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“[M]ost of us believed he was just a slightly delusional and idiosyncratic personality with an exaggerated sense of self importance and a lack of empathy, hardly a crime or even a rarity in the rabbinate…”

Really? Wow.

The ribald rabbi with the radio schools us on… rabbis.

Margaret Soltan, October 28, 2014 10:07AM
Posted in: forms of religious experience

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3 Responses to ““[M]ost of us believed he was just a slightly delusional and idiosyncratic personality with an exaggerated sense of self importance and a lack of empathy, hardly a crime or even a rarity in the rabbinate…””

  1. Greg Says:

    I’ve been looking at a lot of Rembrandts lately, both in museums and on the web. Over the last week or so, this story has reminded me of his Susanna and the Elders and of course the underlying creepy story from the Book of Daniel.

    Of course the moral and legal wrongs are flabbergasting. But, as someone who has written some fiction and would like to write more, I’d like to hear his inner dialogue. Purely sociopathic and narcissistic — with no need to justify? Or involving some deluded and baroque set of “justifications? With anything left in the moral tank, how would a serious Rabbi with a sick compulsion, not just immediately check himself into a mental health facility, given the harm to specific congregants who were being betrayed, his entire synagogue, his family and, ultimately to the wider set of institutions permitting trust in general .

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Greg: I’d have to go for “deluded and baroque set of justifications,” but that’s probably because I like to figure out ways to continue to assimilate everyone into the human family…

  3. MattF Says:

    People like Freundel picture themselves at the center of an epic moral struggle– in particular, if you can persuade enough people that it’s true, then it’s true. In the meantime, the various little sleazy and humiliating facts of their actual lives simply disappear in the fog of war.

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