According to the guests gathered in a Great Neck, Long Island home who came together to celebrate a little girl’s first birthday, Rabbi Mordechai Aderet stormed in to the party and rained down curses like an ancient biblical prophet. Sharon Udasin of the New York Jewish Week describes the scene as follows:

‘After “shrieking Hebrew oaths,” the “uninvited” rabbi launched into a “lengthy diatribe” during which he told those who chose to remain at the party that they would be cursed with “illness, bankruptcy and tragedy for eternity,” according to a petition signed by some of those in attendance.’

Without defending Rabbi Aderet’s behavior in any way, the real story is the deafening silence from his rabbinic colleagues in the community. Where is the condemnation of such behavior? And if public condemnation is not the way to go, where is the attempt to reassure those who were shocked and scared by Rabbi Aderet’s antics at the party? With the exception of Rabbi Yamin Levy of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Great Neck’s Beth Hadassah congregation, not one rabbi has stepped up to do either.

It’s really a terrible situation in that, with one exception, those who claim spiritual authority stand mute in the face of hurtful acts perpetrated in the name of the Torah whose authority they claim. Or, as my friend Tom suggested, “What we are seeing is the tension between wanting to preserve the spiritual so desperately so as to act in a manner devoid of spirituality”.
Two possibilities strike me regarding such rabbinic silence. Either Rabbi Aderet’s fellow clergy are so weak that they don’t deserve to be regarded as the religious authorities they claim to be, or they play weak because they are actually sympathetic to the rabbis rantings against people who would allow mixed dancing at a party in their own home. Either way, it’s a sad state of affairs.
On the up side though, I guess it’s wonderful in the sense that this kind of foolishness can go on and it poses no real threat to anyone.