RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The sexual revolution stripped young women of the social support they need to play gatekeeper, just as it deprived men of a positive vision, or even a reason, for self-restraint. Recognizing those losses is where any reformation has to start.”

Last fall, as the first #MeToo scandals scrolled across the cable news chyron, I happened to be reading Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s superb new biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. As Hagan describes the magazine’s early years in the 1960s, just about everyone on the staff—male and female—was having sex with everyone else, under and on top of desks, on the boss’s sofa, wherever the mood struck them. Hagan quotes one writer claiming that Wenner told him that “he had slept with everyone who had worked for him.” Compared with Wenner and the early Rolling Stone crowd, Harvey Weinstein was a wanker.

Did the women of Rolling Stone consent to the goings-on at what today would be regarded as an illegal den of workplace harassment? They appeared to. In the company’s bathroom, women employees scribbled graffiti ranking male staffers for their sexual performance—not, as they do on college campuses today, the names of rapists in their midst. Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, was known to judge job seekers by “whether a candidate was attracted to her” and, in some cases, to test the depth of their ardor personally. Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who made her name at Rolling Stone, routinely slept with her subjects and was rumored to have had threesomes with the Wenners.

Different as they seem, there’s a direct line between that revolutionary time and our own enraged, post-Weinstein moment. What started out as a clear-cut protest against workplace harassment has mutated into a far-reaching counterrevolution—a revolt against the combustible contradictions that the sexual revolution set in motion 60-odd years ago.

Exhilarated by the sudden freedom from the restrictive sexual morals of their mid-century childhoods and overflowing with youthful, and often chemically enhanced, animal spirits, countercultural kids like those at Rolling Stone gave little thought to the possible risks of their momentous experiment in sexual liberation. History is filled with social schemes, many cruel, some more lenient, designed to protect women and girls from sexually predatory males, as well as from their own risky but more discriminating desires: everything from codes of chivalry to chaperones, from burkas to single-sex dorms, from courtship rituals to romantic love.

I admit that I am absolutely unfamiliar with the music of Kanye West. But I also suspect that Mr. West is unaware of how his latest comments on slavery actually echo the interpretations of slavery that permeate Jewish classical texts.

When the people, later to be called Jews, were originally slaves in the land of Egypt, they were known as Hebrews and were considered the property of Egypt. After their release from bondage, they became Israelites. After three months of traveling toward the Promised Land, they received the Decalogue and it is here that they are introduced to “the fundamental and astounding idea” of freedom. As Rabbi Ben Zion Spitz, Chief Rabbi of Uruguay explains

God introduces to the world an entirely different concept of ‘slavery.’ It is a temporary condition. A Jewish man, out of luck and resources (typically because he stole something and then couldn’t repay), becomes an indentured servant for six years. He must be treated well and cared for. He must have a quality of life equal to that of his master. However, if he becomes comfortable with his servitude and his master, he can request to stay on longer. The Torah [Bible] prescribes that in such a case the master takes this slave to the doorpost and pierces the slave’s ear by the doorpost, marking him, branding him as a slave until the Jubilee year, when all slaves are freed, all men of Israel reclaim their ancestral lands.

This ear piercing is meant to signify that even though the newly freed people heard the First Statement (often called the First Commandment), they simply refused to listen to its incredibly revolutionary message. G-d freed them but they must be exquisitely careful not to become enslaved again and they must never make slaves of others. Thus, the piercing indicated that they refused to acknowledge that “man is meant to live free and not be the slave of any other human being.”