by Rabbi Josh Knobel

 

While the national media remains glued to ever-changing dangers posed by Iran, North Korea, and Syria, an imminent threat continues to plague the Western world with little scrutiny. Though this menace has taken on many guises, potentially masking its coherence, the single greatest threat to democracy comes neither from the Middle East nor the Far East – it comes from disaffected, young men, who constitute the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of mass violence in first world-countries.

The most recent instance of Western mass violence witnessed a 25-year-old, self-proclaimed “incel,” an involuntarily celibate man, using a van to kill ten innocents in Toronto, ostensibly as revenge against a world that he felt owed him sex. Though sexual frustration may seem a novel rationale for mass murder, mass murderers regularly cite their dissatisfaction with a world that denied them the dignity, sexual or otherwise, to which they felt entitled.

Though we struggle to solve indiscriminate violence born of unfulfilled expectations, women have faced this sense of male entitlement, and the violence that accompanies it, for millennia.

In fact, Jewish tradition paints an unapologetic picture of the disastrous effects that violence against women can wage upon a civilization in the Book of Judges.

[1] By exploring the moral and spiritual deterioration that occurs within a society when men treat women as objects and sex as an entitlement, Biblical tradition suggests that women can serve as the barometer of a society’s likelihood to endure, a barometer we would be wise to heed.

In the aftermath of the Toronto attack, it should be abundantly clear that violence against women, which now kindles indiscriminate mass violence, poses an existential threat to Western civilization. As a movement that has long embraced female religious leadership and gender equality, Reform Judaism uniquely possesses the responsibility to devise a strategy for enriching Western civilization with a culture that teaches young men how to view women as true equals, rather than as objects to be attained. By developing an answer to one of our tradition’s greatest historical challenges, we can also save Western civilization from its greatest peril.

[1] See Judges 11:39, 14:1-3, 14:18, 19:20-22, and 21:16-23, among others.