BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

JUDAISM & ABUSE: EXPECTING BETTER This was written a few years back. Despite strides in educating leading rabbinic authorities it seems that nothing much has changed… not yet. Some are truly working on the problem and I beg them to keep working on it. Sometimes preserving a marriage AT ALL COSTS or allowing a manipulative man to make a woman an AGUNAH and then looking the other way - is NOT the way to go. Allowing the verbal & emotional abuse of children in the name of Torah and keeping it hush-hush for appearances is enabling the abuse! Loshen Hara can be a mitzvah if it stops an abuser from taking advantage of his family, his friends and the world at large. If You Beat Him He Will Not Die by Richard Silverstein A personal and theological meditation on child abuse As spiritual communities, it is enormously important that we provide grief work as part of the process of healing [from the effects of abuse]. At the same time, we have to take that lesson of choosing to...

There is a pervasive way of thinking in our culture today that seeks to undermine women's fight for empowerment. Women are being attacked at every opportunity by messages designed to make them feel bad about themselves, in hopes that these women will then buy what the messenger is selling. At the Media Awareness Network , this problem is defined quite clearly: Why are standards of beauty being imposed on women, the majority of whom are naturally larger and more mature than any of the models? The roots, some analysts say, are economic. By presenting an ideal difficult to achieve and maintain, the cosmetic and diet product industries are assured of growth and profits. And it’s no accident that youth is increasingly promoted, along with thinness, as an essential criterion of beauty. If not all women need to lose weight, for sure they’re all aging, says the Quebec Action Network for Women’s Health in its 2001 report Changements sociaux en faveur de la diversité des images corpor...

As I have said here repeated, I am healing myself; though it will always be ongoing. Even disabled, my overgrown sense of responsibility tells me I need to do some small thing to contribute to society in a positive way. As someone I respect said "service to others is the payment for living here on Earth ." I am also doing teshuva towards others I may have harmed (since I have been blocked from working it out with any of them directly) by working with victims of Domestic Violence and running a blog on the subject. I work mostly with non-physical forms of abuse: Verbal, Emotional, Online or Psychological. Abuse that is almost impossible to see and even harder to get at and often scars permanently. This month is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Aside from my political babbling, I am going to post about abuse. I hope you take the time to read these posts, pass them on and, if you need help - you can email me privately and I will try to point you in the right dire...

For the women I counsel ... by Michele Toomey, PhD Abuse that begins in childhood takes the highest toll. Children are just forming their view of the world, their sense of who they are in relation to the world, and where the power lies. Abused girls tend to learn that they are unworthy and have little or no power and that the bullies are superior and have all the power. Some abused girls react rebelliously and counterattack, becoming abusers themselves, but they are the minority. Either way, childhood abuse takes a toll that has a lifetime effect. The most devastating toll is the self-abuse that evolves out of being abused. Children think they deserve the abuse, and they turn on themselves. Instead of learning how to live intimately and at one with themselves, in keeping with the integrity they were born with, they are at war with themselves, violating themselves and their integrity. They learn to say to themselves the abusive words and phrases that have been directed at them. They for...

In June 2007 I wrote an article called PRISONERS OF THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. Over that summer I was lucky enough to attend a number of conferences on Domestic Violence Advocacy, an area where awareness & advocacy is still desperately lacking. Aside from my speaking out about the lack of or insufficient responses from law enforcement, a lot of talk circled around faith-based abuse counseling. It seems priests, pastors, rabbis and so on are still trying to keep families together when there is clearly a cunning and remorseless abuser or exploiter in the home. Many don't get verbal, emotional or psychological abuse at all! And worst of all, they have little to no knowledge of what their "forgive & forget" speeches and minimization of the abuse's effects do to children. I made the following honest comments to one group: I grew up in a home where I was insidiously abused. To this day I deal with a profound lack of ego & self-esteem and seem to be a magnet f...