ISRAEL
Haaretz
By Dr Samuel Lebens / Jewish World blogger | Jul.18, 2012 |
This week, a rabbi from New York was convicted of money laundering. Rabbi Mordchai Fish was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for laundering close to a million dollars in what he thought were illicit funds through a religious charity. We should be flabbergasted that a teacher and preacher of Judaism should stoop so low. But, of course, we’re not shocked at all. In fact, we’ve seen rabbis who’ve done, or have at least been credibly accused of doing, much worse crimes. In the U.S., rabbis were arrested as part of a major corruption sting surrounding the illegal organ trafficking of a Mr Levy Rosenbaum (himself, not a rabbi). In Australia, a tightly knit Chabad Lubavitch community was rocked by claims of sex abuse by the community’s rabbi, in alleged instances of child abuse at an Orthodox boys school. And in Israel, Rabbi Moti Elon has long been fighting off serious accusations of sexual abuse. While the rabbi, who denies the accusations, has conceded that he might have kissed and hugged two of his students, he rebuffed suggestions that he did so for sexual pleasure, but rather as a way to console and encourage them.
In this latest case concerning Rabbi Fish, one might have some sympathy for the man. He was, after all, caught in a sting operation. He was approached to launder money by a police informant to see how he might respond. He was tempted. Now he’s going to prison. The problem with a sting operation is that you can never know whether the person really would have lead a life of crime had it not been for your entrapment. The Torah commands us not to put a stumbling block before the blind. If you ignore this law, and then blind people stumble, you can hardly blame the blind.
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