My very last consultation last Friday was with Rabbi Mordechi Dovid Slivovitz of Silver Spring, Maryland, recently elected President of the Modern Orthodox Rabbinical Organization National and International Council. Frankly, I’ve never seen him so upset.
“Oy vey ist mir,” he wailed as he plunked his ample, ovoid frame down on the couch with an air of complete anxiety and consternation, “the worst crisis since the Doheny glatt kosher scandal has erupted, right here in Washington DC – and in Georgetown, no less!”
“You are referring,” I presumed, “to the arrest of Rabbi Barry Freundel, of Congregation Kesher Israel, the most prestigious upscale Orthodox Jewish synagogue in the entire National Capital area?”
“What else?” Slivovitz shrugged. “The entire Jewish community is in an uproar about it!”
“Uproar or not,” I noted, “isn’t today Simchat Torah? What are you doing here talking to me about Barry Freundel? Plus, it’s Friday and sundown is coming pretty soon. How did you get downtown to my office and where are you going to walk to after this appointment?”
“Not to worry,” he assured me. “I’ve made all the proper arrangements.”
“Which were?” I pressed.
“As for attendance of a consultation appointment with you on Simchat Torah,” he explained, “there are special extenuating circumstances which the Council’s Talmudic and Halaka Committee unanimously agree take precedence over Simchat Torah, which is, after all, not a major high holiday, like Passover.”
“Furthermore,” he continued, withdrawing a Samsung Galaxy from his coat pocket, pointing at it and explaining, “as for what happens after sundown today, Uber is sending over a nice Shabbos goy with a car to drive me back to my shul in Silver Spring. So, about this Barry Freundel mess. As rabbis go, he’s about as big a macher as you can get, you know – fancy expensive synagogue in Georgetown with Joe Liberman, Linda Greenhouse, Jack Lew and more than half of the most influential members of the Washington Jewish community in his congregation. Not only that – he teaches law at Georgetown University, ethics at Towson University, and advises the NIH on biomedical ethics! You get it, Tom? “Law” and “Ethics” are this guy’s middle names! This is not some small-time schmegegge conducting services in Pittsburgh for a bunch of little old ladies wearing babushkas, Tom, this is a person who has been called the most prominent Orthodox rabbi in the United States! And what happens? His entire family is there at his house next to the synagogue – they came to visit for Sukkot, Shimini Atzeret, and yes, Simchat Torah and the Shabbat after that, of course, since none of them could travel out of town back to their homes until Sunday. And what happens Tuesday, right in the middle of all that? They get to watch the DC Police make him do a perp walk in handcuffs in front to the TV cameras!”
“Charged,” I interjected, “with voyeurism. ‘Oh, how the mighty have fallen’ – Second Book of Samuel, Chapter One, Verse Twenty-five.”
“Tell me about it,” Slivovitz fumed. “They said he had been sneaking peeks at the women in the mikveh, with a camera hidden inside a clock radio! Can you believe that – a camera in a clock radio?”
“The Sony Dream Machine digital clock,” I pointed out, “not only has a built-in hidden high definition color surveillance camera, motion detector activation and a DVD player, it also comes with an eight gigabyte SD card at no additional charge.”
“And I bet he got it for wholesale, too,” Slivovitz sighed. “But what possible excuse could he have used to put a clock radio in the mikveh?”
“The police say,” I related, “that if a woman asked him about it, he told her the clock radio was ‘for the ventilation system’ or words to that effect.”
“Ventilation system?” Slivovitz huffed. “And they believed him?”
“Apparently,” I surmised, “the typical upscale Orthodox Jewish female Washingtonian is unfamiliar with how HVAC systems actually work. It seems a shiksa who was converting to please her Orthodox Jewish fiancé became suspicious about that explanation and decided to investigate. When she opened the clock radio up, there was a digital camera inside.”
“It figures,” he groused. “Only a shiksa would be… mechanically inclined enough… to monkey around with opening a clock radio. That’s the problem right there with conversions, Tom – if that putz had gotten engaged to a nice upscale Orthodox Jewish woman, everything would be fine today; she would have gone right ahead and taken her clothes off in front of the camera inside that clock radio…”
“And the one hidden in the fan,” I added.
“In the fan?” Slivovitz gasped. “You mean, there was more than one camera in the mikveh?”
“I’ve been told there are several,” I said, “in various locations, including…”
“This is all a big pile of lashon hara,” Slivovitz interrupted. “It has to be!”
“The DC Police say it involves multiple devices in multiple locations,” I assured him. “And when they searched his home, they found six external hard drives, seven lap top computers, twenty memory cards and ten flash drives.”
Slivovitz blanched white. “Have they found any pictures of… underage girls?”
“Nothing yet,” I dryly responded. “But that’s an awful lot of digital memory to search, not to mention recovery and reconstruction of deleted files. They’ve already found over one hundred deleted files with feminine names and they’re working on finding out what’s in them as we speak. If the police do find any pictures of juveniles, of course, he will probably be charged with child pornography, too.”
Slivovitz bent forward, placing his face in the palms of his hands. “Oy gevalt, oy, oy…” he softly moaned. “Eleven days after I become President of the most intelligent group of Jewish scholars outside of Israel this verkakte schande happens! Can you believe it, Tom, we were about to announce that the Council was going to give him an award – for his lectures and essays on Orthodox Jewish Morality and Ethics in the Age of Technology. We’ve already booked the banquet hall and had the plaque engraved – now we’re going to lose over two thousand dollars in deposits and for what? For bupkis, that’s what! Eleven days, Tom, eleven days after I get elected President of the Council, the world finds out that the great Rabbi Barry Freundel – the man who oversaw thirteen rabbinical courts last year, the man who was the chairman of the Orthodox Conversion Committee, the man who is the leading authority in the Western Hemisphere on the Laws of Yichud – is, in reality, nothing but a hypocritical alter kacker! What kind of meshuggeneh luck is that?”
“Perhaps,” I speculated, “He Whose Name Cannot Be Mentioned is testing your faith, as he did His loyal servant, Job.”
After a moment pondering the proposition, Slivovitz slowly shook his head. “Not likely,” he replied. “Such a thing only needed to happen once. No, Tom, the test here isn’t my faith – it’s whether I can figure a way out of this predicament.”
“What predicament?” I asked. “Sure, maybe Barry Freundel has gotten himself into a predicament, but not you.”
“The pickle I’m in, Tom,” Slivovitz explained, “is that sooner or later, it’s going to come out that on Tuesday, we were six days away from publishing a press release…” He reached into his briefcase, extracted three pages of hard copy and handed them to me. “Here… this… read it for yourself, by Monday night I had already written the first draft. See how I extoll this guy? See how I laud him? See how proud I am that he’s an Orthodox Jew? When, Tom, not if, but when it gets out that the plaque and the banquet hall reservations were for Rabbi Barry Freundel, and that I am responsible for them, and when, not if, but when one of those three fachnyok frommers I beat in that election for President of the Council eleven days ago gets hold of a copy of this draft press release, I’m going to be the biggest klumnik nebbish in Silver Spring, if not the entire National Capital region!”
“Understandable,” I conceded. “But you seem to be overlooking one important aspect of the situation.”
Slivovitz looked up at me hopefully. “Really? What?”
“All your conclusions,” I noted, “are based on the assumption that there’s no acceptable explanation for Rabbi Freundel’s conduct.”
“Well… well… well of course,” Slivovitz stammered, “how could there be?”
“Is it not the case,” I inquired, “that the great majority of Talmudic authorities place practically no restrictions on how a male doctor may examine a female patient?”
“True,” Slivovitz agreed, “even for routine checkups.”
“And even more so,” I pressed, “if she is cholan sheyesh bah sakanah, for example?”
“The more dire the dangers posed,” he nodded, “the fewer the restrictions.”
“And what if the dangers are to the woman’s spiritual well being, instead of her body?” I proposed. “And if, instead of a doctor, the man is her rabbi? Should those differences result in any significant distinction?”
“Probably not,” Slivovitz mused as he took out his laptop and began poring over on-line Talmudic references. “Let me just check that…”
“And isn’t the reasoning behind such latitude for a male physician,” I maintained, “that because of his professional position and relationship with a woman who is his patient, he is extremely unlikely to experience hirhur?”
“Correct,” Slivovitz acknowledged, staring intently at the screen, tapping away furiously at the keyboard and frowning fiercely with scholarly concentration.
“So would it not follow,” I reasoned, “that it is an acceptable heter with respect to the relevant Halachah for Rabbi Freundel to observe performance of mikveh rituals in order to safeguard the spiritual well-being of the woman engaged in them?”
“Why would he be concerned, though?” Slivovitz wondered as he paused his Googling and looked at me quizzically.
“A woman convert,” I suggested, “performing her first mikveh ritual, might overlook critical requirements, such as complete and through cleansing in the shower prior to immersion, as dictated by the Halachah. The immersion might be incomplete, or she might not properly recite the Blessing of Conversion, ‘Baruch ata adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam asher kid-shanu b’mitzvo-tav v’tzi-vanu al tevilat gerim.’ Any such discrepancies would render her conversion invalid, would they not?”
“Probably,” Slivovitz grumbled as he returned to staring at his laptop. “Maybe not the thing with the shower before, but if she doesn’t go all the way under, including her hair, or she is wearing jewelry, or screws up the prayer, then the conversion could be disputed, at the very least.”
“So it would be in the female convert’s best interests,” I argued, “for Rabbi Freundel to document every aspect of this essential portion of her conversion to Orthodox Judaism.”
Slivovitz stopped tapping his laptop keyboard once more and threw a steely gaze my way. “Okay, say that gets him off the hook for making videos of the conversion mikvehs. What if there are others that aren’t conversion mikvehs?”
“Not to worry, he’s got all of the niddah mikvehs covered, too,” I asserted.
“What about the zavah and yoledet mikvehs?” Slivovitz fretted.
“All of those,” I assured him. “It doesn’t matter which – the rules say she has to completely immerse herself without touching the walls or the floor of the mikveh and recite the Blessing of Purification, ‘Baruch ata adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam asher kid-shanu b’mitzvo-tav v’tzi-vanu al ha-tevilah.’ And if she doesn’t do it right, she’s not properly purified.”
“That’s true,” Slivovitz vouched. “All those details are very, very important.”
“So important,” I emphasized, “that, as a matter of fact, there is supposed to be someone watching her doing all that stuff, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” Slivovitz nodded sagely, “two witnesses are required.”
“So,” I concluded, “Rabbi Freundel is only in trouble if the DC Police find a video where there are two witnesses present. If there is only one – or especially, if there aren’t any – he can argue that the cameras were ethically and morally acceptable use of modern technology to verify and validate correct and successful performance of his congregants’ mikveh rituals.”
Slivovitz ceased typing again and stared at me, but this time in awe. “Ei, yei, yei! That explains why he has so many of them! That’s brilliant, Tom!”
“Thanks,” I replied with a modest smile.
“Okay,” Slivovitz declared as he snapped his laptop shut and glanced over his shoulder out the picture window behind the couch, “looks like I’ve got about five minutes left before sundown, so I need to get in the elevator while I can and go wait out on the street in front of the building for that Uber car to show up.”
“Right, better hurry,” I encouraged him.
“So – you figure Freundel is going to use that argument of yours in court, and he’s going to be found innocent and not look like a gonif? And if that happens, I’m not going to look like some kind of ganz mamzer schmo?” Slivovitz asked as he paused, his hand on the door knob, awaiting my answer.
“Take no chances,” I advised, “regardless of what Freundel says, you tell everybody that’s what you thought he was doing.”
Slivovitz shook his head and smiled. “Tom Collins,” he proclaimed as he opened the door, “it’s a shame you’re a shaygetz, because you’d make one hell of a Talmudic scholar!”