What the Book of Genesis Tells Us About Sexual Harassment and #MeToo

YCT musmakh Rabbi Daniel Goodman (’16) claims that the first book of the Torah has plenty to say about sexual exploitation.

“Bill Cosby. Bill O’Reilly. Harvey Weinstein. Kevin Spacey. Charlie Rose. Matt Lauer. John Conyers. What drives these men to engage in such terrible behavior? The Book of Genesis may offer us some answers.

The weekly portions of the Bible that Jews across the world are currently reading are taken from the Book of Genesis. It is a book notable for its lack of laws and abundance of stories, which are some of the most famous in the entire Bible—Adam and Eve, the flood of Noah, the Binding of Isaac, and Jacob and Esau. But a curious feature of the Book of Genesis is that many of its stories are about the very kind of sexual impropriety that is currently deluging the news on a daily basis: powerful men (and occasionally powerful women) seeking to force vulnerable women and men into unwanted sex.” Continued here