Start with the courtroom.<\/p>\n
The Airport Courthouse sits near the runways at LAX, a low building where the planes climb over the parking lot. Inside, early in 2004, Superior Court Judge Katherine Mader sets the terms of David Schwartz’s freedom. He pleaded no contest the year before to a lewd act with a boy under fourteen, one count, eight others dropped, and he served his year in a treatment home. Now he comes home to Pico-Robertson, and the judge draws a line on a map. Stay east of La Cienega. Keep a hundred yards from the schools and the shuls where the boys might pray.<\/p>\n
In the gallery sit men in black hats. One of them is Rabbi Berish Goldenberg, principal at Yeshiva Rav Isacsohn Toras Emes and chair of the Family Commission of the Rabbinical Council of California. He came to be seen. “The families see us there and the community knows we’re there,” he tells the reporter Julie Gruenbaum Fax<\/a>, “and I think that it’s an important factor for them to know we are not just going to sweep this under the rug.”<\/p>\n Across the aisle sits the defense. Vicki Podberesky speaks for Schwartz. She has her own line, and it cuts the other way. “The court has commented that the victims need to step back and let the man lead his life.”<\/p>\n Two sentences, one room. Each speaker says something true. Each says something the other cannot use. To read the gap between them, start with Ernest Becker (1924\u20131974).<\/p>\n In The Denial of Death (1973) Becker argues that a man holds off the knowledge of his own death by joining a scheme of meaning larger than his body, a hero system that promises his life will count after the body fails. The scheme assigns the roles. It says what a hero looks like, what a coward looks like, what counts as a clean life and what counts as filth. A man inside the system does not see it as one option among many. He sees it as the world.<\/p>\n Goldenberg has built his life inside a particular scheme, and it runs through children. He raises money for a school of more than a thousand boys and girls, the largest Orthodox elementary day school outside the New York area. Its campaign carries his face and a slogan about inspiring children who will inspire children after them. The promise of the yeshiva is a chain. Torah passes from a man to a boy to the boy’s sons, and the line does not break, and that unbroken line is how a finite man touches something that does not end.<\/p>\n So the molester is not one crime among many in this scheme. He is the terror. He poisons the transmission at the youngest link. He takes the vehicle that carries the community past death and he fouls it. A man who has spent decades building children feels that harm in the place where his own meaning lives.<\/p>\n A second terror sits beside the first. The tradition calls it chillul Hashem, the desecration of the Name. The community holds its holiness as a public fact, a light to be seen. Abuse inside the camp, inside the shul, inside the school turns that holiness into a scandal, and worse, hands the scandal to outsiders, to the gentile court, to the reporter, to the front page. For generations the defense against that second terror was silence. Guard the Name by keeping the shame inside the family. Handle it at home.<\/p>\n You read a man by what he gives up. Goldenberg, in the Schwartz case, gives up the silence. He sits where the families can count the hats. He signs his name, with Rabbi Avrohom Union, to a letter filed with a secular judge on March 2, 2004, asking the court to bar a convicted man from any shul where children pray, to seat him only among the old men, to keep him from the mikvah. Mader reads the letter and says no. The rabbis ask anyway. They put the request in writing, in a public file, under their own names. A generation earlier the same men might have kept the whole thing in the back room. Goldenberg moves it to the gallery and the docket.<\/p>\n The renunciation is real. It is also partial, and the limit of it tells the rest of the story.<\/p>\n Take the word protection. Goldenberg uses it. The detective uses it. The defense attorney uses it. They are not telling the same truth.<\/p>\n For the homicide detective who worked the camp case, protection is distance you can measure. A radius. A registration that lasts for life. A boundary at La Cienega and a hundred yards of air around a school. He thinks in restraining orders because he has seen what happens when the order runs loose. Protection is a wall, and the wall has coordinates.<\/p>\n For Podberesky, protection runs the other way. She guards the accused from the state and the mob. She tells the reporter that the system runs imperfect, that innocent men sit in cells, that a man facing a life sentence will plead to a lesser thing to be sure he sees his children again. In her scheme the hero stands between one frightened man and the full weight of the government, and protection means the presumption that survives even a plea.<\/p>\n For the public-health officer who studies how predators find the young, protection is base rates and exposure. Remove the source from the susceptible. No arc of the soul, no second act, only the arithmetic of who gets hurt next and how to lower the number. She treats the seat among the old men as quarantine.<\/p>\n Goldenberg’s protection holds a piece of each and answers to none of them. He wants the wall, so he signs the letter. He wants the man watched, so he speaks of monitoring. He wants the watching done by the beit din, the rabbinic court, inside the house. “In one sense we want to be harsh and tough and make him understand that he is going to be monitored,” he says. “On the other hand we are here to help.” The detective hears half a sentence he can use and half he cannot.<\/p>\n Now take the deeper word, the one that carries the whole scheme. Teshuvah. Return. The penitent who turns back.<\/p>\n Here the hero systems split hardest, because the same act looks like grace from one seat and theft from another.<\/p>\n For the Trappist in his choir stall, every soul stays open to redemption to the last breath, penance runs long and public, and the door is never barred to the man who turns back. For the parole officer, return is a curve on a chart, a recidivism rate, a thing you predict and never trust. For the founder of the recovery house down in Culver City, a former convict himself, the word for a healed man is not cured. It is recovered, present tense, never finished, one day at a time. Each scheme has worked out what it owes the man who did wrong and wants back in.<\/p>\n Goldenberg’s scheme owes him. Teshuvah ranks among the highest goods the tradition knows. The beit din that monitors Schwartz also offers to sit with him, to help him find a job, to find him a shul, to bring him home. Rabbi Shalom Tendler, on the same board, frames the duty in the negative and means it as honor: it would be wrong, he says, to solve the problem by pushing the man onto some other town. The scheme refuses to make the penitent another community’s burden. It takes responsibility for his return.<\/p>\n Hold that value still and look at it from the seat of the child he harmed. From there, the arm that shelters the penitent is the same arm that covers the crime. The second chance handed across the table to the man is the first chance taken from the boy. Grace offered to the one who turned looks, from the other seat, like the community choosing him over the children he hurt.<\/p>\n The Schwartz case is the clean one, because a court ruled first. The rabbis arrived after a conviction, and the scheme’s pull toward the penitent ran inside the lines a judge had already drawn. Watch what the same pull does when no court has spoken.<\/p>\n A young woman named Sima Yarmush<\/a>, raised in a Chabad home, granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor, says a man at a Santa Monica center molested her when she was fourteen. At eighteen she came forward. An Aleinu social worker promised her four rabbis and a beit din. By her account, given to Jewish Community Watch and the Los Angeles Jewish press, the four men heard her recount the acts in detail and then sent her off with blessings and little else. She names Rabbi Berish Goldenberg among them. She says he is the one who took her accused abuser under his wing. When an investigator from Jewish Community Watch later called the accused man about the allegations, the man, by her account, called Goldenberg, and Goldenberg called the investigator, troubled that the group might expose him. The Jewish Journal, reporting the event, withheld the accused man’s name because no court had charged him.<\/p>\n Set the cases side by side and the scheme reads plain. The value that arrived for the families in the gallery, the refusal to push the problem away, the long patience toward the man who might still turn, is one value, not two. It protected children in the case a judge had already settled. By the victim’s account, it sheltered the accused in the case the judge never saw. Becker might not call this hypocrisy. He might call it the cost of the hero system. The scheme that lets a community carry a man home past his worst day is the same scheme that can carry him past his victim.<\/p>\n Three places locate the man.<\/p>\n The first is the gallery at the Airport Courthouse, where he sits in his black hat so the mother of a hurt boy can see the rabbis chose her side. Read him there and he is the reformer who buried the hush.<\/p>\n The second is the wing, the arm a rabbi puts around a man the community has decided to bring back. Read him there and he is the keeper of teshuvah, the one who writes off no Jew, including the worst.<\/p>\n The third is the room after the beit din, the one Sima Yarmush walked out of with her blessings and her silence. Read him there and the same arm that gathers the penitent has closed around the wrong man, and a girl stands outside the chain the whole scheme exists to guard.<\/p>\n He is one man in all three rooms, and he carries one set of values through each. The values hold steady between the rooms. The inputs change, and the same love of the chain that seats him beside the victim in the first room seats him beside the accused in the third. That is the hero system. It gives a finite man a way to outlast death, and it decides for him, before he knows he has chosen, which terror he answers first.<\/p>\n A community that wants both, the watch in the gallery and no silence after the beit din, has to see that a single value drives both rooms. Goldenberg shows it. He kept the watch older rabbis avoided. He also kept the wing. The work left undone is the work of saying, in advance and out loud, which one comes first when a child and a penitent reach for the same arm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Start with the courtroom. The Airport Courthouse sits near the runways at LAX, a low building where the planes climb over the parking lot. Inside, early in 2004, Superior Court Judge Katherine Mader sets the terms of David Schwartz’s freedom. … Continue reading