When I was chosen this year to serve alongside Queen Rania of Jordan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Richard Branson as one of the judges for CNN's Heroes, I met and befriended an incredible woman named Carolyn Lecroy who runs the Messages Project, which videotapes prison inmates reading bedtime stories and communicating with their children. As I watched Carolyn's work with my own children on the DVD CNN sent me, tears streamed down all of our eyes. We immediately identified with the millions of children who have done no wrong but whose parents' incarceration brings them unending suffering.
Madoff and Rubashkin: A Contrast in Two Scandals
When I was chosen this year to serve alongside Queen Rania of Jordan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Richard Branson as one of the judges for CNN’s Heroes, I met and befriended an incredible woman named Carolyn Lecroy who runs the Messages Project, which videotapes prison inmates reading bedtime stories and communicating with their children. As I watched Carolyn’s work with my own children on the DVD CNN sent me, tears streamed down all of our eyes. We immediately identified with the millions of children who have done no wrong but whose parents’ incarceration brings them unending suffering.
In this spirit, consider the case of Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin, the former chief executive of Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, who has been denied bail and is being detained pending trial in the Dubuque County jail where his wife can visit him once a week for 25 minutes and communicate only through video conferencing. She is charged with looking after their 10 children on her own, including their 15-year-old autistic son Moishe.
WHAT COULD this rabbi have done that would cause the justice system to be so harsh? To be sure the charges against him are serious, including child labor violations and knowingly employing hundreds of illegal immigrants. But Bernie Madoff allegedly ripped off $50 billion and took scores of Jewish charities to the cleaners, including the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Yet he’s sitting under house arrest at his $10 million East Side apartment! Rubashkin and his wife Leah long ago surrendered their passports to federal authorities, not to mention the fact that he was previously fitted with a GPS ankle bracelet. So why did the judge deny a multimillion dollar bail package offered for his release, with 32 people offering mortgages on their homes to back the bond?
In his November 20 decision, federal magistrate Jon Stuart Scoles offered the astonishing and disquieting rationale that Rubashkin is a flight risk because “under Israel’s Law of Return, any Jew and members of his family who have expressed their desire to settle in Israel will be granted citizenship.” Huh? A federal judge designates 5.5 million American Jews as potential flight risks due to Israel’s Law of Return, and the Jewish community responds with silence?
It is possible that there are uncharitable motives behind the absence of any Jewish outrage to a ruling with potentially devastating consequences to our community’s basic rights. Until he imploded, Bernie Madoff was in a business Jews consider sophisticated and noble, finance. He was a secular Jew who made good on Wall Street and even brought the community pride by becoming chairman of Nasdaq. Rubashkin, by contrast, was essentially a glorified shochet and butcher, the country’s largest producer of kosher meat. Rubashkin’s beard and black hat were enough to unnerve many Jews. But that his missteps at Agriprocessors highlighted what others consider the unsavory sight of Jewish ritual slaughter all but guaranteed Rubashkin’s total abandonment at the hands of American Jewry.
THIS EXPLAINS why, in sharp contrast to what is developing in the kosher meat industry, there has been no move afoot to establish something akin to “Hechsher Tzedek,” a rabbinic certificate of ethical excellence, for financial institutions. After all, how is it that when so many of the people going to jail on Wall Street turn out to be Jewish, the Modern Orthodox and Conservative movements have not immediately launched a campaign, as they are doing with kosher meat, to evaluate firms that invest Jewish money to ensure that they conform to the highest ethical norms in terms of treatment of employees and overcompensation of dead-beat executives?
Why is it that only kosher meat is being singled out as being in need of ethical reform? I suggest it is because the Jewish community has an obvious sense of discomfort with ritual observances that the non-Jewish world finds confusing or distasteful rather than the Jewish money machine which, when it works soundly, everyone rather enjoys.
To be sure, Judaism commands the highest ethical treatment of animals, including the commandment to feed one’s livestock and pets before oneself. Indeed, the whole purpose of shechita is the severing of an animals’ carotid arteries leading to death by asphyxiation so that an animal dies without suffering. I for one applaud many of PETA’s goals of ensuring humane treatment of animals, even as I decry some of its more radical means, like their comparison of the slaughter of animals to the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust.
BUT LET’S be honest, the hatred that Jewry feels for Rubashkin cannot be completely divorced from his profession as a giant kosher butcher no more than secular Israelis natural scorn for the bearded settlers can be completely divorced from their view of them as religious fanatics who are obstacles to peace. Consider the fact that Israelis have expressed no strong outrage against former Knesset speaker Avrum Burg who recently published a book, highlighted in The New York Times recently, suggesting that “Israeli Arabs are like German Jews during the Second Reich and that the entire society felt eerily like Germany just before the rise of Hitler.” Burg adds that “the Israeli government would probably soon pass the equivalent of the Nuremberg laws, with provisions like a prohibition on marriage between Jews and Arabs.”
Now who is more of a fanatic? The settlers, or Burg who equates Israel with Hitler but is largely given a pass because of his essentially secular bearing (diminutive yarmulke notwithstanding).
WHEN I was a teenager at Chabad yeshiva in Los Angeles, my friend Dovid Goldman’s sister Leah married a young rabbinical student from a Lubavitch family distinguished for its pedigree and vast philanthropy, including a decades-old soup kitchen in Brooklyn that fed thousands. His name was Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin and there was great chatter in our yeshiva because his wife Leah was a ba’al teshuva (returnee to Judaism). I had never met him but respected him for rejecting some of the sillier ideas inherent in Orthodox courtship, including the fact that those from religious backgrounds do not marry those who are new to Jewish observance.
Those who read my columns know that I can be a sharp critic of this kind of Orthodox excess. Still, I have always been extremely proud of my faith, just as I have encouraged my Christian and Islamic brothers and sisters to be proud of theirs. If Rubashkin is guilty, he will pay a terrible price. But our rejection of him as some kind of fiend before he even goes to trial says more about us than it does about him.
The writer is the founder of This World: The Jewish Values Network. His upcoming book, The Kosher Sutra: Eight Sacred Secrets to Recreate Desire and Recapture Passion for Life will be published by HarperOne in January.
zeldy
A true life comment! Worth being publicized by all who can send it on – preferably to send this thoughtful article to “important” or influential people.
Who do you think you are?
Boteach ruins his article by writing:
“If Rubashkin is guilty, he will pay a terrible price.”
A-
Boteach, you are not Hashem, who are you to decide another human’s judgement????.
B-
As we have seen since day one in the Rubashkin case, paying a terrible price has nothing to do with if you are really guilty of crimes you are being accused of, rather it has more to do with if the government has decided to use you as a scapegoat and if the Jewish world has largely decided to help feed you alive to the scum and the system that is behind what happened and what continues to happen to Rubashkin.
Even if there are any wrongdoings whatsover on Rubashkins part, remember this…
1-They have been grossly exagerated.
2-Some of the “crimes” were a direct consequence of the situation the government put them in after they raided their plant and basically shut it down(no money to pay back bank).
3-Most murderers are not arrested and treated in the same way the governmemnt is treating Rubashkin.
4-Compared to other very big companies that were “caught” doing similar activities (illegal workers), the treatment of Rubashkin is completely biased and hugely disproportionante.
Please daven for Sholom Mordechai HaLevi ben Rivka for an immediate and complete and apparent Geulah together with all of us Yidden.
Please increase in Torah and mitzvos with this in mind.
Moshiach NOW!!
May we hear good news.
voices!
kol b’ramah nishmah our mother rochel will not be silenced
her voice will be heard read and seen
Eli
I think we in CH Brooklyn need to start the ball rolling and show more than just lip service before we can expect other individuals and organizations to get involved.
I hear a Kosher Kool-aid drinker
“They have been grossly exagerated.
Some of the “crimes” were a direct consequence of the situation the government put them in after they raided their plant and basically shut it down(no money to pay back bank).”
How about looking at things from the other side.
SHOCKED!
The first thing i’ve ever read from him that doesn’t stink! Very well put.
boteach does it again
Shmuley makes sure we don’t miss the fact that he had the “merrit” of being “chosen” together with other great people and personalities (sick) as a judge for CNN, etc, etc. bla bla bla bla. What a YICHUS! What a great man!
It’s what he goes on to “BOLBE” in the rest of the article that makes me want to vomit. He is soooooo full of himself, it pathetic.
Shmuley, I assure you, this has nothing to do with jealousy.
I wonder why you couldn’t just make the few good points in the article and leave it at that. I guess if you did that, you would’t stand out and above normal people.
SHOIN TZAIT TZU CHAPEN ZEECH TZUM SECHEL.
INDEED A MAVEN
BOTEACH…..THIS ARTICLE SAIS MORE ABOUT “YOU”, THAN IT DOES ABOUT “US” OR “HIM”.
teenager
moshiach now look in to your self the deepest partof your self and make it shine may it shine more than it already does!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
reality
all people should learn how to axcept the fact they u have weeknesses and rnt perfect. i love how eveyone goes and statrs attacking one of the only people who had the strength to speak up, and just because he isnt singing ur praises doesnt meen its not the truth.
Huh
This is a ridiculous equation.
The difference between Madoff and Rubashkin is that Madoff — when discovered to having been a criminal — was ostracized from the secular Jewish community, while Rubashkin has largely been embraced and his crimes excused by people who place sentimental personal interests before values and ethics.
Yossel
who cares at least he took the time to write one and untill you or me or anyone else is willing to do something then just keep on doing what you do best NOTHING
HAPPY VHANUKA
MM
Shmuley wrote an article that should awaken all of us to the horrific realities and the necessity for us all to do something.
Instead, in these comments you can see the trouble with the world and indeed our own “community” which would choose to replace the matter at-hand with their obnoxious opinions about the author or his message.
To all those nay-sayers
“Mekabel es haemes mmi sheomar”
crown heightser
It’s actually a good thing that Boteach is a judge for CNN, because as such he can make more of an impact on what he’s saying. Let there be 10 more letters like Boteachs! We need all the pro Rubashkin press coverage we can get
38 yr in the hood
hey !!!! yingiy lets get the buss rolling to demonstrate , we need @least 2o buss filled . iam ready to go . lets get avi wise inolved in the demostration . lets move.
smully boteach wrote very nice . ok one point was out of line , but the rest was on target,,,,,
happy
so much noise but no one cares. its just another day.what i always here is its for someone else to take care of.we have problems at home and around the world and i gess we are to busy with are oun lives. for myself all i can say is that i say more tehillim every day [for what ever it worth] and do mivtza tefillin.may hashem bless us all with the coming of moshiach amen.