...I think rape should be a hate crime, not a sex crime, because people continue to be confused that rape is a form of sexual behavior.

I will just get this off my chest too while we are at it. A long time ago the first friend I told wrote me a supportive letter...it was great. Wasn't my fault etc but she also at one point wrote that

"she would like to embarrass him like he embarrassed me" and I remember I grimaced when I read this and thought oh no I am not the one who's embarrassed ... I did nothing wrong. But I was so grateful for her letter I didn't want to get nit picky!!

I think rape should be called an "anti-sex crime" (Catroot)
I think rape should be a hate crime.... (Matt)

+++ and not just against women - against all humanity and the beauty of human sexuality and even against God (in whose image we are created and being created). OK, I get that God talk is hard for secular society, but it isn't for those whose social justice is religiously motivated and they are largely silent too.

Does it ever occur to anyone that the tendency to reduce rape trauma to its mental health sequalae and see it as a "women's issue", is merely another example of our failure to exclude the experience of woman as part of the paradigm of humanness?

I yearn for is the day we have a rape literature on par with that created to suck meaning out of the Holocaust and the experience of war. No one says that âThe Deer Hunterâ only has meaning for Vietnam Vets coping with their war experiences or that Victor Frankl's âMan's Search for Meaningâ is a niche publication for survivors of the Holocaust.

There is something that we learn during rape or during the recovery process that makes it more than just a woman's issue or a woman's story.

Beth

"Does it ever occur to anyone that the tendency to reduce rape trauma to its mental health sequalae and see it as a "women's issue", is merely another example of our failure to exclude the experience of woman as part of the paradigm of humanness?"

Just last night I told a college class that I have a real problem considering this a "women's issue," because it lets men off the hook to ignore the topic and remain distracted when it's addressed. I'm also making a strong case in my current writings that rape trauma is unique among all trauma in its spiritual wound, coining the term "Post-Traumatic Soul Disorder" to describe the effects. I'm also proposing that treatment of it will require a more innovative approach than mainstream therapies have even considered, let alone been willing to do. I think there has to be inclusion of spirituality (for spiritual people, at least), ceremony/ritual, social connection between the client, the therapist, and other survivors, community-building with other survivors (hence this "RAR" group), and availability of support outside the 50-minute-a-week appointment.

It'll never fly in any administrative setting, though. Dialectical Behavior Therapy comes the closest so far.

A crime against the beauty of sexuality...that phrase describes so eloquantly a strong thought/feeling of mine that I've never been able to put into words.

"I'm also making a strong case in my current writings that rape trauma is unique among all trauma in its spiritual wound, coining the term "Post-Traumatic Soul Disorder" to describe the effects."

Matt, this is beginning to make a lot of sense to me. Until therapy, I had never even considered the spiritual impact of my rape. If asked, I probably would have denied any. But my therapist kept saying, in different ways, "They wounded your soul." And I would think, "Huh? Not really" even as I was telling my therapist that I had never thought to pray during the rape, it was as if God had ceased to exist during that time, and I had never really talked to God about the rape afterwords. "It just isn't part of our relationship," I would tell my therapist, and I couldn't figure out why he saw this as another symptom of my wounded soul.

I'm still working out the whole "Why does God allow suffering?" issue. I think the hardest aspect of that question for me is why innocent children are raped and abused. I don't know if that is even a question that can be answered in this lifetime.

"I'm still working out the whole "Why does God allow suffering?" issue. I think the hardest aspect of that question for me is why innocent children are raped and abused. I don't know if that is even a question that can be answered in this lifetime."

This is me. However, it really applies to how could this happen to anyone innocent.

The God issue.. I am not sure what to do with that one. I know that I could not go to Temple last Friday night. Too much stuff. and where was God?

It does effect your soul.

Now, I am approaching the death of my abuser. It brings it to question what do with all of the Jewish traditions around death. For me, I will not do most of them for it does not make sense for me. It is about those of us left behind. I will not sit shiva. I will not have my dad's name put in the bulletin or email. However, I think that I will say kaddish.

The God thing throws everything up in the air.

I wish I had a good answer to that question. But even if that's a mystery, I DO believe that God has a particular preference for wounded people. I think people who have been wounded, oppressed, or mistreated in some way constitute those especially chosen. Every world religion and every sacred text through history bears that out, but the problem is that our society doesn't act like that's true.

I also know that God doesn't allow suffering because God is just passive, ambivalent, detached, or uncaring; my understanding of God is a spirit that lives in and through all things, experiencing our lives with us, WITHIN us, not observing from a "distant above" (the word "compassion" means "to love with" or "to love in partnership," and the word "religion" originally meant coming into awareness of the Sacred present within all things, according to Joseph Campbell).

Clearly, God is wounded simultaneously with us during our trauma, so it would be impossible to conceive of a God who just isn't deeply interested in the healing of our wounds or the process of restorative justice for wounded people. As we heal, God heals. God is wounded too, if you can conceive of such a thing.

Being all-powerful does not mean being "immune" to our struggles. This is why I think that your healing is not just a psychological task, but a holy work. The more you heal, the more God heals within you too. Healing is a mutual atonement between the wounded person and God.

But good luck finding mental health professionals who see it this way. This is the gap between psychology and ministry, and it hasn't been bridged yet.

I often wonder why the lacking of such understanding. Why can we not bridge that gap. I believe that God dwells within us guiding us and feels our pain. I believe that he cries for the hurting and is angered by those who hurt. I know and have experienced what Matt wrote about God healing too. I get that.

I absolutely believe that God has a special feeling for the wounded.

An old Jewish proverb from the Talmud states: 'The gates of Prayer were locked when the Temple was destroyed, but the gates of tears are always open'.

In the bible, 'widow and orphan' is a code word for all who are wounded in some way. They have lost emotionally, socially and economically. The family headed by a male was the unit of governance in the ancient middle east so to be a woman or a child without a family was to be the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Over and over again starting with the Torah (traditionally, the law handed down to Moses along with the 10 commandments) and moving on through history to the prophets, the bible demands that we take special care and give justice to 'widows and orphans'.

I first began seriously dealing with the question of God when I was 16. The God I have known in all those years of prayer and study is one who decidedly is on the side of those who suffer. I can't say that strongly enough.

I have no answer for why children (or adults) suffer. I'm not sure I even want to give one. Among the many types of âbad speechâ Judaism recognizes and condemns, one of them includes saying to someone who is ill or burying their children, âGod never punishes the innocentâ.

What I can do is to affirm the right to argue with God. Job did. Jonah did. Abraham did. So can you.

I do believe that God has some crazy love affair with free will. I believe for free will to mean something it has to have the capacity to create evil as well as good. Action without consequences is meaningless. But since this devotion to free will, even at the expense of evil, is God's choice, God also has responsibility to clean up the mess that free will creates. God owes us redemption and if we're not getting it we have the right to hold God accountable and demand it from God.

But it is also a partnership. When the world was created, God said to God's creation, humankind: âI have given you dominion over the earth and all that is in it.â For God to undo the damage of free will without violating free will, God needs yet another freely made choice to fix it. As incredible as it sounds, God needs our permission and even our joint efforts to redeem.

Most of those funny things were supposed to be single quotes - sorry - still experimenting with how to get OpenOffice to use only ascii characters.

A further clarification: God specifically has to allow the ability to choose evil, because God in God's self absolutely doesn't want evil. If we can only choose what others want, we aren't free.

Elisheva, that is exactly why I am titling my next book, "The God of Wounded People." I am taking the radical position that there is no other God BUT the God of Wounded People. I believe that it is impossible for God to dither support for those who suffer.

When you say that 'The gates of Prayer were locked when the Temple was destroyed, but the gates of tears are always open', would it be sacrilegious to suggest that the word "temple" refers not only to the physical temple of the Jews, but also metaphorically to the human being herself? Consider the profound meaning if you understood the phrase this way also: 'The gates of Prayer were locked when your body was assaulted, but the gates of tears are always open'. In other words, during and after trauma, prayer became hard; God felt distant. But through healing, grief, and tears, we regain atonement with God.

I must say that this last two sentences is quite profound.

"In other words, during and after trauma, prayer became hard; God felt distant. But through healing, grief, and tears, we regain atonement with God. "

I am clearing am in the first sentence.

After trauma should also apply to discovery of trauma later in life. That has rocked me. It would be nice to get to that second sentence.

James: cool website, man. Thanks!

Matt wrote:
When you say that 'The gates of Prayer were locked when the Temple was destroyed, but the gates of tears are always open', would it be sacrilegious to suggest that the word "temple" refers not only to the physical temple of the Jews, but also metaphorically to the human being herself?

Would it be sacriligious? ... not at all... that is a wonderful reading.

First there is a Jewish tradition comparing the human being to the Temple. From the Talmud (Taanit 11b): Let a person always consider him/herself as if the Holy One dwells within.

And from Brachot (the section of the talmud discussing blessings):

"Just as God fills the whole world, so the soul fills the body. Just as God sees, but is not seen, so the soul sees, but is not itself seen. Just as God feeds the whole world, so the soul feeds the whole body. Just as God is pure, so the soul is pure. Just as God dwells in the innermost precincts [of the Temple], so also the soul dwells in the innermost part of the body."

Second, the phrase "when the Temple was destroyed" is a formula that is used in a number of Jewish proverbs. Objectively it refers to the actual date when the second temple in Jerusalem was destroyed (70CE). But on an emotional and spiritual level, it refers to the trauma of the temple's destruction. Each of the proverbs using that phrase describes one of the ways that trauma changed the way Jews approached God. As with all trauma, the impacts were on many levels: ritual, social, philosophical, ethical, and spiritual.

Folding in other related traumas into a particular trauma is also very much within Jewish tradition. The notion that trauma is both particular and archetypal is also deep within Judaism. This shows up especially on Tish B'Av and Yom Kippur. Tish B'Av is the day set aside to remember the fall of the temple. But it also remembers the exile to Babylon 500 years earlier. And in modern times, the memory of various other dispersions and exiles have been folded in.

Of all the traumas in the history of Judaism, I think connecting rape to the fall of the Temple is particularly appropriate. On this thread we have already discussed the theme of exile in relation to rape, but the connection is appropriate for another reason as well. There is a long standing tradition in Judaism to use the reason for the Temple's destruction as a moral commentary and reminder of our responsibilities to each other in the present.

Jewish tradition attributes the destruction of the temple to reasonless hatred. Because of that hatred the Jewish people self-destructed, failed to protect one another, and even sabotaged one another. To the extent that rape is a symptom of our society's failure to teach mutual respect, the very fact of rape shares a common root with the destruction of the actual physical temple. To the extent that someone is attacked as a random target, just because they happened to be at a certain place at a certain time, they are destroyed by the rapist's senseless hatred. To the extent that someone is more vulnerable to repeat victimization because of earlier âsenseless hatredâ inflicted upon them, that person is like the Temple weaked from within and without by hatred.

Although I think comparing whatever the rape destroyed to the Temple is completely appropriate, are you sure you want to specify that it is the _victim_ that is destroyed? I know it is hard to come up with a good alternative word for what actually was destroyed. I still haven't thought of one, or I would have suggested it. All the same, in your book you work hard against blanket statements of destruction when your clients try to pass them off as truth and even suggest a journal essay to name all that was not destroyed.

Rape destroys a great deal, but the one thing it does not destroy is the core person, the soul-breath that is within us and was created by God and reflects the image of God. Rape can obscure the soul behind grief and anger and shame. It can bury it deep in our unconscious. But it is there all the same, waiting until we have the courage to find it and reconnect it to our conscious selves.

But going back to your observation that temple=what was destroyed (whatever we call it). You have put together several centuries of Jewish reflection and custom together in a simple observation. Way back on post #18, you wrote... I'm not claiming to be a profound religious thinker... you are a lot more profound than you give yourself credit for.