UNITED STATES
The Jewish Week
Laura Gold
Special To The Jewish Week
Recently, prominent Washington, D.C. Rabbi Barry Freundel received a 6 1/2-year prison sentence for spying on women immersing in the mikveh, the ritual bath. And just last week, The New York Times published an expose on Riverdale Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt’s longstanding habit of bringing teenage boys and young men whom he was mentoring to sit with him naked in a sauna.
With every new rabbinical scandal, after the initial shock and concern and denominational finger-pointing, people tend to breathe a sigh of relief and feel reassured that whatever flaws their rabbi may have, at least he or she isn’t an out-and-out sociopath. The rabbis who make headlines for abusive criminal behavior tell us more about the entwining of psychopathology with power than about the rabbinate, per se.
Still, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that all ITAL rabbis are vulnerable to the possibility of misusing their power. For this reason, all rabbis should be encouraged to consider the personal psychological pitfalls that may trip them up. One bad rabbinic apple may not treif up the whole bunch, but it can remind the other apples to look carefully at themselves, not for purposes of preening but for pruning.
As a clinical psychologist and rabbi consulting to clergy across the country, as well as teaching rabbinical students, I find that they often ask me whom to be wary of “out there”: In other words, which congregants pose the greatest danger to the rabbi by way of their excessive neediness or narcissism or other diagnostic warning signals. But rabbis occupy a position that requires turning their scrutiny inward as well. They are professionally remiss if they are not routinely asking themselves: Is there something about myself that I ought to be worried about?
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