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Discovering the Lust in a Religious Man’s Heart

When I found pornography in my Talmudic mentor’s desk, I felt betrayed. What did it say about him—or about all of us?

by
Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman
November 25, 2014
(Andrea Sparacio)
(Andrea Sparacio)

When I was in my late teens, I discovered something that I did not wish to discover about a religious mentor of mine.

I found out quite innocently; he had asked me to get something for him from his desk, and I stumbled upon a cache of pornography. I thought I must be seeing things, so I looked in a different set of drawers on the other side of the desk. And there too was a stack of magazines: Hustler, Penthouse. This wasn’t a single lapse for him—it was habitual.

This man—not merely my teacher but a mentor, a man very close to me and 14 years my senior—had guided me through the intricacies of Talmudic passages. He had guided me in personal matters, too: how to conduct myself as a man, a Jew. As I stood at his desk, I felt the hot flames of betrayal down my throat. I held back tears as they formed in my eyes. I closed the door to his office to compose myself. How could this man do this to me, to himself? I closed the drawer and made believe that I didn’t see what I saw. I didn’t confront him at the time, or say anything to anyone else.

Even though this took place 34 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday.

For years after I made my discovery, I continued to learn from my mentor, trying to put the incident out of my mind. I had to. I was simply unprepared at the age of 17 to contemplate the king-size lusts in the minds and bodies of grown yeshiva men like him. Compared to him, I considered my libido pint-sized, but I did not want to think what might await me in full adulthood, and there was no way I would talk about it.

My friends and I were just a generation or so removed from the shtetl with its pieties and invisible boundaries: There were things that a Jew could not or would not do, red lines—an eruv that it was unthinkable to cross and a shame to even discuss. (I was still innocent enough to faint, if only for a moment, the first time I saw a friend of mine—in a rebellious act—break the Sabbath.) Certainly, the habitual use of pornography was one such red line. In our world one could fall, but one invariably got up. One had to get up! But with this horrible unwanted revelation, I was forced to consider that perhaps something was lurking in myself and others that was stronger than I had realized.

I cast about in a fugue-like state. My religious life became that peculiar Jewish mix of both sickness and health. One the one hand, I developed a puritanical streak with a shrill distaste for anything sexual. I even hated myself for being a man. On the other hand, I attacked myself for being a cover-up artist and party to a fraud.

The bigger problem was that I did identify with him, somewhat. We all have lust. So, I couldn’t wholeheartedly condemn the sinner or the sin, knowing the frailties of man and myself. But I couldn’t accept him or it either.

In my more lucid and sensible moments, I would turn to the sacred texts. The lost soul who roams the precincts of Talmud always has somewhere to go for comfort. And sure enough, the Talmud relates an illuminating event: Captive women who were redeemed were brought to the house of Rav Amram the Pious. They were placed on the upper floor of his house and the ladder was removed from the opening so that they would not be considered in yichud, or seclusion, with Rav Amram. That evening, Rav Amram inadvertently caught a glimpse of one of the women who passed by the opening between the floors. Overcome by her beauty, Rav Amram grabbed the ladder, which 10 men could not lift, and placed it by the opening and began to ascend. Halfway up the ladder he managed to stop himself, regained composure, and shouted as loud as he could, “Fire in the house of Amram!” Rabbis came running in and asked where the fire was. Rav Amram explained why he called them. They said, “You have put us to shame,” for revealing to us you were tempted to sin. He said to them, “Better that you be shamed now, in the house of Amram, in this world, and you not be ashamed by him in the World to Come.”

It was a great story, inspiring and reassuring, but I knew in my bones that there are moments in a man’s life when stories and even deep knowledge will not suffice. Knowledge breaks down in the face of irrational desire. In such moments, even the wisest meditations on sin and penitence, the most moving or inspiring stories, will not protect a man or make him whole. Nor will they explain a fractured, incoherent universe. Sometimes, these stories of triumph over the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, can fracture him further. The ever-present call, loud or soft, for a kind of mechanical repentance—one vows to be better, one vows to correct—can send a man further from himself.

The traumatized soul (and we are all traumatized, to a degree) needs to feel very deeply (but can’t), and like most young men I would have done anything to avoid feeling deeply. Years later, I reached out to the culture of psychoanalysis to help me understand my own sins and the sin of my mentor from a different perspective.

My mentor’s sin was completely alien to the pious life he projected. It was more than just a sin—it was 180 degrees in conflict with who he seemed to be. It had to be, I concluded, a protest vote. Somewhere in his religious soul was a deep fissure that he may not have wanted to know: madness, a healthy hate, a piece of heresy.

What do I mean? The horny preacher is by now an American archetype: Fire and brimstone at the pews on Sunday mornings, furtive trips to the massage parlor in the afternoon. This can be reflected even in the best of our men of God; Martin Luther King, whose oratory was verbal ballet and still moves the religious spirit in me, is at the same time famous for his cavorting and philandering. In such men who may be close or feel close to the divine spark, there may be at their core a profound disbelief in everything they say, everything they preach, and everything they are. Rather than confront that horrible darkness, the sin may be a way perversely unproductively and reprehensibly of avoiding a fissure in their own soul. A place where there is no God, where madness but also a vulnerable, quivering, challenging humanity reign.

***

I confronted my mentor nine years after my discovery. He didn’t deny it, nor did he fall apart when I confronted him. “All men fail,” he mumbled. In some sense, he was satisfied with himself. He didn’t want to look deeply at what he did or who he was. Nor did he really want to consider the effect it had on me. Deep down somewhere he was a man of great, great doubt—a doubt that would have destabilized him and everything he built in his life. He might not even have believed in God at all, but he’d rather see himself as a sinning servant of God than as a man in rebellion who was deeply unsure of who he was or his place in the world. That was to him worse than anything. No wonder he didn’t have much remorse. Pornography was both a sin and a mitzvah for him. It was an ingenious device that cast a weak protest vote but also sustained the world order at the same time.

To this day I can hardly blame him. Our fragile sanity often depends on us not looking at ourselves too closely. So few have the desire, even fewer of us can.

***

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Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman, a psychotherapist in New Jersey, is director of The New Center for Advanced Psychotherapy Studies. He is also author of the Yiddish novelYankel and Leah.

Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman, a psychotherapist in New Jersey, is director of The New Center for Advanced Psychotherapy Studies. He is also author of the Yiddish novel Yankel and Leah.