Promote Biblical Family Values:
Stop Draft of Women in Military
Stop Sexual Abuse and Rape of
Women in Colleges and the Military
Make Family Affordable
Stop Government Pressure for Anti-Biblical Family Values
By Rabbi David E. Eidensohn Disciple of World’s Greatest Rabbis
Aharon Kotler, Moshe Feinstein, and Yosef Shalom Elyashev, all of blessed
memory
The
Talmud tells us that in the End of Days, prior to the Coming of the Messiah,
the Satan will be given great power to do things that never happened in earlier
times. Although great sins always snared people, there were still some
standards. For instance, there are sins of eating forbidden good and stealing,
and yet these sins are common with some people. But even people who do many
sins refrained from insulting their parents or the parents of their spouse. But
in the era before the Coming of Messiah family values will collapse, not
everywhere, but relative to earlier times. New sins in family will appear. “A
son will berate his father, the wife her mother-in-law.”
The new
level of sin is the profaning of Derech Erets, the Way of the World. This
means, that people have an innate appreciation of how to behave as people, as
human beings. Before the arrival of Messiah the ability to refrain from
behavior that defiles our humanity will be weakened. The most sensitive level
of Derech Erets is with family, how we treat our parents especially. True,
dealing with all human beings is Derech Erets, the Way of the World, a holy
obligation upon each person created “in the Image of G-d.” But there is a
special and higher level of treating our parents properly. After all, they
brought us into the world and they raised us, and we must show our
appreciation. If a stranger raised us, would we not appreciate it? Surely, if
our parents have us as children and raise us for many years, we must honor
them. This is the highest level of Derech Erets, the Way of the World. And
before the Coming of Messiah, the Satan will have the power to loosen this
appreciation even though before that time people generally honored their
parents.
We find
in the Written Bible, the Torah, three sections. Torah, Prophets, and Holy
Writings. Torah is the Five Books of Moses and basic history and laws. Prophets
is the work of the prophets. Holy Writings are entire books such as Psalms of
David, the Book of Job, the Book of Daniel, etc.
The end
of the second section of the Bible, the Prophets, is about Elijah the Prophet.
G-d spoke of the Redemption and said, “I am going to send you Elijah the
Prophet … and he will restore the hearts of the fathers to the sons, and the
hearts of the sons to the fathers…lest I come and destroy the world.” It is
very rare for a biblical book to end on a bad note, one of curse and
punishment. But if the world does not respond to Elijah’s efforts to restore
Derech Erets, the Way of the World, and the feeling of humanity in family, G-d
will destroy the world.
This is
our time and our challenge.
There is
a book taught by Elijah to a great rabbi of the Talmud known as Tono Divei
Eliyohu, the Teachings of the Yeshiva of Elijah. The first lesson there is that
Derech Erets, behaving like a human being to other human beings, is greater
than the Torah. This has become a popular phrase, “Derech Erets precedes the
Torah.” And today, in times of great testing and great evil, the Satan is
empowered to test us with Derech Erets. And we must withstand the pressures.
The
gemora that talks about this testing time adds that things will be so difficult
that “We have nobody to rely upon other than our Father in Heaven.” Rabbi
Elchonon Wasserman, the greatest disciple of the Chofetz Chaim explained, “This
does not mean we should despair. It means that G-d is with us when we struggle
even against the darkest day in our history and the furious power of the Satan.
We will merit the Coming of Messiah because we trust in G-d and defend
ourselves against the prevailing temptations to violate Derech Erets even in
family matters.
Stop Draft of Women in Military
The
above gemora mentions that in the End of Days before Messiah arrives,
governments will deny biblical values. In America we have President Obama
working very hard to use the military as a tool to violate biblical family
values. He has appointed an openly gay person as a very senior general, and has
turned the traditional male military into a male-female army. Now, women are
weaker and smaller than men. You never heard of a woman who can play on a
professional football team. But Obama worked hard to bring women into the
military and shoot it out and smash and stab men who are stronger than women.
What will happen to the weaker ladies? But Obama does this not because it
enhances the military, but because it enhances equity, equity with ladies who
belong in the house raising children, and equity with men who are openly gay
and who will influence the military to become accepting of gay actions, even
publicly. Woe to an American lady who is captured by ISIS. Her life will be a
slavery publicized for the entire world to see the horror that Obama created for
American women.
Biblical
Family Values means that we take a look at Harvard and its tragic failure to
protect women from rape, see below the entire article. We also want to publish
facts on abuse in the American military which is a growing failure with no end
to the most hideous suffering of women who joined the military voluntarily. Now
the government is getting ready to force all American women into the military
where even more of them can be raped. In this article, we deal mostly with
Harvard, as the military has a huge annual book with the stats on rape and
abuse, and we can’t use all of that stuff right now. But the Harvard article is
only a few pages long, and it says very important things, so now we will talk
about Harvard, and hopefully, in a later article, we will deal with the
military. The military has some very complex problems that has created a great
uproar in the United States Senate and elsewhere, and we have to do that
separately. Now back to Harvard.
In
September of 2015 the Harvard Gazette, the official publication of Harvard
University, devoted much space to the problem of women being raped and abused
sexually in Harvard College. The article is published here below. But we quote
here some very troubling parts of that article. In the article, these sections
are in red, as they are here.
The
survey found that sexual harassment is a problem for women students all across
the University, with 72.7 percent of undergraduate women reporting an incident
of harassment during their time at Harvard, while fewer than 62 percent of
undergraduate women in the broader 27-school survey reported such incidents.
Almost half of Harvard’s
female graduate and professional School students reported being harassed, and
21.8 percent of these women said a faculty member had sexually harassed them.
Here is the
article. I find it amazing that the smartest professors of Harvard are
wondering why Harvard came out so poorly regarding suffering of women there.
For one thing, here is a part of that article: But when
asked how likely University officials were to take action against an offender,
46 percent of female undergraduates said they had little or no confidence that
they would. In addition, 84 percent expressed some doubt any action would be
taken. Overall, 68 percent of Harvard students surveyed were dubious of
follow-through against offenders.
How in the
world could Harvard’s geniuses who run the school have ignored the most basic
thing that is to create confidence that a molester would be punished? If that
wasn’t done, what are they doing about these things?
But allow me to
conclude with my thoughts about Harvard and the military. These are both
organizations with tremendous talent and money. But saving women from rape is
beyond their ability.
Biblical Family
Values are the answer. In my family, boys and girls never mix, ever. A secular
writer once commented in amazement about how in Israel the ultra-Orthodox girls
are virgins. It is nothing to be amazed about. Ultra-Orthodox children are
mostly virgins. But when you go to Harvard, and are not home, but in a dormitory
that is flowing with men and women who are boiling with biology, and drinking
and who knows what else, you are going to have rape and abuse.
Another point.
My children and ultra-Orthodox children marry young. When you have people
earning a doctorate before they marry,
you get Harvard. Thus, the military and Harvard and modern colleges with co-ed
dormitories will never be free of rape and abuse. And yet, they will never be
honest enough to accept that without separation of male and female there will
always be suffering women. They know it, of course, but since their purpose in
life is to be modern, they have to accept that women will be raped and too bad
because it is more important to be modern.
Troubling findings on sexual assault
Harvard’s portion of national study paints disturbing
picture
September 21, 2015 | Editor's Pick
Jon
Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
President Faust
discussed the survey results with students Monday night at the Science Center.
By Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Staff Writer
In tandem with
the release of findings from a new national survey of college and university students
about sexual assault, the University’s Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual
Assault made Harvard’s data public Monday, including results that paint a
disturbing picture of sexual misconduct here on campus.
In a 13-page letter to President Drew Faust, Task Force
Chairman Steven E. Hyman said that the survey, which was administered to nearly
20,000 degree-seeking students enrolled at Harvard College, the Graduate School
of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), and the 10 professional Schools last spring, makes
clear that sexual assault is “a serious and widespread problem that profoundly
violates the values and undermines the educational goals of this University.”
Women at
Harvard College appear especially vulnerable to sexual assault, the survey
said. More than 60 percent of women in the College’s Class of ’15 responded to
the survey. Of those, 31 percent said they had experienced some sort of
unwanted sexual contact at Harvard. Ninety women characterized that contact as
what the survey termed “nonconsensual completed or attempted penetration
involving physical force, incapacitation or both,” the most serious category of
misconduct. This group comprises 16 percent of female College seniors.
Faust finds
results “deeply disturbing”
In an email to
students, faculty, and staff, Faust called the survey results “deeply
disturbing” and said the findings reinforce the “alarming frequency” with which
Harvard students experience sexual assault, and she called for a Monday evening
meeting to discuss the results with them.
“All of us
share the obligation to create and sustain a community of which we can all be
proud, a community whose bedrock is mutual respect and concern for one another.
Sexual assault is intolerable, and we owe it to one another to confront it
openly, purposefully and effectively,” Faust wrote.
The survey was
part of an effort led by the Association of American Universities (AAU), a
consortium of 62 research universities, to better understand the nature and
pervasiveness of sexual assault, harassment, and other misconduct on college
campuses. More than 150,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students
at 27 private and public research universities across the country took part,
making it one of the largest surveys of its kind.
Overall, 19.3
percent of eligible students responded to the AAU survey, though rates at each
institution varied depending on the type of school and size. At Harvard, 53
percent of the eligible students participated, the highest rate among the
universities surveyed. Faust said she took that as a “positive sign” that
students recognize sexual assault as a serious issue.
Harvard fared
slightly better than the averages reported by students in the national survey
aggregate. Four percent of Harvard students surveyed said they had at least one
incident of nonconsensual sexual contact last year. Additionally, 1.4 percent
said the contact was completed, or involved attempted penetration by use of
force, incapacitation, or both. Nationally, 6.5 percent of students reported
some form of unwanted of sexual contact, while 2.4 percent reported penetration
or attempted penetration by force or incapacitation.
Last April, the
Harvard task force asked students to complete an online survey about sexual
assault. Students were asked a series of questions about various kinds of
sexual misconduct that they may have encountered while they were enrolled at
the University, regardless of where or when the incident took place, or whether
the perpetrator was part of the Harvard community. The survey focused on
nonconsensual sexual activity conducted through the use of physical force,
incapacitation, or both.
The
survey found that sexual harassment is a problem for women students all across
the University, with 72.7 percent of undergraduate women reporting an incident
of harassment during their time at Harvard, while fewer than 62 percent of
undergraduate women in the broader 27-school survey reported such incidents.
Almost
half of Harvard’s female graduate and professional School students reported
being harassed, and 21.8 percent of these women said a faculty member had
sexually harassed them.
“We must commit
ourselves to being a better community than the one the survey portrays,” Faust
wrote in her email. “It is up to all of us to ensure that Harvard is a
realization of our ideals, not our fears.”
Also in
response, Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College, announced that the
College would host three town-hall style discussions with staff from the Office
of Sexual Assault and Prevention this week.
“We have it in
our power to make Harvard better,” he said in a message to students. “This is a
moment for all of us to take stock of what we stand for as a community” and to
make the necessary changes to better Harvard and the world.
At a 90-minute
meeting Monday evening before an overflow crowd at the Science Center, Faust
and Khurana answered questions from students following a presentation of the
survey results by David Laibson ’88, the Robert I. Goldman Professor of
Economics. Laibson, who serves on the task force and chairs the Economics
Department, was closely involved in the survey’s design and analysis.
As an
institution of higher education, learning from these survey results “is
something we are especially equipped to do,” Faust said.
“We want to use
those skills to figure out how can we combat this, how can we make it stop, and
how can we help the individuals who are trapped in these terrible, terrible
circumstances from ever having to have those kinds of things happen to them
again. How can we help future students not have to confront the same
realities?” she said. “Let’s use every tool that we have to make this a better
place.”
Students
attending the community meeting asked that the University offer more
opportunities to gather in both large and smaller groups not just to discuss
their views about sexual assault policy initiatives and programs, but also to
comfortably share their experiences in the hopes of learning more about the
underlying issues that contribute to such traumatic incidents. Many expressed
support for better and faster access to mental health services and the creation
of “safe spaces” so that final clubs events were not a focus of undergraduate
social life.
Noting the
essential value that students derive by socializing and learning from Harvard’s
diverse student population, Khurana appeared to signal that single-sex entities
like final clubs may face greater scrutiny in the near future.
“Any
organization that attaches itself, recognized or unrecognized, to Harvard,
recruits from Harvard students and enjoys any sort of status by being
affiliated with the College has to be in synchronization with the mission of the
College,” he said.
Alcohol use a
major risk factor
Unsurprisingly,
the use of drugs and alcohol as a “tactic” or precursor to sexual assault on
college campuses accounts for a “significant” percentage of reported incidents,
the AAU survey found.
At Harvard,
when students were asked if anyone had been consuming alcohol before an
incident of completed or attempted penetration when incapacitation was a
factor, 89 percent of respondents said they had been drinking, while 79 percent
said the perpetrator had been drinking.
“The percent of
alcohol is so high that prevention efforts are not likely to succeed if we do
not, as part of our final report, suggest approaches to decreasing the harm
associated with student drinking,” Hyman wrote in his letter to Faust.
More than 75
percent of Harvard College women reported the assaults took place in student
Houses, while at least 15 percent said they occurred at what the survey
categorized as “single-sex organizations that were not fraternities or
sororities,” a category that most closely aligns at Harvard with the
non-affiliated final clubs.
Not serious
enough to report?
One reason why
reliable information about the pervasiveness of sexual assault on college
campuses is so hard to come by, analysts say, is that, historically, few
students choose to report such incidents to someone in law enforcement, at a
university, or at another organization. The AAU survey bears out this
unsettling truth. Just 5 to 28 percent of students nationally said they had
reported an incident, depending on the type of misconduct. Among those who said
they did not report an incident, the most common reason given was a belief that
it was not serious enough to warrant action. Other explanations included that
the student felt “too embarrassed, ashamed, or that it would be too emotionally
difficult” to report the incident, or that she or he “did not think anything
would be done about it.”
On
that score, Harvard appears no different. Here, 80 percent of female
undergraduates who said they had been penetrated as a result of incapacitation
did not formally report the assault, while 69 percent who said they were
penetrated by the use of physical force did not report the instances.
Fifty-four
percent of Harvard student respondents who said they “had seen or heard someone
acting in a sexually violent or harassing way” did nothing to intervene. A full
80 percent who said they had seen a “drunk person heading for a sexual
encounter” indicated that they did not take any action.
Hyman
said the survey results are “entirely congruent” with testimony that the task
force has heard since its formation. “The fact that Harvard data is quite
similar to that of other private universities within the AAU gives little
comfort,” he wrote to Faust. Noting the “deeply ingrained” nature of sexual
assault, Hyman wrote, “It reminds us that we cannot simply make and implement a
series of recommendations and consider that we have done our work.”
Messages on
assault not being received
Despite
initiating several efforts in the last two years to better confront sexual
assault on campus, such as the adoption of the University-wide Title IX policy,
the establishment of the Office for Dispute Resolution to investigate
misconduct, and the addition of 50 Title IX coordinators to work across Harvard
on such issues, many students said they are not well-informed about where to
get support, how to report sexual assault or misconduct, how the University
defines sexual assault and misconduct, or what happens after a report is made.
Just 24 percent
of Harvard students said they were very or extremely knowledgeable about where
to go for help, and only 20 percent said they were very or extremely
knowledgeable about where to report an incident. When asked what happens after
a report is filed, 82 percent said the process wasn’t entirely clear to them,
and only 15 percent said they fully understood what constitutes sexual assault
or misconduct at Harvard. In all four areas, the percentage of Harvard students
who said they were very or extremely knowledgeable was consistently smaller
than the national survey average.
“Clearly, we
must do more,” Faust wrote. “University leaders — starting with the president,
the provost, and the deans — bear a critical part of the responsibility for
shaping the climate and offering resources to prevent sexual assault and [to]
respond when it does occur.”
To that end,
Faust has asked the deans from each School to prepare “school-specific plans”
that begin to facilitate community discussion, engagement, and action
surrounding the survey findings.
The task force
and the University’s Institutional Research Office will further analyze the
survey data to better understand the full results. In January, the task force
will submit a report and make recommendations to Faust.
Confidence in the
University’s ability to handle sexual assault cases vigorously and
appropriately varies widely.
Although 61
percent of all Harvard students think the University is “very or extremely
likely” to take a report of sexual assault seriously, only 43 percent of female
undergraduates at the College and at the Division of Continuing Education said
they feel that way.
Asked if they
thought the University would conduct a fair investigation of any reported
assault claim, 41 percent of Harvard students said they were only “somewhat”
certain officials would do the job properly, while 29 percent said the process
was “very” likely to be fair. Female undergraduates were a bit more skeptical,
with 45 percent saying a fair investigation was “somewhat” likely.
But
when asked how likely University officials were to take action against an
offender, 46 percent of female undergraduates said they had little or no
confidence that they would. In addition, 84 percent expressed some doubt any
action would be taken. Overall, 68 percent of Harvard students surveyed were
dubious of follow-through against offenders.
The national
survey was designed to provide university communities, federal policymakers,
and educational researchers with greater insight into the scope, frequency, and
nature of sexual assault and misconduct on American college campuses, the AAU
said in a press statement issued Monday.
The survey
results come amid growing pressure on colleges and universities from the Obama
administration, Congress, the Department of Education, and activists to codify
and make transparent their procedures for investigating, disciplining, and
reporting sexual assault cases, as well as the case outcomes.
Other
participating Ivy League schools included Brown University, Columbia
University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, the University of
Pennsylvania and Yale University. Public universities involved included the
University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Texas at Austin, among others.
END OF HARVARD ARTICLE
This is the end
of this, our first discussion on Biblical Family Values.
We invite
everyone to write us what they think about our work, with comments. We also
invite new people to join our email list.
Shalom,
Dovid E.
Eidensohn
Monsey, NY
10952
845-578-1917
dddeid@verizon.net
