{"id":3494,"date":"2008-07-21T14:24:24","date_gmt":"2008-07-21T22:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=3494"},"modified":"2008-07-21T14:24:24","modified_gmt":"2008-07-21T22:24:24","slug":"the-contaminated-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=3494","title":{"rendered":"‘The Contaminated One’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Gafni blogs<\/a>:<\/p>\n

One Friday evening in Salt Lake, I went with my friend Dalit and her two children to eat at the home of a Jewish family. We had eaten there several times before. It was not a place in which I had a close connection or relationship. It was more of an open house, a Friday evening event, that I went to in order to give Dalit’s kids an experience of community and Shabbat. The host called me over in the midst of the meal and said, “Take a walk with me outside.” “Sure,” I replied. We walked. He was silent. Then he said, “You cannot come back. One of our guests has read on a blog that you are a ‘confessed child molester.’ I know that this is malicious nonsense. We have discussed this before. I tried to explain to her that this was nonsense. But she would not listen. You may never come back to our house.”<\/p>\n

I could not quite believe my ears. As I walked back into the house, it was clear that everyone present knew that this conversation was taking place. They all averted their eyes. I had never known the experience of the leper. The falsely accused. The contaminated one.<\/p>\n

At that moment people’s eyes bore into my back as if I was?God forbid?a rapist or a child molester. And my heart broke for all who are wrongly rejected and detested by a society filled with fear. I felt the pain of the falsely accused, of all those who die in prison?innocent, with no one to hear their pleas. I felt the pain also of those who are rightly rejected because they present a genuine danger. For, had we grown up in the brutality of their lives, who knows how our souls might have been formed? The pain was so intense that I fell on my bed unable to move for most of the night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc Gafni blogs: One Friday evening in Salt Lake, I went with my friend Dalit and her two children to eat at the home of a Jewish family. We had eaten there several times before. It was not a place … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[5836,2807,10486,10485,4700,10104],"class_list":["post-3494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gafni","tag-child-molester","tag-close-connection","tag-dalit","tag-evening-event","tag-jewish-family","tag-marc-gafni"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}