Don't Panic

There's something horrible in the news

I hesitated before writing this post. But there was a special Knesset Committee session on it, the police have opened an investigation, the Times Of Israel ran an article on it, and it’s probably only going to get more publicity. So, before you read about it elsewhere and panic, I would like to arm you with some reassuring information.

Last month, MKs from the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality and the Special Committee on Youth Affairs heard appalling testimony from numerous people. This was regarding organized ritual sexual abuse that they experienced as children over a decade ago. The stories left members of the Knesset Committees in tears.

These were accounts of incidents that took place primarily in the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious communities in several cities in Israel. Doctors, educators, police officers, and both former and current Knesset members allegedly took part. The tales involved the most appalling torture. They also involved bizarre rituals. One person said that her abusers slaughtered a snake, mixed its blood with hers and drank it before raping her.

It’s absolutely horrific. And there are indisputably many, many deeply traumatized people. But while I’m certainly not one to deny the existence of crime and sexual abuse in the Orthodox community by prominent figures - just look at Yona Metzger and Leib Tropper and Yehuda Meshi-Zahav and Chaim Walder - everything that I have read on this story (which is about alleged events that I wrote about a decade ago) and similar such stories leads to me to believe that, for the most part, it’s not true.

Investigative journalist Menachem Kaiser wrote two outstanding articles on this story several years ago, Panic in Jerusalem and An Open Letter to a Community in Pain, which are a must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about this terrible story. It’s very difficult for people to grasp the power of the phenomenon, but what appears to be happening is mass hysteria. In some cases there are real incidents that are exaggerated, but in other cases people are deeply traumatized by childhood events that never happened, but which they genuinely and sincerely believe did happen, as a result of the adults falling victim to this strange psychological phenomenon.

I first discussed this phenomenon ten years ago in a post titled When Mass Hysteria Attacks. There have been several cases of it - the 1983 West Bank fainting epidemic, in which nearly a thousand Palestinian schoolgirls and IDF female soldiers were hospitalized for fainting and nausea believed to have been brought on by poisoning, and the 1954 Seattle windshield pitting epidemic, in which many thousands of people reported seeing pits and bubbles suddenly appear in their car windshields. The most serious case by far, and the direct precedent for the current case in Israel, is the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic which swept the world during the 1980s. It was widely believed that there were vast numbers of people involved in this and that a conspiracy had infiltrated the highest levels of society. Yet of the twelve thousand alleged cases, not a single one was substantiated. Eventually it was determined that there was never any satanic ritual abuse and that the whole matter had been a product of mass hysteria.

The Satanic Ritual Abuse panic, along with the daycare abuse scandals of the 80s and 90s, were facilitated by numerous psychotherapists who engaged in “recovered memory therapy” to elicit testimony from the child victims. But, as Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson explain in their fascinating book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), “recovered memory therapy” was subsequently scientifically discredited, and is described as “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental-health field since the lobotomy era.” Yet its practitioners often cannot bring themselves to believe that they were mistaken.

When the ritual abuse ring panic started in Jerusalem just over a decade ago, people genuinely believed that dozens of children had suffered at the hands of a ritual abuse ring like those described in the US in the 1980s. Prominent community leaders, learned and good people (but not knowledgeable about the psychology of moral panic), believed it. They also believed that one of the masterminds was a certain 72 year old woman who had been housing the ring’s horrific activities in a secret lair beneath her home in Nachlaot, and that she was attempting to convert the children to Christianity. Some of the children’s fathers broke into her home, ransacked it, tied and gagged her, and beat her with crowbars until they broke her limbs.

The police caught the men, who told them that they were acting under the guidance of Rav Moshe Shapiro, the brilliant but overly-passionate and zealous creative thinker (who, a decade earlier, spearheaded the ban on my books). Rav Moshe flatly denied it and published a letter declaring that the victim was a righteous woman.

So one of the fathers promptly produced a video that he had secretly recorded of Rav Moshe Shapiro telling them to do it. You can watch the video in my post on this topic, “Vigilante Action and Rav Moshe Shapiro.” Rav Moshe told them that the police are not going to be of any help, that some tough men need to put on masks and break into the woman’s home to overturn it and find the secret dungeon, and that the woman herself must be beaten until the point of hospitalization; he added that he doesn’t mind if she is beaten beyond that point.

The video evidence led to Rav Moshe being indicted. No secret dungeon was found in the woman’s home. And a year later the Israel Police announced that after a lengthy investigation, they had discovered that the "secret abuse ring" was fabricated by three people as a way to make money. These people had conspired to spread rumors of a terrible threat in order to solicit funds for an organization to fight this fictitious threat.

Traumatized parents, an elderly woman beaten nearly to death, several men who were desperately trying to protect their children sent to prison. It was a terrible story with many victims. As seen in the latest news, though, this was clearly not the end of the matter. The panic has spread far and wide, and the children of a decade ago, now adults, are attesting that they were the victims of terrible crimes.

Are there numerous instances of pedophilia, even in religious communities, and even by people in very powerful positions? Undoubtedly. I know of many terrible cases, and you can look at the crucial work that Magen does. Many go unpunished, and many more go entirely unreported. And according to experts in the field that I consulted, the perpetrators sometimes act in groups, and sometimes there may be elements of torture beyond the abuse, and sometimes there may be some ritualistic elements.

But are they coordinated by a giant secret organization which involves the most extreme forms of torture, bizarre religious rituals, and is protected by a nationwide conspiracy involving the highest levels of doctors and police and government? What is the evidence for such an extreme claim, beyond the words of suggestible children surrounded by panicking adults? Isn’t it more likely that we have a repeat of the discredited Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s?

There are, unfortunately, enough day-to-day cases of regular abuse that need to be properly dealt with. Theories about enormous conspiracies involving national ritual cults are distractions from these and can hamper them from getting the attention they deserve and being dealt with properly.

The human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe. It’s capable of extraordinary accomplishments. But it also malfunctions in ways that most people don’t appreciate. Books like The Invisible Gorilla, Predictably Irrational, and Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) illustrate just some of the ways in which are brains are far less reliable than we believe them to be. Even intelligent, honest, adults can sincerely believe things about their own lived experiences which are demonstrably false. It’s important to be aware of this.