A Hebrew opinion column argues that the religious ideal of “judging others favorably” can sometimes function as spiritual gaslighting, teaching people to distrust their own judgment and excuse abuse. The author opens by responding to a reader who accused her of distorting a Talmudic story about the Babylonian sage Samuel and abusive medical examinations of his maidservant, and says the exchange itself showed an attempt to undermine her credibility.
She then turns to the contemporary definition of gaslighting, citing psychotherapist Stephanie Moulton Sarkis, who describes it as an attempt to gain power by making a victim doubt reality. On that basis, she says the reader’s attack was an example of gaslighting because it tried to shake her readers’ confidence in their ability to understand texts. She adds that whether the tactic succeeds depends on the result, and says she was not personally destabilized.
The column links this to the recent conviction of gynecologist Prof. Menachem Alkalai on 10 counts of rape by deception and sodomy by deception against nine patients. One complainant said he worked hard to make her feel foolish, suggesting that a touching on the clitoris was either accidental or not a clitoris at all. The author quotes scholar Michael C. Podosky’s distinction between gaslighting that disputes an event and gaslighting that attacks the victim’s conceptual framework, and says the court found Alkalai used both.
From there, the piece argues that gaslighting can prepare the ground for sexual abuse and that communities must understand such manipulation to stop it. It then applies the idea to a Talmudic tale in which a laborer from the Upper Galilee works three years for a southern landlord, is denied wages repeatedly on the eve of Yom Kippur, and leaves empty-handed. After the landlord eventually pays and tests him, the laborer repeatedly invents charitable explanations for the delays, including that the landlord may have invested the money or consecrated his property to Heaven.
The author says the moral lesson, “judge him favorably,” is itself the problem: it pressures the weak to ignore obvious injustice and accept excuses for a powerful man’s conduct. She concludes that this value, and similar religious norms, can train people into submission, and rejects applying that mentality to God or to religious authorities. “I am a believer,” she writes, “and I am not prepared to leave my mind in the cloakroom at the entrance to the study hall.”
