[Avodah] Balancing needs

[Chana Luntz]

On Areivim I wrote:
> One might argue about the Meah She'arim yellow star protesters --
> they were clearly craving publicity, and not publicising their action
> might have prevented what is clearly significant hurt to the remaining
> Holocaust Survivors and their descendents (not to mention the rest of us).

> But from what I hear from people who are a lot closer to the RBS situation
> than I am, things have gotten infinitely better for the little girl in
> the news report and her classmates since the media clip. Before, they
> had been begging the Mayor and the police and everybody they could to
> do something, and nothing was done, with them feeling very alone. Now,
> suddenly, there is a wave of support, the Mayor is lighting channukah
> candles and apparently promising some support, the police are engaged and
> things are happening to keep little girls safe, with the girls getting a
> very clear message that what has been done to them is unacceptable. Nor
> were the spitters craving media publicity, they did not invite the media
> in, it was the victims of the spitting that did so.

> The historic justification for pressuring parents and others not to
> go to the police in child abuse cases is precisely this. Once it goes
> to the police or the media, then bad publicity will almost inevitably
> result for the Orthodox community. And this is of course absolutely
> true - once the parents or whoever goes to the police or the media,
> bad publicity will result for the community as a whole, despite the
> abusers being only individuals. There are those who hate the Orthodox
> community who will unquestionably use any report of child abuse to
> tarnish the whole community. Better, the argument therefore goes,
> that individual children suffer and continue to suffer than the whole
> community be tarnished. The Catholic Church (and other groups, such as
> prestigious boarding schools) historically also used precisely the same
> justification. However my impression is that, at least in the US and
> Australia, I am not so convinced about the UK, all Orthodox communities
> are rejecting this argument in favour of the one that says that children
> need to be protected no matter what, and hence the police and media need
> to be involved, even if that does make the community look bad.

On a more philosophical note, is not this debate reminiscent of the
debates over utilitarianism, which to my mind were so beautifully captured
by the Ursela Le Guin short story, "Those who walk away from Omelas".
Omelas (it is O Salem backwards) is a fictional place in which the
sum total of happiness by some law of nature needs to be balanced by
the sum total of misery. Therefore the powers that be in Omelas have
arranged things so that everybody is happy, with the sole exception of
one single child, who is kept in a state of total and absolute misery,
torture and degradation, thereby ensuring everybody else's happiness. The
argument is that the greatest happiness for the greatest number trumps the
suffering of a single individual. But yet there are those who "walk away
from Omelas" ie who are not prepared to have their happiness be built
on the suffering and misery of another. Although note that even Ursela
Le Guin does not have them rising up in revolt and saving the child at
the expense of the happiness of the majority. That is presumably left
to others who locate themselves further towards the personal end on the
communal versus personal spectrum (Ayn Rand at the extreme perhaps? RTK,
weren't you at one time keen on and the person who first introduced
me to Ayn Rand?). But if one does not tolerate the physical and/or
sexual torture and suffering of individual children for the good of
the majority, the question becomes is there a line to be drawn where
the good of the community does overwhelm more limited unhappiness and
personal freedoms. Tznius as it is currently discussed is clearly one
case. To what extent can one require the individual to limit their
self expression in the form of the clothes that they wear for the good
of the community. The nudists argue never. Even most secular Israelis
would agree with some level of minimal clothing. At the other extreme,
baseball caps, denim skirts and such other non regulation forms of dress
must be verboten, and certainly anything which calls attention to the
individual as an individual, and not just part of the mass community,
is destructive of community norms and ought to be stamped out. The Ayn
Rand's of this world unquestionably have a point that uniformity of garb
is the mark of totalitarian societies everywhere, because it encourages
"we" rather than "I" thinking. The question then, as religious Jews, is
this what is mandated and/or sanctioned by the Torah. Ie to what extent
does the Torah value and sanction individualism and to what extent does
it demand and require that the individual submit, and how completely,
to the mass of the "we" and the leaders of the "we".

I of course, in numerous posts over the years, have argued that the
Torah's position is the Rambam's golden mean, in this as much as any
other area. That there is a balance that needs to be achieved between the
individual and the the community, the I and the we, and that in fact the
Tznius guidelines can be understood to be structured precisely to achieve
this balance. But in that regard I am referring to positions regarding
tznius of the form set out in R' YH Henkin's book on the subject, and
not those set out in R' Falk's book on the subject. R' Falk's book, it
seems to me, falls very much further to the side of the need to subsume
the individual into the mass of the community.

One can thus use questions balance to view the whole debate about
advertisements in Jerusalem. That while having women scantily dressed
and in provocative poses is too unbalanced in one direction, having
no women at all is too far to the other extreme, and that therefore
fighting to have women restored to advertisements does not necessarily
mean that one is advocating a return to the other extreme. Which raises
yet another issue - if society has gone too far to one extreme, to what
extent is it appropriate, if what one wants to do is restore balance,
to link up with those who actually want to swing it to the other extreme?
After all, in any pendulum swing, it may be easiest to use the force of
the extreme to get back somewhat to the centre, relying on the extremists
on the existing side to fight back, rather than refuse to use that force,
because if it works too well you will end up swinging too far.

That is why I personally have a lot more sympathy with the young men who
did not want to listen to women singing in the army, because as RRF has
pointed out, they did not seek to stop the women singing, but to remove
themselves from the situation. And the reason I am not in greater sympathy
is simply because, it seems to me, there is a much more straightforward
and less offensive remedy, that of earplugs. With earplugs the soldiers
need not leave the room, they can just look down and not hear anything
and nobody, except perhaps those immediately around them, need be any the
wiser. Given the existence of earplugs, seeking to remove oneself totally
seems more like they were taking a deliberate political stance (and
if the young men in question were not capable of thinking of earplugs,
somebody else a bit more skilled in creative thinking should have been
able to think that for them). Ie the question is not just about balance
of needs, but where smaller things can be done to alleviate the situation,
and greater things are demanded, that too is upsetting the balance.

In relation to the balance between exposure (eg of the Meah She'arim
yellow star protesters) and the hurt that such exposure will cause
(such to Holocaust survivors) - this gets into a question of the right
balance between emes and shalom. As we know, there are times when emes
is supposed to give way to shalom (eg HaShem telling Avraham about
what Sarah said, Yosef and his brothers, etc), and the problems of
talebearing. On the other hand, there is the concept of eidus. After
all, if you are two kosher eidim, and you see a murder by somebody in
circumstances where you can be pretty sure they will not murder again,
on what basis and justification can you possibly go and report to Beis
Din? After all, going to Beis Din will not bring the victim back, and
no doubt the murderer has relatives and the like who will be humiliated
by him being hauled before Beis Din (not to mention he himself). So it
is hard to see any justification for it based purely on sholom trumping
emes, and all the more so where you are dealing with a victimless crime.
And yet there is an obligation on those who can to give eidus - even
though tzedek and shalom in this regard are generally opposites, as the
gemora in Sanhedrin notes.

It reminds me of the famous Teshuva of the Node B'Yehuda. The case was
that a certain woman committed adultery with her son-in-law. Many years
later, the son-in-law did teshuva, and asked the Node B'Yehuda whether
he needed to tell the husband of the adultery. It was accepted that
if the husband had been of an age where relations with his wife could
have occurred, then the son-in-law would have been require to tell the
husband, to prevent him having relations with her in a situation where
such relations were forbidden. But the husband was now sufficiently
old that this was considered unlikely. And the question was, should the
son-in-law perhaps not tell the husband on the grounds that (a) it was
going to cause significant hurt to the husband for no purpose; and (b)
the husband would then go and divorce his wife, the matter would become
a publically known scandal, and there were children from the husband and
wife who were grown up with families of their own, and indeed who were
prominent talmidei chachamim, and the scandal would hit them all badly.
Does kovod habriyos trump the obligation of the son-in-law to tell
the husband?

Now the Node B'Yehuda held that indeed the son-in-law was required to
tell the husband. But that given the age of the husband, it was not
then necessary for the husband to then divorce his wife, moving into
separate rooms and attempting to avoid yichud was enough. And this way
the scandal could be hushed up and not impact the reputations of the
children, although the hurt to the husband remained.

Again, it seems to me, it gets back to a question of balance. Balancing
the need for emes and exposure and justice with the need for sholom
and kovod.

In relation to the argument regarding craving exposure, is that not
the old teacher's dilemma? You have a child in your class who is craving
attention and determined to disrupt. Do you ignore them, knowing that will
provoke them to even greater and greater extremes, eventually resulting in
something (such as injuring another child) that you are not at liberty to
ignore, or do you crack down at an early stage, and not let it get to the
extremes. The logic behind cracking down at an earlier stage, even though
it is indeed giving the person what they seek, is, as I understand it,
the philosophy behind zero tolerance. Let's have the fight over graffiti
or littering rather than over physical injury. On the other hand,
if the thing that you crack down on is something that the rest of the
class have a sneaking sympathy for, you may make the child into a kind
of martyr/hero amongst their classmates, so that you may need to wait
until you get sufficiently unpleasant behaviour to alienate the class
and not create that effect. Again, a question of balance and judgment.
In the case in question, given the craving for publicity, what would they
have come up with next if even this had failed to attract any attention?
Thus my instincts are that it needed to get publicised, and certainly
if RRF is right and it did get them in trouble with those they do listen
to. Ie emes and tzedek need to trump sholom here.

But ironically, getting back to the questions discussed in the beginning,
some of the more extreme individualists would no doubt say that the
craving for attention is in fact all about repressed individualism caused
by too much of a "we" society.

Regards
Chana