The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter Sept./Oct. and Nov./Dec., 1999, Vol. 6, Number 5 & 6. NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SEXUAL TRAFFICKING Human Rights Guest Speaker: Blu Greenberg, Author Jewish Law and Women's Rights Blu Greenberg

F or me as a Jew, the Torah is the central source of morality and ethics. The crime of sexual traffic in women violates several core principles of the Torah. The first is the explicit commandment in Leviticus 19:29, a chapter that carries special weight because it is evocative of the Ten Commandments, which are embedded in that chapter. It reads: "Do not defile your daughter by selling her into harlotry and do not thereby violate the land, lest it be filled with depravity."

Now, the Torah is not at all prudish about sex. In fact the First Commandment is about being fruitful and multiplying, and there is only one way to do that- And, of course, this first story about human relationships, about human beings, is about Adam and Eve. And even though it's skewed from a feminist perspective its all about the naturalness of sexual relationships. But the tradition understood that sexuality must be in the context of a relationship and to separate sex from human relationships is to destroy the humanity of the person.

But the verse in the Torah is remarkable not only for its time, because it came to us in a society where women were bought and sold, but also for its broader context that is, the holiness and purity of society at large or, to put it another way, the perversion on a cosmic level.

Selling a woman's body degrades her and it spills over into the whole society, bringing it down, polluting the land, driving out all sancta. So the Torah teaches us that not only are the body and soul inter-connected, but individual human beings in society are inter-connected and humanity and nature are inter-connected.

The second violation is against slavery. In truth, the Bible permitted slavery but with very tight limits on it. Slaves were required to have a day of rest and not suffer physical abuse. They could go free after they paid off their bond. They could go free with their earnings. There was the seventh year of freedom and the jubilee year and additional markets and protections, Moreover, even when slavery did exist the sexuality of a female slave was protected.

The law of Exodus 21:11 permitted a father to sell a young daughter as a slave to another Israelite and often this was done. The assumption is out of poverty or indebtedness, but when the slave girl reached marriageable age the master was required to do one of three things, to marry her himself, to take her as a wife for his son, or allow her to go free.

He could also pledge her to another Israelite, who could redeem her with payment to the first master, but the new master was also required to marry her. In other words, she wasn't sexual property. She could only be taken sexually in marriage.

Her sexuality was intact even as a slave and even if she was transferred as a slave to another man. In truth, the motives may not have been so benign, i.e., protection of her sexuality. There may have been an economic factor, also, because a virgin was a less desirable wife. Nevertheless, the end result was to eliminate the possibility of sexual traffic even in a slave girl.

By contrast, trafficked women of today or trafficking today is much more primitive than slavery of ancient cultures. Reports from the victims of the slave trade show that they are beaten, raped, robbed, bought and sold, held in debt-bondage, held against their will, with constant supervision, no control over when and how much they must work, tremendous fear in their lives, and physical punishment if they try to escape-- the classic attributes of the worst kind of slavery.

A third injunction is the law of kidnapping, no less than one of the Ten Commandments. Actually, the Ten Commandments come to us in two different places in the Torah, in the Hebrew scriptures. In the second one, in the verse "thou shall not steal"- the injunction against stealing- the rabbis of the Talmud interpret the second formulation of the Decalogue in the book of Deuteronomy to refer to 'stealing a life' as that of kidnapping a human being. Trafficking in women is kidnapping- Many of these young women were kidnapped, some with the knowledge of their parents, some lured through some trickery. Something more attractive dangled before them, for instance, the prospect of being hair dressers or waitresses or earning a lot of money. So, given the violation of so many of the fundamental precepts of religious tradition, given the sheer weight of the tradition against such a heinous crime, given the commitment of religious leaders to the sanctity and integrity of family life, given the enormous emphasis on sexual purity and its implication for holiness of the whole society, I am baffled regarding religious leadership.

Where are the rabbis? Why don't they speak out?

Where are the imams and the priests and the ministers and the clerics? With some few exceptions, they're not involved with this issue. Furthermore, the exceptional few who have taken the initiative to enter into these troubled waters don't have much support from their colleagues in their work. I think there are many reasons why the clergy of all faiths don't get involved here. For one, it's not the people in their pews that deal with these issues. Secondly it takes enormous time to hear the stories and enormous energy to absorb the pain.

Religious leaders are very busy. They are on total overload handling crises of relatively intact families. So the attitude is, let women's groups handle this or let the law, the lawyers or the judges, handle this. And, of course, the pimps and the traffickers don't come around to religious leaders for advice. And yet each of us is set down on earth as responsible for the moral fabric of society, not just for our own lives but for society at large, and each of us is given a gift in that we are entitled to make moral judgments. But some of us are invested with greater moral authority than others, and some voices carry more weight in values dissemination than others. The latter are religious leaders. And as religious values shape our society, those invested with religious authority simply cannot look away.

If this is as grave a sin as the tradition communicates, and as grave a sin as I feel in my bones, then our religious and moral leaders must be vocal, pro-active, and present on the issue. And I believe they can play a large role in taking up the challenge that will ultimately save souls and bodies and protect society and cleanse it.