So I know this has little to do with life in Jewish Baltimore, but I have to write something about the Orioles.
There’s nothing that I can add that hasn’t been written or said. I don’t know the players or management personally. I don’t know the owner personally.
When I was growing up, my mother used to sit by the radio or TV with her knitting and listen or watch many, many games. She called the Orioles “my boys.” The O’s did a lot of winning back then, but even when they lost, there was often a spark to their step that said to the other team, ‘you know what, we’re still better than you are.’
I watched them on TV last night lose to the Yankees. That spark is missing in action.
Instead, there’s a look of hopelessness. There’s a feeling almost of why bother going out there.
So many of us as kids used to go outside and pretend we were Brooks Robinson.
There’s just none of that now.
Yes, there are many reasons. Free agency, the cost of doing business, the creation of the Washington Nationals, the owner’s seeming unwillingness to bring in big names, and the mere fact that the big names probably don’t want to play here.
We seem to count down now on how many days left until Ravens training camp.
The team and the community’s Oriole morale is a mess.
If they weren’t being well paid, I’d almost feel sorry for the players who are wearing the Orioles uniform.
The shame of it all is, we’d come to the stadium in droves if they team was above average. It wouldn’t have to win the American League East or the World Series…yet.
I remember in 1968, the Detroit Tigers won the World Series despite the long hot summer of racial unrest in their city. The Tigers were given credit for not only winning the Series, but for helping Detroit gain some sort of semblance of healing.
Fortunately, we’re not having racial riots, but we could use a unifying spirit here in our city.
It would be so wonderful to be able live in the presence of a great team instead of always remembering how great 1983 was.
I wish sometimes that the ghost of Jerry Hoffberger could come back and wake up Peter Angelos from a sound sleep a la “A Christmas Carole” and take him back to the days when winning meant so much here in the summer.
Now our baseball team goes through the motions, treading water in a sea of losing.
Losing has become the corporate culture of the Baltimore Orioles, and that is so tough for me to write.
Because this is a city made up of families who would love to feel empowered by a winning baseball team. It would give us all a jump to our step.
I’m so sick and tired of going to Camden Yards to be unnumbered by the Red Sox and Yankees’ fans. I remember one year the entire crowd it seemed was yelling “Let’s Go Yankees.”
My wife, Lisa, stood up on her seat and yelled, “Go Home Yankees.”
I was so proud.

(This article first appeared in the New York Jewish Press) and I am running it here as a guest blogger in my blog space.

By Bracha Goetz

Silly me!  It took me so long to open my eyes to the fact that we could have religious leaders who appear outwardly very pious and above reproach, but really aren’t.  Waking up is a struggle alright.

Over 30 years ago, after searching for spirituality in many religions, reading the book,  A Tzaddik in Our Times, had such a powerful effect on me.  I saw for the first time that a pure, simple, kind and spiritual life could be found within my own religion.  It seemed like a way of life that most valued those who courageously cared about the downtrodden.  If this was the way a true Jewish hero could be identified, this was the kind of Judaism about which I wanted to learn.  And, thank G-d, I got to do that. The teachers in the women’s division of Ohr Someyach, at Neve Yerushalayim and at Aish Ha Torah all seemed to embody these kind of beliefs as well.  They offered such a wonderful world view, an idealistic and yet practical one that I was so grateful to finally find.

Getting married and leaving the baal teshuva yeshivas to settle in an apartment and find work, was sort of like landing with a thud, though.  We discovered that the real Orthodox world we moved into wasn’t all that much like the idyllic picture that had been painted, but we were determined, with G-d’s help, to make our own beautiful world within it.  With tapes and seforim and shiurim as encouragement to stay on course through the years, we were able to keep on overlooking all the behavior that didn’t seem to fit in with the lifestyle we’d chosen.  And we were okay with making excuses for each seemingly crooked, arrogant or illegal action we’d encounter.  As baalei teshuvas, we figured that we probably just didn’t get the whole picture.  They must have great reasons, based on the Torah, for doing what they were doing – and we just probably didn’t understand them yet. 

For many years we were blessed to cultivate a genuinely happy frum home, thank G-d, just overlooking what we thought were a few “bad apples” or seemingly wrong behavior that we couldn’t understand fully.  But then something hit us in the face that was so traumatic, we couldn’t look away anymore.  The intimidating cover-up that followed was probably even more shocking and horrifying than the initial trauma, however.  We learned overnight that we were trying to be dan l’chaf zechus (giving the benefit of the doubt) too often, even when it wasn’t appropriate.  We found out that could sometimes be extremely dangerous. 

Naïve and way too trusting, we were hurt to the core of our beings, but not disillusioned enough to leave.  We knew there was nothing better out there anyway– we’d been there and done that already.  Checking out would just give the frum perpetrators and their Mafia-style supporters, that much more power and free rein as well.  So we came to see that what we needed to do was ask Hashem for help to try to encourage others like us who lack the confidence and courage as we did, to work on addressing the denial and strive to actually implement improvements.  Everybody has to pick and choose what they are willing to stand up for, but if frum people are less fearful of standing up when they see smaller wrongs, they hopefully won’t have to get a brick thrown in their face to wake up, like we needed. 

We can’t blame our rabbis or the institutions and organizations they lead for not having courage if we don’t have it.  As we take on the responsibility to clean up the dirty business we encounter, their actions will reflect ours.  We initially were drawn to Torah Judaism because it seemed so sweet, and for so many of us, it really is.  At the same time, we need to accept the difficult truth that power corrupts in this way of life too.  We really thought that in this more spiritual lifestyle, money, power and political machinations would not sway our community’s leaders.  We were taught stories about great rabbis in the past who wouldn’t take one coin for a yeshiva if the funding might have been somewhat tainted from some unsavory source.  And since it is emphasized repeatedly in the Torah that bribes are strictly forbidden, we actually thought that those in positions of authority who dressed like they believed in these precepts, would actually be scrupulous about following them.

To take just one area in critical need of improvement as an example: we can wait for the administrators of our schools to create basic safety plans and written policies for dealing with sexual predators.  We can wait for community leaders to demand that our day schools conduct background checks and fingerprinting of their employees, just as public schools do.  We can wait for somebody harmful to teach our children about inappropriate touching.  Or, each one of us can decide to take responsibility when our children are being left unprotected.  We can “vote with our dollars” if that’s all that will get our administrators to pay attention.  But first we have to stop fearing them.

Before the destruction of our Second Beis Hamikdash, corruption was widespread among the Kohanim Gedolim.  Much more recently, in the past generation, there were many Jewish people that turned away from Orthodoxy after widespread corruption in the kashrus industry became apparent.  The corrupt flaws proliferating in our midst now involving financial scandals, prostitution and abuse are being highlighted, so that we can remove them.  We have a lot of work to do on ourselves if we really want to be shining lights to the world, and not just dim bulbs.

The Vilna Gaon reminds us that just as water (which is often compared to Torah) helps plants to grow, it also helps weeds to grow.  Alongside the wondrous blossoming of our Torah communities, abusive and corrupt behavior can also grow, strangling what is most valuable, if left unchecked.  In order to have a beautiful garden, we can really never become complacent about the weeding that goes along with it.  The weeds look so much like the real thing, but they are out to strangle all that is good. 

Scandals are G-d’s way of nudging us to get weeding.  So after the denial, the shock, and the disillusionment have passed, we can be grateful that G-d still thinks we are up for the job.

Abuse causes agony not just for the victim, but for the victim’s family members as well, who are shunned and silenced, while well-connected perpetrators are supported.  And yet, when I asked my husband just last week, what he would say if he had to tell a person in one sentence why this way of life was valuable, he responded that he would still say, “It brings the deepest pleasure possible.” 

What’s different about my family now is that we are finally no longer so complacent.  If it feels in some ways like we’re living under an oppressive regime in our midst, we are coming to understand now that we’re the ones responsible for letting that situation develop.  Through education, however, we can enlighten each other about the frum-style intimidation and cover-up tactics that have become so successfully entrenched.  In the future, things can really be the way we thought they once were.

We want to wear the outer garbs and perform the rituals as long as they are vehicles that can continue to bring us to a higher level of consciousness about G-d.  Unwilling to surrender the soul of Judaism, we’re craving integrity.  Parents can devote their lives to instilling purity in their children, and then have their efforts destroyed overnight.  May Hashem give us all the courage to keep waking up.

Bracha Goetz serves on the Executive Committee of the national organization, Jewish Board of Advocates for Children.  She also coordinates a Jewish Big Brothers and Big Sisters Program in Baltimore, Maryland, and is the Harvard-educated author of eleven children’s books, including Aliza in MitzvahLand, What Do You See in Your Neighborhood?  and The Invisible Book.  For presentations, you’re welcome to email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

News of the conviction of Baruch Michael Lebovitz for child sexual molestation and the maximum of 32 years came to me via email under the heading, “Thank God for sunlight.”
Michael Orbach reports in the Jewish Star that a daughter of Mr. Lebovitz asked the question, “Don’t you think we’re victims too?”
Of course the daughter was quoted as saying that she believed her dad to be 100 percent innocent.
Of course, of course, of course.
It’s all such a shame.
I agree with the daughter. She is a victim of her father as well.
When the issue of the late Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro’s molestation transgressions surfaced, two major questions were asked of me. One, why report on a deceased person who can’t defend himself? The other, “don’t you understand the impact this will have on his children and grandchildren.”
In an Orthodox world of shidduchim where a person’s choice of wearing apparel and Shabbat table cloth sometimes comes into play, it’s not surprising that this THE issue of issues.
Many years ago while living in Detroit, my wife and I employed a babysitter, a frum high school student. She was and probably still is a remarkable young woman. Indeed, we trusted the care of our children to her.
She had a brother, however, who was suspended from his yeshiva allegedly, because he got caught smoking marijuana. His travails were almost common knowledge in the community. When I picked up the babysitter to bring her to our house one Saturday night, she told me that her biggest worry was that she’d not be able to get a good shidduch because of her brother’s drug use.
She was 16. She didn’t say a word of concern about her brother’s well being. Nothing came up about where her brother would be going to school in the future, or how his drug issues could be helped. It was all about the wedding.
Fast forward several years, and after the stories were written on Rabbi Shapiro, the issue of shidduchim for his future generations was thrown my way.
I do feel that his future generations are victims. I only wish that knowledge of the impact on their own family would be enough for a perp to keep his hands off of us. But Ephraim Shapiro didn’t respect nor love his future generations enough to keep from impacting their lives and hampering the lives of his victims.
The same can be said for Baruch Michael Lebovitz.
I think his daughter is a victim of her own father’s actions as well.
I wish for her “sunlight.”
Sunlight brings truth.

Had a great conversation with a friend of mine, a student at Yeshivat Rambam.
I asked him his assessment of the school’s future.
While he didn’t have a real strong answer about the future, one thing he knew for sure, he wants to be able to still go to Rambam.
He wants the school to survive. And while he’s not wringing his hands in worry, he said that his mother worked so very hard to get him into Rambam. He didn’t want her efforts to disappear.
He said he really doesn’t want to go to another school, that Rambam is “my” school.
He worries a bit that he might not be able to academically fit into one particular school, or that he might not religiously fit into another or socially in another. But for where he is in his life, it just doesn’t seem for him possible that he would have to make any other choice.
Usually when we’re talking, it’s about sports, or cars or the movies. But this time, this boy, on his Passover break, kept bringing up the future of his school. He had suggestions as well. He brought up the discontinuation of different parts of the school, and the bolstering of others. He asked if the Rambam building sold right away, couldn’t the school stay in the building for a while until it found another place to call home?
He also wanted to talk about rabbis and teachers who really liked and who have really helped him. He named them.
Then he asked me if I thought the school would make it.
I told him that I hoped so.
But I also told him that he had a job to do. His voice needed to be heard by the administration and the community. And if he has friends who think the same way, even though they are young, get them to talk to their parents and their teachers as well. Because for my friend, this is all very personal.
Rambam is his school.
He wants to keep it that way.