATON, Fla.
The Associated Press - August 17, 1987, Monday, PM cycle,
Rock News & Notes, This Elvis Rellica
ain't Nothing But a Sound Doll
Daily News of Los Angeles (CA) - August 21, 1987
Elvis Presley sang of his desire to be a teddy bear, but the late rock legend will have to settle for being a battery-operated doll. Starr Associates of Greenvale, N.Y., will market a 20-inch replica of the King in his famous white, rhinestone-studded jumpsuit and mounted on a sound stage. The doll, which is being marketed as "Elvis in Concert," features multicolored lights that flash as a built-in cassette player plays one of Elvis' original RCA gold records with "true...
Complete Article, of 682 words
Los Angeles Times - August 18, 1987
http://jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2005/01/rabbi-mordechai-gafni-series-part-3.html#comments
Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation's press Entertainment Desk
An Orthodox rabbi in Boca Raton, Fla., is reaching out to young people in an unorthodox way--with rock 'n' roll. Mordechai Winyarz, 26, paid New York songwriter Lenny Solomon $30,000 to write songs with contemporary Jewish themes and hired young Jewish musicians to perform and record an album for $12,000. The album, "Jewish Pride," set for release Sept. 1, includes a rap song "Rappin' Jewish" written by Danny Furst. A sample of the lyrics:
La-die-doo, I'm a Jew 'cause I think it's cool
Yeah, I eat kosher meat 'cause I ain't no fool
Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat
I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
The San Diego Union - August 18, 1987
Dead days Wed head Couch potato alert
So you think Lt. Col. Oliver North is a hero? Fine. Color him red, white and blue. Or maybe you're sure he's a crook. That's OK, too. You can give him fangs and facial hair if it will make you feel better. In fact, you can do whatever you want with Ollie North -- now that he's got his own coloring book. Although it is just getting to bookstores this week, Mort Drucker's "The Ollie North Coloring Book" already is in its third printing because 200,000 copies...
Rabbi's Rap Sings Praises of Judaism - Jewish
Rap
Sun-Sentinel - August 28, 1987
By Carol Brzozowski, Staff Writer
Imagine hearing a Jewish rap song to the beat of ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, boom, ch-ch boom.
Imagine it played full blast from the stereos of the cars of Jewish teens as they cruise around town.
An Orthodox rabbi from Boca Raton is content in imagining that. He helped to make the album on which the song appears.
Imagine that!
Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz, a freshly ordained transplant from New York and the first rabbi for the newly established Boca Raton Synagogue, is in the sanctuary, playing the music at full volume, making motions with his hands as if he were beating on drums.
The album, Jewish Pride, is scheduled to be released on Tuesday in Palm Beach County and then in New York.
''This is going to have an impact!'' he exclaimed. ''Take cantorial music and throw it out the window!''
Later, Winyarz conceded that he liked cantorial music, but added that he thinks it cannot reach out to young Jews the way modern music can, if set to ''Jewish'' lyrics.
''I like cantorial music, but it doesn't express Jewish pride
in the '80s,'' Winyarz said. ''Ritual expression is critical, but it's not
the end-all. If it doesn't create a certain kind of person, a certain kind
of society, then what is ritual for?''
To know a bit about Winyarz' history is to understand why an Orthodox rabbi would be backing a project to reach out to unaffiliated Jews through rock music.
Winyarz, 26, was responsible for initiating an outreach into New York schools. He would walk into a school holding a shofar -- the ram's horn used in sacred services -- and would recruit any Jewish child into his youth programs who recognized the shofar.
He became the second rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue, leaving behind the program in New York after building it into a host of youth groups with a budget of $500,000.
The album was done through the cooperation of JPSY, an acronym for Jewish Public School Youth, a program Winyarz initiated in New York. Winyarz and his small group of musicians scouted for young Jewish musicians to perform on the album.
The group worked six hours during the weekdays from midnight to 6 a.m. for two weeks at Eastside Sound Studio in New York.
In making the album, Winyarz convinced Lenny Solomon, an accountant, to go into Jewish rock music full time.
''His mother is real thrilled,'' Winyarz said, tongue in cheek. Solomon has dropped his job to lead the organization's musical outreach program.
Not every song on Jewish Pride is the type that's only understood when played full-blast from an oversized radio. Some have the traditional Hebrew folk music beat. Some talk of familiar themes in Judaism.
Minyan Man is about a group of nine Jewish men in search of a 10th man to have a minyan, the ''quorum'' needed to conduct Jewish worship.
The title song is Jewish Pride.
Winyarz said that the album is a pioneering one in Jewish music, and representatives of national Jewish music organizations say they can't argue one way or another.
Although he concedes that Jewish music has been ''updated'' with every generation, the rabbi said the album is a first in its combination of a variety of modern styles and its use of Jewish messages for lyrics.
He hopes it will start a trend such as the one Christians began in the 1960s with religious rock music, featuring such musicians as Randy Stonehill, Larry Norman and Amy Grant.
Winyarz will introduce the album through Jewish cultural radio programs and in Jewish book and record stores, but he has his eyes set on secular radio as well.
''This is religious music, there's no question about it,'' Winyarz said of Jewish Pride.
Jews' pride in themselves is shrinking, Winyarz says. He said that many Jews are ''trying to be WASP-y'' in an attempt to cover their Jewish heritage, following the cue of their parents who have done so in order to assimilate.
''We're saying, 'Don't do that. Chuck it,''' Winyarz said. ''The 11th commandment of a Jew in America has been, 'Thou shalt melt (into the melting pot).'
''We've ... been comfortable in our Judaism and pay lip service to Judaism. Our direction is complete confrontation -- in the most positive way.''
Winyarz figures that confrontation is done best through music.
The lyrics from Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz' new Jewish rap song, Rappin' Jewish, which is on his album Jewish Pride.
''La-die-do I'm a Jew 'cause I think it's cool
Yeah I eat kosher meat 'cause I ain't no fool
Ask me anything you want to but I will repeat
I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
Got a son who's a doctor, a daughter who's a lawyer
My wife teaches English and reads Tom Sawyer
Each morning I sit at my breakfast table
Eatin' 'filte fish with lox and bagels.
I'm a Jewish man been all over the map
That's why I'm singing my Jewish rap
Y'see I've been rappin' since the age of three
When my home boys rocked across the Red Sea.
Chorus: Jewish Pride keeps ya going strong
Makes our people last real long
So don't ignore what comes from inside
Let it grow, 'cause it's Jewish Pride.''
Rabbi To Mark Papal Visit By Walking A Picket
Line
by Dexter Filkins - Herald Staff Writer
The Miami Herald (FL) - September 10, 1987
When
Pope John Paul II meets with Jewish leaders Friday, Rabbi Mordechai
Winyarz will greet him, but not like everyone else. Instead of waving
and cheering, the rabbi will shout and walk a picket line -- in the uniform
of a concentration camp survivor.
Winyarz, who will join 15 other rabbis in the Miami International Airport protest, has some questions for the pontiff, and he wants them answered:
Why did the pope meet with and praise Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, the former Nazi? Why was the Vatican silent during the Holocaust, when six million Jews perished? Why does the Vatican refuse to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel? Why did the pope embrace the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose group is dedicated to the destruction of Israel?
Winyarz said he is not angry; just suspicious, and driven.
"The pope is playing on both sides of the fence," said Winyarz, 26, rabbi of the orthodox Boca Raton Synagogue. "This is not pope-bashing. I just want to know where he really stands."
To find out, Winyarz and others will don concentration camp uniforms and get as close as they can to the pope when he lands. Tonight, the group will lecture on "the history of church anti- Semitism" outside the Omni Hotel, where the pope and several Catholic leaders will gather. And when Jewish leaders meet John Paul II Friday at the Cultural Arts Center, Winyarz will be outside.
"It is important that the Jewish leaders are there," Winyarz said. "But it is just as important that we are there to let our leaders know that there is a constituency outside."
To the rabbi, the pope is wading in murky moral waters. Past actions of the church and the pope, he said, raise the specter of anti-Semitism, and as the spiritual leader of 900 million Roman Catholics, the pope is obliged to put the questions to rest.
"(Yassar) Arafat's methodology is killing women and children. Waldheim is a documented Nazi," said Winyarz, whose mother survived the Holocaust. "What does that say when the pope welcomes these men and embraces them?"
For Winyarz, the heart of the matter is whether the church is anti-Semitic. On this, Winyarz is undecided, but he asserts that some actions -- such as the Vatican's refusal to recognize Israel -- suggest that it is.
"The recognition of Israel is, I think, a theological problem," Winyarz said. "The church used to teach that the Jews, as the killers of Christ, are condemned to eternal damnation."
What could Pope John Paul do to placate Winyarz? Simple, said the rabbi:
Recognize Israel, repudiate Arafat and Waldheim and explain the Vatican's behavior during the Holocaust.
Winyarz doesn't think that will happen, but to him, the pope must know. The rabbi does not claim to speak for his congregation, but he is certain that many Jews share his views, and that he won't be ostracized.
"We all have to take the path that our consciences dictate," Winyarz said. "I don't think my fellow Jews will be offended by that."
Caption: photo: RABBI Mordechai Winyarz
Promised Protests Fall Flat Amid
Festivities
Miami Herald, The (FL) - September 11, 1987
by LUIS FELDSTEIN SOTO And RODRIGO LAZO Herald Staff Writers
The traffic, a sudden illness and the sheer joy of a papal visit all took blame Thursday for dampening -- and in some cases washing out -- a series of demonstrations by TWA flight attendants, AIDS activists and Mariel refugees.
The day's loudest demonstration, an afternoon of sign waving and fund raising for AIDS victims, drew as many journalists as protesters, 75 of each. And only a handful of out-of-work TWA flight attendants turned out to protest the pontiff's use of TWA jets during his 10-day visit to America.
"We had a party and nobody came," said Sonny Wax, an organizer of the Cure AIDS Now demonstration at Vizcaya. "I'm very unhappy. With all the work we put into it, all the days and weeks, nobody came out."
"If someone had told Martin Luther King to give up when he only had a handful of people, we wouldn't have the civil rights act," said TWA flight attendant Sherry Cooper, who said the fear of traffic kept other attendants at home.
The biggest surprise -- and biggest relief to police -- was the daylong calm at clinics that perform abortions. After weeks of threatened pickets and sit-ins, a national anti-abortion group called off its plans Wednesday.
The Rev. Patrick Mahoney, local spokesman for We Will Stand Up, claimed there was no need for protests because Miami would be "abortion-free" during the pope's two-day visit. He said Metro and Miami police confirmed that clinics would either close or not perform abortions during the pope's visit.
Spokesmen for the two police agencies said later that they made no such guarantees. They said only that an informal, incomplete survey of clinics found no evidence of abortions scheduled.
Even so, Mahoney said that was good enough for his group. Instead of demonstrating, We Will Stand Up decided to unfurl a 40-foot, anti-abortion banner near the airport. But the banner didn't appear when the pope passed through the airport.
A group of Cuban exiles, who planned to call for the release of Mariel refugees held in U.S. prisons, canceled its protest at the last minute. The mother of one of the group's leaders had suffered a stroke, one member said.
The most successful protest occurred hours before the pope arrived. At 8 a.m., nine hard-line rabbis danced, recited psalms and blew three ram's horns -- known as shofars -- in a call for "true dialogue" between Catholics and Jews.
The rabbis strongly criticized last week's Rome meeting between John Paul II and nine Jewish leaders, saying the pope "ducked the issues," said Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz of Boca Raton. The rabbis recited a litany of beefs against the pope -- his audience with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, his refusal to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, his "old charges of the Jew being a Christ-killer," Winyarz said.
Caption: photo: Bob Klein sets up tombstones in aids protest (JOHN PAUL TRIP MIAMI*)
"Never Again!' Pope Says Holocaust Condemned in Talk
to Jewish Leaders
Sun-Sentinel - September 12, 1987
By James D. Davis, Religion Editor
MIAMI
-- Pope John Paul II, in a major address on Catholic-Jewish relations, gave
his clearest statement thus far that Jews were the primary targets of the
Holocaust.
The pontiff, in a historic speech Friday to 175 national and South Florida Jewish leaders at the Center for the Fine Arts, passionately called the World War II Nazi slaughter a ''ruthless and inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish people ... only because they were Jews.''
The remark was an apparent attempt to allay Jewish fears that the Vatican was trying to ''universalize'' the Holocaust and play down its special victimization of Jews. Many Jews have voiced concern that such an approach might make Catholics less sensitive to anti-Semitism.
The statements were the ''first time any Vatican official has said it with such clarity,'' said Burton Levinson, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, in a news conference afterward.
In his second summit-style meeting with Jewish leaders in a week and a half -- the first was at Castel Gandolfo, his summer home in Italy -- the pope pledged to have his church fight bigotry, teach positive Jewish images in Catholic schools, and explore the historical roots of anti-Semitism.
As for the Holocaust horrors, ''Never again!'' he vowed, to spontaneous applause, the only time his address was so interrupted. The phrase has become a standard rallying cry for world Jewry.
The pope also defended Pope Pius XII, who reigned during World War II, against charges that he remained silent during the Holocaust.
Pope John Paul II said he was ''convinced that history will reveal more clearly and convincingly how deeply Pius XII felt the tragedy of the Jewish people, and how hard and effectively he worked to assist them.''
The pontiff spoke on a raised dais in the center, eye-level with Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, head of a group that keeps in touch with Vatican officials. It was a symbolic departure from the pope's usual raised throne.
In his own talk, Waxman mentioned ''recent tendencies to obscure the fact that Jews were the major target of Nazi genocidal policies.'' However, he also said Jewish-Catholic talks are ''one of this century's most positive developments.''
The delegates were a cross-section of mainstream Jewry. They represented the Synagogue Council of America, an umbrella of most U.S. Jewish groups; and the interdenominational American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League.
The Catholic side included several Vatican cardinals, including its secretaries of state, education and interfaith relations. Also present were Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Vatican's ambassador to the United States, and four American cardinals.
A small group of people demonstrated outside the Spanish-style center. The protesters, some wearing concentration camp garb, waved Israeli flags and placards with slogans such as ''Arafat, Waldheim, what next?''
The protest was over an audience granted by the pontiff on June 25 to Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who has denied accusations that he helped deport Jews and partisans when when he was a German army officer in World War II, and one granted in 1982 to Palestinian guerrilla leader Yasser Arafat.
In his address, the pope made no reference to the Waldheim affair, which Waxman said still causes ''pain and distress.'' But the pontiff told reporters on the trip from Rome that it had been his duty to meet Waldheim, since he came ''as a president, democratically elected, of a people, of a nation.''
Although the pope said the Jewish people ''have a right to a homeland,'' the delegates greeted with stony silence his assertion that this ''also applies to the Palestinian people, so many of whom remain homeless and refugees.'' Delegates were only slightly more receptive when he mentioned the ''state of Israel,'' with which the Vatican still has not exchanged ambassadors.
The response was warmer when the pontiff said that the suffering of Israel's children reminds the church of its common bond with the Jewish people. It was a clear theological rationale for making Holocaust studies a Catholic priority.
The pope repeated his announcement of last week that he was planning a major document on the Holocaust. He also reminded the listeners of a Jewish-Catholic workshop on the significance of the Holocaust, set for December in Washington, D.C. He said it would explore ''religious and historical implications of the Shoah'' for both faiths. ''Shoah,'' which means ''destruction,'' is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.
Rabbi Waxman's talk was more specific, urging more attention to ''the Christian roots of anti-Semitism.'' He said the Holocaust was the climax of centuries of bigotry ''for which Christian teachings bear a heavy responsibility.''
Waxman voiced Jewish concern at the lack of full Vatican diplomatic relations for Israel, a matter that many Jews take as a lack of Catholic understanding of what Israel means to them. The Jewish state often is called a last refuge for persecuted Jews worldwide.
''Obviously, the differences have not been resolved,'' Waxman said. But he acknowledged a Vatican promise to keep in closer touch with Jewish leaders on actions that might affect them.
''We live in an historic moment. The last quarter-century has irreversibly changed the way we perceive and act towards each other,'' Waxman said.
But even among the mainstream Jewish groups, there were signs of divisions. An Orthodox rabbinical group boycotted the Friday dialogue because the previous talks failed to mention the Holocaust and recognition of Israel.
The Orthodox group also forbade Synagogue Council president Gilbert Klaperman to read the main statement to the pope Friday. Waxman, a Conservative, got the job instead.
Klaperman came to the meeting, anyway, because ''I felt the process is important and that it must continue.'' Saying that the church had specifically acknowledged Jewish anger, he said the dialogue now must get beyond that.
Caption: (Papal pool photo/BRIAN SMITH)Umbrellas shield Pope John Paul II during a rainy Mass that was cut short on Friday in Tamiami Park.
Pontiff listens as Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, of Great Neck, N.Y., a leader of the (Staff photo: Robert Azmitia) Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz of Coalition for Concerned Zionist Activists protests meeting with Jewish leaders. PHOTOS (2, One Color)
Sun-Sentinel - September 18, 1987
By Carol Brzozowski, Staff Writer
http://jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2005/01/rabbi-mordechai-gafni-series-part-4.html#comments
South Palm Beach County rabbis who attended Pope John Paul II's meeting with Jewish leaders say they are encouraged by the dialogue and add that they will participate in plans for increasing dialogue between local Catholics and Jews.
''It was heartwarming,'' Rabbi Sam Silver said of the meeting. ''It is part of the process of strengthening the bond between Jews and Catholics. I was impressed by the pope. No person of Catholic faith can now sink into bigotry without knowing how their leader feels.''
Silver, of Temple Sinai in Delray Beach, was one of two south county rabbis selected by the Archdiocese of Miami to attend the pope's meeting Sept. 11 with Jewish leaders.
The meeting was jeopardized following the pontiff's audience with Austrian President Kurt Walheim, accused of participating in Nazi war crimes against Jews. But even before the pope arrived in the United States, many Jews had decided to go on with the meeting in Miami.
''I believe it was a moment of spiritual reconciliation,'' said Rabbi Merle Singer of Temple Beth El in Boca Raton, who also was present at the meeting.
''The pope called for an understanding of our diverse ways and a respect for the integrity of various religions. He called on Jews to understand his motives and reasons for talking with the president of Austria and we called upon the pope to understand the Jewish community's sensibilities regarding his meeting with a member of the Nazi party.
''His remarks spoke of the joint responsibility the Jewish and Christian community have in righting the social wrongs of our time.''
Silver and Singer agree that is unrealistic of those analyzing the meeting to expect that the pope would have made an official announcement of recognition of the state of Israel during his whirlwind tour of the U.S.
But both say the pope's statements set the groundwork for what they feel will be an eventual establishment of Vatican diplomatic relations with Israel.
Silver was especially encouraged by the speech of Cardinal Johannes
Willebrands, the Vatican's top interfaith officer, presented at an
interfaith dinner Sept. 10 at the Omni Hotel in Miami.
Willebrand ''elaborated at great length on the fact that these contacts precipitated by the Waldheim encounter will continue to produce a number of documents (from the Vatican),'' Silver said.
''The reaction against the pope on the meeting involved not only protests from the Jewish community, but from Catholics as well, including bishops,'' he said. ''I'm quite confident the Vatican will establish ties with the state of Israel.''
Singer said the meeting ''did not soften any negative feelings in the Jewish community'' among those who boycotted the meeting.
''But that's their agenda,'' he said. ''I feel the appropriate agenda is to open the door for dialogue; not to stand on a street corner and protest.''
While Singer was in the meeting, another Boca Raton rabbi, Mordechai Winyarz, stood on the street corner to protest on behalf of an organization he chairs, the Center for Justice.
Winyarz said he is not against participating in dialogues with Catholics, but would not do so under the conditions of last week's meeting, which he said was ''theatrics'' and not a session of ''true conversation.''
He pointed out that the speech of the Jews' spokesperson, Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, had to be submitted to the Vatican prior to its delivery last week, which Winyarz called ''censorship.''
Winyarz also criticized the pope for ''ignoring the Waldheim issue'' and called the pope's comments ''ambiguous.''
There already are signs of the meeting having an impact in South Florida, which has the second-largest Jewish population in the United States and is home to one of the largest Catholic populations in the country.
''The relations here are improving through that remarkable school, St. Vincent de Paul,'' Silver said, referring to the Catholic seminary west of Boynton Beach. ''They've offered lectures and meetings and I've spoken there as a representative of the Jewish community.
''Bishop (Thomas) Daily couldn't be more amicable. He's already sponsored dialogues in the cathedral between Catholic and Jewish leaders.''
Singer said he has met with Monsignor John McMahon, pastor of St. Joan of Arc parish and vicar for social services for the Diocese of Palm Beach, to prepare a program of dialogues on Jewish-Catholic relations.
A joint Catholic-Jewish statement released prior to the papal visit expressed encouragement over the meeting, while recognizing ''that there continues to exist mutual unresolved problems and prejudices.''
The statement acknowledged an ''environment of mutual respect'' in the local community and called for measures to continue fostering that environment.
Controversial Rabbi Starts Jewish Outreach
Organization
The Palm Beach Post - January 5, 1989
An Orthodox rabbi whose activist style has sometimes made him the center of controversy is starting a Jewish outreach organization with classes and other programs designed to draw more people into Jewish life. Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz will kick off the new enterprise, called the Center for Jewish Living, with a lecture at 7:30 tonight at Spanish River High School, 5100 Jog Road, in Boca Raton. "What we're offering is real Jewish exposure to real Jewish ideas which make a...
Complete Article, of 417 words
Rabbi Urges "Revolution" In Values Winyarz's Controversial
Speech Part of Classes
The Palm Beach Post - January 6, 1989
Nothing less than a "revolution" will stir south county Jewry out of complacency and into a life devoted to Judaism, Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz said Thursday night. Speaking to about 250 people at Spanish River High School, Winyarz said: "To my mind, there is no greater tragedy than South Florida. . . . We'd like to start a revolution of Torah values." Winyarz, who left the pulpit of the Orthodox Boca Raton Synagogue last year amid differences with...
Complete Article, of 436 words
Boca Rabbi Accepts Job On West Bank
The Palm Beach Post - July 22, 1989
An Orthodox rabbi whose activist style won both friends and enemies among local Jews has accepted a religious post in the Middle East. Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz, 28, said he will leave in September or October for a two-year post as rabbi of Zufim, a Jewish settlement on the West Bank. The new community is on the western edge of the occupied territory, about 2 miles east of the Israeli city of Kefar Sava. Winyarz said the community has only 10 families now, but has plans for about...
Complete Article, of 322 words
The New Orthodoxy: The New Rabbi of the Boca Raton
Synagogue Expects to Make Waves
Sun-Sentinel - July 24, 1987
By Carol Brzozowski, Staff Writer
http://jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2005/01/rabbi-gafniwiniyarz-series-part-2.html#comments
The name Mordechai Winyarz may not ring a bell in Palm Beach County yet.
But as the Orthodox rabbi settles into his new position as the first full-time rabbi for the Boca Raton Synagogue, he has hopes of being a ''clanging cymbal'' for God.
Winyarz, 26, just may do that. If he were a Christian, his style would be called evangelical.
Winyarz immediately is forthright about his lifestyle, should there be any questions on the topic: ''I'll be making about $40,000 to $44,000, I drive a 1984 Topaz and I own eight suits.''
Winyarz has come from New York to the fledgling Boca Raton Synagogue, the only Orthodox synagogue in Boca Raton, and one of three in Palm Beach county.
Its construction is the bloodline for the Orthodox body. Orthodox Jews walk to the synagogue on the Sabbath and its construction has made it easier for the Jews to worship.
''People were moving here because they knew we were here,'' said Dr. Gary Lieber, a spokesman and founding member of the synagogue.
Just a few weeks into his position, Winyarz is making plans in an effort to get involved. He is constantly on the telephone, talking with religious and secular community leaders. On the drawing board is a plan for some type of ''demonstration'' in regards to the papal visit.
''Judaism has got to be a moral and social force,'' Winyarz said. ''Not just to make pronouncements, but to become involved.''
''We were looking for someone to shake the bushes, to make the synagogue a dynamic place,'' Lieber said of the search for a rabbi. ''We're looking to make the congregation the Jewish center in south county. With a mouthpiece like him, we want to let people know we're here. We've essentially done the groundwork.''
Winyarz ambitiously speaks of a few of his plans, one of which is to create a national Jewish retreat center on the synagogue's property.
''Why not?'' he said. ''The assumption is that everything operates out of New York. (Studies show) there are 75,000 Jews in Palm Beach County.''
Yet South County Jewish Federation studies also show that the affiliation rate of local Jews is 13 percent, half the national average.
''Boca in general is extremely materialistic and completely self-involved,'' Winyarz said in interpreting the statistics.
''Younger people come to Florida to escape and be unaffiliated.''
Winyarz said he doesn't condemn the acquisition of material goods and adds that Hebrew scriptures show that God created the world and the world is to be enjoyed.
As a spiritual leader, Winyarz said he will attempt to guide his congregation into emphasizing aspects of life that transcend material goods.
''So you've got the Porsche, the pool and the boat. What happens when you die? What do you have then? What did life mean? There must be a purpose to life. Living a meaningful existence is more pleasurable than owning a Porsche.''
Thus, the synagogue becomes what he calls the ''pleasure center.''
Winyarz did not say how much membership in the synagogue will cost, but said, ''Any Jew can come to High Holy Days even if they can't pay. And no Jew ever will be turned away for lack of funds -- ever, ever.''
Although the Boca Raton synagogue structure is complete, Winyarz said there is still more work to do on the inside and the work that is being planned will introduce some new twists on established ideas.
For instance, men and women are seated separately in Orthodox synagogues and typically women are out of the sight of the men, either behind a screen or in the back of the synagogue.
Plans for Boca Raton Synagogue (the word ''Orthodox'' is intentionally omitted) still separate men and women, but women are not out of sight. Structurally, the synagogue is in a semicircle, focusing on the center of worship: the Torah and the Eternal Light.
''There will be an opportunity within the synagogue context for women to express themselves in a public manner, which is completely within the (Hebrew) law,'' Winyarz said. ''Men or women will be able to get up and give a talk about a religious issue.
''We will have orthodoxy with a small 'o' and Halakhah (Jewish law) with a capital 'H.' ''
He calls it the new Orthodoxy. Orthodox Judaism usually evokes the stereotypical image of long beards, curly sideburns and black coats -- and a separation from the rest of society.
The ''new'' Orthodox Jew is the upwardly mobile doctor, lawyer, stockbroker or other person integrally involved in society, yet set apart from others in similiar professions by a belief system that emphasizes religious law and spiritual values.
A prime example of that was Winyarz's ''outreach'' lectures on Wall Street. He once did a lecture on Wall Street called ''Jewish Sexual Ethics.'' He also conducted lunchtime scripture studies in a prestigious Manhattan law firm.
Orthodox Judaism is attractive to young Jews, Winyarz said, because ''young people are looking for something that's real. People intuitively sense that which is authentic and I think there's a desperate yearning for authenticity.''
Winyarz is an example of the attractiveness of Orthodoxy to young Jews. He had become so immersed in it that by 23 he was teaching Bible at Yeshiva University.
''There's nothing as exciting as traditional Judaism,'' Winyarz said. He wants to turn what he feels is a stereotype of Orthodox Judaism from ''backward, anti-feminist, anti-science'' to ''real exciting, progressive system of life.''
In New York, winyarz recruited young people by walking into public schools with a shofar (the administration did not know of his actions). Children who recognized the shofar -- a ram's horn used for ceremonies -- were targeted as recruits for his Jewish Public School Youth Project. He turned his efforts into a string of clubs with a budget of $500,000.
If Winyarz initiates the project in Florida, he won't be staging any press conferences.
''It would be difficult to do it in Florida schools,'' he said. ''If I do it, I won't announce it.''
Winyarz is critical of some other Jewish and non-Jewish religious groups (For instance, he asks, ''What's Jewish about Reform Judaism?'') although he adds that he believes he will have a good working relationship with other clergy.
''I believe we have the most correct system,'' he said of Orthodox Judaism. ''I believe there are moments of truth in others.''
Caption: (Staff photo/MARK RANDALL) Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz says Orthodox Judaism is attractive to young Jews because of its ''authenticity.'' PHOTO (1)
by Tracey Wong Briggs
USA Today - August 17, 1987
Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz of Boca Raton, Fla., has produced Jewish Pride, a rock album appealing to Jewish youth. The LP, set for USA-wide release Sept. 1, includes songs written by Lenny Solomon and performed by young Jewish musicians. Rappin' Jewish, by Danny Furst, says: ``La-die-doo, I'm a Jew 'cause I think it's cool/ Yeah, I eat kosher meat 'cause I ain't no fool/ Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat/ I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.''
METRO AND STATE
Rabbi rolls out Jewish rock album
Associated Press/St. Petersburg Times - August 17, 1987
BOCA RATON - A 26-year-old rabbi is using rock 'n' roll to appeal to Jewish youth in a way they can understand.
Mordechai Winyarz, spiritual leader of the Boca Raton Community Synagogue, has produced what he calls the first Jewish rock 'n' roll album, set for national release Sept. 1.
I'm looking to create a revolution in Jewish life,he said. Music speaks to people. I want this to become a major outreach tool to bring young people back to Judaism.
The album, titled Jewish Pride, includes a danceable theme song of the same name, a ballad called Minyan Man and a rap song Rappin' Jewish written by Danny Furst.
A sample of the lyrics:
La-die-doo, I'm a Jew 'cause I think it's cool
Yeah, I eat kosher meat 'cause I ain't no fool
Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat
I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
Letter by Rabbi Causes Flap in House
Race
The Associated Press Political Service - November 2, 1990
BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) _ An endorsement letter sent to 50,000 Jewish voters was written by a controversial rabbi using a different name, the Republican congressional candidate has acknowledged.
Scott Shore faced a jeering political crowd Thursday when he confirmed the letter was written by former Boca Raton Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz. He was once censured by the local rabbinical association for inappropriate behavior, but the censure was later withdrawn.
The letter was signed by Rabbi Marc Gafni, a name Winyarz said he adopted when he moved to Israel two years ago.
It also was addressed to "my fellow Democrats" even though Gafni's last registration was as a Republican.
Shore refused demands from the audience at Temple Beth El that he apologize for the letter.
The audience of more than 250, including many supporters of the incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Harry Johnston, hooted when Shore claimed he wasn't trying to deceive voters about Winyarz's true identity.
Johnston, who attended the forum to debate Shore, also noted Gafni said in the letter that he had been a supporter of John F. Kennedy. Winyarz was 3 years old when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Johnston said.
Gafni, who was Shore's rabbi while in Boca Raton, was active in protests such as one against Pope John Paul II's visit to Miami in 1987, where he dressed in concentration camp clothing.
Gary Rosenblatt - Staff Writer
The Jewish Week - July 20, 2000
.... Perhaps most disturbing has been the number of people urging me to investigate specific rabbis and Jewish educators in the Orthodox community, naming names and offering me details. One is said to be a pedophile with a history of arrests who is a principal in a Brooklyn yeshiva; another pedophile reportedly now works with Jewish youth in Florida; a womanizing rabbi has changed his name and moved to Israel, I was told; and a local rabbi is said to have an unhealthy interest in teenage boys.... (please see the entire article)
Rabbi Accused of Manipulation in Shore Campaign
Letter
Miami Herald, The (FL) - November 1, 1990
An orthodox rabbi censured two years ago by a local rabbinical association has penned a campaign mailing that charges U.S. Rep. Harry Johnston with ethical lapses while in Congress.The rabbi wrote the letter using his new name.Marc Gafni, previously known as Mordechai Winyarz, was Republican challenger Scott Shore's spiritual leader at the Boca Raton Synagogue from 1987 to 1989. In 1988, he was censured.Gafni, 30, introduces himself in the letter by saying he has supported...
Complete Article, of 412 words
Shore Refuses to Apologize Over Letter
The Palm Beach Post - November 2, 1990
Facing a jeering political crowd Thursday, Congressional candidate Scott Shore admitted that the rabbi who signed an endorsement letter mailed to 50,000 Jewish voters was actually controversial Boca Raton rabbi Mordechai Winyarz. Shore refused demands from the audience at Temple Beth El that he apologize for the letter, mailed under the signature of Rabbi Marc Gafni. Shore said Winyarz changed his name to Marc Gafni before he left last year to live in Israel. The audience of more...
Complete Article, of 560 words
Voters Revenge' On TV For Texans, DALLAS
The Associated Press - November 3, 1990, Saturday, PM cycle, Political News, 810 words
(If you have access to this article please e-mail it to us!)
PBS Special - Soul Prints - Your Path to Fulfillment
(DVD)
Starring Marc Gafni
Fox Lorber (Publisher) - April 10, 2001
http://dvd.idealo.com/prices/P20008840135K2.html
Soul Prints - Your Path to Fulfillment - MARC GAFNI 790658993808 Rabbi Marc Gafni compares a person's individual spirit to the uniqueness of their fingerprint, dubbing the former a "soul print." In this 73-minute lecture, he describes the principles and practical applications of his philosophy culled from his study of many religious and ethnic traditions. The essence is to better appreciate the life you have and redirect your energy in the parts that make you unhappy. He promises the viewer "access to the precise and gorgeous nature of your spirit," suggesting exercises like making a list of the 10 most important things in your life. He offers mantras and stories from Buddhism, Russia, West Africa, and his own ministry--even singing a short "soul print song" a cappella. Much of his advice is common sense (If you treat the waiter badly, he will treat you badly), but he presents it in an energetic and inspiring manner. However, this PBS Special is interrupted so frequently with shots of an enthusiastically applauding audience that one might think he was selling a food preparation gadget rather than inner peace. Unfortunately, the effect is that of a hard sell for material that should speak for itself. --Kimberly Heinrichs
Publisher Fox Lorber
UPC 790658993808
Release 2001-04-10
Format DVD
Mpaa rating NR (Not Rated)
Primary Contributor Marc Gafni
Features Color
Running Time 60
By Mordechai Gafni
Tikkun Magazine - March/April 2003
WARNING: The following may be found offensive
The Temple of the ancient Israelites is the
original Hebrew _expression of pagan consciousness. Now—as we will see
later in this essay—the difference between Temple and pagan consciousness
is very crucial. But it is a difference that is only important because of
their profound similarity. Both the Temple and the pagan cults shared an
intoxication with the feminine Goddess, symbol of sacred eros.
The relationship with the Goddess was not a hobby for the Israelites like modern religious affiliation often tends to be. It was an all-consuming desire to be on the inside, to feel the infinite fullness of reality in every moment and in every encounter—it was an attempt to fully experience eros. Because the ancients were so aware of the depth of reality, to live without being able to access the infinite in this erotic way was enormously painful. (For an example, read the story of the idolatrous King Menashe, as retold in the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 92A.)
The prophets of the Temple period opposed paganism with all of their ethical fire and passion. For them, it was inconceivable that the ecstatic and primal Temple experience, religiously powerful and important as it might be, should become primary. When eros overrode ethos, the prophet exploded in divine rage. In moments of clash, the prophet taught that the ethical always needed to trump the erotic.
Modern Judaism has developed from the ethical teachings of the prophets. In the process, however, we have overlooked the erotic, present in the pagan consciousness of the Temple service. We have forgotten the Goddess, a vital presence in the life of ancient Israel. Hebrew liturgy reflects the virtually inconsolable longing of the Hebrew spirit for the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. This longing is not a dream of proprietorship over this or that hill in Jerusalem. Indeed, ownership and holiness are mutually exclusive. Instead, it is a yearning to reclaim sacred eros as part of the fabric of our lives. And, in the way of the circle, our longing for eros is also a longing for ethos. All ethical breakdown emerges from a dearth of eros. When we are overwhelmed by an erotic vacuum, ethics collapse.
Both the vitality and metaphysics of a pagan eros were understood by Israeli mystic Abraham Kook to be essential to the reclaiming of a religious sensibility which reflected both the depth and need of modernity. It is in large part for this pagan sensibility that we yearn when we speak of the dream of a re-built Temple.
To find our way back to eros and the feminine, we must yearn back and forward to the Hebrew mystical tradition, whose masters kept these ideas alive in the form of esoteric tradition, practice and lore.
Eros
In the kabbalistic tradition, as in Plato, the erotic is not a mere synonym for the sexual, but an _expression of inner passion which sexuality models but does not begin to exhaust. In Hebrew myth and mysticism, eros has four faces. The first face of eros is being fully present on the inside, traversing the chasm that separates subject and object. To use the imagery of the Zohar, the magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, eros is to be in the flow of "the river which swells forth from Eden," the fountain of life; when I am not in the flow of my own life, I am not living naturally. The opposite of eros is alienation, the feeling that you are an outsider with no safe place to call home.
Kabbalah scholar Yehuda Libes suggests that the word "zohar" is roughly synonymous with the Greek word "eros." The authors of the Zohar were not dry medieval scholastics; they were rather men of great passion and depth who believed that by entering the inside of the moment, the text, or the relationship, they could recreate and heal the world. Eros is aroused whenever we move so deeply into what we do, who we are with, or where we are, that its interiority stirs our heart and imagination. Shechinah, the Hebrew mystical term for the indwelling feminine presence of God, is no less than the erotic merged with the Holy. Shechinah is the radically profound experience of being on the inside.
The second face of eros is the "fullness of presence." This is not a distinct and different quality from the first but flows naturally and even overlaps with the erotic quality of being on the inside. And yet it is not quite the same. Of course, being on the inside requires the fullness of presence. But we can experience full presence even when we have not merged with the moment or crossed over to the inside. Full presence is about showing up. You can show up and be fully present in a conversation without necessarily losing yourself in the encounter's flow. Full presence at work can mean that you derive joy, satisfaction, and self worth from your vocation. It means you feel full and not empty.
To live erotically is to be fully present to each other's richness, complexity, and ultimate grandeur. It is to fully wait for the other to appear. The Shechinah, say the mystics, is presence waiting for us to be present. She is eros, standing outside of our window, waiting. Waiting for us to run out and behold, with wonder, her face.
The third face of eros is desire. Eros is the yearning force of being. I yearn, therefore I am. As long as I am on the outside, I can ignore my deepest desires and stifle my longing. When I am on the inside, however, when I am fully present, I am able to access my yearning. For the Hebrew mystic, unlike his Buddhist or Greek cousins, desire and longing are sacred. To be cut off from the eros of yearning is to be left in the cold of non-existence. To yearn is to be aflame.
Depression is at its core the depression of desire. When we lose touch with our authentic desire, we become listless and apathetic. There is wonderful eros in desire. It is what connects us most powerfully with our own pulsating aliveness. Longing is a vital strand in the textured fabric of the erotic. It is of the essence of the Holy of Holies.
The fourth face of eros is the interconnectivity of being. Longing, desire, and tears remind us of the fourth strand in the erotic weave. They whisper to us that we are all interconnected. No human stands alone. The word "religion" traces its source to the Latin root ligare which, as we can hear in the word "ligament," is about connectivity. Religion's goal is to re-ligare—to reconnect us. Religion's original intention was to take us to that inside place where we could indeed experience the essential interconnectivity of all reality. All of existence is one great quilt of being and we are all patches in its magnificent intertextured pattern.
Eros is what allows us to move past the feeling of isolation and separation and experience ourselves as part of the quilt. To sunder our connection to eros is therefore to sin. Sin is but the illusion of separation. Sin is not evil; it is merely tragic. Not only do we lose the source of life's greatest pleasure, but we would undermine the building blocks of connection without which the world would ultimately collapse.
The Merging of Male and Female
One of the most obvious yet profound qualities that the sexual models for the erotic is the merging of the feminine and the masculine. The drive towards union between the female and the male is the essential underlying force that powers the universe. Although it is often expressed in the merging of man and woman, it is by no means limited to that _expression. For the Hebrew mystics, the sexual union of man and woman both models and participates in the more primal union of Shechinah (the Divine Feminine) and Tiferet (the Divine Masculine). Whether understood as Yin and Yang, as in Taoist thought, or Shiva and Shakti in Hindu mythology, masculine and feminine are different faces of the greater union, the force of divinity that courses through the cosmos and beyond. The kabbalistic archetype of the integrated male-female are the two cherubs, one male and one female, present in the Holy of Holies in the ancient Temple. Described in the Book of Kings and unpacked in the Babylonian Talmud, these golden cherubs were twined in sexual embrace. For the kabbalists, their integration is the highest erotic _expression of a healed world.
What is the difference between masculine and feminine?
The core cosmic intuition of Hebrew mystic Isaac Luria, later developed by mystics Isaac Chaver and Abraham Kook, offers a deceptively simple paradigm. Men are lines, "yosher" or "kav" and women are circles, "iggulim." Or, more accurately, line is a masculine image and circle is a feminine _expression. Every man and woman is a unique interpenetration of line and circle.
Let us look at the nature of a circle. Circles are characterized by suppleness, intimacy, egalitarian sensibility, connection, and communication. The feminine circle is defined by relatedness. It surrounds, embraces and envelopes. It is a symbol of intimacy, loyalty, and a capacity to forgive and renew. The circle moves round and round, in a constant flow of re-newal, re-membering, and re-cognition. It always comes home again
Already it is clear to us that a circle is naturally erotic. In a circle, everyone can see each other. In Luria's language, everyone is face to face. There is intimacy in circle.
The masculine line is far more rigid than the circle. Judgment and distinction are natural line functions. With a line, there is a clear hierarchy. One is either higher on the line or lower. If people are moving in the same direction on a line, then they will not be face to face. Instead, they will be face-to-back or back-to-face. A line signals a clear lack of intimacy. A line is forward moving, goal-oriented, directed, and focused. It spends a lot more time looking ahead than looking around. The line's natural movement is to thrust forward.
Luria writes, "Every world of world and every detail of detail in every world of world is made up of these two principles, circles and lines." Lines and circles in various permutations and balances are the DNA of spiritual reality. It is the unique blending of their energies that gives contour, character, and depth to every unit of reality. It is a blending in which neither the circle nor the line ever disappears. Each is fully absorbed in the bliss of merging with other while never losing its own integrity.
Does the union of masculine and feminine mean that, after total integration, gender will dissolve as an issue? That a kind of transvestite existentialism is the kabbalistic dream of an evolved world? Well, yes ... and absolutely not.
There is a core paradigm in Hebrew mystical sources and many other traditions which provides a clear reality map for the integration of circle and line. It is a trinity of stages.
Simple (Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water)
Complex (Enlightenment)
Simple (After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water)
The linchpin of the idea is that the third stage and the first, although externally similar, are really worlds apart. For stage three deeply integrates the new consciousness of stage two. So while the simplicity of stage one might be naïve, superficial, and even irresponsible, the simplicity of stage three is deep, wise, and responsible. In the reality map of eros, level one is the natural eros of the circle. Level two is the line, which occasionally opposes and even overrides certain circle manifestations. Level three is the return to a higher eros, where circle and line interpenetrate, yielding a sensual symphony of flowing spirit and precise form, unimaginable in the initial erotic offering of level one.
Lines and circles, the masculine and the feminine, are cosmic principles whose roots are in our souls. Neither New Age spirituality (circle) or the old religious Orthodoxies (lines) alone have within them the power to heal our souls and our planet. It is only a deeper erotic vision unpacked from both, the paradox of holding lines and circles together as one that can heal us.
We need to fully embrace the truth of the line, then roundly challenge it with circle consciousness, only to re-embrace the line from a more supple and rounded place. Similarly, we need to rejoice in the circle, only to bisect it with the power of the line and then re-turn again to the circle. This is the trinity paradigm in which level two rejects level one, only to be transcended and absorbed by level three, which is always an evolved version of level one. Circle, line, circle. Line, circle, line.
We begin in the middle—in the glory of the circle.
The Power of the Circle
Phallic line consciousness has proved impotent for so many of
us. It has not given birth to the reality for which we dreamed. We have competed,
failed, and succeeded. Yet we have found the process debilitating and the
prize woefully insufficient. Even if we've "gotten" what we were always supposed
to want, we have realized that it isn't enough.
On the most personal level, the rat race of line consciousness has failed us. The radical focus on our place in the hierarchy has exhausted us. For many years we have ignored Lily Tomlin's truism: "Even if you finish first, you are still a rat."
On the global level, line consciousness has failed us as well. We live on the edge of unprecedented ecological disaster. The imbalanced Genesis Chapter One ethics of "fill the earth and conquer" is not innocent in this. The ecological disaster is driven by corporations who take advantage of the core emptiness in the heart of the West, by feeding it with an obscene overabundance of goods and foods. Corporations driven by line consciousness form the crux of our world's economy. These corporations are sadly driven by basically only one desire: that of accumulating maximal power through maximal profit. Unhappily, the natural result of this posture is a virtual rape of the environment for the sake of climbing higher on the line's ladder. Tragically, it is the line consciousness of probably not more than 10,000 people (nice people) that is having this devastating impact on the world's environment.
The driving force behind the corporate ethos is fear of emptiness. When we lose the sense of the world being divine and full of meaning, we risk falling into the void—we "lose touch" with our own essential self-worth and value. So we learn a-void-dance, doing everything we can to deny the lurking emptiness. In order to stifle those voices we work hard at producing and climbing in the line world. Somehow, the eros of productivity and competition give our lives a veneer of meaning, at least until a crisis when our vulnerability is exposed and we plummet into the void.
It is only by raising a new generation on the eros of the circle that we can hope to truly effect a transformation in the world. Only by unpacking and internalizing our erotic experiences of interconnectivity, interiority, and the fullness of being can we move towards healing and change. This is the call of circle consciousness. This is the ethos of redeemed paganism. This is Temple consciousness.
Temple Consciousness
The Jerusalem Temple is the place where the Shechinah dwells between the cherubs. The Shechinah is known in the kabbalistic sources as the great feminine. She is mother, daughter, and lover. She is the force that allows the human being to feel at home in the world. The Temple is the place of eros; it is the experience of being on the inside.
The biblical story is based on the line. In this account, the world is God's place. God's relationship to world is that of father, king, or even husband. In biblical myth, God creates world outside of Himself, even as he dwells in world. For the pagan and the Temple mystic, however, the world is not God's place; instead, God is the place of the world. To be in Temple consciousness is to be in God. Eros pure and simple.
This shift in consciousness is hidden within the folds of biblical myth text. The central biblical term which describes Temple consciousness is "lifnei hashem," usually translated as "before God," (as in "standing before God"). A closer reading, however, yields the hidden eros in the term. The word "lifnei" derives from the Hebrew word "pnimi" meaning "inside," the first face of eros.
This same Hebrew word for "inside," and "before" has a third meaning as well. The third meaning is "face," "panim." Face is the place where my insides are revealed. There are forty-five muscles in the face, most of them unnecessary for the biological functioning of the face. Their major purpose is to express emotional depth and nuance. They are the muscles of the soul. When I say, "I need to speak face to face," I am in erotic need of an inside conversation.
All three English words, "face," "inside," and "before," share the same Hebrew root. The essence then of the biblical Temple phrase "lifnei Hashem," before God, is not a commandment to appear "before God" in the magistrate sense. It is an invitation to enter the inside of God's face.
To be on the inside of God is precisely the vision of the pagan circle.
It was paganism which understood well the primal human need to feel at home in the world. The erotic pagan imagination was able to uncover divinity in every nook and cranny of existence. For the pagan, there was an understanding that the Goddess is "on every hill and under every tree." For the pagan, the hills were literally alive with the sound of music. Nature is the music of divinity undressed to the human ear. Every hill, brook, tree, and blade of grass was invested with its own divine muse.
In the ancient world the tree in particular, in all of its lush sensuality, was a primary manifestation of the erotic Goddess. The central symbol of much of the ancient pagan cult in biblical Canaan was the Ashera tree, symbol of the Goddess Ashera incarnate. Unadulterated paganism is the eros of level one circle consciousness.
It is clear from the biblical record itself that Ashera worship was the norm in ancient Judah and Israel. Occasionally, someone would intervene. King Josiah attempted the most radical reform, after finding a new book—very possibly the book of Deuteronomy—that explicitly prohibited having an Ashera tree in the precincts of the Temple. The discovery of this "new book" is the greatest indication that there were many Ashera trees in the temple. New texts only emerge to outlaw popular practice. Josiah's goal was to fully obliterate the Ashera goddess' presence. Only a few years after his death, however, the Ashera was back in the Temple once more.
No one could deny the people their goddess. A careful reading of the biblical sources reveals that of the 370 years which Solomon's temple stood in Jerusalem, for at least 236 of those years—two-thirds of the time—the statue of Ashera was present in the Temple. Her worship was not some underground cult, but part of what was understood to be the legitimate Hebrew spirit itself.
Ashera, who began as a foreign interloper, became, in Raphael Patai's phrase, a beloved "Hebrew Goddess." She was worshipped openly and with great joy as part of the official religion by kings, the court, the priesthood and most of the people. She was opposed only by a few prophets crying against her and even then only at relatively long intervals. Indeed, the erotic passion for the Goddess was so essential to the people's spirit that when the great reformer Elijah challenged the pagan god Baal, Ashera's son, he pointedly avoided challenging Ashera. The text in Kings tell of 400 prophets of Ashera and 450 prophets of Baal who eat at the table of the Queen Jezebel, wife of Ahab. Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal but somehow doesn't touch the prophets of Ashera. The Ashera has become too much of a Hebrew Goddess to be challenged even by Elijah.
The pagan Goddess was not viewed by Solomon or the people as a compromise of the Hebrew spirit. On the contrary, she was experienced as an organic deepening of the Hebrew spirit. In the pagan world, as we have noted, the Goddess erotically merged with her male counterpart. Hieros gamos—the marriage the God and Goddess. Ashera has divine intercourse with El, notably the very name of the Hebrew god! Her daughter, Astarte, copulates with Baal, her brother. This marriage of the gods—symbolizing the mythical merging of the primal masculine and feminine—brings blessing and joy to the world.
The Hebrew version of this Heiros Gamos—marriage of divine principles—was personified in the union of the biblical male God with the Goddess Ashera. We know from relatively recent archaeological excavations that many people served the Biblical male God image and the Ashera together. One of the most fascinating finds is that of Kuntillat Ajrud in the northeastern Sinai desert. Two storage jars were found, and one of them carried the inscription (in anthropologist Raphael Patai's translation) "Amarayhu says to my Lord ... may you be blessed by Yah-weh and his Ashera."
There is evidence that the worship of Ashera extended even into the Holy of Holies. Pattai supports our intuition that the two cherubs intertwined in sexual union in the Holy of Holies are an evolved _expression of the Hebrew-pagan marriage between the biblical Yah-weh and pagan Ashera. That is to say, the spirit of biblical text, which rejected some of the essential dimensions of paganism, nevertheless accepted the core feminine erotic principle that powered paganism and recognized the essential need to integrate it with the masculine principle. So Ashera was transmuted into the female cherub in erotic union with the male cherub. While the prophets rejected the Ashera they embraced the cherubs. Indeed, biblical prophecy taught that the space between the sexually entwined cherubs was the source of prophecy.
The erotic and pagan nature of the female cherub was clearly apparent to the wisdom masters of Babylon. They understood that the cherubs were the Hebrew embrace of the sacred moment in paganism and thought it essential to the Hebrew spirit. In a post-Temple world where survival depended on the Law, the wisdom masters were not willing or able to openly embrace the pagan moment in Temple consciousness. So, in a classical literary device, they placed in the mouths of foreign interlopers their profound perception of the cherubs as purified expressions of the pagan archetype. The Babylonian Talmud in Yoma 54b tells us that when the Temple was conquered and Nebuchadnezzar's army sees the cherubs, the Jewish religion was immediately cheapened in their eyes. "Said Reish Lakish: When the foreigners entered the temple and saw the cherubs sexually intertwined they took them out to the market place. Israel whose blessing is blessing and curse is curse—is this what they were engaged in?" A parallel text in the Midrash (Lamentations Raba, 9) is more explicit in relating the cherubs to paganism. The Babylonians were sure that the Cherubs were pagan Gods and the Jews had laid claim to a more pure faith: "Ammonites and Moabites entered the holy of holies and found the two cherubs. They ... paraded them around the streets of Jerusalem ... did you not say that this nation does not worship idols? See what we have found. What they were serving."
The cherubs atop the ark went underground after the destruction of the Temples. However, they re-appear in public consciousness centuries later as the masculine and feminine _expression of the divine in the kabbalistic books of the Bahir, the Zohar, and in virtually every subsequent kabbalistic text. This divine pair are called Malchut and Tiferet, Shechinah and Tiferet, and a host of other appellations. They reach their apex in kabbalistic consciousness in the mystical works of Isaac Luria and his one-time teacher, Moses Cordovero. In Isaac Luria's graphic and daring vision, the world is not formed by a forward-thrusting male movement which creates outside of itself. Quite the contrary—Divinity creates within itself a sacred void in the form of a circle. This is the creation not of the masculine God but of the Goddess, of the Shechinah! This is the Great Circle of Creation.
In Luria's vision, all of being is within the womb of the Goddess. Life is born not by expelling the baby, but by making room for offspring within the Goddess' eternal womb. Nature is not outside of the Goddess but instead is a daughter _expression of the divine. Luria's teacher, Moses Cordovero, was even clearer about the identity of this Goddess. In a passing comment in one of his works he says explicitly, "Malchut (Shechinah) is Ashera." Cordevero's statement emerges from a powerful and radical passage in the Zohar (Vol. 1, 49A) which suggests that the altar in the Temple itself was an Ashera tree!! The deep intention of the Zohar is not that this was an actual Ashera tree. Rather the Zohar is teaching that the Temple was deeply connected to the primal power of the sacred Ashera Goddess.
So we have come full circle. The Canaanite pagan Ashera has been reclaimed as a Hebrew Goddess. Primal circle consciousness has been rewoven into the rich fabric of a resurgent Hebrew myth.
Sod HaYichud
If the circle is so wonderful, why not live in circle consciousness and just jettison the jagged and cutting line once and for all? Why not simply return to the Goddess?
The answer is that the circle alone is not sufficient. Indeed, followers of both the biblical line and the mystical path have been quick to point out that the circle not integrated by the line not only lacks integrity, but is a primary ontological cause of evil. Master Nachman of Bratzlav writes that the source of evil in the world is the primal chalal reik, the empty void. The chalal reik is a circle image drawn from Lurianic Kabbalah which has not yet been penetrated by the kav, the line.
We are used to viewing the source of evil as being somehow external to man. Both capitalists and communists of the last century insisted that market conditions and economic opportunity were the prime cause for evil. Others blame evil on parents, schools, television violence or handguns. Many varieties of religion have long spoken about a Satan or tempter force that moves men to "the dark side." The common denominator is the location of evil somewhere outside the human being. If that is true, then we only have to fix that external system and everything will be okay. Economic reform, social engineering, gun control, parent education, school reform, are all potential messiahs.
While all those may be good things, the core premise of Hebrew myth is that none of them will prevent evil. Biblical mysticism has an entirely different view of the human being. Evil comes from the failure to integrate the feminine circle and masculine line. This is called in Kabbalah Sod HaYichud, the secret of the union. More accurately it means the secret of the integration which is no more and no less than the secret of the cherubs. This is our life's work: to achieve full eros through the deep integration of our circles and lines. Or to say it differently, we need to move from the eros of the first level circle, which is pre-line, to the eros of the third level circle, which is transline. To confuse the two would be to fall prey to the pre/trans fallacy which so often marks contemporary New Age philosophies. To know how to move to third level circle eros we must expose the shadow of the first level pagan circle from the perspective of the prophetic line.
The Closed Circle and History
Intellectual historian Yehezkel Kaufman is correct in reminding us that the opposition to paganism—the opposition to pure circle consciousness—may well be the singularly most important theme of the entire Hebrew biblical project. The prophets exposed the two great shadows of pagan circle thinking. The first shadow stems precisely from its circle nature! The pagan myth believed as an absolute given of reality in the great wheel of Being. Mircea Eliade's great work The Myth of Eternal Return is probably the best modern statement of this powerful cyclical motif which is shot through all pagan reality maps. The problem with the cycle, however, as Buddha already pointed out, is that it is a trap. The circle is by very definition not open, but closed. There is no way out. It is to this circle consciousness that the wisdom masters referred when they said, "Until the Exodus no slave had ever succeeded in leaving Egypt." In the pagan circle consciousness of Egypt, no one could ever leave his or her place. You were born into your circle and destined to go round and round within it.
In contrast to the stasis of the circle, the line of evolution—beginning with the gradual unfolding of creation from simple to complex in the Genesis creation story—is essential to the biblical spirit. Biblical myth in the story of the Exodus introduces line consciousness into the mind and heart stream of the world. It is the creation of the very ideas of history, progress, and therefore hope. Love desires growth, healing, and transformation. For the circle to exist without being bisected by the line would be the greatest failure of love.
In biblical myth consciousness the story of the Exodus is the story of the second great escape from the tyranny of the circle. The first great escape is the story of the first Hebrew, Abraham. In fact, it is precisely Abraham's ability to make the great escape from the circle that makes him the first Hebrew, for the very word "Hebrew" (Ivri) means the "one who crossed over." The line consciousness of Abraham introduces to the world the notion of journey. The clear implication, against virtually all of pagan thought, is that you can actually go someplace. Line consciousness is history. The idea of a plot, suspense, and ultimate resolution introduced by the Hebrews and so engrained in us today was unknown to the circle consciousness of the pagan.
In Hebrew, there is no word for "history"; instead, the word is zachor—remember. Not accidentally, zachor in Hebrew has a second meaning: the masculine. His-story is a function of line consciousness, the masculine thrusting-forward property of the spirit. It is biblical mysticism that gives birth to the notion of tikkun olam, "the world's fixing"—which a very close reading of Isaac Luria's works reveals to mean the evolving and healing of all consciousness—human and divine. It is only when the journey to God is over that the journey in God begins.
What we are talking about is much more than the evolution of humankind. It was the kabbalists who introduced the idea of an evolving divine consciousness. The unfolding of divine consciousness is not a purely intra-divine process. The great privilege of being a human being is that we participate in the evolution and healing of God. The Zohar, in Vol 1 Genesis 4A, even imagines the human being as a creator of God. It is the evolution of the human spirit that catalyzes the evolution of God. As biblical mystic Zecharia says, "On that day [in the future] God will be one and his name will be one." When God and man meet in an evolutionary embrace, redemption is achieved. In the words of Nikos Kazantzaikos, "We are the saviors of God."
This is the great messianic idea, the climax of all history and evolution. "Messiah" in biblical mysticism is more than a person. It is a destination which we arrive at after the long and often arduous journey. It is the hope and the vision of a better tomorrow. It is the possibility of possibility.
Until this shaft of the line cut across human consciousness, human existence was fundamentally determined. All that happened was thought to be revealed in the astrological wisdom of the stars in their heavenly cycles, or in the guts of animals when you killed them. The key was that there was "nothing new under the sun."
The freedom implied in line consciousness means not only that a slave people can throw off the shackles of the oppressor. It also means that each of us can throw off the shackles of our own personal taskmasters. There is no greater slave master than the idea that yesterday determines today. This is precisely the shadow of circle consciousness. The line sets us free. It pierces the circular bubble, shattering the "realities" that want to hold us back and keep us down.
God and Nature
We now come to the second great shadow of pagan circle consciousness. The pagan insisted that divinity was in trees and in all of nature. But the essential biblical idea is that God is also beyond nature. God is the creator of nature and therefore not trapped within it. Biblical myth therefore opens with the Genesis story, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The powerful and revolutionary implication is that God is not merely nature. Unlike the Greek, Roman, pagan, or Buddhist pantheons, biblical myth insists on a God who is both within and infinitely beyond the circle, radically immanent as well as transcendent.
When we say that God is infinitely beyond trees, we are also saying that if you can connect to God, God can free you from the ensnaring web of nature. The notion that a human being is created in the image of God means for the Hebrew mystic that a person has it within them to reach beyond the natural to the moral.
The reason this is so critical is because in biblical consciousness, the loving God's primary demand is ethical behavior. The single most important _expression of love—and the most important principle of Hebrew ethics—is how we treat each other, not how we think about each other. Sixteenth-century master Aron of Barcelona wrote, "A person is formed by their actions." Treat a person lovingly and you will love them in the end. Love a person passionately and treat them unethically and you will be alienated from them in the end. Paradoxically, there is no eros without ethics.
Ethical behavior always requires that we be able to act against our primal instinctive natures. We must be able to step out of the level one pagan circle and become response-able for actions, able to respond to and control our instinctive nature. If we were part of nature, then clearly we could not be expected to ever control or direct our nature. We are both part of nature, and parting from nature. It is only because of this paradox that we are capable of self-control. Of course, it is giving up control which is essential in the classic frameworks of circle consciousness. Sex and emotionally vulnerable relationships are two good examples. Giving up control, however, is only possible in the context of a safe environment created by people who can be trusted to exercise self-control. The circle integrates with the line to foster the integrity of higher eros, a level three circle.
Circle consciousness claims that people are naturally the best that they can be. The problem, argues the circle, is not goodness but alienation, and in circle consciousness the greatest evil is to be cut off, distant, disenchanted, out of the circle. Line consciousness disagrees with the circle and says that people are potentially good but not naturally good. In biblical myth people are born innocent, but they are not born good. The most important act of love, according to the Hebrew gospel, is to develop a training system for goodness. For biblical myth the belief that people are naturally the best that they can be is not only wrong but destructive. If people were naturally good, then evil would be the result of some set of external forces. Here we return to the idea of Sod HaYichud, the secret of union. Biblical myth, then as now, says no to this thinking. Hebrew gospel teaches that only the control and refinement of our internal nature, the integration of line with circle, can bring the good.
There is, however, a second critical reason why the line-driven ethical prophet does not experience God as being exclusively in nature. If God were in nature and not beyond Nature, then Nature would be our source of ethics. It is clear though that, for all of her splendor in reflecting a pale cast of divine beauty, nature is amoral. The law of nature is nearly always that the strong kill the weak. Social services, hospitals, help for the disabled are all profoundly "unnatural," at least according to the law of nature in the non-human world. In fact, the hospital is a direct corollary of line and not (first level) circle consciousness. The morality of the line insists that those higher on the line—that is to say stronger and with more means—take care of those lower on the line. This is the faith and God experience of the prophets.
The Prophet & the Pagan
Let's frame the clash between circle and line in the most striking possible terms.
The prophet, the hero of the Hebrew bible, represents ethics, the line. The pagan, hero of the ancient world into which biblical thought was born, represents eros, the circle. The clash between the prophet and the pagan—the circle and the line—is in the end the clash between the erotic and the ethical. (That is to say, between first level circle eros and second level line ethics.)
Having said that, I want to make a radical claim—which, as is often the case, is patently obvious once you see it. On the essential interpretation of reality, the prophet actually was closer to circle consciousness than to line consciousness. The difference was that the pagan was a first stage circle archetype and the prophet a third stage circle archetype.
The prophet's line _expression is a necessary corrective response to the pagan consciousness that dominated the world at the time. The prophet saw his role to be overturning a pagan ethic which was bound up with so much cruelty. For example, built into the pagan ritual are demands for parents to burn their children as a sacrifice to the gods. "They have set their pagan abominations in my house ... to burn their sons and daughters in fire." (Jeremiah 7:30, 31) The burning of children was not the exception in pagan worship. Rather it was the model of the pagan idea that erotic abandonment to the God must, by its very definition, overrun all intuitive human ethical boundaries.
In the picture of the prophet as a social reformer, it is, however, too easy to lose sight that, at core, he was an erotic mystic. The prophet is actually the archetype of the feminine. The "most beautiful among women," according to King Solomon, are the prophets. The phrase is drawn from Canticles, King Solomon's love song to the erotic Shechinah, whose deep essence is modeled, but never exhausted, by the sexual.
Yes, the prophet insisted that nature was not all of God, yet he experienced with all his being that God was all of nature. Even as he decried the pagan claim that identified God with the Ashera tree, he knew and rejoiced in the truth that God was fully present and accessible "on every hill and under every tree." God was not only reflected in nature as the external creator. God was fully present in nature—in the words of the later mystics, mamash, meaning literally—"actually," for real, not just in metaphor or symbol. The words of later Hebrew mystics capture accurately prophetic consciousness. Schneur Zalman of Liadi writes that "Trees and stones are mamash divine." Nachman of Bratzlav told his disciples that "Every blade of grass has its own (divine) song."
It is critical to understand that God is paradoxically within and beyond. Dennis Prager, generally a brilliant polemicist for the core intuitions of biblical religion, dismisses any possibility of a mainstream Jewish position which embraces pantheism in his "Is God in Trees." However the overwhelming majority of classical Jewish thinkers in the past 500 years have categorically refused to choose between pantheism and monotheism. To give but one example, Abraham Kook consistently and intentionally embraces a paradoxical dialectic between pantheism and monotheism throughout his writings, so much so that in his letters he refuses to term Judaism as monotheistic (Orot Hakodesh Vol. 3 pp. 399).
The goal of the prophet is integration. The erotic and ethical, the line and circle, must merge. This is the secret of the cherubs and the model of the sexual.
What the prophet and the pagan respectively incarnate, however, is made manifest when the erotic and the ethical clash. An oft-quoted line from Jung, modern heir to the pagan myth tradition, is the best summation I have ever heard of the pagan position: "I'd rather be whole than good." For the pagan, the alienation from divinity is so palpable and painful that it must be overcome at all costs, even if ethics are the price. This is where the balanced scales start precariously to slip. It was Jung who was sadly seduced by the pagan Goddess Ashera into a flirtation with Nazism, that menacing shadow of eros which horrifically darkened our world just a few short decades ago.
The prophet always responds, "I'd like to be whole. Indeed I yearn to be whole. But if I have to choose, I'd rather be good than whole." It is for this reason that the prophet is the great critic of the pagan consciousness intrinsic to the Temple experience. The erotic fulfillment of the Temple experience was all too often a replacement for the kind of direct ethical action which could heal the world. It is the widow and the orphan, the vulnerable and the dispossessed, who must be the primary concern of the homo religious, according to the prophets. Thus Isaiah declaims:
I do not want your multitude of sacrifices
I delight not in the blood of bullocks or goats or rams.
Do not come to seek my face ...
as you trample my courts of justice ...
your hands are full of blood ...
wash yourselves, make yourselves clean ...
cease your evil doings ... seek fair judgment,
argue the case of the widow and the orphan ...
Zion will be redeemed
by justice and ... integrity.
For Isaiah, the ecstatic pagan service of the Temple, with its blood sacrifices, has led Israelites to forget the ethical imperative to feed the hungry and clothe the poor. Isaiah refuses to allow eros to trump ethos.
Rebuilding Temple Consciousness
In my spiritual community of Bayit Chadash in the hills around Israel's Sea of Galilee, we are committed to reclaiming the spark of sacred paganism. We return to the pagan when we practice deep ecology, because for the pagan "Love your mother" means not only your human biological mother, but mother earth who nurtures you, balances you, and grounds you in her embrace. We reclaim the pagan in meditation, ecstatic service and passionate love of the Shechinah in all of her myriad manifestations. It is in large part for this pagan sensibility that we yearn when we speak of the dream of a re-built Temple.
The Temple in its ideal state was supposed to manifest the third stage circle moment in Hebrew consciousness. What the prophets realized, however, was that the people had not incorporated second stage line consciousness. The erotic was overrunning the ethical. In principle, however, the Temple was meant to be a balance between line and circle, erotic and ethical.
Only a short distance from the seat of eros—the holy of holies with her sexually intertwined cherubs—was the lishkat hagazit, the room of hewn stone. This was the Chamber of Justice whose passionate concern was the ethical—the creation of a just society. On the face of it, its sensibilities seem far removed from the erotic motifs of the sensual and the sacred that permeated the Temple's aura. What, after all, do ethics and eros have to do with each other?
The answer is—everything. In the short run we can train people through behaviorist ritual, social engineering, and a good deal of guilt to behave ethically. However, in the final analysis, non-erotic ethics will always collapse under the weight of contracts and contacts it cannot fulfill. The Room of Hewn Stone must necessarily be housed in the eroticized temple in order for its ethics to truly thrive.
In the end all ethical failure is a violation of eros—your own or someone else's. Ethics without eros cannot hold. Ethics which are not rooted in eros ultimately fall ... apart. We yearn for eros. By exiling God from nature and secularizing the sexual, we condemn ourselves to emptiness and vacuity. Ethical collapse always occurs when we are overwhelmed by our emptiness. The failure of ethics is always rooted in a failure of eros. When we talk only about a God giving rules that run counter to our nature, the rules cannot hold. The eros of our nature will always overrun them. But if we come to understand that ethics is an erotic _expression of our deeper divinity, we are truly moved to the ethical. For at that point we realize that the ethical is an _expression of our deepest selves, a response to the call of our own voice. Ethics, to be compelling and powerful, must be an _expression of our erotic divine nature and not a contradiction to it. So when the prophets insist that God and the God within us is beyond nature, and can therefore act ethically against nature, they are referring only to our first nature, not to our deeper second nature. Our deeper nature is God.
At the same time that ethics cannot live without eros, eros cannot live without ethics. The erotic dies without the ethical. The circle cannot survive without the line.
Circle consciousness rejects the non-bi-sected circle not only as ethically flawed but as ontologically inadequate and existentially unsatisfying.
Humanity is life become aware of itself. It is this very self-awareness that moves us from the harmony of the natural to the tension of the confronted. We are at once part of nature, subject to her laws, even as we are free, confronting, controlling, and healing nature. The human being is the only creature in nature whose very existence poses a problem to itself. It is a problem from which we cannot escape. Living our merely natural circle life is both impossible and boring to us. It is this sense of boredom, even ennui, which makes us feel alienated, evicted from paradise. We are moved both by reason and soul to struggle endlessly not only with questions of the techne, of how and what, but also with the mysterious why and ultimately we long to see the Who!
The divinity of humanity—that which makes us not only within but also beyond nature—is precisely what assures that nature alone will not ful-fill. Line consciousness suggests that a non-accomplished person can never be satisfied. We require for our psychic-spiritual wholeness the pursuit of a goal. Meditation is insufficient for bliss. But not just any goal will do.
The goal must be an ethical one; an ambition that promises the greater good. Without such an objective, we ultimately get lost in our ennui and overwhelmed by our emptiness. The circle is incapable of captivating us by herself.
Eros always needs to in-corporate ethics. What this points to is that the good is not only an ethical need, it is an erotic need as well. At the same time, all ethical collapse is caused by un-ful-filled eros.
The modern mystic who understood this best was Abraham Kook.
Morality not guided by the sacred is not deep,
and does not enter into the inwardness of the soul; ...
Such a weak morality
does not have the power to guide ...
the polis, the human community,
to penetrate to the depth of the soul
and to transform the heart
of universal man and of individual man
from stone to flesh.
There is no alternative plan for humanity
other than that it be guided by the erotic morality....
It is the same Kook who refused to term Judaism a monotheistic religion, believing as he did that strains of purified pagan pantheism were essential to the essence of Hebrew religion. The prophet in us needs to reclaim holy paganism. The pagan within must be open to hearing the call of the prophet. When the prophet and pagan meet, the Temple of the heart will be rebuilt.
Letter from Rabbi Bob Carroll, Program Director
- Edah
From: "Bob Carroll" <bobcarroll@edah.org>
To: vickipolin@ theawarenesscenter.org
Subject: Link to www.theawarenesscenter.org site from www.edah.org
Date: Thursday, February 19, 2004
Ms. Polin,
I had
the privelege of hearing your presentation last weekend at the
JOFA
conference and was just discussing with Edah's Director, Rabbi Saul Berman,
the possibility of linking to www.theawarenesscenter.org from our own web
site. Both of us are entirely convinced that you are doing extraordinarily
important work and we would very much like to be of assistance to you. Upon
looking over your site, he and I did have a few questions about your policies,
specifically with regard to the list of cases of clergy abuse which you publish,
which I would like to ask you before we go ahead and create the link.
Specifically, are there any criteria for deciding which cases of alleged abuse to include in your list of abusers beyond what you state, to the effect that you only mention individuals who "are ones who'd had allegations made against them which were then published in reputable newspapers, have transcripts from televisions shows where the case(s) have been discussed, have police records and/or we have court documentation regarding the case" ? In other words, is there any attempt made to discern when allegations have been levelled that may not be credible, or to review ongoing legal proceeedings and remove names from the list if convincing evidence emerges that the charges do in fact lack credibility? If so, what criteria are used to decide what constitutes credible evidence? Who reviews cases that are submitted? Lastly, what utility do you see in listing names of people who are no longer alive?
I very much appreciate your time in answering these questions and look forward to being in touch.
B'hatzlacha,
Program Director, Edah
____________________________________________
Rabbi Bob Carroll, Edah's Program Director has an interesting and varied background, which makes him well suited for the challenges he faces at Edah. Rabbi Carroll is a graduate of Brandeis University, and received his Smicha from Yeshiva University as well as a Master's in Jewish Philosophy from YU's Revel Graduate School. He has also completed Doctoral coursework in Kabbalah at NYU, and studied at Yeshivat haMivtar and Yeshivat David Shapell in Jerusalem. Rabbi Carroll worked for four years as a Hillel director at several New York area campuses.
Prior to joining the staff at Edah, Rabbi Carroll worked as a corporate strategist and project manager, while serving as a respected mentor and teacher of Kabbalah and Rabbinic texts at a number of community-based Adult Learning programs.
By Neri Livneh
Haaretz - March 4, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/401222.html
CORRECTION: In "What is the question?" (Haaretz Magazine, March 5, 2004) Rabbi Mordechai Gafni should have been described as being 43 years old, married for the third time, and due to complete his doctorate at the end of the year.
"We've
forgotten the Ela [the Goddess]," says Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, founder of
Bayit Chadash, a community
that aspires to be a new stream in Judaism, and, in his words, "to restore
the spark of holy paganism." Judaism was once an erotic religion, he argues,
in the sense that the Divinity had two experiential sides or dimensions:
a male side called "God" and a female side called "Shekhina," the Goddess.
The sense of the Divinity is achieved by a fusing of the two elements, as
between a man and a woman, yin and yang, Shakti and Shiva. In the Temple,
the Holy of Holies, there were two cherubim - male and female. To kabbalists,
the blending of the divine male, called "Tiferet" and the divine female,
called "Shekhina," a unity described in the Babylonian Talmud in reference
to the cherubim on the Holy Ark, represents the Divine Power. Rabbi
Tzvi Yehuda Kook described the fusing of these two elements as the combination
of a (male) straight line with a (female) circle.
To Gafni, the line without a circle represents Ethos without Eros, i.e., rational life, without emotion, disconnected from Mother Earth and from natural impulse. The circle without the line represents an immersion in the erotic or spiritual, as in New Age practices. The fusion of the line and the circle represents Eros purified by the encounter with the rational and ethical foundation - a desirable encounter that is necessary for the building of the "Bayit Chadash" ("new home") or the new Judaism.
"Orthodox
Judaism developed out of the ethical teachings of the Prophets, who tried
to obscure the Eros for the sake of nurturing the Ethos," he says. This is
how we've gotten the ultra-Orthodox Judaism that we're familiar with, a religion
that tries to suppress the impulse and whose rabbis are supposed to supply
absolute truths and answers to every question. Gafni, who calls himself
"post-Orthodox," takes an opposite view of what religiosity ought to mean:
"To me, the religious duty is to ask questions. I think it smacks of great
arrogance to give pat answers to ultimate issues."
Gafni is not an anonymous personality by any means. His Channel 2 television program, "Tahat Gafno," attracted many viewers. He says that thousands of people have attended his community's encounters. He also writes a regular column in the magazine Hayim Aherim and has published five books in the United States in recent years. One of them, "Soul Prints," will soon appear in Hebrew translation, with an introduction by the religious poet Admiel Kosman. Gafni's television show is due back for a new season, and he recently finished taping segments for the Keshet broadcasting network "about the situation and questions related to the situation - for Keshet to use on days when there is a terror attack."
In addition to his rabbinical ordination, he also holds a Ph.D. from Oxford. And no, he says, he is not at all inclined to become a guru. He says that he's as far from New Age as he is from Reform Judaism. His "new Orthodoxy" does not offer any breaks when it comes to observance of the 613 commandments, or mitzvot. What makes him unique are the additions he makes to Judaism, the changes of emphasis, the way he relates it to modern life and the special focus he puts on commandments related to human dignity and love of fellow human beings. He also invites non-Jews to the Shabbat weekends he runs at the Bayit Chadash center in Poriya, overlooking Lake Kinneret. He officiates at same-sex marriages, and sees feminism and equality for women as key Jewish values. He plans to ordain women as rabbis and women in his community can be called up to the Torah. Every blessing in the community's prayer book and every blessing recited at community ceremonies open, as usual, with "Baruch ata adonai eloheinu" and then continues with "ve'berukha at hashekhina" ("And blessed art thou, the Shekhina"). "I'm not talking about Judaism-lite, like the Reform or the settlers," says Gafni. "I'm talking about whole Judaism that has both Ethos and Eros, both faith and a full life, both male and female."
Gafni divides his time between the new Bayit Chadash center in Jaffa, where this conversation took place, and the older center in Poriya - and between Israel and the U.S. He is 42, married to Chaya (his second wife), and father of three children from his previous marriage. He radiates warmth, and is not the type of rabbi who is reluctant to shake a woman's hand. On the contrary, he does not shy away from physical contact. "Someone who wanted to study with me said, `I have a problem with you. I've heard that you love women.' As if loving women is a bad thing. I told him that I'm very happy that I'm a loving person and also that I love women. I think love is a very important thing."
He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to a family of Holocaust survivors that lived an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. "At age six or seven, I knew that I wanted to be a rabbi," he relates. "Because I really loved the world of the book, which I'd known since I began learning at age 3." He went to a yeshiva high school in New York, then to Yeshiva University. He also took courses at Queens College and earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy ("I majored in Sartre, Heidegger and Nietzsche"). At the same time, he also set up a network of Jewish clubs within the New York public school system, to draw in Jewish youth that had left the synagogue and Judaism behind.
After being ordained as a rabbi, he moved to Florida and served as the rabbi of South Palm Beach. Then, at age 29, he decided that it was time to make aliyah. "To me, the Divine call of our generation was to participate in the destiny of the Jewish people in our generation, and that's hard to do from Florida," he says.
What happens in Israel will either shape or answer an essential question: "Is Judaism a relevant and important instrument in the symphony of the spirit of the modern world? Or is it just another fundamentalist approach that does not grapple with this generation in a substantial way? Of course, I'd prefer for us to develop a Judaism that has relevance and contributes to life in our era."
New look at kashrut
Gafni describes his main occupation as "clarifying the issue of the place and contribution of the Jewish instrument in the world symphony of the spirit." To this end, he participates in discussions with a group of philosophers and "international sages," as he calls them, who conduct a dialogue, by means of e-mail, on theological and philosophical subjects. One member of this group is philosopher Ken Wilbur, whom Gafni calls "the Aristotle of our time." "We examine Judaism's place and contribution, starting with the premise that there is no competition between religions," he says. "It's not the old idea of seeking to prove that Judaism is better than other religions. That outlook has to be uprooted."
Another question he addresses is the purpose of Judaism. "The standard argument is a circular one - that Judaism must be preserved so that Jews will be preserved so that they will preserve Judaism. If the whole purpose of Judaism is merely the survival of people as Jews without any ethical or spiritual content, then Judaism is essentially a kind of `enlightened racism.' In my opinion, the answer to the question of what is the purpose of Judaism has to come from questions about the essence of Judaism. The question that all the big rabbis are concerned with now - whether the tuna is a kosher fish or not - is not, in my view, an essential Jewish question. An essential Jewish question is a question that shapes life."
His transition from Orthodox to post-Orthodox began even before he received his rabbinical ordination. "We were studying `The Letter of Rav Shrira Gaon,' and in it he says that everything that happens in the world is for the sake of the Jewish people. I asked the rabbi a simple question: When a couple in China, on a beautiful moonlit night, feels a great physical attraction to each other and makes love - are they also making love for the sake of the Jewish people? The rabbi said, `Indirectly, yes.' That's when I realized that there was something twisted in this Jewish outlook that is incapable of seeing anything that happens in the world as distinct from it, but instead sees everything as somehow enslaved to the needs of Judaism. To me, that means that as a Jew you cannot see the Other, and I don't accept that."
Gafni sees the world as rich and varied and ever-changing. "The classic Jewish outlook tries to freeze everything in order to fit the changes to its needs, instead of fitting itself to the needs of the world," he says. "I thought that it was necessary to seek a new Jewish outlook that would try to deal with our place in this world and in this generation. For example, the matter of kashrut. I don't give myself any breaks in terms of kashrut, but I have a different understanding of the meaning of kashrut than the standard one."
In speaking of kashrut, Gafni includes ecological and humanistic considerations with the halakhic [Jewish legal] system: "Meat is considered kosher if it comes from a kosher animal that has been slaughtered according to Jewish law. Everyone knows this, and that suffices for them. But I say, let's ask another question: A goose that is slaughtered in accordance with Jewish law is kosher according to the classical outlook, but is the fact that it was cruelly fattened in such a way that its entire internal system was wrecked of no significance? How can that not detract from its kashrut? Or if the vegetable that we eat was previously sprayed with a substance that harms the soil and poisons the groundwater, can it be kosher?"
And he adds another, social consideration: "What I mean to say is that there needs to be kashrut not only in the accepted halakhic sense, but also `eco-kashrut.' Judaism must also be expressed in concern for the world and for life, for ecology in other words. And another question: If someone eats food that was grown by people employed in slave conditions at starvation wages, how can it be kosher?"
You're adding a moral dimension to kashrut.
"Yes, and not just to the kashrut of food. I'm saying that we have to find the kashrut in every aspect of human life. For example, I need to check into my mutual fund and make sure that I'm not investing in the world of globalization that is impoverishing people and companies."
What else do you consider an essential Jewish question?
"For example, how do I see my world: Do I divide the world into the enlightened and the primitive, the secular and the religious, the Jews and the goyim, or is my world more complex than that - one in which no one possesses the absolute truth, in which each one contributes something to the symphony of the spirit and in which everyone must ask himself questions. In my view, the most essential part of the spiritual quest has to be doubt - to begin every effort to understand something not from the classical Jewish starting point that says either I or my rabbi has the right answers to all the questions, but to cast doubt on all the answers, and from this point to begin asking questions."
Male and female He created them
Another essential question on Gafni's mind is where the feminine voice has disappeared to in Judaism. This question, he says, is especially urgent in this generation, in which the feminine voice has great importance. "The Orthodox public is so worried about `kol be'isha erva' (the provocativeness of a woman's voice) that it also doesn't listen to the Bat-Kol (the Heavenly Voice) and erases the Goddess."
What exactly is the connection between God and the Goddess?
"First of all, these are two different elements of one Divine essence. The masculine God creates the world outside of himself and the feminine Goddess creates the world within herself. The masculine God is rational, judgmental, ethical. The Goddess is more giving, more encompassing, more accepting. I don't advocate annulling the masculine God, but there has to be a holy mating. Meaning, a combination of the male and the female - in experience, in prayer, in equality. And all this isn't my own personal invention, it comes from the sources of Jewish thought, from the Talmud and the kabbala and Jewish mysticism."
What do you have against neo-liberalism?
"That's another
essential question. We live in a world today in which no one truly lives
solely in his own place - economically, ecologically or culturally. But what
happens is that in the New Age world, which is all superficiality, and in
the academic world, which is completely disconnected from life, and also
in the world of intellectualism, there is no real discussion of globalization
and its meaning for the life of the spirit, government and economics. This
discussion has to take place, and that's what we're trying to do in Bayit
Chadash."
Is Bayit Chadash a group of `sages' conducting a discussion, or it is a type of Jewish community?
"Both. Bayit Chadash is comprised of several parts. First of all, it's a spiritual-cultural stream that currently has about 2,500 adherents and aspires to be a new stream in Judaism. There's the aspect of the community, which is built on the model of the Buddhist community, or the way the Hasidic community was built once upon a time. The original Hasidic community wasn't in the community center: A person would go to his rabbi a few times a year or a month, or every Shabbat. In our community, there are people who come a few times a year for Shabbat and there are those who come for the festivals and those who come every week or every few days and study in our Beit Midrash or take a class.
"In the inner circle of the community, there is our ordination program and our leadership program. I decided that we have to ordain people for the rabbinate and we currently have 17 men and women in our program. In our leadership program, we try to train people for social leadership. Outside of this inner circle, there is the public, cultural circle, which is composed of our activities in the media."
What is pleasure?
People who have been to Gafni's center in Poriya and to the new center in Jaffa describe Shabbat there as an especially pleasurable experience. "I had seen Rabbi Gafni on television and read his articles in Hayim Aherim, and I was intrigued," says Ziv Barnea, a student in the rabbinical ordination program. "I come from a Marxist, very non-religious background. I went to the Bayit Chadash center in Poriya and discovered that I'd come to a warm and accepting and interesting place. Gafni greeted me and hugged me and also said it was an honor for him to meet me. He's a very warm and loving and loved man, and on the other hand, has no pretensions at all of being a guru.
"One hundred and sixty people came that Shabbat. I kept coming for weekend retreats and there was usually a big crowd. I take my children and my wife there, too. One Shabbat, my wife was called up to the Torah and this had tremendous meaning for me, because the value of equality is something that has very great meaning in my life: equality between men and women, between Jews and Muslims, between straights and gays. Gafni applies this in his life, too. His wife, Chaya, is his equal partner in leading the community. She gives classes and workshops."
Bayit Chadash is registered as a nonprofit organization and also has a center in New York. Gafni is the director-general of the NPO and when he is abroad, Rabbi Avraham Leader, who also grew up in America, substitutes for him at Bayit Chadash.
The organization
pays a salary to several teachers and a director. Money to fund the
centers comes from fees paid for lessons and - primarily - from contributions
raised by Friends of Bayit Chadash, which operates in Israel and the United
States.
"I don't make my money from religion," says Gafni. "Most of what I earn comes from lectures abroad and from my books." He lectures, among other places, at the Harvard University business school and teaches several times a year at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. "And even though they're Reform there, they accept me as an Orthodox rabbi," he says.
"Judaism needs to be liberated from all the religious establishments. The establishments are a desecration of God's name. If buses have to travel on Shabbat for the non-Orthodox majority, then there should be buses. And if the needs of this majority require civil marriages, then there should be civil marriages. And if gays and lesbians want to live together in love, then there should be marriages between them. Only if we throw off all the shackles of the religious establishment will Judaism be able to freely contend in the ideological market without cloaking itself in a mantle of establishment-based superiority. Tommy Lapid is always saying `no.' I agree with most of his `nos.' The problem is: What does he say `yes' to?"
And what do you say?
"I say: The security of the State of Israel depends on our ability to recount a narrative that the country's non-Orthodox majority will feel a part of. If there is no such narrative, then you can make one kind of fence or another, set borders here or there, and it won't work. Because what will be inside the borders? This, by the way, is a very Zionist and not a right-wing thesis. Now, in order to search for this narrative, you need seriousness first of all. New Age populism and kabbala centers won't help. The insularity of the yeshiva world and the alienation of the academic world won't help either. And another thing, we have to create the kind of philosophy in which a person feels that he is developing and growing in his inner spiritual and ethical world, that he is on an inner journey.
"The kabbalists say that the primary ideal in life is pleasure. But what is pleasure? Pleasure is to develop. Today, the Orthodox Jewish world has become a kind of gym or training program where a person marks off pluses and minuses on a card and calculates how many pluses he needs to check off in order to get to heaven. I've done such and such mitzvot - okay, I've completed my quota. It's a rigid approach that doesn't contribute a lot to one's inner life, and we need to return to the inner view that says that Judaism is a journey that can be expressed in many areas outside of religion: culture, science, you name it."
You're opposed to the rabbinical establishment and yet you ordain rabbis yourself?
"Yes, but a different type of rabbi. They won't be rabbis whose job is to give halakhic answers. In Orthodox Judaism, the rabbi serves as a kind of alter-ego whose role is to underscore the imperfection of anyone who isn't the rabbi. I say that anyone looking for this kind of rabbi should not come to me. I've made and am making a lot of mistakes in life. A rabbi has to be a person who genuinely loves people, who loves the Torah and is a person who has courage and is not just another kind of political person. He has to be outside the establishment and outside the political system and must be capable of admitting mistakes.
"I tell my people that I fall down and pick myself up every day. I'm no better than anyone else. But if you want to go on a spiritual journey together with me, then let's do it. The whole philosophy of Bayit Chadash is that the rabbi is not a guru, the rabbi is essentially the community as a whole. Our philosophy is a kind of new Hasidism. We're the successors of the Ba'al Shem Tov in this sense. Naturally, I'm aware that this approach is threatening to all the traditional approaches."
Gafni may not want to be a guru, but he has not shown any special reluctance to establish a Hasidic-style court. A picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe - "when he was still young and modest" - in other words, before he was crowned as the Messiah by his admirers - adorns the wall of his study. The approach of Bayit Chadash could reopen the war between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, if it comes to be perceived as a real threat to Orthodox Judaism. The Hasidim of the Ba'al Shem Tov were accused by the Mitnagdim of engaging in a form of paganism, and the emphasis that Gafni places on the existence of the Goddess and her importance certainly could invite such accusations.
It's not that hard to see the study methods at Bayit Chadash as a kind of almost idolatrous cult. Gafni himself described this in an article he wrote for Hayim Aherim: "In the Bayit Chadash spiritual community, located at Poriya overlooking Lake Kinneret, we are committed, in the spirit of Rav Kook's teachings, to restoring the spark of holy paganism. We return to the pagan when we reconnect to Mother Earth ... We restore the pagan in meditation, in ecstatic rituals and in passionate love of the Shekhina in her many manifestations. According to the kabbalist Cordovero, we yearn for the consciousness of this Goddess, when we speak of the dream of rebuilding the Temple."n
Gafni: "I'm not talking about Judaism-lite, like the Reform or the settlers. I'm talking about whole Judaism that has both Ethos and Eros."
Letters to the Editor
Very poor answer Regarding "What is the question?"
Haaretz Magazine, March 5, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/403750.html
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni is without doubt a Jewish thinker who combines a deep knowledge of the Jewish traditional sources with a refreshing capacity for original thought. Unfortunately, he often deliberately misreads historical Jewish thought in order to promote his own role as "savior" of us all. The rather strange incorporation into his thought of what he calls "neo-pagan elements" are in clear contradiction to the kind of wise moderation the Jewish tradition has promoted in all areas of life, most especially the sexual one.
What is most absurd and unseemly here is his claim that he is doing this while strictly adhering to the 613 commandments. Rabbi Gafni knows well enough that for Judaism, Torah means the Oral Law, and there is no sign in the Oral Law that I know of concerning permitting one individual to change the formulas of traditional blessings, or condoning something clearly abhorrent to the traditional Jewish family - i.e., same-sex "marriage."
The truth is that Rabbi Gafni, if he succeeds in inventing a new kind of communal life (something I strongly doubt), will not create a new stream in Judaism, but rather another one of the type of small utopian sect that flourished in 19th-century America and which now have almost completely disappeared.
The celebrity of an hour, and the public relations hype of the moment, will not lead to his having any significant influence on the ongoing struggle of the Jewish people. And here I would mention that his pooh-poohing of the miracle of Jewish survival through millennia of persecution seems to be particularly irresponsible at a time in which Israel has, in Prof. Alan Dershowitz's telling formulation, become "the Jew of the nations."
To put this in Rabbi Gafni's terminology, "the narrative" he is "selling us" about the "eroticization of Judaism," in which personal passion is the center of all, seems a very poor answer to Israeli buses being blown up, over 10 percent unemployment, the assimilation and demographic decline of the Jewish people, worldwide anti-Semitism that is greater than at any time since World War II, and a few other Israeli and Jewish realities that need urgent addressing by Jewish thinkers and leaders now.
Shalom Freedman
Jerusalem
Note: Shalom Freedman is a freelance writer in Jerusalem whose work has appeared in a wide variety of Jewish Publications
Integral
Naked
An Introduction to Integral Kabbalah: Study, Prayer, and Meditation.
Rabbi Marc Gafni, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and Ken Wilber
Kabbalah—the mystical branch of Judaism—is concerned with the ultimate knowledge of God. In this series of clips from a gathering in Boulder, Rabbi Marc Gafni and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—the world's foremost proponents of Integral Kabbalah—discuss with Ken three of the main practices within their tradition that constitute the means of this knowledge: Study, Prayer, and Meditation.
In this introductory clip, Ken sets the context by noting that in the world's great spiritual traditions, the process of God-realization is often divided into three stages: ethics, meditation, and nondual awareness. The second stage, meditation, can be understood to have a variety of forms, one of which is study. According to Gafni and Zalman, "study" is not merely cognitive book-learning, but ecstatic surrender to the Divine via union with a sacred text.
The lectures can be watched on-line at:
http://www.integralnaked.org/live/view_kabbalah.aspx
http://www.integralnaked.org/people.aspx?guest=Dossey
http://www.integralnaked.org/contributoRabbiaspx?id=34
Rabbi Marc (Mordechai) Gafni has emerged as an exciting new
voice in Israeli and international religious life and spirituality.
In addition to teaching graduate seminars on mysticism at Oxford University in England, R'Gafni is the founder and head of Bayit Chadash. Overlooking Israel's Sea of Galilee, Bayit Chadash is an international spiritual community retreat center committed to Jewish renaissance.
Additionally, Gafni is the host and creator of a highly acclaimed national Israeli television program on ethics and spirituality. The show, with hundreds of thousands of viewers, has become an important weaver of the Israeli spirit.
Besides contributing to a number of American journals, R'Gafni is a contributing editor to Chayim Acherim, Israel's leading spirituality magazine.
An acknowledged master of the ancient texts as well as the texts of the heart, Gafni has published three works of Jewish thought in Hebrew.
Gafni's work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher and spiritual master: wise, compassionate, accessible, and universal.
Along with Gafni's two English-written books listed below, a two-volume work with extensive primary source footnotes, entitled The Erotic and the Holy, is soon to be published.
Gafni's written work in English includes:
Soul Prints
Gafni's fourth book, written for a broader English-speaking
public, was the subject of a National PBS Special. The book hit the bestseller
list, has been translated into numerous languages, and was chosen for the
prestigious Napra Nautilus Award for the Best Spirituality Book of 2001.
It will be re-released shortly, with an extensive section of primary source
footnotes drawn from the Kabbalistic tradition.
The Mystery of Love
Gafni's latest—highly acclaimed.
Rabbi Marc has appeared on Integral Naked:
A Prayer for Malka · 4/12/2004
Your Own Letter in the Torah · 4/5/2004
A Second Person Relationship to God · 3/29/2004
A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self. Part 2. · 3/29/2004
The Ultimate Erotic Act · 2/16/2004
A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self. Part 1. · 12/22/2003
Protocols Blogspot - May 5, 2004
http://pro.enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=protocols&commentid=108384928788288286
Has anyone else noticed that Bayit Chadash has replaced almost every reference to their founder Rabbi Mordechai Gafni on their website with the phrase Rabbi Mordechai Gafni (aka: Marc Winiarz, Marc Gafni, Mordechai Winiarz), the same phrase that the Awareness Center has had on their website for Rabbi Gafni since March.
see: http://www.google.com/search?q=gafni+winiarz&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&meta=
Apparently, Bayit Chadash did not like that searches for their founder/leaders current name Gafni and former name Winiarz were leading to The Awareness Center so they have taken this action to boost their standing in the google search resuls for these words.
So far it has worked and they have overtaken The Awareness Center in the search results list.
Protocols Blogspot - May 7,
2004
http://protocols.blogspot.com/
It also says that from 1984-1985, he was a Lecturer in Bible at Yeshiva University. He was one of the editors of the SOY Haggadah, along with Rabbi Kenneth BrandeRabbi Reportadly, Gafni/Winiarz is the reason Rabbi Mordechai Marcus no longer gives out smicha.
http://www.haloscan.com/comments.php?user=thevillageidiots&comment=107893543654332325
·1991 - MA, Philosophy, Bar Ilan University.
·1989 - Rabbinic Certification, Chief Rabbinate of the State of Israel.
·1982 - BA, Philosophy, Edison College.
·1982 - Rabbinic Ordination, Ohr Torah Institute.
·1983 - Private Ordination, Rabbi Mordechai Marcus.
·1977-78 - Secondary Education, Yeshivat Gush Etzion, Israel.
By Levi Ford
I chat by phone with Gary Rosenblatt, editor of The Jewish Week, Thursday morning, June 24, 2004.
"How happy are you with your job?"
"I love it."
"How happy are you with your paper and which parts if any most need to be improved?"
"I'm happy with the paper overall. We could stand improvement across the board. We're always trying to reach more readers, particularly younger readers, more people outside the organized Jewish community."
"Would you describe The Jewish Week as a compelling read?"
"I don't want to tout our paper. That's certainly our goal."
"Would you describe it as the best Jewish newspaper?"
"I'd have to give the same answer."
"What do you think are the obstacles to good Jewish journalism?"
"I sometime describe our ongoing dilemma this way -- a Jewish journalist works with two competing mandates. The first commandment for journalists is to probe, explore and uncover and all the things people expect when they pick up their daily paper. On the other hand, one of the commandments in the organized Jewish community is the opposite, to cover-up and create a unified front, and not present any negative impression to the outside world. The Yiddish expression, shandze fer de goyim (scandal for the goyim). You're always walking that tightrope -- doing the job of a journalist and being a responsible part of the Jewish community."
"How much status does a journalist for a Jewish paper have in Jewish life?"
"We're like the Rodney Dangerfields of Jewish life. We don't get any respect. On the other hand, it is incremental in building respect. I think it can be there. It depends on the paper and the individual. It is too easy to hide behind the notion that there is some inherent part of our job that makes us not respected by the community. If you do a good job, you are respected by the community."
"What do you love and what do you hate about your job?"
"I write about and deal with issues that are meaningful to me. One of my first jobs was with TV Guide (sports editor from 1970-72). If you get a high from writing for a big audience, that was great. Now I get to combine my love of journalism with Jewish life. The downside is the same. Sometimes it can be dispiriting when you see the pettiness of the community you really care about. People you admire until you meet them. See their egos and the things that motivate them. Sometimes you wish you had just known them from a distance."
"How do you deal with threats, such as threats to the financial survivability of the paper if you publish something that a powerful person does not want?"
"It is part of the nature of the job. I remember in Baltimore, we did a story about Israel bonds. We were told that if that story appeared, it would not only hurt that local bonds drive, but the state of Israel was going to suffer. They both survived.
"That doesn't mean I'm dismissive of what you'd call a threat, which is a pretty strong word. A cautionary message. I try to take them all seriously and not be so cavalier as to not think about the consequences of things we write. My experience has born out that the sun will still come up the next day. I have yet to see the kind of article that would be so destructive. There are threats of boycotting the paper and boycotting our advertisers but it hasn't gone anywhere."
"Your paper was famous for its investigation
of [Rabbi] Baruch Lanner and the abuse situation. Many people think that
have you information about other rabbis who were similarly abusive. You even
wrote a column about information pouring in to you. But you didn't seem to
go on to investigate other rabbis with the same zest you applied to
Lanner?"
"I don't think that's accurate. I have a lot of files. One rabbi in particular I've been trailing for over three years. I've talked to many dozen people. I have to apply the same standards as I would for the Lanner story. We have done stories about other rabbis and other cases of abuse. Until it meets that bar, I have continued to pursue some of these stories.
"I think the Lanner stories have had a corrective element. I've written that I don't think that the newspaper should be the mechanism for dealing with these issues. There should be communal mechanisms. The reason people come to us is that they have struck out everywhere else in the community. They come to us out of frustration and desperation. There was a rabbi [Willig] who was on the Beit Din on the Lanner case who I wrote about last year. He did a public mea culpa about his role."
"How would you rate the quality of Jewish journalism done on the Federations?"
"It depends on city to city, newspaper to newspaper, issue to issue. If I pick up a Jewish newspaper from different parts of the country, I sometimes wouldn't know what community I was reading about if I covered up the masthead. It's a lot easier to run a JTA story about what is going on in Israel than to send a reporter to cover a conflict in your own neighborhood. It's cheaper and safer to the run the JTA."
"Are there any individuals in the Jewish Establishment who you would regard as the greatest threats to Jewish journalism because they're bullies?"
"Yeah. I wouldn't name them. I've met some national Jewish leaders who've told me, not in a bullying way, that they believe that the role of Jewish newspapers is to promote Israel and the Jewish community and to unify the community and not to write critical articles about the community. I differ with that. The best way to educate, enlighten and involve people in the Jewish community is to tell them what is really going on. If we tell them we are one, all we do is lose our credibility. I don't think we are one is a goal."
"How often do you encounter bullying?"
"There are varying degrees of it, from canceling subscriptions to stopping advertising to getting my friends to do those things."
"What's the biggest hit you've taken for publishing a story?"
"It's hard to measure. When the Lanner story first broke, we were threatened with institutions pulling their advertising. We didn't see it happen."
"What are the joys and tribulations of being a Federation paper?"
"We do not consider ourselves a Federation paper. We have no formal ties with the UJA Federation. There was a time when the UJA were ex-officio members of the board of The Jewish Week but that stopped about eight years ago. They buy subscriptions for people who give $50 or more to UJA."
"Does that make them the dominant force behind the paper?"
"Yeah, in that sense, sure. Then we have close to 30,000 subscribe directly."
"How many papers does the Federation buy?"
"It depends from year to year."
"Approximately."
"Between 50,000-60,000."
"If they are buying about twice the number of papers than subscribers, could not the paper be fairly called a Federation paper?"
"I don't think so. We have no formal ties. They don't have any say in editorial or financial matters. It's their choice. They think it serves them well to supply their donors with a Jewish newspaper.
"Some of the pressure I got in Baltimore, where we were an independent paper, was just as strong as the pressure I get here. From the Federation and the Establishment community."
"If you wrote a memoir, would you have a pile of stories you weren't able to work into the Jewish papers you've worked on?"
"I have a file I keep called, 'My Last Issue.' Not necessarily a tell-all memoir, I'd just like to deal with some of these issues."
"There isn't a market for hard-hitting muckraking Jewish journalism for a Jewish audience?"
"Jewish readers tend to be very bright, well-read, sophisticated people, and if you present them good journalism, I think they will want to read it."
"What did your father the rabbi think of your going into journalism?"
"He was proud of me. He used to tease me that if I stayed away from the rabbinate because I saw you live in a glass house, he'd say he only had his congregants giving him a hard time while I had everybody giving me a hard time. But they don't pay my salary directly."
"What's your relationship to Judaism?"
"I consider myself an active observant Jew."
"Do you believe in God?"
"I do."
"Choseness?"
"Yep. I think it is a misinterpreted word. I don't think it means chosen to be better than everybody else. It means simply to be responsible."
"You're happy to believe that the Jews are God's Chosen People?"
"I don't have a choice."
"Some Jews reject it."
"I don't reject it."
"How do you think the Internet and blogging is affecting Jewish journalism?"
"That's a good question. It's very hard to say. I always wonder who has the time to read a lot of these blogs. I don't get the impression that those audiences are wide but I guess they're pretty deep. It does give me a lot of pause because I think it has the potential to reach as many people as standard journalism but it doesn't have the checks and balances and an editing process that more normative journalism has. That's something to worry about."
"You think that's more of a downer than a good sign?"
"It's certainly worrisome. People can come home late at night and write anything off the top of their head and send it out and it's out there."
"Is that scary?"
"It can be."
"Do you think we have too many checks and balances in Establishment Jewish journalism?"
"No. They are the same checks and balances you have in any professional journalistic enterprise, maybe with an added element of sensitivity, which I don't think is a bad thing. I don't think it is a question of whether or not you do a story but how you do a story. I don't see any stories that are absolutely verboten, but it depends on how you treat it."
"You should be sensitive to save people's feelings?"
"You should be aware of feelings. At times it is inevitable you will hurt people's feelings, say a rabbi who's losing a job. You have to weigh that against what you owe the readers in the larger community. Those are tough calls. I don't think there are clear definitions. They are ad hoc and made as much from your kishkes as from your brains."
"Did you read the book The New Rabbi?"
"Yeah."
"What did you think of it?"
"Well, you know, there was a lot that I admired and I think he went a little too far sometimes in exposing people, specifically embarrassing them in ways that he could've handled a little more indirectly and gotten the same message across and not be as hurtful."
Update: Rabbi Marc Gafni (AKA: Mordechai Gafni,
Marc Winiarz
The Awareness Center's Daily Newsletter (Message 5751 )- July 11, 2005
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/TheAwarenessCenter/message/5751
Child molester Rabbi Mordechai Gafni (or whatever name he's going by this week) releases new book Who is afraid of Lilith?
http://jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2005/07/child-molester-rabbi-mordechai-gafni.html#comments
When the Rabbi Met Lilith
by Rabbi Marc Gafni
Monday July 11, 9:00 am ET
TEL AVIV, Israel, July 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Last month, a riveting and controversial text was published by Modan Publishing House in Israel. Together, Rabbi Mordechai (Marc) Gafni and Rabbi Ohad Ezrachi co-authored the book, Who is afraid of Lilith? Rereading the Kabbalah of the Feminine Shadow.
It was met with shock by many readers, as it takes a radical path to understand the fullness of Lilith. Lilith is the mythological figure of the Jewish tradition embodying the fears of men towards the perception of a sexually liberated temptress. Most books focus solely on Lilith's shadow aspects. This book, though, includes the process of Lilith's redemption through a re-examination of Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalistic sources. The authors recognize not only the problematic aspects of Lilith, but are also attuned to her essential spiritual quality.
The book begins with a scholarly examination of the Lilith character and myth, then turns to other female figures of the Hebrew Bible which represent her many aspects, each one through her own unique story.
Society is used to hearing feminist literature only through the female voice. This book offers the much-needed perspective of the male feminist viewpoint. Hearing the male feminist voice, especially that of a rabbi, is a direct rectification of the past when male rabbinic voices originally created the demonization of Lilith. The book has been published in Hebrew, and the English translation of this modern mystical text should be released soon.
For more details please visit www.marcgafni.com
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, Director of Bayit Chadash, has emerged as an exciting voice in Israeli and international religious life and spirituality. Rabbi Gafni's work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher and spiritual teacher: wise, compassionate, inspired, and universal.
Ohad Ezrahi, the Rabbi and the founder of Hamakom spiritual community.
Ohad's path goes through nature, Zen, years of learning Torah and Kabala in the ultra-orthodox Hassidic communities in Jerusalem, teaching Kabala in the Yeshiva world, "graduating" from orthodoxy and being one of the leading figures in the renaissance of Jewish liberal spirituality in Israel.
Bayit Chadash is a spiritual community in Israel, focused on reclaiming inner Eros and the wonder of Hebrew wisdom as an essential and vital guiding source in the service of human spiritual evolution and physical survival. For further details on Bayit Chadash activities in Israel or abroad, please email zvi@bayitchadash.org or call us at +972-3-683-972. Visit us online at www.bayitchadash.org
Source: Bayit Chadash
Wisdom Chair - Jewish Studies at Stephen S. Wise Temple
(Los Angeles, CA)
http://www.sswt.org/@wise/0904/@wise0904.pdf
The Chair will be held by Rabbi Mordechai (Marc) Gafni who over
the last tow years has become a beloved part of our Stephen S. Wise Temple
community.
Rabbi Gafni is the Dean of the Bayit Chadash Community and Think Tank in Israel, an Oxford Scholar, and important new voice in spirit in the international community, as well as the author of a growinglibrary of both new Jewish Thought and best selling volumes on Modern Jewish Spirituality.
Rabbi Gafni will be in residence at Stephen S. Wise Temple for three months between Septemeber 2004 and July 2005.
Visit One: September 11 -22, 2004
The Dance of Laughter and Tears; Towards a Vision of New Jewish Spirituality
Visit Two: October 31 - November 12, 2004
The Mystery of Love
Visit Three: February 23 - March 8, 2004
The Mystery of Love - The Next Level
Visit Four: May 1 - June 14, 2005
The Psychology of Judaism Through the Prism of the Book of Genesis
For more information, please contact Randi Goetz in the clergy office: (310) 889-2264
By Gary Rosenblatt - Editor and Publisher
The Jewish Week - September 24, 2004
http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/editcolcontent.php3
Is there a statute of limitations for rabbis accused of abuse — and should there be?
How does the community determine when someone has done teshuvah, or repentance, as claimed? Can rabbinic ordination be revoked? And when, if ever, do persistent rumors and allegations over a period of years add up to a legitimate story?
Prompting
these thoughts in this season of repentance and forgiveness is the continuing
saga of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, 43, who in recent years has become an increasingly
influential leader of the Jewish Renewal movement.
Born as Marc Winiarz, he came to New York from the Midwest for high school and college, became a youth leader and rabbi, was accused of sexual abuses and misconduct, and started life anew in Israel 13 years ago with an Israeli name. He has left several rabbinic and educational posts, here and in Israel, amid a swirl of rumors and allegations spanning two decades.
Over time Rabbi Gafni has assumed an increasingly high profile as a charismatic teacher, promoting what he calls a new, post-Orthodox stream of Judaism. He has been featured on Israeli television; written several books, including "Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment," which was made into a PBS special; lectured extensively in the United States and Israel; served on the spiritual advisory council of Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a national organization based in Philadelphia; led retreats at Elat Chayyim, a Jewish Renewal center in the Catskills; preached frequently at the Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles; and founded Bayit Chadash ("new home"), a New Age Jewish community in Israel that he said strives "to restore the spark of holy paganism."
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the spiritual leader of the Israeli community of Efrat, called several months ago to tell me he would like to revoke the rabbinic ordination he gave Rabbi Gafni many years ago when they had a close rabbi-student relationship. Rabbi Riskin characterized as beyond the bounds of Orthodoxy his former student's theology, described earlier this year in a lengthy profile in Haaretz, the Israeli daily. In the newspaper, Rabbi Gafni called for restoring a balance between the erotic and the spiritual in Judaism.
For his part, Rabbi Gafni acknowledged he has moved beyond Orthodoxy. He said he has other ordinations and, in a letter to Rabbi Riskin this spring, "returned" his semicha to spare his former teacher any further embarrassment.
Dogged By Critics
But the crux of the controversy surrounding Rabbi Gafni is more about his personal behavior than his theology. For the past two decades he has been dogged by a small, informal network of people, here and in Israel, who charge that he has had a long history of immoral conduct, including sexual contact with and abuse of underage girls.
These critics, including alleged former victims, several rabbis and educators, have urged synagogues and educational institutions not to hire or engage him, and they have stepped up their efforts as Rabbi Gafni's activities have broadened and become more public after his return from a self-imposed exile of sorts, spending several years writing and studying at Oxford University in England.
Rabbi Gafni admitted to having "made mistakes in my life," including giving in to a strong temper when he was a young man. But he insisted that while he had adult relationships with women at times when he was single — he has been married for several years to his third wife — he was "never abusive." He said he has done teshuvah, in part by carefully removing himself from potentially tempting situations.
"I don't work with kids, I don't counsel men or women, and I don't meet alone with women," he said, anxious to be rid of the old allegations. "How do I make it be over?" he asked me.
Even Rabbi Gafni's detractors said he is brilliant, charming and magnetic; even his supporters admitted he has a powerful ego and a spotted past. And he has plenty of detractors and supporters. Indeed, what makes this case so unusual — besides the length of time this issue has been discussed and debated — is the number of prominent rabbis and educators lined up on opposing sides, and the intensity of their convictions.
Avraham Infeld, now the president of Hillel, was heading an educational program in Israel called Melitz when he hired Rabbi Gafni in the late 1990s, despite pressure not to do so. Infeld has said he had no regrets. Rabbis Saul Berman, who heads the Modern Orthodox group Edah, and Joseph Telushkin, the writer and ethicist, also defended Rabbi Gafni, asserting that he is a gifted teacher and that they have heard no credible reports against him of improper behavior in the past 15 years or so.
"There is an element of unfairness," Rabbi Berman said, "in continuing to resuscitate the same old claims, which are not substantiated, and for people not to acknowledge that individuals can change and grow."
Regarding the allegations of sexual misbehavior against Rabbi Gafni, Rabbi Riskin said he has been approached by many people over the years with similar patterns of complaints of seductive and harassing behavior toward young women on the part of his former student — charges he takes seriously.
Other rabbis troubled by Rabbi Gafni's past behavior and skeptical of his depth of teshuvah include Rabbi Heshie Billet, the former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, and Rabbi Yosef Blau, spiritual adviser at Yeshiva University, both of whom knew Rabbi Gafni in his youth.
Rabbi Blau said he has spoken with a number of women "from the past who said they were victimized, and in no case do I know of his admitting direct responsibility or contacting them to express regret. So what teshuvah has he done?"
In Love Or Abusive?
Two women who claim to be victims of Rabbi Gafni when they were teenagers in New York more than 20 years ago have come forward separately to speak out, though both asked that their full names not be used because they said they still fear the rabbi.
One
of the women said Rabbi Gafni "repeatedly sexually assaulted" her over a
nine-month period, beginning when she was 13. The woman said she remains
emotionally scarred by the experience, which took place in 1979 and 1980.
She asserted that Rabbi Gafni, who was then a student rabbi, "repeatedly
and forcibly sexually assaulted me" when he would stay at her house over
Shabbat and sneak into her room in the middle of the night.
"It was a reign of terror and I felt helpless," she said. "He told me that if I told anyone, I would be shamed in the community and I believed him. I was physically afraid of him."
In the mornings, she continued, Rabbi Gafni would be overcome with guilt and pray fervently, beating his chest, and urge her to do teshuvah as well, since he said his desire for her was her fault.
Only years later was she able to tell her family, and she still feels anger about the experience.
"I had a real spiritual home in Judaism, and he completely destroyed it," the woman said. "My work has been to make peace with my own spirituality because it died after that experience."
When told of the woman's comments, Rabbi Gafni said he would like the situation to be "healed," adding that his attempt to do so several years ago went unheeded. He pointed out that he was only 19 or 20 at the time of the relationship.
"I was a stupid kid and we were in love," the rabbi said. "She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her."
The second woman, Judy, said that when she was 16 and deeply unhappy at home, she joined a popular Orthodox outreach group for teens that Rabbi Gafni was leading called JPSY (Jewish Public School Youth), and was drawn to his charisma and concern for her.
During a two-week period when she ran away from home and was staying with Rabbi Gafni, who was then 25 and married, Judy said he abused her sexually on two occasions. Even more upsetting, she said, was that afterward, the rabbi tried to convince her the encounter did not happen, and then harassed her for many months. He threatened to keep her out of Jewish schools (she was seeking to transfer from public school to a yeshiva), called her home at all hours of the night and then hung up, mailed pictures to her home of naked men, and had her followed.
"He attempted to destroy my life for a year and a half," she said.
Rabbi Gafni said that Judy was a troubled, unstable teenager who fabricated the story after he rebuffed her advances.
A woman named Susan, who at the time was a 22-year-old adviser in JPSY, said she believed Judy's account. She said that when she took Judy's side, Rabbi Gafni made harassing phone calls and threats against her.
"He told me I would regret it," Susan said, adding that the rabbi made inappropriate advances to her as well.
The rabbi said his version of the episode with Judy was corroborated by a psychologist engaged by Yeshiva University, which housed JPSY at the time. Judy said other psychologists support her account.
`Spiritual Signature'
The back-and-forth on the charges and explanations have filled many of my notebooks over the past three years, as I have interviewed more than 50 people on this issue. Some investigations have a clear resolution; this one does not.
Defenders of Rabbi Gafni note the allegations go back many years. They demand more recent proof of wrongdoing and real names to back up the charges. His critics offer, and psychologists affirm, that it is common for abuse victims to speak out only after much time has elapsed, if at all, and to feel embarrassed, if not fearful, about using their names.
Even the criteria of when a public airing of abuse charges constitutes lashon hara (prohibited gossip) and when it is an obligation — to protect people — is ultimately a judgment call. The determining factor is whether the accused person is a danger to society and may abuse again. But who is to say when and whether Rabbi Gafni is free of his acknowledged past "mistakes"?
Two groups in the Renewal movement, Aleph and Elat Chayyim, looked into the allegations against Rabbi Gafni and found "no evidence of wrongdoing," according to Rabbi Arthur Waskow. (The three women with whom I spoke said they were never contacted.) And Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the acknowledged leader of the Renewal movement, said he is aware of the allegations against Rabbi Gafni but supports him.
"If you want to find fly specks in the pepper, you can always find them," Reb Schachter-Shalomi said. "But I've watched him teach. He is learned, exciting and charismatic. A good teacher is one who gets people excited."
Indeed, Rabbi Gafni's followers and admirers said he is a gifted thinker and leader who has helped bring many people closer to Judaism through his writings, lectures and television shows. They said he has done teshuvah, presents no threat to anyone and should be left alone to continue his important teaching.
His critics contend that he is a self-promoter and deceiver who has never been honest with others, or himself, about his behavior. They find his increasing popularity infuriating and worry that his charisma and influence could result in trouble for unsuspecting followers.
In the middle is Rabbi Gafni, who said that while others portray him as Svengali, he sees himself as a "victim" of a longstanding "witch hunt," motivated primarily by several Orthodox rabbis jealous of his success.
In his writings he described himself as "a flawed human being, forever striving," and urged each of us to establish and craft our "soul print," our personal life story, the "spiritual signature" we leave on the world.
Rabbi Gafni evokes strong emotions wherever he goes, leaving a mark of darkness or light, depending on how his own "soul print" is perceived.
Letter to the Editor - The Re-Invented
Rabbi
By Vicki Polin - Executive Director, The Awareness Center
The Awareness Center - September 27, 2004
(The following letter was sent to The New York Jewish Week in response to the article "The Re-Invented Rabbi")
The Awareness Center wants to thank Gary Rosenblatt and The Jewish Week for the courage it took to publish the story on Rabbi Mordechai Gafni (AKA: Marc Winartz, Mordechai Winiarz, Marc Gafni). We also want to thank the three women who were brave enough to share their "alleged" history of being sexually violated by such a prominent public figure. These three women should be seen as heroes.
According to the article "The Re-Invented Rabbi", Rabbi
Gafni confessed to having sexual relations with a 13 year old girl. He pointed
out that he was "only 19 or 20 at the time of the relationship." According
to New York law, an adult is someone who is age 18 or over. Keeping
this in mind, Gafni's actions would be considered "statutory rape." But we
need to keep in mind that the "alleged" victim who was only 13 years old
at the time is quoted as calling this "relationship" as "repeatedly
sexually assaults over a nine-month period."
Rabbi Gafni is very fortunate that he committed this confessed crime in the United States. If he would have been a few hundred miles north in Canada, there is NO statute of limitation on sexual violence committed against minors.
It's also hard not to believe the cases of Judy and Susan. If Rabbi Gafni confessed to having a "sexual relationship" with a 13 year old, how difficult is it to believe that he would also "allegedly" sexually assault a 16 year old who was living in his own home, or the alleged attempted rape of a 22-year-old woman.
Judy stated in her recall of her assault that Mordechai was married to his second wife at the time, yet Gafni stated he only had "adult relationships with women at times when he was single, and was never abusive." He already confessed to having a "relationship" with a 13 year old, so who's telling the truth?
The Awareness Center is the Jewish Coalition Against Sexual Abuse/Assault (JCASA). We are an international clearinghouse of information that deals with sexual violence in Jewish Communities around the world. If you or someone you know has been sexually victimized, please feel free to contact us. You can learn more about us at: http://www.theawarenesscenter.org or by calling us at: (443) 857-5560.
Vicki Polin, MA, ATR, LCPC
Executive Director - The Awareness Center
"The Re-Invented Rabbi,"
The Jewish Week: Letters - October 1, 2004
http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/letters.php3
Rabbi Jacob Neusner
Your coverage of accusations of scandal in the rabbinate pays
tribute to the maturity and moral integrity of the Jewish community, which
gains strength from honest confrontation with its alleged faults and its
flaws ("The Re-Invented Rabbi," Sept. 24). Had the Roman Catholic Church
in the 1980s and 1990s enjoyed the kind of professionalism in community
journalism that American Jewry has in The Jewish Week, it would have spared
itself its present calamity.
Accusations of lashon hara (hurtful speech), claims of privilege for the rabbinate, "who are you to judge?" ad hominem exculpation of a "beloved scholar" and the like — these forms of special pleading confirm the urgency of reforming the rabbinate, and not there alone, in organized Jewry.
Jacob Neusner
Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
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I know you have "researched" and spoken to people who have made
allegations about Rabbi Mordechai Gafni's past, but to write what you did
("The Re-Invented Rabbi," Sept. 24) is nothing short of a nasty exercise
in lashon hara (hurtful speech).
What right do you have to publish, for the eyes of thousands, unsubstantiated accusations of this kind? Were a court of justice to have made such a pronouncement, based on a fair trial and evidence, you would be justified in publishing their findings. There are appropriate ways to deal with such accusations, and our tradition presents us with theological understandings of justice and teshuvah (repentance) that are for the individuals involved in wrongdoings to consider. Nowhere does this tradition speak of the rights of a third party to make public allegations as part of this process.
Your article has done a great disservice to the reputation of a great teacher and learned rabbi. I hope you will ensure that Rabbi Gafni receives both a public and personal apology. This is the appropriate time of year to take such action.
Rachel Gurevitz
New York, N.Y.
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By Rabbi Arthur Green
Although I am not a regular reader of The Jewish Week, a New
York colleague sent me your column regarding Rabbi Mordechai Gafni ("The
Re-Invented Rabbi," Sept. 24). It makes me wonder whether journalistic honors
and awards are as rescindable as rabbinic smicha seems to be.
I have known Rabbi Gafni for several years and think highly of his abilities as a creative teacher of Torah. As a trusted friend, I also know how he struggles with a personal history that includes some genuinely bad deeds done when he was quite young, some 20 years ago. He has been relentlessly persecuted for those deeds by a small band of fanatically committed rodfim, in whom proper disapproval of those misdeeds combines with jealously, anger at his swerving from Orthodoxy, and a range of other emotions.
Perhaps this rabbi should be made to confront his past more fully. A bet din before a mutually accepted rabbi would be the right setting for that. But the public press? Who set you up as ruler and judge over us? Is this responsible journalism?
Rabbi Gafni has more or less been assassinated in the Jewish community. None of his explanations will mean much against the whispering that will accompany him forever, thanks to your article, within the confines of our extended gossipy shtetl. You have taken it upon yourself, on erev Yom Kippur, to drive a man away from Jewish life. In the absence of anything like a "smoking gun" evidenced in present or recent conduct, I find this journalistically and Jewishly abhorrent.
Rabbi Arthur Green
Newton, Mass.
By Ami Eden
Forward - September 24, 2004
http://www.forward.com/amieden/index.php
In his latest column, Jewish Week editor Gary Rosenblatt relays several sexual assault allegations dating back 15-plus years against Rabbi Mordecha Gafni (formerly Marc Winiarz). Many fair-minded readers will ask why drag this all up now. It's a fair question, and one that Rosenblatt acknowledges right from the start, in his first few sentences:
"Is there a statute of limitations for rabbis accused of abuse — and should there be? How does the community determine when someone has done teshuvah, or repentance, as claimed? Can rabbinic ordination be revoked? And when, if ever, do persistent rumors and allegations over a period of years add up to a legitimate story? "
In my mind, Rosenblatt made the right choice, but his first question was the wrong one. The term "statute of limitations" suggests the victims came forward only now, after more than a decade. But, in fact, the allegations against Gafni are more than a decade old. The accusations never made the papers because most of his professional success came after he moved to Israel to launch a teaching/lecturing career, thousands of miles away from his alleged victims. As long as he was in Israel, most of his critics were willing to keep quiet, even as his fortunes rose overseas. It was only after he tried to reestablish himself back in America several years ago that the rumors about his past began recirculating.
As for the question of "teshuvah," the Jewish concept of repentance, Gafni and his defenders seem to want it both ways: Whatever happened, it happened a long time ago -- and he didn't do anything wrong.
Teshuvah requires a personal apology and forgiveness from the wronged party. So, as long as Gafni denies the allegations against him and the accusers remain angry, his defenders can say he is innocent, but it is intellectually sloppy or dishonest to suggest that a newspaper should keep mum because the guy has repented in the classical Jewish sense. He's done no such thing.
It's also worth noting that the Bible offers several examples of leaders faced with sexual allegations who survived scandal -- but all of them offered public admissions. And, even now, millennia later, we continue to recollect their misdeeds.
The only real question, then, is Rosenblatt's last one: When, if ever, do persistent rumors and allegations over a period of years add up to a legitimate story?
The truth is that no universal answer exists, but in this case, I suspect Rosenblatt made the right call.
Herscher: Gafni Still Welcome in
L.A.
by Julie Gruenbaum Fax, Religion Editor
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles - October 1, 2004
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=12984
(see sidebar to right of reprinted Jewish Week article)
Rabbi Eli Herscher has an emphatic answer to Gary Rosenblatt's
question about when persistent "rumors and allegations" add up to a story:
They don't.
Herscher, senior rabbi at Stephen S. Wise Temple, says The New York Jewish Week and The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles have stepped from responsible journalism to outright lashon hara, or gossip, by printing and reprinting an article that looks into alleged sexual abuse by Rabbi Mordechai Gafni.
Gafni has become an important part of the Reform congregation's educational program as a frequent scholar-in-residence, and Herscher has no plans to break off a burgeoning relationship based on allegations he says are unfounded and malicious.
"`Rumors and allegations' are not going to be the basis for bringing down one of the great Jewish teachers of this generation," Herscher said.
But Herscher may have to watch his back legally.
"If the congregation brings him out now with full knowledge of these allegations, and if something were to happen now, they may have culpability," said Anthony DeMarco of the Beverly Hills law firm Kiesel, Boucher and Larson, which is handling 300 abuse cases for victims in the Catholic church and serves as liaison counsel for all such cases in Southern California.
But Herscher hasn't found any substance to the rumors he said he personally checked out after Gafni himself brought the issue up soon after they met.
The article, Herscher points out, brings up incidents alleged to have occurred more than 25 years ago, when Gafni was 19, and even those are based on allegations that have never been proven and that Gafni denies.
The fact that the alleged cases are 25 years old does not mean they shouldn't be acted upon, Demarco said.
"What we find in childhood sexual abuse is there is a latency period for when people come forward, and that is why years will go by until these kids finally speak out," Demarco said. Often adults speak out when their own children reach the age they were when they were abused.
Rosenblatt, once nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is one of the most respected editors in Jewish journalism. He printed the story, based on more than 50 interviews over several years, after months of deliberation.
Herscher takes The Jewish Week to task for implying that Gafni has admitted to wrongdoing or done teshuvah, or repentence, for specific incidents.
For instance, Rosenblatt says that Gafni has done teshuvah by agreeing not to work with children, to do private counseling or to be alone with a woman.
But Herscher said he discussed those self-imposed ground rules with Gafni, and it was clear to him that Gafni was not trying to avoid temptation, but only trying to preclude even the appearance of wrongdoing, given the rumors that have haunted him for two decades.
"There are people who could be learning with him and being counseled by him who don't have that opportunity," Herscher said.
Herscher has invited Gafni to teach frequently over the last two years at Stephen S. Wise. This past Rosh Hashanah, 1,000 people came to hear him even on the second day — traditionally a low-attendance day at Reform congregations — and hundreds more came to evening lectures during the week.
Gafni's appearance on Rosh Hashanah kicked off his tenure holding the newly created wisdom chair of Jewish studies at Stephen S. Wise, where he will be returning to teach this year for two weeks in November, two weeks in March and six weeks in May and June.
"Rabbi Gafni has inspired people who might have never been engaged in serious Jewish learning were it not for him," Herscher said. "I've seen him move them, challenge them, uplift them and have been amazed at his greatness as a teacher."
None of that, Herscher said, would matter if Gafni were, in fact, an abusive man.
"There would be one reason and one reason only to publish such an article, and that would be if factual evidence, and not allegation and innuendo, determined that Rabbi Gafni was in some way a danger," he said.
Attorney Demarco said he has seen this response before — that priests confronted with allegations about their colleagues are often unwilling to believe that fellow men of God could have committed such crimes.
Gafni's support is coming from a list of prominent rabbis, including ethicist Joseph Telushkin and Modern Orthodox scholar Saul Berman.
Among his supporters in Israel is Rabbi Daniel Landes, director of the Pardes Institute, who led the upstairs minyan at Beth Jacob in Beverly Hills and Congregation B'nai David-Judea in Pico-Robertson.
Although Landes has never worked professionally with Gafni, the two have been acquainted since Landes moved to Israel nine years ago. Landes officiated when Gafni and his third wife married a few years ago.
When Landes first befriended Gafni, people approached him to let him know Gafni was the subject of persistent rumors. Landes chose not to believe hearsay and tracked the stories back down the grapevine until he got to the sources. He spoke to three women in Israel.
"Their response was, `Why are people telling such stories? They're just not true,'" Landes said in a phone interview from Jerusalem. He did not investigate any of the cases alleged to have happened in the United States 25 years ago.
Herscher thinks the public's eagerness to unearth and believe such stories goes back to years' worth of people not believing victims of abuse.
"What has happened now, I fear, is that the pendulum has swung the other way, so that when there is an accusation there is an assumption that the accused is in fact guilty," Herscher said.
Herscher said that now it is even more important to continue to support Gafni and bring him to Los Angeles to teach.
"Rabbi Gafni coming to teach here makes a deeply important Jewish statement — that if rumors and allegations and innuendo are allowed to destroy someone who only wants to teach, Jewishly, that is tragic."
The Power of a Word: Rabbi Arthur Green Calling
for the Death of Child Victim Advocates
The Awareness Center - October 2, 2004
Rabbi Arthur Green - Dean, Rabbinical School of Hebrew College Newton MA
Hebrew College, 160 Herrick Road, Newton Centre, MA 02459
Phone: 617-559-8626 Email: agreen@hebrewcollege.edu
The following information was recently forward to The Awareness Center. The message provided below is posted on a blog (something like a bulletin board). Due to my lack of knowledge of Hebrew and Torah I had to ask one of our volunteers for the definition of a rodef. Below is the response:
"din rodef" - the Jewish law of rodef, which literally means one who chases and refers to a license to kill someone who intends to kill someone else.
Basically, a rodef can be killed on sight. You can't break the Sabbath to save the life of a rodef.
People publicly called Rabin a rodef. Many feel this contributed to the atmosphere in which Rabin was murdered. Din rodef was used as a justification for his murder.
Rabbi Arthur Green has put members of The Awareness Center, Rabbi Yosef Blau, Rabbi Heshie Billet, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the women who have been "allegedly" sexually assaulted and attempted sexually assaulted by Rabbi Gafni and all of the child victim advocates who have supported the "alleged victim/survivors" at risk of harm. The Awareness Center is demanding that Rabbi Arthur Green make a public appology for making such a dangerous of statement.
If any harm should come to any of the survivors, Rabbi Blau, Rabbi Billet, Rabbi Riskin, the board members of The Awareness Center, or any of the victim advocates connected to making the case of Rabbi Mordechai/Marc Gafni/Winarz public -- Rabbi Arthur Green should be held responsible.
Sincerely,
Vicki Polin, Executive Director
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rabbi Arthur Green writes The Jewish Week
http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/letters.php3
Protocols
http://protocols.blogspot.com/
me @ 11:40PM | 2004-10-02|
Rabbi Arthur Green, the Ayatollah from the left has apparently launched a fatwa against: the Awareness Center, Rabbi Yosef Blau, Rabbi Heshie Billet, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, victims raped/sexually molested by Rabbi Gafni and supporters of Gafni's victims and apparently Me too.
Using the language of the late Prime Minister Rabin's murderer (and advocates of Rabin's murder), Rabbi Green has invoked Din Rodef. Calling the above rodfim.
Is this a sign of times? Will Jewish Renewal now resort to the language and advocacy of murder against fellow Jews?
Jewish Renewal, no boudaries, no standards, a place where an abuser and exploiter of children and women can feel at home.
Now advocating murder.
Irresponsible and disgusting language.
Shame.
It's time for the Rabbi Arthur Green to appologize and remove himself from any position he holds as a Rabbi. From his use of the word rodef in reference to community figures in a public letter he shows himself unfit to be called a rabbi. He has gone beyond the bounds of civilized discourse.
Update: Case of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni and statements
made by Rabbi Arthur Green
By Steven I. Weiss
Protocols Blogspot - October 3, 2004
I think this comes from The Awareness Center crowd: Please be advised that Rabbi Arthur Green, a Lown Professor of Jewish Thought at Brandeis University, past President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a leading figure in the Jewish Renewal movement published a letter in the October 1, 2004 edition of the NY Jewish Week (copy at bottom of letter) which was in response to an editorial in the previous week's edition of the Jewish Week regarding a colleague Rabbi Mordechai Gafni/Marc Winiarz (see http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/Gafni_Mordechai.html)
In this letter Rabbi Arthur Green refers to "a small band of fanatically committed rodfim". That "small band" apparently includes Vicki Polin of the Awareness Center ( http://www.theawarenesscenter.org ), Rabbi Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Heshie Billet former President of the Rabbinical Council of America, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin Chief Rabbi of Efrat, a young women raped by Rabbi Gafni when she was 13 years-old, a young women allegedly sexually assaulted by Rabbi Gafni when she was 16-year-old and a young women who Rabbi Gafni allegedly attempted to rape, among others.
For a person to use his title as rabbi to refer to such people using the term "rodfim" is both irresponsible and reprehensible. A "Rodef" is a Hebrew term that refers to the Jewish legal term of a "pursuer". A "Rodef" can be killed on sight and it is forbidden to even break the Jewish Sabbath to save the life of a "Rodef". This language was invoked to advocate and justify the murder of the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin by his murderer and his murderer's supporters. By using this term, Rabbi Green has invoked "Din Rodef" (law of the pursuer) in a similar murderous fashion.
While I believe in a free society with free speech and free exchange of ideas and appreciate and cherish the academic freedom we enjoy in this free country, Rabbi Arthur Green's use of the Jewish legal term "Rodef" is outrageous.
I call on Rabbi Arthur Green to immediately withdraw and apologize for the use of the term "Rodef". I call on Gary Rosenblatt to print an apology for allowing his newspaper to be used to print such a murderous libel. I call on Brandeis University, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the Jewish Renewal movement to immediately and publicly condemn such comments and make it clear that such comments do not represent their institutions and are utterly unacceptable in a free society.
..........
Levi says: Good thing I got this email when I did, otherwise I was off to kill the leaders of The Awareness Center because Rabbi Arthur Green (who I look to for all my halakhic decision-making) called them pursuers in The Jewish Week (my primary source for Jewish news).
Clarification regarding the use of the term
rodef
© (2004) The Awareness Center
The Awareness Center - October 11, 2004
Some have questioned why the Awareness Center posted a very strong, immediate and public response to Rabbi Arthur Green's public letter stating:
"He has been relentlessly persecuted for those deeds by a small band of fanatically committed rodfim, in whom proper disapproval of those misdeeds combines with jealously, anger at his swerving from Orthodoxy, and a rangeof other emotions."
It is the position of the Awareness Center that the use of such language to designate an alleged victim of any form of violence that seeks justice against their abuser as a rodef is utterly irresponsible and unacceptable. It is also a dangerous event to allow to pass without unequivocal public condemnation. This is a term which as we have seen in Israel with Prime Minister Rabin can lead to tragic consequences. Such language cannot be ignored or tolerated by advocates of victims of sexual or physical violence.
We cannot allow victims, their families, friends and supporters to be labeled as rodfim. A reckless public libel such as Rabbi Arthur Green's must be responded to with in an unequivocal public condemnation. It is a dangerous thing to let stand or ignore. This type of language has no place in civilized discourse.
"Rodef" or the plural form "rodfim" when used as a noun has one meaning "a pursuer with murderous intention". A person who meets the definition of a rodef/rodfim is subject to din rodef / law of the pursuer and is subject to death on sight. It is forbidden to transgress the sabbath to save the life of a rodef/rodfim.
The term rodef/rodfim is commonly known due to its use in rationalizing and excusing of the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. It is claimed that the use of the term rodef against Rabin by community leaders at the time contributed to the charged atmosphere in which Rabin was murdered.
His murderer uses that designation as justification for killing Rabin. Today the use of the term rodef in Israel is widely seen as "incitement for murder" and those who make such statements in public are reported to the police.
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/445895.html
It has been suggested that rodef literally means pursuers in some benign, innocent way. That is incorrect. In Hebrew, many words have a three letter "shoresh" or root. There can be numerous words with differing yet similar root meanings that have the same derivation from the same shoresh. There are numerous words with the same shoresh as rodef but they are mainly adjectives, verbs and adverbs. There are a few nouns with the same shoresh.
They include:
Redifah = pursuit
Meradeh = one who pursues vanities
Mordaf = persecuted/pursued.
Rabbi Arthur Green used rodfim as a noun. As a noun, there is no modern Hebrew usage of the term rodef/rodfim. It is a biblical term and a Halachic designation. It does not mean a mere benign pursuer. It means "a pursuer(s) with murderous intention". A person who meets the definition of a rodef/rodfim is subject to din rodef / law of the pursuer and is subject to death on sight. It is forbidden to transgress the sabbath to save the life of a rodef/rodfim.
The average person in any hebrew speaking community in the entire world who saw a person shake his fist at a group of people and shout "RODFIM" would instantly recognize, understand and appreciate the "blood libel" being stated. That is exactly what Rabbi Arthur Green has done here.
We call on Rabbi Arthur Green to publicly withdraw his comment and issue a full public apology for the use of the term rodfim. We call on Jewish institutions affiliated with Rabbi Arthur Green and that work with victims of violence to condemn his comments and distance themselves from him until he takes those steps.
Articles on rabbi Gafni, born Marc
Winiarz
By Levi Ford
October 3, 2004
My personal experience with rabbi Gafni. I heard him lecture for an hour at UCLA in 2002. I saw him hustle Dennis Prager to get a half hour on Dennis Prager's radio show the next week. I considered what Gafni had to say worthless (both in person and on the radio). I read about half of his book Soul Prints. I considered it worthless. Just New Age nonsense.
Gafni struck me as a charlatan.
I have an ex-girlfriend who was deeply moved by his book.
I understand that Rabbi Gafni's greatness as a religious teacher,
such as it is, is not in coming up with original material, but in taking
other people's ideas and restating them more clearly than the original thinkers.
He's an excellent mimic and actor.
This is not a bad quality so long as one attributes one's sources. Dennis Prager is a popularizer of other people's ideas, but he attributes his sources. Rabbi Gafni frequently takes without attributing (as does Dr. Laura Schlesinger, who takes a lot from Prager without attribution). Many of his Renewal followers, who are so ignorant in Torah that they don't know any better, think he's a genius. He certainly knows more Torah than 99% of Renewal Jews.
He's been to yeshiva. He's well read. He knows how to speak. He's charismatic. They're dying for a guy like him.
Rabbi Gafni's main problem is not his sexual philandering, say his critics. Those sexual sins are but a symptom of a larger problem -- he's a creep.
Rabbi Gafni, and Rabbi Arthur Green and his other supporters, are convinced that there is a small group of people who are destroying his career. They are right. There is a small group of people destroying his career (well, he's destroyed his own career with his creepy behavior). They pushed Gary Rosenblatt to write that expose in The Jewish Week.
They are also the group of people who have known Rabbi Gafni best and longest.
If Rabbi Gafni has truly done teshuva, why hasn't he contacted the long list of innocent people he hurt and made restitution?
Gary Rosenblatt writes: "Avraham Infeld, now the president of Hillel, was heading an educational program in Israel called Melitz when he hired Gafni in the late 1990s, despite pressure not to do so. Infeld has said he had no regrets. Rabbis Saul Berman, who heads the Modern Orthodox group Edah, and Joseph Telushkin, the writer and ethicist, also defended Gafni, asserting that he is a gifted teacher and that they have heard no credible reports against him of improper behavior in the past 15 years or so."
Rabbi Gafni has gone through more reinventions (not to mention name changes, marriages and relationships) than any rabbi I know.
When he was young (mid '70s), he saw himself as the next rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He was delivering rabbi Riskin's talks, word-for-word, better than rabbi Riskin. Rabbi Riskin didn't mind this. On the contrary, he was flattered to have a protege. Rabbi Riskin speaks personally, as if he is giving you some secret (with the way he uses his delivery and moves around the room). Mordecai imitated him exactly.
Then Rabbi Gafni graduated from Riskin and decided he was going to be the second coming of Rav Yosef Soloveitchik. He claimed to be the Rav's disciple. Probably another of rabbi Gafni's exaggerated claims. Perhaps Gafni heard a lecture or two of the Rav's in person.
The Rav was completely out of Rabbi Gafni's range, but he used his terms.
This didn't last long. Next (around 1980) Rabbi Gafni wanted to become the next Shlomo Carlebach (including Carlebach's creepy history of sexual abuse, including of underage girls).
In The Jewish Week article, Rabbi Gafni admitted to committing statutory rape. He said "She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her." That's an argument Luke Ford would use.
It's true people won't leave Mordecai alone. It's because of what he has done.
He's been married three times. He was engaged for a fourth time. He walked out on his first wife when she was three months pregnant.
He ran an organization called JPSY (Jewish Public School Youth). He was hired by Ellen Lieberman (who is now married to South African rabbi Ian Azizolohof). When Ellen left on maternity leave, Gafni took the organization from her. He seduced the board. She came back from leave to find she was out of a job.
Rabbi Gafni is insatiable for power and his sexuality is just a part of his power thing. Some of his supporters, such as Mark Belzberg (wealthy Canadian family) have said, "Yeah, Mordecai has a yetzer hora." As the Talmud says, the greater the man, the greater the yetzer hora.
Once in control of JPSY, Mordecai Gafni self-destructed. On his second marriage, he got caught molesting an underage girl. I understand that a similar problem broke up his first marriage.
When Mordecai was in high school, he was accused of various crimes and misdemeanors and use of credit cards. But how could the good rabbi effectively preach against sin if he hadn't experienced the pleasure of it first hand?
It's the people who know him longest and best who are most scared of what he can do. People he went to high school with. Today they are high profile Orthodox educators. They have made sure he can't get jobs in the Orthodox community, which is probably why he drifted out of Orthodoxy in the past four years and into Renewal, a place with loose enough standards to take someone with his history.
Also, he probably ploughed through the furrows of available Orthodox girls and women and he needed the type of female refreshment (Wilt Chamberlain understands what I'm saying) that is more easily available outside of Orthodoxy.
After he sexually abused this 16 yo Judy girl in JPSY a couple of times (and after that she turned him down), he hounded her for about a year. He went on a preemptive strike against her. He tried to destroy her life. He spread rumors that she was crazy. That she had a crush on him. That she was trying to destroy him.
Judy told her story to rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He chose to believe Rabbi Gafni instead and discounted her story. Rabbi Riskin told her to stop bothering the good Rabbi Gafni.
Judy told one of her counselors in JPSY. She confronted Rabbi Gafni. He sexually assaulted her as well.
A Beit Din was convenened in New York. He was told to quit his job and move from New York to some unsuspecting community and make a new life (this is how these things were handled until recently, the new community of these sexual predators never got warned what hurricane was headed their way).
Around 1984, Rabbi Gafni had problems with the IRS.
Rabbi Gafni moved to Boca Raton around 1985. He did a great job in outreach. He was charismatic. He touched people deeply with Torah and other things. He built up the community (Boca Raton synagogue) that rabbi Kenneth Brander is leaving for YU. Rabbi Brander inherited the community from Mordecai in 1987.
Rabbi Gafni left the Boca Raton community suddenly. There were rumors that he'd had an affair with a married woman. There were a string of sexual allegations against him. He had to pick up in the middle of the night and move to Israel (and then took on the name Mordecai Gafni?).
Before the scandal broke, he was considering moving back to New York to run for Congress going into politics. The guy is obsessed with power.
He also wanted to become a television anchor man. He knew he spoke well and he was just looking for ways to put his face before a lot of people.
He kept a scrapbook with clippings from every article he was in.
He kept coming up with various schemes for getting the most love.
There was a wealthy Jew in Boca Raton, the late Jerry Hahn, a big Aish Ha Torah donor who loved Mordecai.
Gafni took the three day Aish Ha Torah Discovery seminar around 1987. He then went into the office and took all the original Discovery files. A week later, Rabbi Gafni started teaching the Discovery seminar in Israel.
Rabbi Gafni was confronted on this. He said to Aish -- you guys don't own this. It's Torah. Anybody can teach it.
Rabbi Gafni went around and taught the Discovery seminar for a year month or two. He was a great teacher. He started parroting the teachings of Aish Ha Torah founder Rabbi Noach Weinberg. Rabbi Weinberg, when he found out, was amused.
Rabbi Gafni decided to follow Rabbi Riskin's blueprint of becoming chief rabbi of his own town. Rabbi Riskin became chief rabbi of Efrat by creating his own town with his own community.
In Israel, to become a rabbi of a city, it takes a lot of political savvy and support. If you wanted to become the rabbi of Jerusalem, you'd have to hire a PR firm and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and have major support in political places. Major Torah scholarship won't be enough to make it happen.
Rabbi Gafni cut a deal with the contractor so he could become the rabbi of Beit Tzufim.
He got a job in the Israeli city of Kfar Saba. Every fourth shabbatot, he was the guest rabbi. People loved him. He was charismatic. He made friends.
One man approached him for help with his 22yo daughter. She needed counseling. She was dating a guy the father considered inappropriate. Mordecai agreed to counselor.
He shaved off his beard. He got up in front of the synagogue and said he had found the woman of his dreams. He was leaving the rabbinate. He was leaving his wife. He was going to spend the rest of his life with this 22yo.
His second marriage came to an end. The father of the 22yo went berserk. He contacted the Chief Rabbi's office and filed a complaint.
Mordy's relationship with the 22yo broke up quickly.
Mordy left the rabbinate for about a year. Rabbi Shlomo Riskin was still in Mordy's corner.
At this point, around 1992, no American or Israeli institution would take Rabbi Gafni. So Mordecai Gafni left for Australia. Rabbi Riskin had funding there. Rabbi Riskin wanted to spread his empire to Australia.
Rabbi Gafni was caught in some obvious lies and his credibility down under was shot.
Rabbi Gafni has no contact with his child from his first marriage. He has three kids from his second marriage. He's now married for five years in his third marriage and I don't think he has any kids this time around.
Mark Belzberg hired Mordy (they'd known each other from high school, Mark was a surrogate older brother for Mordecai) as a software salesman. Mark had a business partner, a wealthy lawyer baal teshuva who moved to Israel. He's reported that Mordecai used the company credit card for all kinds of immoral things on business trips (that he was made to pay back out of his own pocket).
Mordy walked into this guy's office and said he wanted to be president. The guy said Mordy would have to buy him out (Mordy doesn't have any money). The guy went away on a business trip for three weeks. He finds out that Mordecai Gafni had told everybody that he was president. So he fired him on the spot.
Mordecai couldn't stay away from teaching Torah. He couldn't stay away from the limelight. Rabbi Riskin helped Mordecai get a job around 1996 with Rabbi David Aaron from Israel (Isralight).
Rabbi Aaron's web site uses a promo from that litigious, and in my opinion, nogoodnik Deepak Chopra (who successfully sued the Weekly Standard and the New York Post for saying he patronized hookers): "Inspirational, wise, warm and witty... David Aaron gives us a down to earth understanding of the Kabbalah, revealing the secrets to living a soulful, happy, and more meaningful life."
Rabbi Gafni had one or two flings with his Isralight students. Rabbi David Aaron won't speak about it. Rabbi Gafni got fired from Isralight.
He got a job with a group called Milah (Jerusalem Institute for Education). He became high profile in Jerusalem around 1998. He got fired because of money and power issues.
(A source writes: "Milah was an adult education ulpan for Americans and ethiopians who finished the regular ulpan and were still not comfortable in Hebrew. Gafni used this role as head of the organization, not to teach Hebrew, but to teach his theories of pagan Judaism and a parashat hashavua class.")
A rabbinical student at Hebrew University around this time had a moral dilemma. He worked for a famous rabbi as a research assistant. "I listen to tapes of other well-known rabbis. I write them up for him. Then he gives over their classes."
It was obvious the student worked for Rabbi Mordecai Gafni.
So whose tapes was he stealing these days? Rabbi Noach Weinberg among others.
Rabbi Gafni would often give over the teachings of other rabbis word-for-word, without attribution.
There was an eccentric, a Yaakov Fogelman, a Harvard-educated lawyer, who ran around the old city of Jerusalem. He swore by Mordecai. He publicized whenever Mordecai would speak. He thought Mordecai was a genius. 'He's the most brilliant educator of the past 500 years. I heard Soleveitchik. I heard this rabbi and that.'
So what genius things did Mordecai say? Yaakov would quote something that Mordy had stolen from some other rabbi.
Mordecai has great taste. He knows how to steal things from great people.
Another man had a moral dilemma. His wife had moved to Israel two months before him. He suspected that she had had an affair with a rabbi. Guess who he suspected of cuckolding him?
A lot of high profile Orthodox rabbis (until this Gary Rosenblatt article) did not know that Marc Winiarz was Mordecai Gafni. His name change worked. He succeeded in reinventing himself.
In the past four years, Rabbi Gafni had developed an effective new strategy of admitting he did some bad things when he was a kid. Confession gains credibility. "I've done teshuva. I have a good marriage. There are people who are stalking me." He turns the accusations around.
A healthy baal teshuva is one who can forgive himself for his sins. In this sense, Marc is very healthy. A part of me admires him for everything he's been able to get away with, like the Tom Hanks crook in Catch Me If You Can.
Rabbi Gafni is great at identifying people with big money. And what they believe, he will believe and preach. He's a purported TV star in Israel. It's paid television. He's paying (or his backers are paying, such Shari Arison, then the richest resident of Israel) for him to be on TV. It's like 6 a.m. for three minutes.
For a while, Rabbi Gafni defined himself as post-denominational. Let others fight these petty fights between Reform and Orthodox. Rabbi Gafni is beyond such things.
According to the recent Haaretz profile, it sounds like Rabbi Gafni's latest theology comes straight from the Da Vinci Code -- the best-selling novel that claimed that ancient Christianity believed in two divinities, Jesus and Mary. In Rabbi Gafni's enlightened theology, he claims the Jews have gotten rid of the erotic and chased away the female deity. He makes his brachot using the name of the shekhina to re-unite the male and female sides of God.
My sources tell me that the Master of the Universe mightily appreciates Rabbi Gafni's good works in this respect, and the Holy One, Blessed Be He and She, feels much more united and whole since Rabbi Gafni adjusted his brachot.
And what's a few molestations by Gafni compared to the Almighty's wholeness? Shall we talk of the things of girls or of the things of G-d?
Rabbi Gafni is mighty different in private than in public. In public, he's full of love and cheer and performance. In private, he curses and talks like a slob.
Rabbi Gafni is a terrific actor, and for that, I salute him.
I am, however, skeptical of his claims of credentials.
By Levi Ford
Protocols Blogspot - Monday, October 04, 2004
I got an email from Dr. Norman Solomon, a retired professor in Oxford's Oriental Studies department, in reply to my questions:
Dear Levi:
Re Gafni's claims:
1) Teaching graduate seminars on mysticism at Oxford University in England
Gafni has spoken on mysticism at my seminar, at my invitation. It could be misleading to describe this as "teaching graduate seminars", since this might be taken to imply that he is or has been a member of staff here, which is incorrect.
2) A fellow at the Oriental Institute of Oxford University
Gafni is not and never has been a fellow at the Oriental Institute (in fact there is no such category).
3) An Oxford-trained scholar
He has worked towards a D.Phil (we have no degree of Ph.D.) under my supervision, but has not not submitted.
4) He also holds a Ph.D. from Oxford
He does not hold a Ph.D. from Oxford. Should it be confirmed that he has made such a spurious claim it would be regarded here as an extremely serious breach of discipline.
Update: Rabbi Arthur Green and his use of the term
"rodfim":
Case of Rabbi Mordechai/Marc Gafni
By Steven I. Weiss
Protocols Blogspot - October 4, 2004
http://protocols.blogspot.com/
Well, it seems that no J-pub has as yet had the guts to try to report out this Arthur Green business. He's presently on sabbatical from his position at Brandeis, so I reached him at home.
I opened by asking him who he thinks are the ones leading the charge against Gafni, to which he replied, "I just don't want to have this conversation, I don't want to put my foot in my mouth," saying that he didn't know enough about the situation and those involved to comment, and that I should contact Gafni for that information.
I then asked him to address his use of the term "rodfim," of which he said "I certainly didn't mean it in any kind of technical halachic sense." He said he was using the term to mean "pursuers," declaring that those going after Gafni are "certainly pursuers."
I then emphasized to him the heat of the term "rodef" as part of the present discussion regarding Ariel Sharon, and in recollection of the discussion regarding Yitzchak Rabin, to which he replied that the situations have "no connection whatsoever," that rodfim is "a Hebrew word" and that "I use it as a Hebrew term, they are certainly pursuing him."
What do those people whom the term would most likely be applying to think of his usage and explanation? More to come.
By Rabbi Saul Berman, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and Rabbi Tirzah Firestone
Jewish Week (NY) Letters - October 08, 2004
http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/letters.php3
There was a time when the Jewish community too glibly and carelessly
disregarded words of accusation of sexual abuse against clergy. That was
clearly wrong, and Gary Rosenblatt of The Jewish Week helped to correct that.
The pendulum has now swung to the opposite extreme, as evidenced in Rosenblatt's
column ("The Re-Invented Rabbi," Sept. 24).
The column reports an allegation concerning a relationship from 25 years ago — when Rabbi Mordechai Gafni was 19 and 20 and not yet a rabbi — in a situation where he had no pastoral relationship with the person in question.
Furthermore, we can attest firsthand that several years ago Rabbi Gafni made serious attempts through an intermediary to contact this woman in a therapeutically mediated context — to clarify the gulf in their understandings of what happened and, if necessary, to apologize for any way in which she felt hurt. This offer was rejected.
The story also reports unsubstantiated allegations that are 20 years old. The story critically omits the fact that the professional to whom Rabbi Gafni (then Winiarz) was responsible at the time conducted an investigation and concluded that the accusations "were not true and were not substantiated."
We have collectively looked at this issue again in the last six months, and come to a similar conclusion. Further, Rabbi Gafni has long expressed his desire to meet with any of the parties who believe he has wronged them — even when he has a completely different account of the situation.
We, like Gary Rosenblatt, have struggled with the question of what gravity to assign to recycled allegations. Our conclusion differs from that of Mr. Rosenblatt. We have collectively, over many years, spoken to virtually everyone who would speak to us who was directly involved in order to examine the accusations against Rabbi Gafni. We have found them totally unconvincing. Further, there is simply no evidence that Rabbi Gafni constitutes a risk to Jewish women, or to anyone for that matter.
We pray that this unfair, scandalous moment will soon be forgotten and that Rabbi Gafni will be able to free his spiritual energy and formidable intellect in order to help build Jewish consciousness and commitment.
Rabbi Saul J. Berman (Director of Edah)
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (Associate at CLAL-the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership)
Rabbi Tirzah Firestone (Congregation Nevei Kodesh - formerly, the Jewish Renewal Community of Boulder, Colorado)
Response to Rabbi Berman from one of the
Gafni Survivors
Protocols Blogspot
http://protocols.blogspot.com/
The following are comments made to:
Here's the letter from rabbis Telushkin, Berman and Firestone:
SWG @ 11:46PM | 2004-10-05|
As one of the victims of Mordechai Winiarz/Gafni, I am writing to express my outrage at the supporters of Gafni who, without ever having spoken with me or the other victims referred to in Gary Rosenblatt's article (Sept. 24) claim that all the allegations were explored and found to be completely unsubstantiated.
First, none of the three of us were ever contacted by any agency or by Gafni and/or any of his followers for the purpose of conducting any sort of investigation of what occurred many years ago. It's outrageous that they claim that they delved into every allegation and spoke with numerous people and rabbis and completely exonerated Gafni. Who do they think they are?
The fact that Gafni is a charismatic and effective speaker and writer is irrelevant when serious charges of rape/ sexual abuse of minors and sexual abuse/harrassment of a young adult are the issues. His own quotes in Rosenblatt's article are his own worst enemy. And, whether or not "teshuvah" has been sought by Gafni is for G-d to determine--not Rabbis Berman, Telushkin, and Carmi(?)
When I sought help from various rabbis in the Orthodox community after my and another young girl's experiences, I was shocked at the vigorous attempts of rabbinic "leaders" to quash our attempts to pursue a true investigation. A well-known rabbi in Lawrence said, "Sometimes the bigger person is the one who can just let things go."
The woman sexually assaulted by Winiarz when she was 13 attempted to contact Berman many times. He refused to take her calls and has never spoken with her.
Kudos to Gary Rosenblatt for his courage and willlingness to explore this ugly issue which exposes the hypocrisy of so-called "rabbis" and defenders of Winiarz/Gafni.
by Bob Lamm
Jewish Week (NY) Letters - October 08, 2004
http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/letters.php3
I was horrified by two direct quotes in Gary Rosenblatt's column about the allegations against Rabbi Mordechai Gafni ("The Re-Invented Rabbi," Sept. 24). In a counter-attack against one of his accusers, Rabbi Gafni pointed out that he was only 19 or 20 at the time they knew each other and said "she was 14 going on 35." This is a classic case of blame the victim. So the 14-year-old girl, who said the rabbi began sexually assaulting her when she was 13, was at fault rather than the 19- or 20-year-old guy? This ugly distortion by Rabbi Gafni certainly does not demonstrate any teshuvah, or repentance.
Then, in dismissing the allegations against Rabbi Gafni, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi said: "If you want to find fly specks in the pepper, you can always find them." So the rabbi views women's complaints of sexual abuse as "fly specks"? Shameful.
Bob Lamm
New York, N.Y.
Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz from the Reconstructionst Rabbinical
College regarding Rabbi Arthur Green
Protocol Blogspot - October 6, 2004
http://protocols.blogspot.com/
To Whom It May Concern:
Arthur Green left the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in 1994. Since that time he has had no formal affiliation with RRC and is indeed the Dean of another rabbinical program entirely.
The use of the term "rodef" to describe people seeking to publicly discredit another person is inflammatory and therefore, in our opinion, ill advised.
Dan Ehrenkrantz
Susan's Story - The Case of Rabbi Mordechai
Gafni
By Levi Ford
October 10, 2004
I talk by phone October 10, 2004 to the Susan in Gary Rosenblatt's article:
A woman named Susan, who at the time was a 22-year-old adviser in JPSY, said she believed Judy's account. She said that when she took Judy's side, Gafni made harassing phone calls and threats against her.
"He told me I would regret it," Susan said, adding that the rabbi made inappropriate advances to her, as well.
Susan: "I became an advisor for JPSY (Jewish Public School Youth) in 1985. I was 21. I was responsible for a club at a high school in Queens, NY. Mordecai Winiarz was the head of JPSY. There were Shabbatonim -- weekends when all the Jewish public school kids were invited to experience a Shabbat together... The goal was to help these young adults become connected with Judaism.
"My initial impression of Mordecai Winiarz was that he was charismatic, appealing to kids, and successful as a speaker. He's engaging. These characteristics are typical of people who have been accused of the things he has been accused of. He knows how to capture people's attention. The kids were enthralled by him.
"I developed a relationship with one of the kids quoted in the [Gary Rosenblatt] article named Judy."
Gary
writes:
The second woman, Judy, said that when she was 16 and deeply unhappy at home, she joined a popular Orthodox outreach group for teens that Gafni was leading called JPSY (Jewish Public School Youth), and was drawn to his charisma and concern for her.
During a two-week period when she ran away from home and was staying with Rabbi Gafni, who was then 25 and married, Judy said he abused her sexually on two occasions. Even more upsetting, she said, was that afterward, the rabbi tried to convince her the encounter did not happen, and then harassed her for many months. He threatened to keep her out of Jewish schools (she was seeking to transfer from public school to a yeshiva), called her home at all hours of the night and then hung up, mailed pictures to her home of naked men and had her followed.
"He attempted to destroy my life for a year and a half," she said.
Gafni said that Judy was a troubled, unstable teenager who fabricated the story after he rebuffed her advances.
Susan: "She came from a troubled home, so she was excited about JPSY. Mordecai took a great interest in reaching out to her.
"At that time, Mordecai had married his second wife. They lived in Brooklyn and they took Judy into their home. Judy was happy living in their basement. It gave her a feeling of worth. Wow, she was living with Mordecai.
"I remember once hearing Mordecai speak [Susan was in her teens] and I remember thinking of him then what you wrote in one of your articles. Yes, he was charismatic, but there was something about him that cult-like.
"When I started working at JPSY, I heard from people that he was peculiar. When you wrote that he's a creep, I thought wow, I've also heard that word [applied to Gafni] several times.
"[Gafni's second wife] had been a JPSY adviser. Mordecai was single. So many people were warning her to stay away from him because there were so many questions about his character -- That he was a dangerous person. That he had a dark side. That he had a sordid past. It was something that some of the JPSY advisers were talking about. People were taking her aside and warning her not to marry the guy.
"They married November 13, 1985. They invited all the JPSY kids to the wedding. I was asked to take a group of kids to the wedding. It was on Long Island. I remember the aura of disbelief among the advisors. People were worried for his wife-to-be..
"I didn't have that much to do with him. He was always very warm and friendly. He always had a way of looking at people and making them feel important. He would joke around a lot with me. He's witty and I can be witty. We would have our repartee. I was never interested in him. It was never an issue.
"We were having a meeting at my home at 6 p.m. one Sunday in May 1986. Mordecai was supposed to be there as the head of JPSY along with several other advisers and me. About 4:30 p.m., I was the only one at home. I hadn't gotten ready yet. I was wearing a robe. Just a regular robe. And the doorbell rang. I got the door. Mordecai was standing at my front door in a dark suit with a yarmulke on his head, holding a large gemara in his hand. I just looked at him, 'Mordecai, what are you doing here? Our meeting is at six o'clock.' He said, 'Oh, I was the neighborhood. I figured I'd stop by early. Don't mind me. I have my gemara. I'll just learn while you're getting ready.'
"I was shocked. I was uncomfortable. I had no idea what it would be like to have him waiting in the living room while I was getting ready for the meeting. It seemed very odd (and somewhat rude) to me that he had come by so early, but. I didn't know how to say that his presence made me feel uncomfortable and that I would have preferred that he leave. Afterall, he I worked for him, and he was 'the rabbi,' so I said, ok, Mordecai. Please stay in the living room. I didn't know you were coming this early, so I need you to stay put here.
"I ushered him into the living room. I closed the french doors .I went back to my room to get dressed. No sooner did I get to my room than I turned around because he had left the living room and walked all the way to my bedroom , opened the door and said, 'Susan, Male Sexual Health,' as he pointed to a book he had taken from a shelf in in the corridor near my room.
"He had taken a book off the shelf right near my room. My father is a psychologist and had many books in the hallway right near my room. Mordecai had taken a book off the shelf entitled, Male Sexual Health. He held it in front of me and said, 'Male Sexual Health. I bet there's a lot you could teach me about that.'
"I was shocked. There he was standing so inappropriately and looking at me with what seemed to me to be a suggestive stare. I didn't know how to handle it. I felt scared but felt I needed to remain calm. I just looked at him and said, 'Mordecai, what are you doing here? You were supposed to stay in the living room. I'm trying to get ready.' Please leave. I purposely didn't even respond directly to his crass comment.
"So he put the book back on the shelf and walked a few steps closer to me. He said, 'You really shouldn't be wearing that robe because it shows me your shape.'
"I just felt this shudder go through me. I said, 'Mordecai, please leave right now.' He was just trying to get a response from me to see if there was any interest. It was clear that he realized that there was none.
"I was shocked and frightened.
"He ended up returning to the living room. I closed the door. I threw on my clothes.
"I was uncomfortable throughout the meeting. Did I approach Mordecai afterwards about it? No. Because nothing happened. And I was scared of the look he had given me during the incident. He had given me a look that terrified me.
"Soon after that, Judy called me. 'I'm shocked. Mordecai came downstairs to the basement and he started touching me.' She ended up crying to me about the two experience she had had with Mordecai. Soon she started telling me the details about what happened to her, which did involve a lot of sexual contact [but no intercourse]. I think he was smart enough to know that she was 16. She told me that he asked her when she had last gotten her period at a point when he seemed positioned for intercourse.
"It immediately clicked with me that this guy is so capable of that because I knew how he had been with me. I knew that so many people talked about his past. The rumors I had heard began to make sense. I realized what could have happened had I not made it clear to Mordechai that he was to stay away from me.
"It was totally unacceptable and immoral behavior Although she was enthralled by the guy and enamoured by his charm, what made her incredibly angry and hurt and terrified was the way he planned the subsequent mind games.
"He came back downstairs and said to her, Judy, I'm worried about you. I think you're imagining that something happened between us.
"When he began playing mind games with her--making her think that she was crazy--fabricating everything, everything started to fall apart for her. Mordechai and (Wife #2) had been parenting her. She had placed her trust in him. She could not believe what had occurred. He made her think that she was crazy and fabricating the whole thing. That, in addition to destroying her trust in him, frightened her. He started to threaten her. 'I don't know what you think happened here, but you will be sorry and I will destroy you if you tell anyone stories about what you think happened. I will make sure that you will never get into any Jewish school. Your reputation will be destroyed.'
"Of course I wasn't in the room when this happened. People in his position do not invite witnesses to observe their behavior. They don't sell tickets for the event. But as an intelligent person who had experienced Mordecai's inappropriate behavior and had heard a lot allusions to his past, I believed that this guy was capable of what Judy described.
"To validate my thoughts, Mordecai called me. 'Susan, it's Mordecai. I need to talk to you. It's really important.' This was right after I had hung up with Judy. 'Susan, you're one of my top advisers. You're terrific. I'm really worried about Judy. My wife and I took her in.... I'm a friendly guy. I went downstairs to say goodnight to her one night. She thinks that something happened. Something physical. Some sort of a relationship. If she says anything to you, please let me know.'
"I began to plead with other rabbis in the Jewish community [to do something about Mordecai]. His position enabled him to be in constant contact with young women and kids, and what I knew firsthand and, as a confidante of Judy was enough to make me feel that rabbis in the Jewish community needed to do something. Rabbi Kenneth Hain is a friend of Mordecai's. It was clear that Mordecai was dangerous and needed to be stopped based on what I knew at that point. (At this time I did not know about his repeated sexual assaults on the thirteen year old girl- over nine months earlier in his life--sexual contact to which Winiarz/Gafni admitted in Gary's article. He [Mordecai] needed to be stopped in his tracks.
"Rabbi Hain called me to to tell stop what I was doing, which was taking Judy's and my experiences to the appropriate people at Yeshiva University, the main group supporting JPSY. I cried on the phone to Rabbi Hain.. I told him exactly what had happened to me, and I told him how Mordechai had been threatening both Judy and me.
"Rabbi Hain knew me. There was no reason for me to fabricate a story. I had heard of all these other stories of people who had various negative experiences with Mordecai. Rabbi Hain said to me in his deep voice, 'Sometimes the bigger person is the one who can just let things go.' He kept telling me to move on.
"I was shocked and disgusted. He knew I was trying to reach the right people [to do something about Mordecai]. I did not have a lot of support. People were telling me be quiet. How dare rabbinic leaders turn their eyes and ears away from crying victims! How dare anyone say that Mordecai was exonerated! There was never any Bet Din nor were there any attempts to contact me or us to do "teshuvah" as (Mordecai) claims he did. And it is not for Rabbis Berman and Telushkin and the others to claim to know who has done teshuva. They are not G-d. G-d handles exoneration of sins, and we women were never contacted by anyone supposedly exploring this case.
"There was a rabbi in Jamaica Estates, Rabbi Yitzchak Adler, who also told me to move on. Since I wasn't there, [when Judy says Mordecai got sexual with her]. I had no right to spread lashon hara.
"I am learned. I have a strong Judaic background. I went to yeshiva. I know the laws of lashon hara. I know when it is permitted and not permitted to speak ill of someone. There are certain situations when it is required [to bring up harmful details about somebody's past to protect innocent people in the present].
"[In the summer of 1986] I was on an Israel program. I went to Efrat, where rabbi [Shlomo] Riskin was rabbi. He ultimately revoked [in 2004] Mordecai's ordination [after earlier being a big supporter of Mordecai]. I told rabbi Riskin everything. He was extremely unsupportive. I think that these rabbis were afraid of what a scandal might mean for the Orthodox rabbinate. He listened to me and I think he believed what I told him, but for some reason he didn't want to do anything about it.
"I met with JPSY advisers and filled them in on what I knew. There was a meeting at YU [not a Beit Din]. Shalom Lamm, the son of the president of YU, Norman Lamm, was there. Judy and I told of our experiences. Soon after that, Mordecai was ousted from JPSY. Throughout the process, as soon as he knew that I was making known to the appropriate people what he had done, I received harassing and threatening phone calls at my phone at home. One was traced by the Annoyance Call Bureau (which had put a tap on my phone) to Mordecai's home. The others came from pay phones. I would get heavy breathing. I would get the sounds of someone smashing a hammer into something. I couldn't press charges since the Annoyance Call Bureau needed three phonecalls traced to the same number. The calls I received were traced to different numbers. It was almost as if Mordecai knew how to make harrassing phone calls without being caught.
"He would also call me and say that he was going to make sure that I was sorry. That he was going to sue me for libel. I remember thinking, for an intelligent guy, why are you using the word 'libel'? I haven't written anything.
"He said I was trying to destroy his marriage. That I had no basis. That I was making everything up."
Rabbi Mordecai Gafni's Teachings to a Teenage
Girl
By Secoya (The anonymous girl in Gary Rosenblatt's article)
Your Moral Leader - October 13, 2004
http://yourmoralleaderblogspot.com/2004/10/rabbi-mordecai-gafnis-teachings-to.html
I was thirteen, entering 9th grade at a yeshiva high school in NY. Mordechai Winiarz (now known as Marc Gafni) appeared at my parent's shabbat table, I think in early September. He was a Rabbinical student at YU. He offered to tutor me in Talmud, a new subject for girls in 9th grade in my school. He invited me over to Lincoln Square Synagogue, where he offered to help me out with learning Buba Metziah, if I would meet him on Shabbat afternoon in one of their class rooms.
After our first lesson, he walked me home, and proceeded to tell me how "special" I was, and that he really liked me. I got a weird feeling about this, but being completely inexperienced with adult men, I didn't have a clue about how to respond to this. I was a very sheltered religious girl. I wore long skirts and long sleeves, had told boys in 8th grade that I would not touch them as I believed in "negiah". I had no experience with boys, or men, for that matter, except for a few wonderful teachers I had in school.
Also, there was a lot going on for me and my family at the time.
My mom was just getting over breast cancer, having gone through a year of
chemotherapy. She was very sick and we were all frightened. My rather large
family was in crisis due to this, and I would say that due to this trauma,
not a lot of attention or attentiveness was being sent my way. Considering
the circumstances, my family was doing the best they could. Mordechai asked
if I would like to "learn" with him, and I said OK.
Over the next month, he continued to tell me how much he liked me and how "special" I was, but told me that I must not tell any one that he felt this way. He told me that if my parents knew about it, they would blame me for associating with him, and that I would be shamed in my community. He told me that we had to keep it a secret, because most people just wouldn't understand. As far as I understood at that point, we had a friendship, and I was getting some extra attention from an adult at a time when there wasn't a lot adult attention to go around in my family. My Dad was overworked, and my mom was recovering from cancer. I didn't quiet understand why I should be silent about the things Mordechai told me. He hadn't touched me yet, but was doing a fine job of "grooming me" into being silent and fearful. He convinced me that I had to be loyal to him, and "not tell" about how he felt about me. I believed everything he told me. In retrospect, he calculatedly brainwashed me into silence, hooked me into an emotional trap, ensuring that I wouldn't tell my parents.
Then he asked my parents if he could stay at our house over shabbat, because he wanted to be able to walk to a synagogue in our part of the city. They said OK. (My parents had no idea that they should suspect him of anything. After all, he was a religious guy from YU.) It was then that he started coming into my room after I had fallen asleep, and waking me up. I remember clearly that when he tried to touch me, I pushed him away repeatedly. I remember saying, "no, no, no!" I knew intuitively that it just wasn't OK with me. But he was larger and stronger than me, and after a huge struggle, he overcame me. Week after week, he would come into my bedroom and woke me up in the middle of the night, and I would fight to keep him from touching me. Every time, I was overcome by him physically. He had already done the job of convincing me that if I told one I would be shamed by my family and my community, so I kept silent about what was going on. I hated it, was disgusted by it, and I was terrified, but there was no place I could talk about it or get help. I also had no words for what was happening to me, it was horrible and indescribable. I think of myself back then as a 13 year old girl who had to become disconnected from the world around her, it was full of contradiction and betrayal, and I had been trapped in this horrible situation with, as far as I could see, no way out. I walked around my neighborhood, a place that had always been familiar and safe for me, and I no longer felt connected to anything.
I remember on one of the nights that he came into my room, woke me up and was trying to molest me, he told me that he and his brother were abused by their mother, who was a holocaust survivor. He told me that she stuck their heads in the kitchen oven. There was a very clear message that because of what had happened to him, he couldn't help but doing what he was doing to me, and he pleaded with me to understand that, have compassion with him, and comply. More than once, he told me what he was doing was because of the way I looked, or because he just couldn't control himself. He described the world to me as he saw it, full of boys and men who just could not control their sexual impulses, and like them, he really couldn't help himself- he just had to do what he was doing to me. He just had no choice. He added, as part of his rationalization, that the guys at YU were always masturbating, but no one talked about it.
But he was tormented by the fact that he had no control over himself. Each morning after the molestation experience, I would wake up and walk into the living room, and see him shuckling wildly, beating his chest, doing "teshuva" for what he had done the night before. He told me that I should join him in doing teshuva too! Amazingly, he really believed that I was a partner in sin. Of course, I didn't "daven" or do "teshuva", but just stared at him in disbelief. And even after this fervent bout of repentance, he would wake me up in the middle of the night the next week.
I also remember him practicing sermons in front of me. He would pace around, gesticulating and dramatizing this or that phrase from the Torah. He wanted to be just like Rabbi Riskin, and he did a great job emulating Riskin's body language and speech patterns. He talked a lot about gaining popularity and getting to be a powerful leader. Mordechai made it clear that he wanted to be a "big Rabbi", a "tzaddik". It seemed to me that he just loved to hear himself talk.
The abuse went on through the year I was in 9th grade. The school year was almost over, I remember it was warm out. He called me on the phone one day to tell me that he would no longer be coming over. He realized that what he really needed was to get married soon, and he explained that this would give him a proper outlet for his sexuality. Its hard to describe how I felt at that moment, because it is complex. My molester finally decided to stop abusing me, to leave me alone, to move on. You would imagine I would feel great relief, but actually the full weight of the abuse I had endured in silence came crashing down on me. Here I was, left with this horrible experience, still with no one to talk to about it, and no language for it anyway. And he wasn't retreating because I had some how managed to make him stop, but because he decided it just wasn't worth the risk any more. He was terrified that he would do more and make me pregnant- then there would be no way to keep his secret. Until then, his abuse included exposing my body against my will, forcibly touching my breast, grabbing my hand and forcing me to touch his penis, and forced digital vaginal penetration. All were the most horrifying, degrading and painful experiences for me. All this only a year or so after my bat mitzvah.
After his phone call, I knew that I no longer had to endure his abuse, but now I had to figure out how to survive it, and what I really wanted to do was escape the world that had allowed this to happen to me. I understand that what I was going through is called post-traumatic stress these days. But in those days, and in my community, the words sexual violence, sexual abuse, or molestation, sexual trauma, were just not house-hold concepts. I knew there was no way any one would believe my story, and if anything, what happened would be misunderstood or minimized and dismissed.
After a while, I figured the best thing to do was to "put the experience away" until I could figure out how to deal with it. During the abuse, I had, out of necessity, become pretty good at compartmentalizing myself, and leaving my body when something was happening to it that I hated, but couldn't control. I was also good at "putting away" the things that were just too complex and painful to deal with at the time. This is how I survived the rest of high school.
I tried to escape the trauma I had endured by spending the next school year in Israel, doing my best to push it out of my immediate reality. Upon returning from Israel for the 11th grade, I began to withdraw from the Orthodox world. I made it to college and embraced college life. My twenties were about getting as far away from what had happened to me as possible. I was determined to be free of a world that had betrayed me, and to embrace the world as a secular Jewish college kid. It wasn't until much later that I was really able to deal with the trauma of what had happened.
While in high school, I had told some of my siblings, who were shocked. No one knew what to do with my story. I told a male NCSY counselor, who had no response, except to look very uncomfortable. When I was 18, I told my parents, who were also shocked, and enraged. But no one knew how to deal with he information I was sharing.
It wasn't until about 10 years ago, that I began to speak out more widely about what had happened to me. In 1994, I wrote a letter to Rabbi Riskin, and told him my story. I never received a response from him. I continue to tell the story to any one who wants to know about it. Many people have contacted me over the years. People who had a "creepy" feeling about Mordechai, or who had heard rumors, but wanted to hear a first hand account.
I tell my story for the following reasons:
If there is any way I can protect another girl or woman from going through what I went through, I will do it. If there is any way I can protect a parent from having their child victimized, and having to deal with the pain and guilt of not having known enough to protect their child, I will do it.
Unfortunately, I knew Mordechai very well. He told me a lot about himself, and I knew him as a sexually compulsive, sexually violent man. After talking with counselors, lawyers, and professionals who advise and counsel sexual perpetrators, I learned that in 99% of cases, people who compulsively sexually abuse girls or women, especially those who were abused themselves as children, don't stop. These are dangerous people. The more we are silent about them, the more they have the freedom to act out their sexual compulsions. Further first hand accounts show that Mordechai continued to molest young women after he was married. Unfortunately, marriage did not solve his problems. There is no reason for me to assume he is not still victimizing girls and women. Back when I knew him, he was a refined manipulator, "groomer", "brain-washer", and he used those skills in order to victimize girls and young women. I have no doubt that, years later, he has honed his skills as a predator.
A couple of years ago, Mordechai asked one of his supporters to contact me, to see if we could meet. I was told that he wanted to make peace with me. I read a letter that he wrote, stating that he regretted that our "relationship" didn't work out, and that he wished he had waited for me to come of age and had married me. He really thought that we had a mutually consenting relationship, and that I was hoping that he would take me as his bride! There was no acknowledgment that he did anything against my will, and certainly no recognition of the gravity of his actions. He was trying to contact me because he knew I was telling my story, and he wanted to stop the bad PR, not because he wanted to make amends, do "teshuva", or own up in any way to what he did. His statements to Gary Rosenblatt, "I never forced her...she was 14 going on 35" are the farthest from the truth. Anyway, I expected that he would be smarter than to make these transparently self incriminating statements. Like your classic pedophile, he claimed that the child was consenting, loved him back, and really liked what was going on. There is no reason for me to believe that Gafni has reformed his ways. There is every reason for me to speak out and protect others from him.
Of all people, Mordechai should not be teaching people about Judaism - any "variety of Judaism" - Orthodox or Jewish Renewal, or any other Jewish trend. Yes, he is smart, charismatic, knows how to excite people, bring people in. Are we that desperate for someone to attract wayward Jews to Judaism, that we condone a sexual predator doing it?
Should Judaism be taught to spiritual seekers by someone who has molested minors and attacked young women? If we want a formula for misrepresentation...and turning people off to Judaism for good - we've got one.
Perplexed Reader - Letter
to the Editor
By Judy Klitsner
The Jewish Week - October 15, 2004
http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/letters.php3
After reading the letter signed by Rabbis Berman, Telushkin and Firestone, I wonder if they read the same column ("The Reinvented Rabbi, Sept. 24) that I did.
Gary Rosenblatt cites three women who claim they were victimized by Rabbi Gafni. It is difficult to recognize these allegations in the version of these incidents presented by the three rabbis; they refer to the women's accusations as a "gulf in understandings" between the women and Rabbi Gafni, as "recycled allegations," and "way[s] in which [alleged victims] felt hurt." The rabbis inform us that they have conducted their own exhaustive investigation and have found all allegations to be "totally unconvincing."
The perplexed reader is left wondering, are these comments a response to the quotes offered by Rosenblatt, or did the rabbis conduct a different investigation? If they did not question these women, on what basis did they conclude that all allegations are totally unconvincing? If they did question them, are we to understand that the rabbis have judged the women to be untruthful? Or are the rabbis asserting that the women are so obtuse as to misconstrue consensual acts of love for abuse and harassment?
And what of the rabbis' own colleague, Rabbi Riskin, whom Rosenblatt reports was approached by many additional women over the course of years "with similar patterns of complaints of seductive and harassing behavior toward young women, charges which he takes seriously"? Was Rabbi Riskin included in the rabbis' thorough investigation of Rabbi Gafni's background? If not, why not? And if so, did the rabbis conclude that all those women must also have suffered from gulfs in understanding with Rabbi Gafni? Or are they implying that the women lied? Or that Rabbi Riskin lied?
Rabbis Berman, Telushkin and Firestone accuse Rosenblatt of succumbing to an overreaction to previous incidents of rabbinic abuse. I fear that in their haste to vindicate their colleague, the rabbis have chosen the much more dangerous and well-tread path of underreaction. It is always easier to accept the claims of the charismatic and powerful religious leader while agreeing to participate in delegitimizing the accuser.
Judy Klitsner
Jerusalem, Israel
On Gafni, Round 2 - Letters to the
Editor
The Jewish Week - October 15, 2004
http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/letters.php3
Apparently some have misread my earlier letter regarding the charges against Rabbi Mordechai Gafni to imply that I know the allegations against him to be valid ("Abhorrent Column," Oct. 1). Nothing could be further from the truth. I have no independent knowledge concerning the allegations, have not investigated them and have no interest in doing so. I do have full confidence in the investigation undertaken by Rabbis Saul Berman and Joseph Telushkin, and I support their findings.
Rabbi Arthur Green
Boston, Mass.
Psychology Of Abuse - Letters to the
Editor
By Nechama Liss-Levinson
The Jewish Week - October 15, 2004
http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/letters.php3
As a psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, including extensive work with survivors of sexual abuse, I applaud The Jewish Week for its leadership and integrity over the past number of years in its investigative reporting regarding instances of rabbinic sexual abuse. Your articles have inspired changes in the way that allegations of abuse are viewed in the Jewish community by laypeople and professionals.
So I was perplexed by your particular spin on the article regarding Rabbi Mordechai Gafni ("The Re-Invented Rabbi," Sept. 24). It was unsettling to see allegations of sexual abuse framed as something to consider in this "season of repentance and forgiveness." Whether or not Rabbi Gafni has "done teshuvah" doesn't lessen the burden on the Jewish community to prevent him from working with people at risk through the educational outreach, teaching and seminar work in which he is still engaged.
Some of the issues you describe are particularly endemic to sexual abuse and abusers. For example, you quote people describing the rabbi as "exciting and charismatic." Many sexual offenders are charismatic. The rabbi described one of his accusers as a "troubled, unstable teenager" Again, it is not uncommon for victims of such abuse to be vulnerable young people, easy targets for charming, persuasive leaders or teachers.
Third, the technique of the abuser is similar in each case described, with each of the three women who spoke to The Jewish Week citing his threatening and harassing behavior regarding the possible revelation of his abuse to others.
I am distressed that the article cites respected figures discussing Rabbi Gafni's prowess as a gifted teacher. Whether he is a talented teacher or an incompetent one is irrelevant to the issue of whether he has committed sexual abuse.
Nechama Liss-Levinson
Great Neck, N.Y.
Full Human Being - Letters to the
Editor
By Dr. Maury Hoberman
The Jewish Week - October 15, 2004
http://www.thejewishweek.com/top/letters.php3
I learned recently of some unfortunate comments about my respected teacher, Rabbi Mordechai Gafni ("The Re-Invented Rabbi," Sept. 24). From my experience and observation, I know that in addition to being an overwhelmingly inspiring teacher, Reb Mordechai exhibits all the characteristics that our sages have told us constitute a full human being.
I have witnessed Reb Mordechai working with those in need into the early hours of the morning, difficult as that is for the cynical to comprehend. Reb Mordechai truly loves the Divine spark in his students. Yet even when he overflows in love, hugging all around him — men and women, young and old — he is scrupulous about boundaries, meeting people only in public spaces. As he has told us time and again, hurt by old false accusation, he does not take on women for long-term counseling.
I am not easily trusting, but in my personal encounter with Reb Mordechai, I found his character, trustworthiness and integrity above reproach.
I learned recently of some unfortunate comments about my respected teacher, Rabbi Mordechai Gafni ("The Re-Invented Rabbi," Sept. 24). From my experience and observation, I know that in addition to being an overwhelmingly inspiring teacher, Reb Mordechai exhibits all the characteristics that our sages have told us constitute a full human being.
I have witnessed Reb Mordechai working with those in need into the early hours of the morning, difficult as that is for the cynical to comprehend. Reb Mordechai truly loves the Divine spark in his students. Yet even when he overflows in love, hugging all around him — men and women, young and old — he is scrupulous about boundaries, meeting people only in public spaces. As he has told us time and again, hurt by old false accusation, he does not take on women for long-term counseling.
I am not easily trusting, but in my personal encounter with Reb Mordechai, I found his character, trustworthiness and integrity above reproach.
Dr. Maury Hoberman
If at first you aren't
heard...
© (2004) By Judy (Also see: Gary Rosenblatt's article)
Your Moral Leader - October 17, 2004
http://yourmoralleader.blogspot.com/2004/10/if-at-first-you-arent-heard.html
The overwhelming exhaustion that has washed over me from existing as a victim for the past eighteen years has ultimately been my silencer. Any remaining strength is channeled into the necessary tasks of parenting and daily survival. I will no longer be a victim.
The better part of my childhood was spent lost and invisible. My earliest recollections are of pleading to an unnamed supreme being.
"Please," I'd say, "I'll do anything, anything at all if you'll let her find me. I know she must be looking for me."
I'd scream and cry into my pillow at night. I remember waiting at the door. Anger was not an issue. If I was angry with anyone, it was the other "she", the one who had taken me away. That was how my childhood psyche worked. Adoption was not a warm fuzzy word defined by "we really wanted you". I read it as; the one person who truly mattered didn't, couldn't or was convinced not to.
So, I kept searching for my mother, for someone to love me the way I needed to be loved.
Along came Judaism, JPSY and Mordechai Winiarz.
At that time, my family was in constant turmoil. My father had brushed with death far too many times. In 1985 he underwent his second open-heart surgery – a quadruple by-pass. I hit puberty and my emotions, hormones and home-life were in shambles.
Mordechai Winiarz paid attention to me. He told me how intelligent and special I was. I spent many Shabbat lunches with him and his wife feeling like I had finally found a family. I began keeping kosher and abiding by the laws of modesty.
Mordechai had awarded me JPSYer of the Year. My sadness and isolation at home had me frustrated and doing poorly academically. I asked Mordechai if I could live with him and his wife. At the time I was hoping for a more permanent arrangement, but we agreed on taking things one week at a time. I had just turned sixteen when I moved in with them the first time.
The week went by rather uneventfully with one exception. I awoke one evening from a disturbing dream. It was maybe midnight and I heard someone awake upstairs. I decided to get some milk and try and relax and think. I soon realized it was Mordechai who was awake. He heard me in the kitchen and asked me to talk to him. When I approached the study, Mordechai was in his robe, preparing a shiur on something.
"Why are you still awake?" he asked me. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing" I said. "I just needed a drink."
"I can tell there is something wrong, talk to me."
"Really, it's O.K.; I just had a bad dream. I am going back to sleep."
"You'll never be able to sleep if you don't tell me."
He wouldn't give up. I felt trapped. Not physically mind you, but emotionally. I enjoyed talking and sharing with him because he listened, but the dream I had was strange, it involved me as a young child and the typical scenario of walking in on your parents' lovemaking (in the dream he and his wife were my parents). I had had general dreams involving them as my parents previously. I didn't want to share it. I wanted time to think about it. He wouldn't take no for an answer. When I finally described my dream to him, he interpreted it as my being sexually attracted to him. I felt he was completely off base. I quickly changed the topic and was able to return to bed.
After the agreed upon weeks' stay came to a close, my parents insisted I come back. So, much to my chagrin, I returned home. Things there went from bad to worse when my mother fell at work and was hospitalized with a broken hip. Now my mother was hospitalized and my father was trying to recoup from open-heart surgery. I felt helpless and lost. I couldn't cope. I had no siblings and no family lived nearby. So off I ran – back to Mordechai, his wife, and the warmth and safety I felt there.
This time however, it was very different. It was Tuesday evening after at school when he made his first trip into what was then my bedroom - the basement. It was very late and I had already been asleep when the door opened. From the door, he said, "You look like you need a hug". I pretended to remain asleep. He approached the bed and repeated himself. I still did not answer and conveniently I was turned away from him. My mind was racing. I was overwhelmed. I didn't know what to say. I was shomeret negiah (abiding by the stringent Jewish laws prohibiting premarital touch). Why was he in my bedroom? Why was he asking to touch me at all? I knew it was wrong. He knew it was wrong – didn't he? Certainly I needed a hug, I always needed a hug, but a hug from him was wrong. Wasn't it? If it were so wrong, why would he have offered it? I could not keep up with the fears and questions flying around inside my brain.
Before I could process them, react or respond he was sitting on my bed. I sat up to tell him "No, it's O.K. I don't need a hug. And why are you even offering?" when he put his arms around me. For a brief moment it felt good - like I was a little kid and my daddy was giving me a hug. Then I realized this was not right I tried to pull away but he held onto me and fell on top of me. He began touching me under my nightclothes. I said "No." and tried to move his hand away. He kept fondling me. I said "No." again and he stopped, abruptly stopped. It was the most bizarre thing. He rose from the bed, told me not to say anything about what happened because no one would understand. He promised me it wouldn't happen again. And I believed him. I had to.
Thursday was an early release day from school. I was emotionally exhausted and went straight downstairs for a nap. Mordechai was at the house. I thought that was odd – why was he not working? He tried to stop me, to talk again. I told him to leave me alone – I was tired and I needed rest. I had been asleep no longer than 30 minutes when Mordechai arrived in my room once again. Now he was in robe. He didn't bother to knock. He stood at the door and said something to wake me. I startled. He arrogantly stated, "You know what you want."
"What?" I asked. I truly had no clue what he was talking about and why the hell was he in his robe in the middle of the day?
"You know what you want. I will go out of this room and come back in. You just give me a sign." He stepped out and closed the door.
The shaking started again. What the hell should I do? What did he say? I was half asleep. I sat up in bed. I was fully clothed, under a thick blanket, warm and uncomfortable. I had layered my clothes so that my elbows would be covered. I removed one layer, completely covered myself up to my neck with the comforter and turned to stare at the wall hoping that he'd just not come back. I felt like such a child. I wanted him to love me, but not like this. I wanted to be their child, just start over with a new family who paid attention, cared and understood.
Then he was there in my room, standing over me at my bedside in only his underwear. I had not even heard him come in the door. He lay down next to me and began touching me again, like he had previously. I said, "Mordechai, no, this is wrong." It was as if he didn't even hear me. I just shut down and let him do what he was going to do. He continued fondling me, took off all of my clothes and his. He positioned himself on top of me ready for intercourse.
"When did you get your last period?" he asked. What a weird question. I wasn't sure of the answer. I just made something up. "That's no good." He replied. "You know I could get you pregnant." He seemed disappointed as he lay beside me. Mordechai took my hand and forced me to help him climax. I had never done anything like that before. I had never even seen a man naked. He ejaculated all over me. I felt horrible. When he was finished he stood abruptly.
"Get cleaned up and come upstairs," he ordered and left the room.
I was now shaking so fiercely I could barely follow the instructions. When I finally ascended from the basement, he was waiting in the living room, in his typical starched white shirt and dark dress pants. "We are going for a walk," he said.
We walked around Flatbush for the better part of an hour. First he attempted to make me think that nothing ever happened; that it was all a figment of my imagination. When that didn't work he tried to convince me that I would never be believed because he was a Rabbi and I was just a kid. Who was more credible? He asked rhetorically. He was still unsure that I was buying his argument so he moved on to threats. He would destroy my life. I would never learn in yeshiva, never get married, on and on. Now he had my attention. What was he capable of? I couldn't be certain. But I knew one thing - I was scared. Emotionally destroyed, hating myself, and hating him, just wanted to disappear.
He left me there at the house and headed toward Manhattan. I was alone in every sense of the word. I knew his wife would be home from work soon. I went to the kitchen, found the sharpest knife I could find and sat on the dining room floor screaming, crying and trying desperately to break the skin of my wrist with the blade. I had just made a few superficial cuts when his wife walked in.
My gut instinct was that he had already told her some crazy story about me. She saw me there curled in ball on the floor crying. She didn't even acknowledge my existence. Maybe she couldn't. She just walked by and went into their bedroom. I knew I needed to tell someone. I called Susan (a JPSY advisor and friend) three or four times before I reached her. I went to school the next day in shock. I was due at Susan's house for Shabbat later that evening. The evening before, I had told her briefly what had occurred. When I returned to his home after school to pack for Shabbat he was there. Again, he insisted I not tell anyone. He made me promise not to.
The train ride to Susan's house was surreal. I was crying and shaking all the way from Brooklyn to Queens. I had never been so confused. I desperately wanted to tell Susan everything that had happened but I was afraid. I felt like I was drowning, like I could barely breathe.
There were other girls there that Shabbat and I could not find the privacy necessary to continue discussing what had happened. I fell asleep crying, hoping that things could just go back to the way they had been only days before. When Motzei Shabbat arrived one of the other girls left and only one other JPSY teenager and I remained. I talked Susan's ear off about nonsense until the other girl nodded off, and then I told her the details of what happened with Mordechai. I was shaking like a leaf.
It was then that Susan told me that she had already heard from Mordechai. He had called her prior to Shabbat "warning" her about my "delusional" stories, my emotional instability and attempting to compel her into allegiance. Susan diligently listened to the facts, my fears, and unequivocally assured me of her loyalty and confidence in my credibility. She told me that he had made inappropriate advances to her in the past.
Susan was there for me through what would be the remaining eighteen months of hell. We were kids trying to figure out how to handle this trauma with no help or support from our parents or the community. I don't remember much after that conversation.
I do remember telling my parents with Susan by my side what had occurred.
I remember how they blamed me since it was I who left the house to begin with. I remember the next year and a half of harassment and mental games. I clearly recollect the "camps" of people who believed what really happened and those who refused to. I remember the telephone calls at all hours of the evening – the hang-ups, the heavy breathing. Then the photos of naked men arriving at our home because Mordechai had taken out a personal add in a gay men's magazine using our P.O. Box address as the return. I remember the Rabbis telling us to "let things go" and "move on": Kenneth Hain, Yitzchok Adler, and Sholomo Riskin. I remember the ridiculous meeting held at Yeshiva University at which I had to bare my soul to men I had neither previously met nor trusted.
People keep telling me that times are different now. People will listen. Things will change. I don't know. I want to believe that. I want to believe that he will be stopped. That he will no longer hurt anyone. All the talking, emails and articles seem very empty to me.
I am placing the truth out into the world once more and putting it formally into print. If this gives other young people the courage to speak out when they are betrayed, hurt or violated by an adult maybe something good will come out of this. Maybe others perpetrators will be stopped. Maybe community leaders will learn to take a stand on crucial issues before victims accumulate in silence, erupting unpredictably later in life with unified inner-strength and piercingly powerful voices. I won't be silenced again. I'm no longer a victim, I have a voice.
Rabbi Yosef Blau On Mordecai Gafni
By Levi Ford
Thursday, October 14, 2004
I speak by phone October 12, 2004, with rabbi Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University.
"Mordecai Winiarz was a student [in the mid '70s] of rabbi Shlomo Riskin in his high school in Riverdale, Queens -- Ohr Hatorah AKA Manhattan Hebrew High School (MHS). Rabbi Riskin also operated a girls high school. My wife was principal of the girls high school - Dr. Rivkah Blau.
"Mordecai was close to rabbi Riskin.
"I first recall
him seriously when he was running JPSY (circa 1983). My wife was now principal
of a different school -- Shevach. He called her and asked her to take a girl
[Judy] from JPSY who had been staying at his home. My wife took the girl
into the school. Clearly, the young woman had issues. She arranged for the
woman to see an Orthodox psychologist in Queens. The psychologist told my
wife the story about what happened between Mordecai and herself. The psychologist
reported to my wife that he believed the girls story.
"I recall a conversation from that time with another psychologist who had a child who was an advisor to JPSY. He had Judy stay at his home for Shabbos a couple of times. I discovered that he was aware of the story and that he believed the girl.
"My wife was very upset about the story.
"During this time, I received a call from Susan, who told me about the incident she described to you.
"At some point, I became aware of problems in his first marriage. I knew his first wife. She came from a small town in Maine. She was sweet and naive. He was a sharp operator. It did not seem like a good match.
"I know loads of people tried to convince the woman who became his second wife not to marry him.
"At one point, Mordecai came into my office and told me he'd get my wife. I was stern with him. He was threatening. That obviously solidified my concerns.
"JPSY came apart. The official story was that one of the major funders of the organization had economic reversals in the real estate market. There was resentment that Mordecai managed to protect himself financially but left others unpaid.
"He managed to get himself into an advanced kollel at Yeshiva University. I was perturbed about it. I realized that this was a troubled fellow who seemed to cause trouble for other people.
"Rabbi Riskin had a beis medresh. He was the only one to get semicha [rabbinic ordination] under that system. He studied under Riskin. Mordecai did not get semicha from YU.
"There is one rabbi who has repeated over the years that he won't give anybody semicha. He gave it once and regretted it eversince. It is thought that he is referring to Mordecai.
"Mordecai ingratiates himself with people. For two weeks, he was a star teacher at JSS (James Streir School, a school for baalei teshuva [returnees to Judaism] at YU. The kids were enamored with him. He made a wonderful first impression. And then it disintegrated. He didn't last the term.
"I know the administrator (with a background in psychology and social work) who made sure that Mordecai had nothing to do with YU anymore.
"Mordecai spent a short time in the rabbinate in a couple of different places. He was in Stamford, Connecticut, in-and-out quickly. He was in Boca Raton for a few months. He came into my office at YU one day to say that he was doing wonderful things at Boca and taking over the world and he is going into politics and he will become a senator from Florida. He is always grandiose. He was going to prove to me the enemy...
"Then something went wrong in Boca and he left suddenly. There were rumors of scandal.
"Recently, I called two people from the community. One said everything was fine. There was a difference of opinion on some issues. The second one was so apprehensive that before he would speak to me, he asked me a question about when I first met rabbi Kenneth Brander, the current rabbi of the Boca Raton Orthodox shul, and his wife. Rabbi Brander's wife was a student of my wife at MHS. So then he was fine.
"I asked him why he did this. He said I had no idea how powerful Mordecai is. How dangerous he is. He was nervous that maybe I was an agent for Mordecai. I couldn't get from him what happened except that Mordecai was evil.
"Mordecai moved to Israel and moved to Israel and changed his name. He was still married to his second wife. People would inform me of things. Mordecai applied to the Chief Rabbinate. Someone called me and asked me to speak to the Chief Rabbinate. I did.
"One night [circa 1995] Mordecai showed up at the Beis Medresh at YU. He walked over to me and said, 'I'm coming back. And when I'm back, I'm going to get you.'
[Circa 1999] I got a phone call from a private investigator in Israel. He said he was hired by a foundation which was considering giving Mordecai money for a television program. The head of the foundation is suspicious of him and wants me to do an investigation. He said he was coming to New York in two weeks.
"Sure enough, two weeks later, I got a phone call from the man. I went to meet him at his New York hotel. He takes out a volume of all the stuff he has. I said to him, why do you want to talk to me if you have all this material? He said, 'Because I have to be complete, and Mordecai had mentioned your name as going on a vendetta against him. And that he said your wife has always been jealous that he is rabbi Riskin's favorite and not him.'
"I said, that is absurd. She ran a school for rabbi Riskin for six years.
"I have the investigator's name -- Meir Palevsky of AMN Investigation Services in Tel Aviv. I have his card in my wallet. I have told people over the years to call the investigator in Israel. I've seen the man's name in the Israeli media.
"Meir told me two things. One, he was wasting his time because the daughter of the man who ran the foundation was enamored with Mordecai and he will get the money anyway. Two, he had an employee interview Mordecai. After Mordecai gave his version of the story -- that Judy propositioned him -- and that if he hugged her, it was only because he felt sorry for her. Mordecai then made some vulgar comment about the girl's anatomy.
"Over the years, people in Israel have sent people to talk to me about Mordecai. He keeps changing jobs and organizations.
"During this entire time [until circa 2001], he was still Orthodox. Saying that certain Orthodox people are opposed to him because he is no longer Orthodox is nonsense. Rabbi Billet was his teacher in high school. If you say people have a vendetta against him, it's an old one.
"Mordecai would reinvent himself. He was Carlebachian for a while. Then he became New Age. Periodically, people would show me articles he wrote. He managed to get his name in all kinds of publications. A number of the articles revolved around eros. Doing sins for God's sake. There was always a sexual component.
"My connection with the thing in The Jewish Week started several years ago. For the 50th anniversary of Israel, there was a special supplement and Mordecai came across as this new religious personality who was beyond everything else, was going to impact on the country. I was upset. I contacted Gary Rosenblatt [a longtime friend of Rabbi Blau's] and said, you are giving such a troubled person a free ride.
"I called the late J.J. Greenberg [son of rabbi Yitz Greenberg]. He had worked for JPSY. 'J.J., nobody is going to accuse you of being right-wing Orthodox. Could you explain about Mordecai?' He said, everybody knew about Mordecai. This is not a secret. Unfortunately, J.J. was subsequently riding a bicycle and hit by a car and killed in Israel.
"After the Lanner scandal broke, several people contacted Gary Rosenblatt and said, why don't you write about Mordecai Gafni.
"Over the past year, I've spoken to the unnamed woman in Gary's article [who says that Gafni raped her]. The story was totally new to me.
"Someone from the Jewish Renewal movement contacted me a couple of years. He'd known Mordecai from Israel. He said this dangerous man is moving into the Renewal movement. I need to do something about it.
"Rabbi Siegal [from the Renewal movement] called me. I directed him to the private investigator in Israel. He said the people were taken with him but his son had come back from hearing him and said, there is something wrong with this guy.
"Rabbi Gafni applied for a job at Pardes. Rabbi Danny Landes liked him. He defended him in Gary's article. The three [Israeli] women rabbi Landes spoke to are different women from the three [Gary's article talks about]. There were and are teachers at Pardes who were upset [when Gafni came in to teach] because they knew his story. A friend of one of my son's who was teaching at Pardes quit over this.
"Mordecai came to American and spoke at some Hillel conferences. They weren't interested in him. Richard Joel [now chancellor of YU, formerly head of Hillel, a Jewish organization on college campuses] says Mordecai came in and complained -- they're telling lies about me. Richard said, 'I have no idea what stories are true or not true. But I heard you speak and you said "I" 35 times and "God" no times. We're not interested.'
"At one point, Mordecai was going to have an article in a symposium in Tradition magazine. A YU student who had heard him at Hillel, and knew something about him, saw Mordecai's article and contacted me. I spoke out. The comment that came back from the editor was -- I knew about Mordecai Winiarz. I didn't know it was the same person. Mordecai's article didn't appear.
"Then I heard Mordecai was involved in Jewish-Buddhist things in Israel. Then Bayit-Chadash came.
"Over the past six months, I've had numerous telephone conversations with the three women [in Gary's article]. Most of it was me listening to them. You never know what affects people's lives. In two of the three cases, it has had a dramatically negative affect on their Jewishness and their other things. They're still traumatized and petrified.
"Rabbi Pam Frydman Baugh from the Renewal movement contacted me. She spoke to one of the women. I was not taken by her. She complained about The Awareness Center and other things. She never called me back. I got an email from someone else in the Renewal movement who heard there was a controversy. I responded. I never heard back.
"Last year, rabbi Saul Berman came to see me. We're old friends. We had a long conversation. We are clearly not on the same page. I can't explain other people's attitudes. I told him about the women. I gave him the name of the private investigator.
"My wife and I went to a lecture given by rabbi Joseph Telushkin. We are close to the head of the organization that hosted the lecture. After the lecture, rabbi Telushkin came over and wanted to talk to me and my wife about Mordecai. What do we have against him? My wife did most of the speaking because she has known Mordecai longer and better than I. Afterwards, she thought he had understood. I said, no, he didn't. Unfortunately, I was right.
"They [rabbis Telushkin, Berman and Tirzah Firestone] said they did some kind of investigation. Rabbi Berman did speak to Judy. She thought that he understood her, but again, probably not. One of the other women called him a number of times and he didn't respond. To the best of my knowledge, rabbi Telushkin has spoken to none of these three. They are not the only ones. I don't have an investigative agency.
"My sense of Mordecai is that he is a profoundly troubled person who can be very dangerous. I have no reason to believe he's done teshuva. Every time he has to deal with a real case, he basically says, I didn't do it. He says he's changed. He's done teshuva. But for what? He says he's never done anything wrong.
"There are the same common patterns between Mordecai Gafni's situation and that of Baruch Lanner. Admitting a little bit one time and that you've stopped. The next time saying you've never admitted it. In the first article [The Jewish Week], he says: 'I don't work with kids, I don't counsel men or women and I don't meet alone with women.' In the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles article, it is as though he did nothing wrong. His story changes. Arthur Green's letter says that he did terrible things 20 years but he's done teshuva. How would Arthur Green know aside from what Mordecai tells him? In the letter from rabbi Berman and Telushkin, it seems that he never did anything bad. This is classic pattern. Admit it when you have to. Deny it later.
"I've never fully understood the fear of Mordecai, but clearly many people see him as very powerful. When he threatened me, I didn't take it seriously. To take something seriously, you have to find it credible.
"Mordecai is good at bouncing back. He is not going to go away."
What did you think of Gary's article?
"Gary is a friend of mine. I've known him forever. We worked together on the Baruch Lanner thing. I would've preferred a stronger article.
"Most of these people bury themselves. Same thing with the article on Mattis Weinberg. It was the quote from Rabbi Weinberg that was devastating. The arrogance of these people gets them. And they're all arrogant. It's part of what makes them what they are."
By Sherri Makover-Balikov
Photography By : Arik Soltan
Maariv / Sofshavua (Friday Weekend Magazine) - October 15, 2004
(Translated from Hebrew to English by Avraham Sonenthal)
"I touched. So what"
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, the one who smiles at you from the television, loves the sheep of his flock. So why is he associated with sexual harrasment?
Charismatic, connected, original, abhorrent to the rabbinical establishment, head of congregation "Bayit Chadash" (New Home) and possesing unabashed political ambitions. And also a big proponent of fondling and touching, out of love of the others, aparently. Rabbi Mordechai Gafni has to come to terms first of all with many episodes from his past which connect him to sexual harrasment and molestation, some of which he as emerged from unscathed, and from others injured. "I believe that everyone needs to decide where they will take a chance. And I prefer to take chances with love".
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, head of the God fearing congregation of the movement "Bayit Chadash", receives me in an elegant shanty at his Beis Midrash in Yafo, surrounded by colorful macrame hangings, barefoot meditating girls, and five stone crystals. I greet him first but modestly, and hesitantly extend my hand. Gafni loves people fervently to the depths of his soul. "Why shake hands, sweety? Come here, give me a hug", he embraces me emotionally, drawing me to him with deep affection.
Deep in the fragrant scented bosom of Admor Gafni you will be enlightened, and which is better: a hidden tzadik who speaks to women from behind a curtain, or a joyous rabbi whose blue eyes dance and whose embrace is pure? We sit across from each other, and between us is an ancient wood table loaded with hasidic writings rich in spiritual illumination. But nonetheless despite his lofty position this righteous rabbi is concerned that I feel comfortable, and from time to time places a joyous hand on my shoulder. I am worthy. Occasionally he adds a comforting carress on my head, bent over my papers.
Putting aside his honor, but that is not how a Rabbi acts.
"According to halachah, hugging a woman without sexual intent is a legitimate possibility. Not all the rabbis agree with me, but modesty is always a contentious issue. To me, to dress in haredi clothes that are very tight, so that the skirt fits perfectly across the ass, is as if the woman is saying "fuck me" even though she is dressed modestly. In contrast to this, it is permitted for a man to hug a woman according to halachah if his sexuality comes from a deep place and is pure and flows out naturally".
Halachah permits hugging women?
"I know for a fact that Orthodox rabbis shake hands with women. Also in Israel. I won't mention names, but this includes the biggest rabbis. I saw some of them hug women. I hug all of the men and the women in my congregation, and I show this love to a 97 year old elderly woman as well as a young girl of 18. I am not prepared to live in a world without hugs. In the haredi world all sexual energy is invalid. No erotic meaning is permitted. But even the hasidic masters said that the movement during prayer is like the movement of a couple together with each other. Is it chutzpah to say this? The Baal Shem Tov himself said that prayer is coupling. I am not saying that prayer is sex, I am just pointing out that prayer is the existence of complete presence, like a woman who can only be reached through the act of love. Both during prayer and during the act of love one succeeds to be completely in th epresence of and to feel the other. To leave narrow egocentrism and to love the other."
This is how you feel when you pray?
"Every member of my congregation feels this way when they pray. We sit in pairs, men opposite women, without any regard to family, and call out the prayers. Then we look at each other deeply and lovingly in the eyes. This is not a sexual act. This is an act of love between a man and a woman in prayer. At Bayit Chadash prayer is erotic being. I'm not saying you have to exagerate it. We also have limits and prohibitions. I have heard of a religious movement that has naked communal immersion in a mikvah. This won't happen with us. With us we are all dressed and every touch is a caress of love."
Even this little bit is foriegn and strange to the Orthodox world.
"I know, I know. But I think everyone needs to decide where he takes a chance. I prefer to take chances with love."
WHY ARE THERE STORIES ABOUT HIM?
Perhaps
Rabbi Gafni took chances with love a little too far, since the reason for
our meeting is a stubborn wave of publicity connecting him to harrasment
of a sexual nature. Let it be said immediately that the two main incidents
occurred over 20 years ago, and according to the words and documentation
of Gafni, they probably flow from the pursuit of a group of people jealous
of his success. But it is hard to rationalize this rabbi flowing with love,
when his most prominent traits are hugs and touches, and the main topics
of his conversation touch on sex, eros, and erotica. At any rate, with the
growth of the flourishing Torah community of Gafni, these incidents have
also grown, and today they are emerging anew, becoming better known in his
immediate circle and threatening to stain the name of a man that his students
see as a "gadol" in Torah and Halachah.
"There are those who say Gafni has gone too far with love of the other" blushes the young head of the congregation, shaking with indignation and rustling some papers attesting to his innocence. "There are those who seek to defame me out of envy and spite, and since you can't defame a man for his ideas, then they say Rabbi Gafni is an ego maniac, and there stories about him concerning sexual exploitation. In order to destroy congregation Bayit Chadash and to distance me from the Rabbinate they bring up these old incidents everywhere and each time add new fictional details.
"We don't have any problem with the success of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni", says a rav who lives in the US (name witheld by editors). "We have a big problem with the testimony of women who have been harmed by him. I have known Gafni 30 years, and once we were friends. Even when he was very young rumors circulated about him and women and primarily young women where he exploited his rabbinical ordination to harrass and touch them sexually, but there was never any hard proof. All the complaints ended with documentation that Gafni presented attesting to his innocence.
Several years ago it became aparent that Rabbi Baruch Lanner, who was thought to be a very successful educator in New York and worked with youth, acted to molest girls for 30 years. The Jewish Week in New York (a small American weekly popular in the Jewish community of New York) succeeded to interview several girls who were hurt by Lanner and exposed his deeds of molestation. They fired him from work, brought a complaint to the police, and today this rabbi sits in jail. Right after this affair exploded, women found courage and started to tell of other rabbis that had molested them. The first was Gafni.
Three women came to Vicki Polin, an activist in the Baltimore Jewish community who deals in supporting Haredi female victims of rape and sexual violence, and the women complained about Rabbi Mordechai Gafni. Polin turned to me and to Rabbi Yosef Blau, the spiritual advisor of Yeshiva University, and we all spoke with the women and helped them through their silence, and in the end we understood that Rabbi Gafni had destroyed their lives.
After all this I distanced myself from Gafni. Prior to that I requested to meet with and speak to him. We sat together for five hours. Gafni had already established himself in Israel and was in contact with girls and women as a Torah authority. I feared for them. But Gafni said that Vicki Polin was crazy and that Rabbi Blau was crazy and that the girls were in love with him and clung to him because he wasn't prepared to get involved with them. He even compared himself to Yosef in Egypt who withstood the advances of the wife of Potiphar. And all the while he shouted that everyone is jealous of him for his success in Israel.
I said to him, `Mordechai, listen, there are many successful Rabbis in Israel, and people that are jealous of them. But why are such ugly stories told only about you?' and he didn't know how to answer. At a certain point in the conversation I looked at him and I said to him, `Gafni, you need help, you are a sick man.' He obviously didn't accept my words. I then distanced myself from him and cut off contact".
Text Box
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WAYS OF PLEASANTNESS
The girl from New York: "I was 13, and Gafni was 20. He offered to help me with Talmud lessons. Afterwards he started to tell me that I was very special and that he liked me. A month later he requested permission from my parents to sleep in our house. That night he entered my room and started to touch me and encouraged me to touch him. I started to cry." Rabbi Gafni: "I was in love with a 14 year old girl. We had an amazing spiritual bond. She wrote me a letter and described in it our beautiful and delicate love. We were young and didn't do anything wrong other than flirting. You know, a little kissing and glances" The first incident occurred 23 years ago, when Gafni was 20. "I was in love with a 14 year old girl. We had an amazing spiritual bond. She wrote me a letter and described in it our beautiful and delicate love. We were young and didn't do anything wrong other than flirting. You know, a little kissing and glances. After a year we broke up. Then I was not yet a Rabbi and I haven't heard from this girl again. Five years ago, when congregation Bayit Chadash began to develop and to gain notice in the general public, suddenly they started to tell me that the girl was spreading lies about me and slandering me by saying I had sexually exploited her when she was young. A group of people who don' t like the friendliness and the ways of Bayit Chadash publicized these stories. When they asked for my reaction I said that as far as I can remember I was a stupid boy and in love, and she was mature beyond her age, and at any rate I didn't do anything bad to her, and in my whole life I have never attacked a woman, not sexually or in any other way." "I was 13, and Gafni was 20", said the girl in a telephone interview from New York. "I was a little girl and didn't understand very much. Gafni offered to help me with Talmud lessons. Afterwards he started to tell me that I was very special and that he liked me. He also warned me not to speak of his love to anyone, or they would think I was crazy and imagining things. A month later he requested permission from my parents to sleep in our house. He said he wanted to go to a synagogue in the area. That night he entered my room and woke me. He started to touch me and encouraged me to touch him. I started to cry and I pushed him away, but he was much stronger than me. He said if I told anyone he would hurt me and my parents. He did this every week, over eight months. Every Shabat morning he would pray fervently and tell me that I needed to repent over what we had done at night, because he had already prayed and repented. He didn't have sex with me for fear I would become pregnant. At a certain point they started suggesting women for him to go out with and he said he was going to get married and that his problems would be over. Then he left me. Only after several years did I have the strength to tell what had happened to several girlfriends. With their help I wrote a letter to a known Rabbi who was friendly with Gafni in Israel, and I told him about all that had occurred. But this Rabbi never answered me."
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THEY ARE PURSUING ME
The second incident occurred when Gafni was already a young 24 year old Rabbi and married to Doris, his first wife. In that same period he lived in New York, and ran a network of Jewish clubs within a network of public schools in the city. "We had a large house with an attic that attracted a group of young runaways who were involved with drugs and sex" Gafni recollects. "They received warmth and support, and among them arrived a young girl named Judy, who was hard and wild, but we had compassion on her and helped her in any way that we could. At a certain point she started to seduce me.
One night I arrived home alone. Judy called to me from the attic and propositioned me explicitly. Of course I refused, and contacted my wife. That same night we asked Judy to leave, and she, in return, went to everyone in her group and told them I had slept with her. I said to her, `Go to a doctor who can examine you and prove that you are lying.' Then she changed her story and said I did not sleep with her, but had harrassed her sexually.
From that point things began develop rapidly. We had with us a counselor named Suzie who believed Judy and brought her to Rabbi Yosef Blau, the spiritual advisor to Yeshiva University. I don't know him, but him and his wife are strident oponents of Bayit Chadash. Since I have made aliyah and have brought people into the community, they pursue me, oppress me, and tell to everyone that I come into contacte with the story of Judy".
Gafni turned to one of the senior advisors at Yeshiva University and requested that he investigate the matter in order to discover the truth. "I said, invite me and the women who are complaining and meet with us in the presence of police, psychologists, whoever you want, just so long as the truth come out and they will finally cease oppressing me. And indeed, the matter was investigated, and an official letter went out from the Rav who conducted the investigation, and he stated in no uncertain terms that I didn't do anything wrong to any girl or woman and that the accusations were baseless. But the stories continue to circulate, and spring up in every possible place, until they have become a legend."
"Judy was 16 when Rabbi Gafni, whose name at that time was Winiarz, sexually assualted her according to her complaint", says Vicki Polin in a telephone conversation, who is a psychotherapist who treats female victims of sexual assault in the Jewish community of Baltimore. "There was no one to help and guide her. She was afraid of this man, was charismatic and impressive but also very threatening. Only after several years had passed did she come to us and tell us what happened to her.
We wanted to go to the police, but Judy had already married and had a husband and children, and it was not in her interest to revisit these issues and deal with them all over again. Since everything had taken place 20 years ago, the statute of limitations had passed. All that was left for us to do was to publicize the story and warn the American public about this man. And then more rumors started to come in, and more girls and women complained, when the matter became known publicly, Mordechai changed his name from Winiard to Gafni, left the US and moved to Israel. In Israel he transformed into a new person, and once again became involved in the Rabbinate and founded his community. And this bothers us. We think it is wrong for a man like this to be involved in counseling and to come into contact with the girls of his community, because he is dangerous and libel to hurt more women."
Gafni replies: "Vicki is outright lying. I did not move to Israel because these things were becoming known about me in the US. Nothing was becoming known about me. We came to a decision based on Zionism alone to make aliyah to Eretz Yisrael, and like most people who move to Israel we Hebraicized our name and changed it to Gafni."
"As part of my duties as spritual advisor to Yeshiva University I am involved in supporting families where there is a suspicion that someone of them may have been sexually assaulted" says Rabbi Yosef Blau in a telephone interview with him from New York. "I didn't know Gafni until his story with Judy the young little girl. We all tried to help. It was impossible to prove anything, since Gafni denied everything and claimed it was said maliciously.
"Later we received more stories about this man. When he understood that the local community already did not trust him, he changed his name, left New York and moved to Florida. From there he made Aliyah to Israel. What he does in Israel, from a Torah standpoint, is not my business, but I've already heard reports that Gafni is harrassing women also in Israel. Therefore I am issuing a warning. I am not making a practice to contact every institution that Gafni is working with, but if they ask me, I tell them about Gafni's background. I think this is my obligation".
Gafni: "Blau and his friends heard that my congregation intends to have me in politics. It was already difficult for the Rabbinate, and the idea that I would advance politically destroyed them completely. That is when they brought out the slanders against me. In the beginning I said to myself, don't react, don't raise up a storm any greater than what is already happening, let things calm down, it's not likely people will pursue incidents from the past, they'll just distort them and they could destroy me with their baseless words. But at a certain point it became clear to me that it was impossible to stop the snow ball."
HALACHAH TO THE TUNES OF LED ZEPPELIN
If the Orthodox community indeed were to take a large step backward, for Rabbi Gafni there would be much to lose. In the last few years hundreds of secular and religious Jews have taken up his spritual practices, who see him as heralding the new post modern religious movement. He is 43 years old, born in Fistville, Massachusetts. From a young age he knew he would be a rabbi, "...because I loved Torah books and philosophical texts, the psychological and the theological". At the age of 25 he was appointed Rabbi of a congregation in the area of South Palm Beach. The he was still a staunch Orthodox and a proponent of the religious establishment. The turning point was when he read a letter of Rabbi Sharira Gaon, "...and in his letter he claimed that everything that happens in the world is for the sake of Torah and Judaism and the Land of Israel", he remembers. "I was young and impudent in those days, and I asked the Rabbi who was teaching us, if a couple in China, on a moonlit night, feel a physical attraction to each other and make love, is this also for the sake of Torah and Judaism and the Land of Israel? The rav answered yes. Then I understood that there was something distorted in the traditional Orthodox approach. Because it can't be that everything in the world is necesarily enslaved. The world is rich and varied and changing".
He made aliyah to Israel in '92 and served as the rav of the settlement Tzufim in the Shomron. In that same time period he began to participate in an international discussion group on the internet , "World Sages", and through it was able to have discussions on theological, Torah, and philosophical topics. He also met with the Dalai Lama, and had discussions with him on the connection between religion and society. Slowly he gathered strength among the newly Orthodox public, and also among the secular community, which was thirsting for spiritual meaning. Gafni wrote and disseminated books of Torah thought, including "Lilith" (together with Ohed Ezrahi, published by Modan) "About the immodest, provacative, sexual and sensual apperance of Lilith according to Torah and kabalah".
Very quickly Gafni came to the small screen. For three years he had a personal program on Channel 2, "Under his Vine (Tachat Gafno)", that dealt with the connections between faith, society and halachah. Last year he presented a broad look at the weekly Torah portion with with Gil Koftesh in the cultural program "The Seventh Morning" on Channel 2. In November Channel 10 will debut a program hosted by him.
In recent years Gafni has based his postition as Rav of congregation Bayit Chadash that he set up in Yafo, on a study center and a rabinnical ordination and on studies in kabalah. He marries and divorces the members of his congregation, organizes communal Shabatot, teaches and guides, and primarily advances by means of his books and lectures his halachik vision and its suitability for new times. Through the force of his charisma and his sweeping ideas he is guiding a new spiritual religious movement, sensitive and symphonic, user friendly, pluralistic and egalitarian, that sanctifies the honor of the woman and the man.
The rabinnical establishment despises him. "The image of a Rabbi in the haredi and religious world is too perfect", he complains. "He never makes mistakes and his customs must be followed as law and all his instructions must be obeyed. I say to my congregation, `If someone wants a Rabbi like that, he shouldn't come to me'. I have made a lot of mistakes in life, and in spite of that I am a Rabbi. Because a Rav has to be first of all a lover of people and a lover of Torah, and after that someone who can admit to a mistake. Therefore in Bayit Chadash the Rabbi is not the center, the Rabbi is the congregation".
And therefore, even Gafni's outward appearance does not jive with the commonly accepted appearance of a Rabbi. His hair is long, his beard is short and his clothes are nice and stylish. With his velvet jacket and his understated glasses he looks more like a movie actor that came around to academia, than a modest and diffident Rabbi leading his community of followers.
Quietly and persistently Gafni works among the members of his congregation most of whom are not religious. He also invites non Jews to his communal Shabatot, marries same sex couples, and fights for halachic feminism. Due to the fervent adoration he gets from his believers, Gafni has withdrawn somewhat from his lifes work, so in order to spread his ideas to others, he has certified 17 women and men to the rabbinate and to communal leadership. The members of the congregation do not pay dues, and Gafni lives off of a small salary that comes from contributions.
Conversation with him is exciting, and his ideas are quick, confusing almost. Gafni throws out Torah proofs, philosophical arguments and logic from the Zohar and the Kabalah into a strange mix, yet one which stimulates thinking. At night he dances a dance of closeness in the study hall after he finishes studying, sometimes to Beethoven and sometimes to the music of Led Zeppelin. And when Chaya, his third wife is in Israel, sometimes she dances with him.
"Chaya lives in San Francisco, studies psychology and writes poetry" says Gafni sadly. "I don't want to leave Israel, and therefore we are only together three months out of the year. We have a trans Atlantic marriage, primarily by means of telephone. We are a post modern couple and we love each other from afar. My friends say, `How can you leave such a beautiful wife by herself outside of Israel?' , and I say to them, `How can I force Chaya to come to me if it is hard for her to live here?'. I can only hope that it is at least as hard for her to live without me as it is for me to live without her.
"I am very feminist in everything connected to marriage. We were taught that if we are not married plus three kids with a house and a garden and parents that come for Passover seder, we are somehow damaged goods. Nowadays we know that the family covers up many crimes and exploitation and cruelty, with the main thing being that the neighbors don't know and everything looks ok from the outside. Therefore I believe that the correct model for our time is marriage to more than one spouse. I think it is good to marry and divorce a few times, and not to strive at any price for a marriage that will last 70 years or more. We now need the attitude that it is possible to marry and divorce several times and this is the correct model. Rabbi Nahman of Breslov says that there is a spouse for an hour. A nice concept. His meaning was that if they are married 5-6 years, and afterwards it ends, then it was wonderful to marry and even more wonderful to divorce". "Divorce is not a failure but a great happiness", says Ziv Rabinowitz, a member of Bayit Chadash. "Rabbi Gafni explained to us that it doesn't make sense that at a wedding we make a big meal and we have a photographer and flowers, whereas with a divorce we are sinking into some hole and we feel sad in a short and painful ceremony. We in this congregation believe that marriage should end with a big party, just like a wedding. Therefore we created a special divorce ceremony, that during it they prepare a meal and separate in happiness, and each one gives a dollar to the other in order to discharge karmic debts (nullification of negative energy) , and they understand that just like they entered into the framework of marriage in holiness, so too they need to leave it in holiness.
POLITICAL AMBITIONS
Gafni's ability to dig paths to the hearts of his people brings to him primarily the young, whose intention is to run him for a coveted Knesset seat. Gafni doesn't deny the timing of the revelations of sexual harrassment to time when the students came out with an announcement of their political intentions. Either way, the resolve of the sheep of his flock always holds firm, even if the heart of he who stands at their head is somewhat weakened from shame.
In the first years of operation of congregation Bayit Chadash in Israel the incidents of the past were forgotten. Rabbi Blau and Vicki Polin tried to inform institutions that were in touch with the Rabbi and with some of the members of his congregation, but people refused to believe or cooperate, and dismissed the allegations as a personal vendetta.
Except that also in Israel the name of Gafni continued to be connected to incidents of a sexual nature. Perhaps not crimes by law, but certainly acts unfitting for a married Orthodox rabbi. In the beginning of '94 as the rav of the settlement Tzufim, and as a visiting rabbi in the religious council of Kfar Saba. "We heard good things about him, and we requested that he meet with our daughter and convince her to stop seeing a boy that we thought was unsuitable", explains the mother of a young girl from Kfar Saba. Gafni met with our daughter, who was then 23, pure and delicate and very religious, and simply fell in love with her. He was at the time married and came to us in a Torah capacity. Our daughter was drawn in by this story, Gafni promised to marry her, and the sky fell in on us.
"It was a long time before we realized how dangerous this man was and we started to fight for the life of our daughter. We recorded him saying to my daughter: `I love you very much, and I dream of the day when we will be together. You are the light of my life. I know I have a lot of problems, but I will go to therapy, the main thing is for you to be mine.' We heard this and we were shocked. We tried talking to everyone possible. We tried to contact his wife but she was not in the area. Then we took off the gloves. We definitely weren't acting like Britons. In order to save our daughter we felt that anything was permitted.
"When the story became known, Gafni left Kfar Saba, but not with our daughter. In the end we were able to save her. She left Gafni and got married to a wonderful boy, and today she is happy and has three children. After all this was over, Gafni stood to accept work with a group of girls in the high school. We disagreed. We said this is like sending a cat to guard the cream. Its crazy."
"I can say in full fairness that there was no sexual harrassment on the part of Rabbi Gafni against me.", says the daughter. "We were two souls that came together. I am a musician and I sang to him, and he was incredibly charismatic. He enchanted me. There was nothing forced or cult like between us. He simply wanted to marry me. We didn't kiss and he didn't make any sexual propositions. Just hugs."
Did you know he was a married Rabbi?
"He said that his marriage was not stable, and that I was the catalyst for its termination. The religious council did not know about our romantic relationship. He always said he had a great love for me, a once in a lifetime love. I was a religious girl, innocent, and to hear words like this from such an impressive man like Gafni...today I feel like I was very lucky. Both because I heard that I was not the only one, and also because I knew Rabbi Gafni had problems. He always needed affection."
Gafni replies: "I have a letter from the girl saying I did nothing bad. I met a wonderful girl and we fell in love. This was at a time that Lisa and I had decided to divorce. I never met her in a framework of rabbinical counseling. This is a lie and a falsehood. I knew her from giving her rides each morning to the university. We decided it would be impossible to go out until after the divorcel, out of respect for Lisa. But the parents were angry and influenced the girl to leave me, and that is what happened. I loved her greatly and wanted to marry her. But six weeks after we separated she got engaged to another."
In January of '97 Meir Polovsky, head of a private investigators office, was asked to prepare a comprehensive report on Rabbi Gafni by a certain customer there. Polovsky prepared an investigation on Gafni in Israel and outside of Israel. "I can't relate the findings in detail", he says today. "I can just say that during the course of time, many suspicions were brought regarding Gafni, but he was never investigated by any body, he wasn't judged and wasn't convicted. The suspicions were primarily in connection with young girls, which like I said before were never substantiated. I can't go into details, I can only point out that the results of the investigation in any case aren't very complimentary to the man".
LOVE IS MY MIDDLE NAME
Last September the Jewish Week in New York published a profile of Mordechai Gafni. There also suspicions were brought up against the head of congregation Bayit Chadash, and the stories of sexual harrasment became widely known. Kerry Rosenblatt, the papers editor, started the aritcle on a personal note. "Rabbi Gafni is a successful personality in Israel", he wrote about him. "He is the leader of a large and flourishing congregation, appears on radio and television and writes articles for newspapers. His popularity is rising and so publicity is following him. Therefore it is apropos to mention these stories, which accuse him of sexual harassment. There are times when it is possible to determine for sure whether someone being examined is guilty or innocent beyond doubt. In Gafni's case it is impossible to judge one way or the other. But it is important that the public know these things, because the man stirs strong feelings wherever he goes and leaves behind either points of light or points of darkness, depending on how the impression of his soul is received".
Gafni: "I didn't know where to bury myself. Sexual exploitation is a horrible thing. For 2000 years women have been exploited in every way and have not had a voice. And today, when the shechinah is demanding honor, they put me into this basket? This is absurd. Anyone who knows me would never believe this."
If this is all lies and falsehood, how come it is connected specifically to you?
"My energy is threatening. It is no secret that they are talking to me about politics, and my congregation is gathering strength and acceleration. People are jealous. Jealous and afraid. Therefore they oppress. Blau is contacting every place I am in contact with and sends emails against me and copies of writings. He is simply obsessed. Vicki Polin set up an internet site whose sole purpose is to spread rumors about me and to write theoretical accusatory articles against me. These two and their friends came to the Steven Wise synagogue in Los Angelos, where I teach, for the Jewish renewal movement, to order the management of Bayit Chadash, to obtain television programs. Until they destroy me they won't have any rest."
"When we started to produce `Under His Vine' , people came to me and told me that Gafni had sexually harassed women and young girls", tells Zivit Davidowitz, executive producer at Channel 10. "They sent me email and harassed me by telephone. It seemed like we were talking about a group of obsessives. After every program they would call and say, `See how Gafni touches women during the program, shakes their hand and hugs them'. They demanded that I fire him. But to me this didn't seem reasonable. I knew the man, I saw how he worked with the women in the crew, how he loved them and honored them. When I told this to Gafni he was depressed and embarassed. He obviously denied everything, and that was the end of it."
"Many times I thought of suing these people", raged Gafni. "But my lawyers told me that if I do that perhaps I could win in court but I would lose in communication. A headline that says: Rabbi sues girl over false accusation of rape sounds much worse than a woman who tries to impugn these terrible acts to a rabbi and he hears his accusation but doesn't respond."
Have you tried to talk to Judy or with the other girls?
"Today Judy is a plaything in Rabbi Blau's hands. Thats like asking Bill Clinton to get in touch with Monica Lewinsky. I have nothing to say to her. She crossed all reasonable lines. My first girlfriend, who was then 14, I would love to meet with. A few years ago I tried to turn to her in a friendly way and offered to meet with a rav or psychologist and to settle things once and for all. I also tried to contact her family, but they absolutely refused".
So why don't you lower your profile, and at least stay away from the hugs and talk of love? Maybe they do come, in your words, from a pure place, but they don't add to the good name of an Orthodox G-d fearing rabbi.
"Love is my middle name. I cannot live in a world where there is no open affection and love. From the great struggle against sexual harassment, which is incredibly important, there is also room for an awareness in the opposite direction, that because of it I am forbidden today to hug too much, and teachers in school cannot caress a student. This is horrible. We have created a sterile world where people cannot touch because they are afraid of being sued. I am not prepared to give in to this fear. This is completely against my faith. On the other hand, I have made a few changes in my management style. I don't see women for extended periods of counseling, since this leaves me open to suspicion. I also don't meet women alone, but only with at least one other person present. This is how I protect myself. I also don't teach youth. I prefer to work with adults who are responsible, not with children".
What does you wife say about this story?
"She is more agressive than me. She knows me well enough to understand that they are comitting character assasination against me when I haven't done anything wrong".
And indeed, in a telephone conversation with the third Mrs. Gafni, it seems she is even more angry than her husband. "I lived with Mordechai for six years, and I know him through and through", she says. "The rumors about him are simply disgusting and dirty. There is no chance that my husband would hurt or exploit someone. Since he is loving and open and ready to help and to listen, it is easy for someone who is not pure to misunderstand his pure love"
Is it possible that the fact that you don't live together most months of the year influences your judgement?
"The distance is hard on me, and this won't continue forever.One of these days we will decide how to resolve this issue. I want Mordechai to set up a rabbinical school in San Francisco, and Mordechai wants me to come to Israel to help him with congregation Bayit Chadash. We'll see what happens. Either he'll break, or I will".
Gafni listens to his wifes words and laughs bitterly. "If the attacks against me continue, perhaps I won't be able to teach any more, not in San Francisco and not in Israel', he says and a thread of hopelessness colors his voice. "And I love to teach. I love the G-dly spark in all my students. I am their teacher, friend, and student. And I intend to fight for my right to teach until the day I die. I am not some perfect rebbe and I am not a perfect teacher. When I started `Under His Vine' my promo was that whoever is looking for a perfect rabbi should tune to a different channel.
"I have made mistakes in my life, and I have had connections that in the course of time I am not happy about, but never have my mistakes had any connection to sexual exploitation. So I try to hide from the rumors.
"It comforts me that someone who supports us so much is sorry over my insult, and contributes a double what he usually does. But lately new students come to my lectures and are caught up in deeply spiritual words. They come home and ask themselves, who is this Gafni, whose words are sweeter than honey and who loves G-d and man? Then they open the internet, and they look for my name with a search engine, and read all sorts of ugly things about me. And oops, they stop coming. Thats why I have chosen to speak".
Facts about Rabbi Mordechai
Gafni
Bayit Chadash - October 17, 2004
http://www.bayitchadash.org/facts/index.htm
Introduction
Recent items in a Jewish newspaper and on several internet sites have raised questions about certain aspects of the personal life of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni. This web site will provide factual information related to that recent coverage, to help interested parties determine the accuracy, truthfulness, and fairness of those recent reports.
Jewish Week Article
A weekly newspaper, The Jewish Journal, published in New York City, carried a story on September 24, 2004, in which the paper's editor, Gary Rosenblatt, extensively reviewed several purported events in Rabbi Gafni's personal life. The original story can be viewed online here.
This article contains factual errors, as well as quotes from Rabbi Gafni that were taken out of context from an interview conducted four years ago, in 2000.
Responses to that article include a letter signed by Rabbis Saul J. Berman, Joseph Telushkin, and Tirzah Firestone, available here, and Rabbi Arthur Green's letters here and here.
Internet-Based Reporting
An Internet site that says it is "dedicated to Addressing Childhood Sexual Abuse in Jewish Communities Around the World" has posted materials about Rabbi Gafni. The person responsible for most, if not all, content on that web site has also posted materials extensively on a few other "blog" web sites. That individual is Victoria Polin, Executive Director of The Awareness Center.
Perhaps the single most insightful portrait of the way she operates is a memo she recently circulated to many parties, and posted on the Internet, in response to correspondence from Rabbi Arthur Green, Dean of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, Newton, MA. His entire letter is available here.
Ms. Polin responded to this letter by sending emails "to every news media source possible" (her words) claiming that in this letter Rabbi Green is "calling for the death of Child Victim Advocates." That malignant distortion of Rabbi Green's words is based on Ms. Polin 's misuse and/or misinterpretation of a single Hebrew word, rodef, which translates as "pursuer." The word is widely used in the Jewish community with a variety of meanings, including, often, in the name of many temples, Rodef Shalom, which means "Pursuers of Peace." Readers of the letter can readily discern for themselves what Rabbi Green's actual use of the word meant – and it was not a call for the death of anyone. Ms. Green's unfounded, irrational, and irresponsible response to this letter is unfortunately representative of her normal modus operandi.
In response to that internet posting, and other statements by Vicki Polin, Rabbis Berman and Telushkin have sent a letter to Rabbi Josef Blau at Yeshiva University, discussing the credibility and motives of Ms. Polin and the Awareness Center, which she completely controls. That letter says, in part, "The Awareness Center posts and distributes material which is totally false, describing as fact occurrences which simply never took place. The clear intent is the character assassination of those whom Vicki has decided are deserving of public defamation." The entire letter is available here.
Luke Ford
A Los Angeles-based individual who represents himself
to others as a "freelance journalist" has been making inquiries about Rabbi
Gafni, and has posted material on his web site regarding Rabbi Gafni that
is malicious, factually inaccurate, and libelous. This web site will not
dignify Ford's internet postings about Rabbi Gafni with specific responses,
because the lies are too numerous and blatant to deal with. Following is
material from third party sources that interested parties can use to determine
for themselves whether Luke Ford's writings should be trusted as
factual.
Is Luke Ford a journalist? He is not a "journalist" in the accepted sense of the word. He runs a web site that is devoted to chronicling the pornographic film industry. He has had a book published, a history of pornographic films. He is quoted in news stories as saying that his primary source of income is advertising from pornographers that runs on his web site.
Is Luke Ford a journalist? He has disavowed that title. In an interview published in The Village Voice (March 9, 1999) he said, "I don't claim on my news pages that they're journalism. There is an element of journalism. But there is a much bigger talk-show element. People call me up, and they tell me something and I run it. An hour later or three days later, people will write and tell me more about it, and I will run that. It's more of a stream rather than filing one story. I've almost got a self-writing Web page. I've got people who read it all the time and they constantly e-mail me. I just cut and paste."
Does Luke Ford care about the accuracy of what he puts on his web site? In the Village Voice article, he states, in response to the question, "Do you vet your stories?": It depends on the importance of the story. If one porner says that another porner sticks bananas up his ass, I will quote that. I don't really care. But if he says, "This guy threatened my life with a gun," that's important and I wouldn't run that until I had more information. If someone will put their name on it, I will pretty much run anything. (emphasis added.)
Also in 1999, Ford told the New Times Los Angeles, "I never publish anything I know to be false unless I am quoting somebody...sometimes I will insert the truth in brackets and sometimes I will not." The same article said, "And sometimes his misinformation comes in king-sized doses. Last year Ford ran a story/rumor stating incorrectly that retired actress Kaithlyn Ashley was infected with HIV. It was not a case of the deadly virus but a case of a deadly lack of fact-checking."
Even by the extraordinarily low standards of the pornographic film industry, Luke Ford is found lacking in honesty. The New Times story also says: "'He lives for negative attention,' says Mike Albo, executive editor of Hustler Erotic Video Guide. `He plagiarizes material, he lies, he's probably the most unscrupulous person masquerading as a journalist I've ever had the misfortune to run into.'"
How does Luke Ford conduct himself personally? See his own words, for example on his web site here. (Warning: sexually explicit material!)
Also, in its July 31, 2001 issue, Jerusalem Report wrote: "Ford covers the pornographic film industry. He interviews performers, producers and distributors; he reports back from shooting sets and trade shows and awards ceremonies; he hangs out with people from the business to elicit the latest `dirt'...Ford, however, is not your everyday journalist. In fact, some of his philosophical leanings would be hard for anyone to swallow: He often cites the writings of a rabid American neo-Nazi, William Pierce, and views liberalism, communism, socialism, feminism and Freudianism as largely Jewish-instigated afflictions every bit as perfidious as the field he covers." In the same article, Ford states, "Nazism is my own favorite kind of pornography. I'd say I find myself agreeing with anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of what Dr. Pierce has to say." (emphasis added)
What is the primary source of income for Luke Ford? In the same Jerusalem Report article, Ford stated, "Yes, my website is sponsored by porn companies. So yes, I do make money from porn. That is very troubling from a Jewish perspective. I have no answer to that." (Note: Ford claims to have converted from Christianity to Judaism in 1992.) (emphasis added)
Does Luke Ford engage in spreading lashon hara? From the New Times article: "'The biggest conflict I've been having is in the area of gossip,' he says. `Judaism is very strict. The Torah says do not go about as a tale-bearer. And that's what I'm doing for a living.'"
Letter from: Rabbi Saul J. Berman &
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
http://www.bayitchadash.org/facts/blau.htm
September 13, 2004
Dear Rabbi Blau,
Since we met some months ago to discuss some issues related to sexual abuse and the role of The Awareness Center, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and I have been maintaining a continuing interest in the activities of The Awareness Center.
My recent letter to Vicki Polin and
the members of the Executive Committee of The Awareness Center included a
list of suggested policy recommendations which would have made the operation
of The Awareness Center website a fair and effective instrument in the battle
against sexual abuse in the Jewish community. Unfortunately, Vicki, in the
name of the Executive Committee, dismissed all of the suggestions with a
single condescending brush stroke.
Permit us to be perfectly blunt. The Awareness Center website as it currently stands is often misleading, its truthfulness cannot be assumed, and, in the name of justice, it has itself become an instrument of vicious abuse. We are moved to make this harsh evaluation in the light of the following points and more:
The claim that the site will only report previously published accusations is an outright lie.
Vicki has herself sent anonymous slanderous postings to web blogs and then cited them on The Awareness Center site as the basis for serious accusations.
The Awareness Center posts and distributes material which is totally false, describing as fact occurrences which simply never took place. The clear intent is the character assassination of those whom Vicki has decided are deserving of public defamation.
The site does not remove accusatory material even after full and multiple investigations have concluded that they are false.
The Awareness Center has initiated campaigns to destroy the reputation and work prospects of accused persons, even after their names have been formally cleared and/or full resolution between the parties has been achieved.
The site will provide no opportunity for response by accused persons, other than an admission of guilt.
The attempt to destroy people's reputations long after their death is not the pursuit of justice, it is journalistic pornography.
These and many other serious offenses (of which we have extensive substantiation) have made The Awareness Center an untrustworthy and deplorable repository of falsehoods, innuendoes, and scandal mongering. It is a disgrace to the Jewish community and we will not abide its continued destructive activities.
We fear that your own reputation for probity and for responsible communal response to the vital issue of sexual abuse may be seriously injured by your continued association with The Awareness Center. We urge you, as we will be strongly urging all others connected with it, to disassociate your name from The Awareness Center until such time as responsible policies and honest procedures are implemented for its future operation.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Saul J. Berman
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
CALL TO ACTION: Gafni
and Walmart
By Jewish Whistleblower
Jewish Whistleblower - March 1, 2005
http://jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2005/03/help-stop-promotion-of-child-molester.html#comments
Help stop the promotion of child molester Rabbi Mordechai Gafni at Wal-Mart - phone 1-800-WAL-MART and complain
When you call make it clear that this is not about book banning, but rather the promotion by a of a dangerous religious guru with a history of child molestation. This is not in line with the Wal-Mart philosophy of being a "family" store with "family" values.
Refer them to the Awareness Center webpage:
Also note that the books have false biography information:
"He teaches graduate seminars on mysticism at Oxford University..."
Which is a complete misrepresentation. He never taught graduate seminars at Oxford University. He is nothing but a mere student.
See Wal-Mart website:
Stop the Promotion of a Confessed Child Molester By The News Media
Born as Marc Winiarz, went to New York from the Midwest for high school and college, became a youth leader and rabbi, was accused of sexual assaulting two teenage girls, and attempted sexual assault of a young adult woman. He was also accused of cult like practices. In 1991 he left the Unitied States to start a new life in Israel, changing his name to Mordechai Gafni.
Marc Gafni: "I was a stupid kid and we were in love," the rabbi said. "She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her"
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the spiritual leader of the Israeli community of Efrat, was going to revoke the rabbinic ordination he gave Rabbi Gafni many years ago when they had a close rabbi-student relationship. When Gafni heard of Rabbi Riskin's wishes, he wrote a letter "returning" his semicha to spare his former teacher any further embarrassment.
Rabbi Gafni serves on the spiritual advisory council of Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a national organization based in Philadelphia; leds retreats at Elat Chayyim, a Jewish Renewal center in the Catskills; preached frequently at the Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles; and founded Bayit Chadash ("new home"), a New Age Jewish community in Israel that he said strives "to restore the spark of holy paganism."
October 2004 - Stories From three Survivors of Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz (AKA: Marc Gafni)
May 15, 2006 - Letter from Mordechai Gafni to Aleph regarding the recent allegations of sexual assault
Rabbi Marc Gafni & Andrew
Cohen
Enlightenment, Evolution, and the Future of Judaism
January 1, 2005
http://www.wie.org/unbound/media.asp?ifr=ra&id=50
Enlightenment, Evolution, and the Future of Judaism Rabbi Marc Gafni is not your average Rabbi. He's an unorthodox Orthodox Rabbi, a passionate Kabbalist, a popular Israeli television host, and the founder of Bayit Chadash, an international spiritual community and retreat center committed to Jewish renaissance. Yet no matter how far from the established order he may travel, Gafni never loses sight of those most basic Judaic tenets: pray to God and live a moral, ethical, and generous life, because this life is the one that matters most!
In this videotaped conversation between two spiritual masters, Andrew's original conception of an evolutionary enlightenment engages with Rabbi Gafni's soul-level understanding of Judaism's timeless mystical teachings. Together, these two free-thinkers propel an enduring ancient tradition into the exhilarating and uncharted terrain of the future.
Eric Yoffe regarding Marc Gafni
The Awareness Center's Daily Newsletter (Message 5205) - March 9, 2005
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/TheAwarenessCenter/message/5205
The following is a discussion between one of our subscriber's and Rabbi Eric Yoffe, President of the Union of Reform Judaism (Reform Rabbinical Association).
The subscriber had contacted Rabbi Yoffe regarding their concerns of Rabbi Marc Gafni presenting and being an honored member of Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles, California.
If you would also like to send an e-mail, Rabbi Yoffe's email address is: PresUahc@urj.org
For more information on the Case of Rabbi Marc/Mordechai Gafni, go to:
______________________________________________________________
-----Original Message-----
From: Name withheld upon request
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2005 4:36 PM
To: Office of the President
Subject: Appearance of "rabbi" Gafni at Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles
Dear Rabbi Yoffe:
I would like to call your attention to the lecture series being presented by the above mentioned "rabbi" at the Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles, California.
The man is a sex offender and his presence in any Reform Temple is a disgrace to our Reform community.
Thank you for your attention to this email.
Sincerely,
Name withheld upon request
Member of a Reform Synagogue
-------------------------------------------------------
Tue, 1 Mar 2005 15:27:44 -0500
From:"Office of the President" <PresUahc@urj.org>
To:Name withheld upon request
Dear Name withheld upon request:
The rabbi of Stephen S. Wise Temple, Eli Herscher, has informed me that the allegations against Rabbi Gafni have been investigated again and again and have been proven to be simply untrue. Rabbi Herscher is a man of great integrity and I rely on his judgment in this matter.
Sincerely,
Eric Yoffie
By Gil Kopatch
Haaretz - June 2, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/583841.html
--------------------------------------
CALL TO ACTION: Please read the newest article published by Haaretz and then feel free to write to Haaretz, and ask them to tell the whole story about regarding Marc Gafni. Send the letter to letters@haaretz.co.il or fax it to 972-3-5121156.
Please remember that Rabbi Mordechai Gafni confessed to having sexual relations with a 13 year old girl. "She was 14 going on 35".
----------------------------------------
Both Moses and Buddha grew up without a mother's love and apparently
longed for it all their lives. Buddha was orphaned at an early age; the infant
Moses got a one-way ticket for a Nile cruise. Both of them grew up in palaces
as pampered princes. Both of them ventured out of the royal hothouse and
were astounded to encounter the suffering of their fellows. Both of them
turned to meditation for many years - Buddha under a tree, Moses in the
wilderness of Midian.
So much for the similarities between these two spiritual giants. But what are the differences? And if there are no differences, why am I not a Buddhist?
I decide to pay a two-week visit to India. To find myself with alacrity. And to return as enlightened - and as delighted - as possible.
The king-god
On the day after Pesach, at 6 A.M., I pick up Rabbi Mordechai Marc Gafni from his beit midrash (house of study) in Jaffa's Ajami neighborhood. The rabbi is impossible to categorize. He is certainly not Reform. He is committed to Jewish law, but could not be considered classically Orthodox. He's spontaneous, ecstatic, profound, filled with joy - and embraces and loves everyone he meets. Gafni is among the most important of the new generation of religious leaders in Israel today, a profound teacher and thinker, a serious scholar and an original philosopher who addresses and provokes both mind and heart. He is much more of an Eastern-style spiritual master, a kind of Jewish Bodhisattva, than an establishment rabbi. Together with fellow scholar Avraham Leader and businessman Jacob Nir David, he founded Bayit Chadash (literally, New Home), a new national spiritual movement, which includes a research center and rabbinic certification program, and appeals to people who are dissatisfied with the world of the religious establishment. Many of his students are former India backpackers, who are now yuppies and part of the mainstream of contemporary Israeli society. The rabbi is also my good friend and partner on a Channel 2 program about the weekly Torah reading, in which he usually explains and I usually nod.
A few weeks earlier, he told me about a dialogue he had intended to hold with a friend he met at a meeting of clerics in Rome and asked if I wanted to be the moderator. His friend's name? Tenzin Gyatso, better known as the Dalai Lama - the great ocean of compassion, guardian of the white lotus, who looks down with mercy.
According to the tradition, the 14th Dalai Lama, who will turn 70 on July 6, is the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama and, in fact, of all those who preceded him. He is a Bodhisattva - a soul who, because of his love and compassion, does not seek liberation from the cycle of human suffering, but remains within it in order to help others end their suffering. The Dalai Lama is the political as well as the religious leader of the Tibetan nation, and for his struggle to hold a peaceful dialogue with China, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He is admired around the world and is sought out by Hollywood's top stars. For his believers, who call him "Kundun," he is more than the pope for Catholics: He is the king-god. He himself has said that he is "simply a human being and, incidentally, a Tibetan who chooses to be a Buddhist monk."
On the flight to Jordan, from where we will proceed to Delhi, are three Israeli Buddhists who are going on a pilgrimage to Dharamsala, the city in northern India where the Dalai Lama's temple is located. Rabbi Gafni immediately invites them to a kabbalat Shabbat (the ceremony welcoming the Sabbath) that he is planning to hold there. They recoil. It sounds too Jewish. They don't need it. They are already very spiritual without that; they have already done Vipassana and they have incense and everything.
"Rabbi, why the Dalai Lama? Why now?" I ask him.
"Today Tibetan Buddhism is flowering in the Western world," he replies, "and therefore a Jerusalem-Tibet conversation is the spiritual dialogue of the generation. Just as in the past there was the Greece-Jerusalem conversation through Maimonides, who dialogued with Aristotle in his writings."
And why Buddhism?
Gafni: "Tibetan Buddhism is, in certain dimensions, very close to some forms of kabbala [Jewish mysticism]. Both kabbala and Buddhism share some common language that speaks to the heart of the modern seeker."
But isn't it true that there is no god in Buddhism?
"It is true that the term `God' in Buddhism is different from our understanding according to biblical Judaism. It is not the God of the Bible who speaks in a thunderous voice and reprimands everyone. They do not have an external God who is above nature. He is not external to creation, but is interiorized. From this point of view, Buddhism is close to Hasidism - in terms of the internal work, the work you do on yourself, from which emerges your relationship to the world around you."
It's clear to you, is it not, that all the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] rabbis will assail you for meeting with idol worshipers?
"Anyone who says that simply does not understand Buddhism; he is speaking from ignorance. The Buddha was a human being, he is not God, and therefore it is clear that his statue is also not God, but only a symbol. So there is no idol worship here."
Travel as thriller
Our hotel is situated in a good neighborhood of New Delhi, meaning that people do not live on the street, but in grimy, neglected apartments. Connaught Place, one of the most magnificent of the city's squares, looks like Kikar Hamedina in Tel Aviv and more especially like "Bread Square," the former protest site of the poor and homeless there. My fastidiousness surges. My only nourishment is nuts and hermetically sealed water.
At night we tour Old Delhi. It's not crowded here at night, only 7.3 Indians per square meter. All of whom are wandering the street in groups. No one suffers from loneliness here. In the West people feel alone in villas; here they sleep two-three to a porter's wagon and don't look especially sad. It's hard to find an Indian depressive who is hooked on Prozac or its ilk. They don't have the leisure for that.
Carpets of people are sleeping on the traffic islands. The drivers of the three-wheeled cabs sleep in their vehicles. It's astonishing, the balance that is needed to sleep on the seat of a bicycle.
The next day we set out in the most expensive taxi we could find; the important thing is just to get out of here. Traveling on the roads of India is like being in a thriller. You watch the developments on the road with disbelief, waiting for the catharsis that will purge you of your fear. It's a terrific movie. Anything can happen. Driving against the traffic, veering out of the way a split second before a bicycle holding an entire family splatters all over you.
To the drivers' credit, they obviously feel their car. They probably live in it. The car is part of their body and they behave on the highway as on the street, in a state of patient, moderate, smiling chaos. Not that there are no accidents. Here and there we see overturned buses along the road. But they, too, are accepted with equanimity.
Many of the vehicles sport a sign saying "Honk, please." In driving there is nothing like the sense of hearing. In Israel every honk can send the honkee out of his car and spark a blood-drenched incident. Here it's a happy thing - people merrily honk at one another. You could mistakenly think that driving here is an ear-splitting experience until you realize that honking is like saying "hello."
At a "workers'" restaurant by the roadside we are careful not to enter the stinking pit called a "lavatory." A large indifferent bull strides in. Guess who's coming to dinner. They feed it fresh chapati and in response it oozes a lot of spittle and strolls off, languidly escorted by an entourage of 200 flies.
Our driver Pablo, an Indian hunk who looks like singer Eyal Golan, travels this road every day for 13 straight hours. His favorite god, he says, is Ganesh, the mischievous Hindu god with the head of an elephant. Ganesh is the most popular god in India. He is responsible for pranks and intrigues.
We crossed the rich state of Punjab and the poor state of Uttar Pradesh and we arrive in the north, in the state of Hiamachal Pradesh, the paradise of India. The weather is far more pleasant. Which is to say, the air moves. In Delhi it's different: There the mosquitoes hold the air between their teeth.
We start to climb the Himalayas. Pablo is very tired - he hasn't slept in three days. Rabbi Gafni encourages him with sacred songs and some tunes by Simon and Garfunkel, too. Pablo has never heard of them but he wakes up, no doubt also aided by the light massage the rabbi applies to his shoulders.
The road bends sharply and the turns begin. Dharamsala is at an altitude of 2,000 meters. High, but still only considered to be at the foothills of the Himalayas. The turns are terribly sharp. Good thing it's been dark for some time. That way we don't see the potholes or the abyss alongside the road.
At 3 A.M. we reach upper Dharamsala. After the Dalai Lama fled from the Chinese and made his way stealthily across the Himalayas on the back of a yak, the Indian government granted him political asylum and this village, Macleod Ganj, adjacent to Dharamsala. Here, like our Yohanan Ben Zakkai, he reinvigorated the Tibetan people and its culture after the terrible destruction.
The Chinese killed more than one million Tibetans and destroyed some 6,000 monasteries. Holocaust is something else we have in common with them.
Your original face
Already during the tour of Macleod Ganj in the morning I was ripped off by shoe-shining Rajasthani kids. The rabbi hinted that I should upgrade my appearance before going to see the Bodhisattva of compassion. So I abandoned my shoes to the kids. They asked for 350 rupees, which is about NIS 35. I paid them a month's salary without haggling and got a serious scolding from the owner of a Tibetan store, who said I was spoiling the young generation. Fortunately it's Rajasthani youth, not Tibetan, so there isn't much to spoil.
There is tension between the different communities in the village. The Tibetans are angry at the Indians and call them slothful, while the Indians are vexed by the industrious Tibetans. They arrived only 50 years ago and already have developed the village and made it one of the major tourist centers of India. It's a small village, with a population of 6,000, of whom about 1,000 are Israelis.
There are three lanes in the village and they all lead upward. The homes snake their way up the side of a green hill and on the rooftops are cafes with a view that makes your heart go pitter-pat. In front of the central house of worship are cylinders on which are drawn colorful verses of prayer. When you turn them they create a kind of mantra, which is delivered to the ears of the universe.
There are fine restaurants in Macleod Ganj. Italian, Japanese, Korean and of course Tibetan and Israeli. True, the lanes are narrow and the cows crap, but it is clean here, the air is clear and the water fresh, direct from the Himalayas. It rains twice a day and the drops are heavy.
The Israelis are concentrated in the neighboring villages of Dharamkot and Bhagsu, which are less crowded. The view is a lot better there, too, but the monkeys are more impertinent. Surprisingly, most of the Israelis here have a busy schedule. A meditation course in the morning, followed immediately by a massage lesson, then cooking and drumming. They don't have time for shanti (total tranquillity) here - that they reserve for Israel.
The next day it was pretty clear that the hawks were looking for food. Because we are situated on the edge of an abyss, they fly pretty much at eye level, just meters from me. Today we have a meeting with Tenzin Geyche Tethong, the secretary of the Tibetan government, about the rules of protocol and the content of the meeting with the Dalai Lama.
Rabbi Gafni wears his special Hasidic garb. The Tibetan government has a special minister in charge of robes and they attribute great significance to this. We don't want to foment a diplomatic scandal because of mistaken fashion considerations.
In the government compound soldiers are playing badminton. There is a great splash of flowers here and their aroma accompanies us to the bureau. The secretary, formal but smiling, waxes enthusiastic over the rabbi's Hasidic robe. "The Dalai Lama is in the middle of writing a book," he says, "but he loves Rabbi Gafni and has specially made time for him. He has an interest in being in contact with the Israeli community. You are our neighbors here and we should get to know you."
He asks about the Israelis, why there are so many of them here. Rabbi Gafni replies that they feel a deep connection to the spirit of the place, perhaps because both the Tibetans and the Jews have suffered oppression and sought to maintain their identity in difficult conditions of exile. I ask why the Tibetans are always laughing. His eyes lighting up, he replies: "The original face of people, beneath all the masks, is a smiling face."
Amen.
The encounter
The Tsuglagkhang compound, the Dalai Lama's official residence, is a few minutes' walk from the center of the village. The morning of the meeting, a Friday, finds the rabbi in good spirits. He takes bills out of his pocket and distributes them to the lepers of the neighborhood. They smile, happy with their lot.
In the Namgyal temple, Tibetan monks are conducting a lively argument. They clap their hands vigorously to emphasize a solid point and snort mockingly to disparage their adversary's argument. Just like the hair-splitting debates that took place in the plaza of our Temple.
The conference room contains luxurious low sofas and silkscreen prints on the wall. Even though this is supposed to be an intimate encounter, a few Israelis who were born again in Indian ashrams have managed to infiltrate the gathering. They are on the verge of a mild orgasm at the meeting with their God.
The Dalai Lama enters. He has nice eyes, his presence is pleasant, that is clear. He and Rabbi Gafni embrace, bow to each other and place cheek by cheek, showing more affection than what is customary. Both the rabbi and the Dalai Lama laugh heartily; indeed, they seem to share a great love for laughter.
After the greetings the rabbi reminds the Dalai Lama that he gave His Holiness his skullcap in Rome. "I hope you still have it," he says. The Dalai Lama nods in affirmation. "I hope that one day it will be useful to me when I visit Jerusalem or Jewish institutions," he says in English, and laughs.
Following are some excerpts from the conversation.
"I represent not only Gafni, but the Jewish tradition," the rabbi said, "and I want to thank you for receiving us in your home. The subject we want to talk to you about is how the world of the spirit can have a practical influence and change the very real world of politics and economics."
Dalai Lama: "That is a good subject. It is very important."
Gafni, with a smile: "That is why I brought Gil with me - he's the Richard Gere of Israel [Gere is active in the movement to free Tibet], because he gets better ratings than I do."
"Your Holiness," I said, "I have a few questions that are bothering me. My first question is what love is, actually. And how do we teach people to love in a practical way?"
Dalai Lama: "I cannot say what the exact meaning of love is. But when I use that word, it means that something is very precious to me. I feel not only closeness, but also caring and respect. For example, I love my watch but there are no relations of closeness between us, we do not share the same experiences. Love is for people who have the same experience as mine - feelings, pain, pleasure. That is why we should respect others, because they are part of myself.
"We learn our first experience of love from our mother," he continued. "The infant wants to be close to its mother. Sometimes, unfortunately, there are unwanted children, but in general the mother sees the baby as part of her body. That is the height of closeness. This feeling is essential in reality for survival. This feeling becomes an important part of our life and it continues until our death. All the spiritual concepts speak about this being the most important feeling."
Gafni: "I want to offer from the kabbala a comment on the words of wisdom of His Holiness."
Dalai Lama: "So I can learn, very good!"
Gafni: "To learn from the tradition of our forefathers. The kabbala says that love, at its core, is not an emotion, but a perception, a way of seeing the world. The emotion then wells up from the perception. Once we understand that, we can train a perception, and we can also train ourselves to be lovers. Love is to see with the eyes of God. To love someone is to see them in their highest, most beautiful place. To love someone is to perceive their infinite specialness, with that divinity. The model for love in this sense is the way the mother sees her child. Even if the baby grows up and falls, the mother will always hold that at his core, he is beautiful and holy, and divine. This is why in Hebrew mysticism we call God `shaddai' - it is the divine breast of the mother who nourishes us all. And because we are all part of God. We are all divine miniatures. So we all have the ability to be lovers, that is, to access our divine perception and see others with the eyes of God."
The Dalai Lama was impressed: "Beautiful! The idea that love is a type of seeing, that it is possible to train it, is a good idea. It is hard to train a feeling, but sight is easier. We are all creatures of God. God is everlasting love. If I love God, I have to maintain a loving feeling toward all creatures, who are part of God. These feelings should be cultivated by logic, by meditation - there are methods for doing that. What is certain is that even people who do not have an interest in religion need a warm heart. A warm heart leads to inner quiet and to a tranquil and meaningful life. If the parents grow up in this atmosphere, they will educate their children accordingly. And that is the right way to change humanity."
"If all the religions talk about love of mankind and compassion," I asked, "how is it that so much hatred and wars are the fruit of religious education?"
The Dalai Lama laughed. "Religion has a big umbrella and under it you can do what you want," he said. "The spiritual tradition represents good values for the long range. When people are in a desperate situation, their emotions become more negative. When anger is strong, the long-range considerations are forgotten. Therefore it is easier to believe in the values of the spirit when you have a comfortable life, but the wisdom is to do that during hardships.
"There are people who use religion for political or financial purposes and manipulate human belief. In Northern Ireland, for example. The naive people have stronger feelings and it is easier to work them up. That is why certain conflicts in history happened because of religion. But if you look closely you will see that the real considerations were different.
"The fundamentalist believes only in his religion and is afflicted with lack of knowledge and lack of esteem for the other traditions. He feels sincerely that he is serving God - and destroys and lays waste. The method to dissolve this is by means of talks between the traditions. Knowledge should be increased. Harmony should be created between the faiths. I was in Jerusalem twice, not only as a tourist but as a pilgrim, and I spoke with Jews and Muslims and Christians. Despite the different philosophy, they all carry the same idea. A message of love, compassion, forgiveness and self-meaning. That is why I feel more contact is needed. More dialogue. I have friends from all religions. If I am ever exiled from here, I will have somewhere to go."
Gafni: "The most important idea I want to share with you is about why people who are deeply religious can behave in a terrible way. In what I call integral kabbala, and in modern integral thought, we say there are stages and states. States mean that which I achieve and lose - like an altered state or mystical state. A stage is a permanent achievement; I have developed to a particular stage of achievement and I do not lose it. In moral development, there are four major stages: egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric (feeling care and compassion for all people), and also the stage of being compassionate for all living beings and not only human beings.
"Now here is the deep idea. All states, mystical ones included, are interpreted through the prism of stages. If I am at one level - let's say, egocentric - and I have a mystical experience, I might think I am Jesus. If I am at the ethnocentric stage, then I might think that only my people is holy ... The secret is that all states are interpreted through the prism of stages, one's moral stage of development. Therefore, even people who reach genuine mystical states can behave in morally reprehensible ways."
The Dalai Lama listened carefully, nodding, seemingly excited to hear this new wisdom.
Gil: "Politicians and businessmen only want to be in control all the time, whereas one of the principles of the spirit is precisely to give up control. How is it possible to combine the two?"
Dalai Lama: "The success of the modern economy depends on other elements, such as clients. A good politician is usually voted into office in elections, so he depends on people. Therefore, they are not actually in control. Politics and the economy need a great many people. Religion, in the end, is the business of one person. Religion depends on the individual.
"If your belief is clean, if you have a healthy and true motivation, all your actions can be constructive, filled with compassion and beneficial to the world. It does not matter what your profession is - politician, scientist or teacher. If your motivation is to be self-centered, then every religion becomes dirty and destructive. All human activity depends on the individual who does it. Therefore, religion has an important role. To instill values in those who make the economy and the politics, to change the way of thinking toward compassion and love.
"Not long ago we had a state meeting with the government of India. And one of the country's most important ministers was there, too. Humbly he said that he is a politician and therefore does not have enough spiritual knowledge. I said to him that a person who is a public figure needs religion more than someone who lives alone in a remote place. Someone like that does not cause much harm even if he goes crazy [laughs loudly]. But the leaders, if they are not mentally balanced, if their brain is complicated and sophisticated, but their heart is poor and wretched, that has serious implications" (laughs in satisfaction).
Sexuality and divinity
Gil: "Let's talk about sexuality in Buddhism and kabbala."
Gafni: "I want to offer from Jerusalem a scientific method of how religion can teach the individual change. Because I do not have the courage to speak in my name, I ask all the angels and sages to speak through me and they will do it better than I can by myself."
The Dalai Lama listens attentively. Gafni concentrates silently for a few seconds and continues:
"In the Temple in Jerusalem, above the Holy Ark, were pictures of two angels. They were embracing in a kind of sexual tantric yoga posture. In the kabbala we call this `the secret of the Cherubim.' The secret is that one of the ways to teach personal transformation and love is through using the principles of sexuality as a spiritual model. Why? Because sexuality illustrates all the principles of religion.
"For example, giving up control, which Gil asked about. In sex it is not good to be always in control. Sex works only if we are willing at times to give up control. So sexuality exemplifies a spiritual principle. There is also another element in kabbala, which is called `the secret of the kisses.' Let's say I go to the bank and ask the teller to record that I as though deposited money. He will look at me as though I am crazy. In this world, after all, either you take or you receive. But in sexuality, giving and receiving are collapsed into one. So the sexual models the holy, the holy way of living."
The Dalai Lama was a bit surprised by what seemed to be a new approach, but listened carefully.
Gafni: "Another spiritual thing that is illustrated by the sexual: to do something for its own sake, not in order to gain some other advantage extraneous to itself. Sex according to the kabbala is meditation of the ordinary person. Because sexuality is for the thing itself. These are but examples of a core kabbalistic idea. The kabbala says that sexuality, which the whole world is afraid of, actually incorporates astounding spiritual principles that should be applied as the model for living in all the nonsexual areas of life."
The Dalai Lama laughs appreciatively. He bursts with laughter. It takes him time to calm down. Sex is something that Tibetan monks of his level are not supposed to take an interest in.
Dalai Lama: "It's complicated. Sex is mainly a matter of culture. That is its main role in nature. We cannot say that there is any religious meaning in it. Animals do it and we cannot say that they are religious."
Gafni: "But animals have a soul, too. You see? I am a good Buddhist."
Dalai Lama (laughing): "In the Indian tradition there may be something similar to what you are saying. But in Buddhism it is different. All the internal feelings and the sexual feelings are related to `internal air,' and we have to control this internal air, the movement of this internal energy. We use the sexual organs to create movement, to make the energy flow, not for the purpose of culture, but to achieve a deeper experience of consciousness. And then the sexual energy melts away. Only trained people are capable of this.
"Good and proper sexual relations are a way to get close to one another," he adds. "but they are also the source of a problem. You are happy for a few months and then the problems come up."
"There seems to be a lot of energy in envy, in ego and in violence," I ask, "and the energy to do well by others is far less powerful. Is it possible to learn how to channel the energy of evil toward the doing of good?"
Dalai Lama: "That is very clear. A negative feeling creates energy immediately. So negative feelings are stronger than positive ones. Through training, positive feelings can also give energy. Compassion, for example, by training one's thinking, can give endless energy. But it is not easy. You need a sharp mind and a developed consciousness to make these distinctions."
Gafni: "There is the story about the founder of Hasidism who was approached because an infant had fallen ill, and instead of going to 10 righteous men, he asked 10 thieves to pray for him. All the Jews were angry with him, and he said, `The gates of heaven are locked and only a thief knows how to pick the locks of heaven.' Maybe that means that we need the highest level of consciousness to access the energy of the thief in us in order to storm heaven."
The Dalai Lama laughs and stamps his feet. "God is nice," he says, "and he may be especially nice to the sinners. That is very true."
The rabbi takes out the fabric he bought in the market the day before, orange silk cloth such as the Tibetan monks use. He asked an Israeli woman named Idit to sew tzitzit (ritual fringes) in each corner and then he had a totally kosher tallit (prayer shawl). With much grace and decorum, he presents it to the Dalai Lama.
"Ho!" the Dalai Lama calls out, moved. "This is wonderful Jewish-Tibetan merger. How wonderful." After the rabbi explains its kabbalistic meaning to a very attentive Dalai Lama, he wraps himself in it, chortling delightedly. Then he gives us white silk scarves, as is the custom when parting - and gets a skullcap. He and the rabbi embrace and their love for each other is felt by everyone. Everyone bows to the Dalai Lama; he bows in return and leaves.
I was caught in the garden. Suddenly the Dalai Lama emerged from behind me, wearing the skullcap and prayer shawl, on the way to his next meeting. "I am a Tibetan Jew! A Tibetan Jew!" Pleased as punch he was.
The differences
The rumor of the visit spread through the foothills of the Himalayas. Dozens of Israelis, young people in search of serenity, arrive for the kabbalat Shabbat at the Hotel OM (symbol of the presence of the universal in the individual). On the porch, which seemed to be suspended in mid-air between the tops of green pine trees, Rabbi Gafni - warmly greeted by many travelers who knew him from Israel - succeeds in creating a moving experience for them, in part thanks to India, which has milked the Zionism out of them. During "Shir Lama'alot" (Song of Degrees), they all lift their eyes to the snowcapped peaks, knowing whence their help shall come.
In our last conversation en route to the airport, I talk with the rabbi again about the differences. Buddha said: Elimination of suffering is all. Suffering is my identification with this world. And this world perishes. The more I am attached to this world, the more I suffer. It is better to sit under the tree, concentrate on one's breathing, do stretching exercises and not identify too much.
Moses, in contrast, foments a political and cultural revolution that is called the Exodus from Egypt. He is a political activist. He operates in this world, influences history, repairs reality and not just one's personal karma.
And there is another difference: What a beautiful land it turned out to be for Moses here. Only when you get back from India do you see it. The streets here are so clean. I feel like getting out of the car and licking the road. Allenby Street never looked so polished. The houses are so white. The dogs are so sated and the flies are so lonely. More power to a sense of perspective. More power to Moses. More power to the Israel Defense Forces.n
CALL TO ACTION:
UJA Federation of NY Sponsors Event with Rabbi Marc "Mordechai" Gafni
July 3, 2005
An oversized card, called "Enjoy autumn in the Berkshires at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center" has been sent out. It it includes a Shavuot event on June 1-4, 2006 conducted by Rabbi Mordechai Gafni. It appears this is an agency sponsored by the UJA Federation of New York. Rabbi Gafni confessed to having sexual relations with a minor .
Please call : Morris W. Offit - Chair of the Board, of the UJA Federation of New York, and Lauren Katzowitz Shenfield - Executive Director (Philanthropy Advisors – A Service of UJA-Federation of New York). Let them know how you feel UJA funds being used to support the teachings of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center.
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Morris W. Offit - Chair of the Board UJA Federation of NY 130 East 59th Street New York, NY 10022 212-980-1000 |
Lauren Katzowitz Shenfield - Executive Director Philanthropy Advisors – A Service of UJA-Federation of New York 130 East 59th Street, 12th Floor New York, NY 10022 Telephone: 212-836-1358 Fax: 212-836-1199 |
CALL TO ACTION: UJA Federation of NY Sponsors Event with Rabbi
Marc "Mordechai" Gafni
The Awareness Center - Sunday, September 11, 2005
http://jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com/2005/09/call-to-action-uja-federation-of-ny.html
CALL TO ACTION: UJA Federation of NY Sponsors Event with Rabbi Marc "Mordechai" Gafni
An oversized card, called "Enjoy autumn in the Berkshires at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center" has been sent out. It it includes a Shavuot event on June 1-4, 2006 conducted by Rabbi Mordechai Gafni. It appears this is an agency sponsored by the UJA Federation of New York. Rabbi Gafni confessed to having sexual relations with a minor (see below).
Please call Morris W. Offit - Chair of the Board, of the UJA Federation of New York. Let him know how you feel about Rabbi Mordechai Gafni representing the JUA at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center.
Please also call:
Lauren Katzowitz Shenfield - Executive Director
Philanthropy Advisors – A Service of UJA-Federation of New York
130 East 59th Street, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10022
Telephone: 212-836-1358
Fax: 212-836-1199
UJA Federation of NY
Main Office
130 East 59th Street
New York, NY 10022
212-980-1000
contact@ujafedny.org
Case of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni
(aka: Marc Gafni, Mark Gafni, Marc Winiarz, Mordechai Winiarz, Mordechai Winyarz)
http://theawarenesscenter.org/gafni_mordechai.html
Born as Marc Winiarz, went to New York from the Midwest for high school and college, became a youth leader and rabbi, was accused of sexual assaulting two teenage girls, and attempted sexual assault of a young adult woman. He was also accused of cult like practices. In 1991 he left the Unitied States to start a new life in Israel, changing his name to Mordechai Gafni.
Marc Gafni: "I was a stupid kid and we were in love," the rabbi said. "She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her"
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the spiritual leader of the Israeli community of Efrat, was going to revoke the rabbinic ordination he gave Rabbi Gafni many years ago when they had a close rabbi-student relationship. When Gafni heard of Rabbi Riskin's wishes, he wrote a letter "returning" his semicha to spare his former teacher any further embarrassment.
Jewish Survivors Speak Out - Monday, December 05, 2005
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3177690,00.html
Call To Action:Stop The Promotion Rabbi Marc Gafni (a Confessed Child Molester) in the News Media
Post a "comment" and write to Ynet News to let them
know how you feel about them promoting Marc Gafni. How can any paper publish
an article by this man anymore, especially when it has to do with "To love
our children is to perceive their soul prints, to see them in their unique,
infinite beauty"?
Also post the comments you put up at YNet on this blog. Just hit the button below that says comments.
Born as Marc Winiarz, went to New York from the Midwest for high school and college, became a youth leader and rabbi, was accused of sexual assaulting two teenage girls, and attempted sexual assault of a young adult woman. He was also accused of cult like practices. In 1991 he left the Unitied States to start a new life in Israel, changing his name to Mordechai Gafni.
Marc Gafni: "I was a stupid kid and we were in love," the rabbi said. "She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her".
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the spiritual leader of the Israeli community of Efrat, was going to revoke the rabbinic ordination he gave Rabbi Gafni many years ago when they had a close rabbi-student relationship. When Gafni heard of Rabbi Riskin's wishes, he wrote a letter "returning" his semicha to spare his former teacher any further embarrassment.
Don't forget there is still a CALL TO ACTION regarding Elat Chayyim allowing Marc Gafni/Winiarz teach at their retreat center. Please contact executive director Bennett Neiman and let your voice be heard:
(800) 398-2630, ext: 221 - Toll Free
(845) 626-0157, ext. 221 - International and Mid-Hudson local
director@elatchayyim.org
Rabbi Gafni serves on the spiritual advisory council of Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a national organization based in Philadelphia; leds retreats at Elat Chayyim, a Jewish Renewal center in the Catskills; preached frequently at the Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles; and founded Bayit Chadash ("new home"), a New Age Jewish community in Israel that he said strives "to restore the spark of holy paganism."
CALL TO ACTION: Marc Gafni Speaking
at the Omega Institute (Being Fearless)
The Awareness Center's Daily Newsletter (Message 6384) - Mon Dec 26, 2005 7:19
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/TheAwarenessCenter/message/6384
Marc Gafni is scheduled to present at the Omega Institute conference in New York City on March 31 - April 2, 2006. Please contact the Omega Institute (Stephan Rechtschaffen and Skip Backus) and let them know how you feel about Marc Gafni presenting.
Please provide them with the following background information and history on Rabbi Mordecai Gafni (AKA: Mark Gafni, Marc Gafni, Marc Winiarz, Mordechai Winiarz, Mordechai Winyarz).
Omega Institute Contact Information:
Stephan Rechtschaffen and Skip Backus
Toll Free: 800-944-1001
Direct Number: 845-266-4444
Fax: 845-266-3769
registration@eomega.org
Faculty Profile
http://www.eomega.org/omega/faculty/viewProfile/df9623c62c2501f12b263440eb627b1c/
Rabbi Marc Gafni is the founder and head of Bayit Chadash, an international spiritual retreat center committed to Jewish renaissance in Israel. Gafni is the author of Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment, which was the subject of a nationally aired PBS special. Translated into many languages, it received the NAPRA Nautilus Award as Best Spirituality Book of 2001. His second book, The Mystery of Love, draws from the ancient texts of the Kabbalist tradition to explore the relationships between sex, eros, love, and holiness.
Along with Erica Fox, Rabbi Gafni is developing the Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. This project engages cutting-edge conversation between the fields of conflict management and wisdom traditions.
Currently completing a doctorate program through Oxford University, Rabbi Gafni is also a contributing editor to Tikkun magazine, and Chayim Acherim, Israel's leading spiritual magazine.
Upcoming Conferences:
Being Fearless - New York, NY
March 31, 2006 - April 2, 2006
Jewish Survivors of Sexual Violence Speaks Out - Monday, January 16, 2006
http://jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com/2006/01/call-to-action-all-rabbis-and.html
Once again a newspaper in Israel is publishing articles written by a rabbi who admitted to having sexual relations with a minor. Once again The Awareness Center, Inc. is going to ask everyone to contact the paper -- asking them to stop promoting an alleged sexual predator as a Torah scholar.
As we all know, sexual offenses have nothing to do with religion. This is NOT an Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Traditional or Jewish Renewal problem. Alleged and convicted sex offenders is everyone's problem.
QUESTION: Does someone who admits to having sexual relations with a minor have a right to be teaching Torah?
Marc Gafni has been hopping around in all movements of Judaism. For this reason we ask ALL rabbis and rabbinical organizations to make a public statement denouncing Marc Gafni (AKA: Mordechai Winartz) behavior. We do NOT want one more person to be manipulated or violated by this man.
Remember the article "Post-Orthodoxy Journey" that was published in Ha'aretz? Marc Gafni said that his community in Israel "aspires to be a new stream in Judaism, and, in his words, "to restore the spark of holy paganism."
I'm sure you would agree with me that Judaism should never be considered to be any form of "holy paganism".
Is Marc Winiarz (Mordechai Gafni) trying to create his own new religion, and then call it Judaism? We all need to ask ourselves if Mordechai Winyartz is nothing more then a modern day Jacob Frank or Shabbetai Zevii?
What will it take for the rabbunim of the world to take action?
Please contact all rabbis you know and every rabbinical organizations and demand they make a public statement regarding this man.
Please call and write (in alphabetical order):
Agudath Israel of America - Orthodox
Rabbi Avi Shafran - Program Director
42 Broadway
New York,
