Some of you know all or part of this story. The seeds of what happened this past school year were planted unintentionally by people who are peripheral to my life. First came an offhanded text (that doesn't seem technically possible, let me find a better word than offhanded), a casual text from someone I know who was experimenting with deepening her sense of Judaism. She told me she'd seen a good speaker and I asked what it was about. I don't remember the whole thing but it was relating shame and something else and teshuvah.
What interested me had nothing to do with the speaker or the person who told me about it. My thought was, if I don't ever intentionally hurt anyone or do any harm, and when I do something even by accident I apologize and try to make amends, what exactly am I atoning or repenting for? And let me just say, I'm not dealing with having evil thoughts as a sin of any sort. Having evil thoughts and not being evil is a positive, not a negative.
The answer that was most obvious to me was things that you did and didn't even realize you'd done. Who had I harmed without realizing it? So I started thinking about this a lot, and just then, #metoo happened. I've never had any kind of incidents and the one time I gave a student a 3-minute ride to the train station I was terrified. But what might I have said or done that made someone feel uncomfortable or harassed?
In the course of my exploration, I started hearing stories of harassment at my school, as there seem to be almost everywhere. I had never really thought about sexual harassment to any depth. I'm a feminist and have thought about issues of bias and discrimination, but harassment specifically wasn't anything I'd focused on.
Long story short, as I explored harassment in general and in the school, three things happened. First, an alum offered to come to school and talk to seniors about sexual harassment in the post-high school world, there were sexual harassment incidents that sent shockwaves through the school, and I tapped into an undercurrent of frustration with the way people in the school treated each other.
What followed were many meetings of constantly growing size, assemblies and discussions among students, teachers and administrators. There was a growing realization that we as a community needed to meet this challenge head-on. And we come into this school year with the topic of how we treat each other at the top of many agendas. Now let's see what happens next.
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