Toxic House: Domestic Violence in the Jewish Community

My attention was caught by a recent newspaper headline, “The Most Dangerous Place.” What place is that?

In Vayikra/Leviticus 14:34, God tells the sojourning Israelites that when they enter the land of Canaan, God will sometimes “inflict an eruptive plague” on a house, and then goes on to provide instructions for what they’ll have to do about it.           

“The owner of the house shall come and tell the priest, saying, ‘Something like a plague has appeared upon my house.’”

When the priest examines the walls of the house, he’s to look for green or red marks that appear to run deep, signs that this is, in fact, a plague. Finding them, he’s to embark upon a series of rituals meant to determine the severity of the disease and to rid the house of it by, for example, pulling out afflicted stones and tossing them outside the borders of the community. If all else fails, the house will be destroyed.

An obvious diagnosis of what’s going on in these walls is that there is an outbreak of mold. But I’m convinced the cause is quite different: something terrible has happened in this house.

Rabbinical commentators past and present find the notion of an afflicted house metaphoric, mysterious and evocative. They point to God’s warning that this plague will be inflicted as indicative of divine retribution. They speculate that the people in the house have been guilty of slander or gossip, or become selfish, self-absorbed. They suggest that since the home is a refuge from the outside world, perhaps the red and green streaks announce that the formerly safe space has been invaded by societal strife. Modern commentaries mention poverty, homelessness and environmental degradation among other possibilities.

But there is another way to read this moment: The plague isn’t coming from outside the house; it is coming from within. It isn’t about the interplay between the inhabitants and the outside world; it’s about the inhabitants themselves. My sense from the moment this passage jumped out at me years ago, and my even stronger sense today, is that someone is being hurt inside this house. What is happening to the physical body of the house is happening to the physical body of the inhabitants of this house, and many other houses, in overwhelming numbers—specifically with regard to women and children.

What we might call a domestic plague is a very real public crisis, perhaps more so now than ever. According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year. Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an average of three women in the U.S. were murdered by an intimate partner or former partner every day. The number is higher on average for women of color and has significantly increased across the board for all women during the pandemic. More than half of mass shootings in recent years have involved a man killing an intimate partner or former partner along with others. Physical and sexual violence against children is also prevalent. Sometimes a child is a predator’s target. Sometimes a child is a useful tool in the intended goal of destroying that child’s mother.

The Jewish community is not immune from this plague. The evidence suggests that intimate partner violence occurs inside Jewish communities at the same rate as outside them.

Domestic violence is defined as a pattern of abusive behavior employed by one partner to gain or keep power and control over another within a relationship. This pattern doesn’t necessarily escalate quickly to murder; it never begins there. I’ve learned the phrase “murder in slow motion” to describe the gradual escalation of controlling behavior that ends in loss of life. I participated in online workshops this past year to learn how to recognize and safely intervene in abusive situations. But in pandemic conditions we were much less likely to witness dangerous situations in public, or to glimpse the signs of what might be happening behind closed doors.

Sheltering inside to avoid one deadly disease, staying home to stay safe, many women and children found themselves locked inside with their attackers, victims of an entirely different deadly threat. For them the most dangerous place, the place referred to in that newspaper headline, is home.

According to some commentaries, the plague described in the Torah teaches that we should take notice of the first signs of bad behavior, so that moral decay can be nipped in the bud and stopped from spreading. But this particular plague has already spread. Indeed, it is rampant.

The instruction for reporting the eruption to the priest uses the very tentative phrasing, “something like a plague has appeared upon my house.” The rabbis read in this hesitation a deference to the authority of the priest. In other words, it’s up to him to say whether a plague has actually appeared. But I find its meaning shifts according to who is giving the report. A woman making her first foray outside the confines of a violent prison, terrified to ask for help, terrified not to? A child hinting that something is not right at home? A perpetrator bringing a woman to the emergency room with a vague story about how she keeps walking into walls? A perpetrator tentatively asking, help me stop doing this?

Then there are those red and green marks running deep into the body of the house: literally the writing on the wall? Displaced bruises blooming? Maybe they’re makeup smears left by a face sliding down a wall. Maybe blood and grass stains. They could be crayoned depictions of events too hard to name. In a house I once knew they could have been both cosmetics and a child’s desperate reach for help, messages from a little girl made to play secret games with makeup, adult clothes and jewelry for the gratification of an adult perpetrator.

The passage on house affliction appears in a section of Torah detailing what to do, and what the priests must do, in a variety of states of impurity or “eruption,” bodily sorts in particular. These are instructions to a people in the midst of 40 years of nomadic existence, presumably pitching tents or sleeping under the stars, a people whose wanderings in the desert follow over 400 years of enslavement.

In other words, they don’t have houses, may have never had houses. A nomad could be stricken with a skin ailment, but only a home owner has stone walls that might erupt in a plague. This is a law about something that had never happened. Yet God anticipates that it will happen when the people are settled. Violence in intimate relationships and in families would have occurred in the desert, as it does everywhere. I imagine God thinking: these people have never been a settled, sovereign community, they have never owned houses, but they have certainly experienced family violence, intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and once they’re in homes made of stone and timber they’re going to perpetrate and suffer from these crimes until the very walls of their dwellings erupt with the disease of it.

Christine Benvenuto is the author of two books, “Shiksa” and “Sex Changes,” both published by St. Martin’s Press, and her short stories and essays have appeared in many publications.