CHAIM WALDER: LAME RESPONSE
By: Suri Davis
OMGGGGG HIS BOOKS!!! Oh his books. Ahhh his books, but his books, and the books, and the shelves of books, the books, the boooooooks, oh the bookssss!!!!!
Chaim Walder abused his authority. Chaim Walder looked the look, walked the walk, talked the talk, and for twenty five years was able to get away with abuse.
I am disgusted at the lame reactions to the acts of Chaim Walder. Almost every written or videotaped reaction to the acts of Chaim Walder starts off with or includes, what should happen to the books of Chaim Walder.
WHO CARES?
The victims. The poor victims. The victims which include his family and those who trusted him.
We never learn.
We follow blindly.
We want to trust leadership.
We want to admire professionals.
In law school, we learn for three years about questioning authority, to question independently. Please remember that the HOLY SCOTUS, SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, believed that it was okay to have separate but equal until a few years ago, in 1954 SCOTUS changed precedence and the rule of Stare Decisis, Plessey v. Ferguson, and decided Brown v. The Board of Education, separate was not equal.
We know now, that President Bush sold us on our duty to invade Iraq, because SOMETHING had to be done after 9/11, but many lives were lost, for a lost cause.
Know that Germans, the whole country, and their allies, believed that Jews and others were subhuman, but that was the law of the land for years, and the Germans and their allies, and their countries believed it and excuse themselves because if it was the law of the land, it must be right.
We send our children off to camp now with warnings about their counselors. Educators can no longer put their students on their laps or hug them because of our wariness. We don’t want to generalize authority and lose our role models, yet it is hard to come up with rules on how to detect when a role model or a teacher or a professional has strayed ethically.
So these people who speak out about the BOOOOOKS and come up with new rules which are frankly absurd, reveal the true issue in society, which includes the Jewish community, it reveals a lack of experience, professionalism and insight, whose leadership is lacking. Rabbis know halachah. Some have experience in every day Jewish life, what we need is a Rabbi Twerski, ZTL, who had several professional degrees and experience in psychological tragedies.
I haven’t heard from our local professionals on the topic, maybe, wisely, they have nothing to add to this tragedy. How does authority teach society to be wary of authority. There needs to be a captain of the ship, and maybe the difficulty in this situation is that it is simple to teach society to be wary of strangers, but almost impossible to upend societal authority structure for aberrant situations, to throw away the baby with the bath water. The difficulty is that society needs leaders, and it is very difficult to teach the nuance of when to trust, 99%, and when not to trust.
Admittedly, the #Metoo movement which has developed in the last couple of years is, at its core, an imbalance of power, and revealed, and hopefully upended the well-known and protected practice in Hollywood of the casting couch. It is still very much embedded in employment authority abuse.
The real tragedy occurred to those who were abused by Chaim Walder, and the real lesson to learn is that our Rabbis and our communities are ill-equipped to address this tragedy in real time and in a meaningful way. Moving forward, we hope Rabbis and other leaders will revisit how we can avoid these tragedies with professionals in the field of “authority abuse” to avoid future tragedies.