A Fiery Furnace

Rabbi's Notes - February 2001

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

I remember stopping by the home of a friend who had a TV during the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. That day I caught the most intense moments of Anita Hill's testimony. As we watched, my friend was alternately cursing and making bitter jokes about how such a @#$%^&* would surely be confirmed despite it all. Which of course he was. I don't remember much more about that exact moment, but I'm sure I joined in the bitter laughter and the crude jokes about his crude jokes. Even so, I felt a little twinge in the pit of my stomach, and not just because I too love crude jokes. And when Thomas said shortly afterwards that he hd been the victim of a "high-tech lynching," I felt a complicated mix of reaction.

All this came back to my mind a few years later during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. And it's been haunting me again this past few weeks as George Bush Jr. has been selecting his cabinet, and we are, as I write, in the midst of confirmation hearings once again. Just a few days ago word came out that Linda Chavez had withdrawn her candidacy for Labor Secretary because of allegations that she had hosted or employed an undocumented person in her home sometime in the past.

I don't think it would surprise many Megillah readers that didn't want to see Clarence Thomas seated on the Supreme Court. I was excited when his opponents in the Senate found a "smoking gun" in Anita Hill and hopeful that all the allegations of his sexual inappropriateness would derail his appointment. But it also made me a little sick at heart. Because my opposition to Clarence Thomas was never based on his sexual jokes, or even what kind of employer he was. And if many of us who opposed him at the time would have been honest with ourselves, we would have known that it was profoundly wrong to shame a person publicly because of their private behavior. He was right: he was, if not lynched, at the very least publicly stripped and humiliated. It was a terrible thing, and a dishonest thing. As far as I am concerned, he never should have been confirmed -- because of his record on a host of issues that matter deeply to me. But if the political process doesn't weight these issues as heavily as I do, so be it. It's our right, our responsibility, to oppose politicians with vigor when their views collide with our own. But not "by any means necessary." "Yesh gevul," as they say in Israel about a completely different subject: "there is a limit" to how far you can go to get your way in the political process.

Not only did one human being suffer degradation, but those hearings, I believe, lowered the bar on political discourse from that point on. If it was okay to do to Clarence Thomas, it was okay to do to Bill Clinton. If it was okay to do to Bill Clinton, it is okay to do to Linda Chavez. And now we can look forward to the personal life of any candidate for public office or public service being raked through and gleefully used as ammunition by his or her opponents. We can expect the candidates we love as well as the ones we loathe to be routinely shamed, degraded, humiliated because of things they have done which have nothing at all to do with their political roles. And, if we cheered when it happened to Thomas or Clinton or Chavez, we have brought it on ourselves when it happens to someone we support.

Jewish tradition weighs in vocally on this topic. The most eloquent disquisition has to be the one in Talmud, Baba Metzia 59a. The lengthy passage begins with a hypothetical question: which is worse: to cohabit with a woman who might be married, or to shame someone in public? There is a wonderful midrash here about King David, after his great sin with Bathsheva. He is complaining that the people around him go out of their way to bring it up, even way out of context. "Even when they are engaging in the study of leprosy or tents, they say to me, 'David, what is the penalty for one who cohabits with a married woman???'" And the midrashic King David replies to his inquisitors, "'His death is by strangulation, but he still has a share in the World to Come. But someone who puts his fellow to shame in public has no share in the World to Come.'" And this is just the beginning of the hyperbole our passage in Baba Metzia brings this topic, the pinnacle being: "Mar Zutra bar Toviyyah said in the name of Rav, and some say, Rav Hana bar Bizna said in the name of Rabbi Shimon Hasida, and some say: Rabbi Yohanan said in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai: It is better for a person to cast himself in a fiery furnace than to shame another person in public." Notice here how many rabbis want to sign on to this statement (and notice, too, the lovely Jewish mandate to quote people by name when you recite their teachings...)

The passage concludes by deriving a lesson from the story of Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38, if you want to refresh yourself on the story.) Tamar has, for a righteous reason, disguised herself as a prostitute and entrapped her father-in-law, Judah. As payment she has taken her "client's" staff, cloak and ring. Now she is pregnant by an unknown man, and she is to be burned at the stake for committing harlotry. Yes, there are many moral difficulties in this story! But the rabbis use it here to make a point: at this moment, she "sent word to her father-in-law, saying, 'By the man to whom these belong I am with child...'" (v.25) So, say the rabbis, she dealt with the matter discreetly, trusting Judah's conscience, even at risk of her own life. Hence: better to be thrown into the furnace than to shame even a guilty person in public.

Now even the Hafetz Hayyim, the most extreme rabbinic authority on matters of speech, says that there are occasions when one must disclose unpleasant information about another person. Maybe you have information that would cause someone not to go into business with someone else, or not to marry a particular person. Yes you can, indeed should, tell that information -- but only the least bit of information possible. And only directly to the person who needs to know. The hearer in turn is responsible to use the negative information only to make the specific decision. And then the hearer must intentionally forget and disregard what they have been told and never spread it further.

So, in this light one might say that we the public are like a person planning to go into business with a candidate. There are certainly things we really do need to know to make a wise decision about our proposed partner. One could certainly make a good case that the person who has committed sexual harrassment in his office should not become a judge who will rule on other people's sexual harrassment cases. Or a person who has employed someone illegally shouldn't be the Labor secretary. (I can't even think of a hypothetical reason why a president who has extramarital sex shouldn't continue to be president. But maybe someone else can.) Maybe some of the salacious facts really are germane and need to be exposed. And since our system is one of public hearings, since we are all theoretically like partners in business with our elected officials, perhaps they really do need to be asked about such things in public and the answers displayed on TV and in the newspaper. As with most moral questions, they really are questions.

But we might think for a moment about Tamar or about that long list of rabbis in the Talmud or about the Hafetz Hayim next time we see a public figure being exposed in such a naked and personal way as candidates routinely are today. And at the very least, maybe their sobering influence will keep us from cheering.

Copyright 2000 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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