In the mid-aughts a trio of counselors at my summer camp, URJ Camp Harlam, coined a term for a certain kind of male persona, a set of behaviors and attitudes which commanded a great deal of attention and adoration from the community: Harlam Male Attention Syndrome, or HMAS (pronounced H-mass).
HMAS: a business casual haircut or floppy mane of curly hair. A cool beard or face that looks like it’s never needed shaving, a bandana in the back pocket or the right basketball shoes. A sense of humor that is quick and accessible but never challenging. A desire, acknowledged or not, to be the most sought after person in the room. A conviction that things are fine as long as everybody feels good, no matter the underlying conditions.
These were the young men who led cabins or taught tennis with charisma and a desire for people to have a good time. Certainly not unadmirable traits. But often, these charismatic men allowed the power of social capital, the feeling of being a sizable fish in a postage-stamp pond, to feed their egos. They could be kind when it mattered, and bring fun and ruach–that most important of camp vibes–to many situations, but HMAS also has a way of making young men believe they have a permission not afforded to the rest of the community to get away with, when the mood strikes them, acting however they want. With being not-so-nice. With caring about their reputations more than another person’s feelings. Acts of bullying, humiliation, and discrimination, often obscured from view by the glowing charm of their popularity.
I thought about HMAS while reading Morgan Lewis’s recent report about the history of abuse, harassment, discrimination and mistreatment on the basis of gender and sexuality at Hebrew Union College, the Reform Jewish seminary with campuses in Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, and Cincinnati. This report chronicles a litany of assaults, insults, and diminishments suffered by female, non-binary, and LGBTQ students stretching back to the early 1970s: Professors who used their positions of power to harass and assault students and suffered no consequences; a professor who refused to sign ordination papers for gay and lesbian graduates; professors who told students their pregnancies were an inconvenience to the learning environment and to their professional prospects. These are only a few entries in the alphabet of sin described in the report, which also makes clear that discrimination and hostility continue in various forms even now. Similar investigations have been initiated in other Reform institutions; the Central Conference of American Rabbis recently released a report while we await the results of a broader Union for Reform Judaism investigation.
The past behavior recorded in the report is despicable. It is one thing to know something is true because, as they say, “how could it not be?” and quite another to see the details surfaced and made plain. The still-ongoing microaggressions and deprecations described in its pages are made sadder because they, too, do not surprise.
I’ve sat in recruitment sessions at professional conferences and camp staff meetings where HUC admissions officers urged emerging Jewish leaders to consider the rabbinate; I have seen coworkers and colleagues and campers discover they are inspired by the notion that Judaism might be their calling. What sort of environment were these young, passionate Jews being encouraged to submerge themselves in? What does it mean when we train our leaders at a seminary where there is such a profound disconnect between the content of their learning and the institutional culture in which it takes place?
There are many failures made plain by the report. I hope that people wiser and better equipped than I am will seek to understand these failures so they can force those in power to address them honestly. But there is one failure written between the lines of the report which I think I can speak to, a problem of culture that I can describe because I benefited from it at Camp Harlam. Yes, dear reader: I, too, have HMAS.
After five summers working in a cabin and one working at a computer, I spent four seasons at Harlam running a unit of teenage campers. I was good at the job–sometimes great at it–but I could lose my temper, and I get mean when I’m angry. Anyone who knows me well will believe that I have, at times, been a bully to the staff and campers with whom I worked. But I got away with it because I know how to make a crowd of camp kids laugh. I could wait until I’d smoothed the whole thing over myself before telling my supervisors, who would trust me implicitly. I relied on my ability to lead a crowd to excuse the way I occasionally treated individual people; I relied on my reputation and good standing and long tenure in the community to launder my bad behavior.
Which is part of the reason I have absolutely no trouble believing the accuracy and veracity of the HUC report.
As I write this, I feel myself attempting to walk a fine line. Losing one’s temper is not the same thing as gendered discrimination, assault, or harassment. And yet: it is painful but honest, I think, to admit that HMAS exists on a spectrum with the refusal by the professor referenced in the report to affix his signature to the smicha of any non-heterosexual graduate of HUC. Not because my actions shared his prejudice-based motivations, but because my HMAS-facilitated sense of social entitlement at camp and this professor’s casually wielded bigotry are both behaviors that exist along a spectrum of permissiveness, of exception, of benefitting from doubt. It is the behavior of men who believe they will be excused for disregarding the policies that govern an institution because they have power in the culture that shapes it.
The professor from the report was widely understood to be so brilliant that it was okay for him to quiz a student about their sexuality before he signed their hard-earned smicha. “Ah,” a convenient strawman might say, “but this professor made it a habit of meeting with each and every student before deciding to sign.” Which is pretty much my exact point: his insights–about a religion whose moral center is the idea that each human being is created in God’s image–were understood to be so profound that his treatment of actual individual people was of minor consequence to his stature in the community.
This man was a symptom of a larger problem: the movement relies on these charismatic men to be its public faces and become synonymous with its institutions, inflating their egos and feelings of power. Surely the whole movement should not operate under the same social principles that arise organically at a summer camp, whose culture is inevitably and necessarily rooted in the adolescent experience. And yet, what we call HMAS at Camp Harlam is a name for a thing that’s all over the movement. It powers the URJ like an economy. It starts with the charming men, but it’s also evident in the points game, Jewish geography as social capital, and the race to accumulate ribbons at the bottom of one’s biennial nametag.
And it’s how people get hurt. How mistakes get made and then made to go away. It’s what makes me certain that these problems are not limited to the treatment of female, transgender, and LGBTQ HUC students, or campers who ask questions at inconvenient times. As detailed in the report, marginalized populations suffer the cruelest manifestations of this dynamic–but the charismatic men are everywhere, making decisions about the movement’s finances, its operations, its personnel, its future.
And how does this culture of permissiveness signal its intentions? How does it maintain its unacknowledged power? Here we turn our attention to that portion of the report detailing the differences in language on smichot for male and female graduates at HUC. Until as recently as 2016, male graduates were described as “our leader, the rabbi” while the same spot on the smicha of a female graduate read “rabbi and teacher”. Is this a minor distinction? For thousands of years, the only rabbis in the world were men, something that changed in this country only a half-century ago–in this context, discrepancies in language on the basis of gender necessarily perpetuate inequality and reinforce existing gender norms.
The words on a smicha are written in Hebrew, but in an institution that educates rabbis this does nothing to justify why such a difference would be allowed to persist across more than four decades of graduating women into the rabbinate. I can only imagine what sort of textual interpretations and Talmudic inferences were trotted out to justify this ornament of discrimination, this final tap on the head on the way out the door. Moreover, that the Hebrew on a smicha would be the site of a political struggle over gender equality in a Reform Jewish seminary is laughably out of touch with what most members of most Reform synagogues care about and value.
Are not the two connected, the permission structure we build for our charismatic men and the inability to manifest our values in the cultures of our institutions?
The discrimination and sexual misconduct described in the Morgan Lewis report is the ugliest and cruelest manifestation of a broader toxic masculinity that operates at all levels the movement. In a way, it has become the center of the movement because we have failed to center a compelling set of values that speak to the spiritual and moral needs of the community. Our message is not strong enough to drive our culture, so we rely on charismatic personalities to drive it. And it becomes a sort of self-perpetuating cycle of cultural and spiritual erosion:
Because charisma is culturally coded, normative, and oriented toward the past, it privileges white men and the white cis-het male gaze. Thus, the movement’s charisma economy is enmeshed in toxic masculinity, informing the movement’s culture. This sort of social ordering by way of charisma is, in a sense, anti-spiritual. It encourages us to think shallowly rather than deeply about our place in the world. It encourages us to consider ourselves in comparison with others instead of in covenantal relationship with them. And it is a de facto social framework of Reform Jewish spaces and institutions. When we fail to place our values at the center, we center the institutions themselves. And when we center our institutions, we center their charismatic men.
When I’ve use the word “we” in this essay, I’ve been addressing (and including myself among) leaders of the Reform movement, particularly those of us who are somewhat ambivalent about it, who see a movement distorted by the invisible gravity of HMAS at the expense of all of the other cultural and spiritual forces that make Jewish summer camps places that shape people and change lives.
We may one day live in a world where a person’s professional, academic, athletic, artistic, financial, or humanitarian achievements, their charms or assets or advantages, grant no special permission for them to treat individual people with some lesser amount of dignity and respect than what each of us deserves. Power should never excuse bullying, much less cruelty, harassment, or abuse.
The world might have the capacity to get there someday,but the institutions of North American Reform Judaism could get there far sooner. We could be the moral leaders our tradition commands us to be. We must not shy away from the truth. We must not shy away from the hard work of living our values. We must not shy away from reform.
I am a writer, so if you ask me about Judaism on one foot I will tell you that it pushes us to build a relationship with the pieces of the world that are immaterial but insistent. Dignity, principle, compassion, accountability, repentance, grace. Justice. None of these things is an object in the world–but if they weren’t real, if they weren’t important, then we wouldn’t have names for them. Or, as Michael Chabon writes, “Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.”
And so, too, their lack.
