[Avodah] Abuse and Halakhah

[harchinam]

>
> Possibly in Chazal's day, living under the Romans or Sassanids (the
> "2nd Persian Empire") made violation more common, and perhaps it was
> therefore less psychologically traumatic.
>
> I'm thinking of the way the death of my daughter was and still is
> earth-shatering, but just a couple of generations ago, when infant
> mortality was more commmon, people apparently managed. Psychological
> trauma and the need for refu'as hanefesh (beyond refu'as haguf) appears
> to partly be a function of expectation.
>

I don't think that this is accurate. It is more accurate to say that this
tzaar was just not discussed and written about and put into the JPost or on
Ynet so we don't know the extent of people's private suffering.

I remember that my mother told me that she overheard her father consoling
her mother after the loss of their infant son [my mother's infant
brother]. In the early 1920's there were many people who lost children to
disease and other things and it did not seem to have made it any easier
according to elderly relatives that I heard stories from. It just wasn't
dwelt upon and people didn't have therapists or social workers to run to
for every trauma in life, so they just "dealt". Or not.

And we have all heard holocaust survivors tell stories of watching family
members be murdered, which was unfortunately very common at that time, and
they were certainly as traumatized as anyone else would be in that same
situation.

Bringing this back to the original subject, I don't think we would ever
find evidence that rape or molestation was less traumatic or less
problematic at any other time in history. People just had to suffer
whatever they had to suffer and didn't have blogs to announce to the world
how they felt about it. The question is what remedy Torah mandates for this
crime against a person and their family.

It does seem to my "modern sensibilities" that monetary compensation should
not be the end of the story, but on the other hand I remember being
surprised at how little punishment one got for killing one's slave by
beating him to death.

*** Harchinam
     out in harei yehuda
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