Anumber of weeks ago, I wrote here to raise a voice of protest against the phenomenon of an enormous, government-supported parade of shame that took place in Tel Aviv. This event, a dagger to the heart of our nation’s continued existence in Eretz Yisrael, brought monumental humiliation upon our nation. “After something like this has taken place,” I wrote, “it cannot be that in all of the vast expanse of the contemporary frum media, not a word is written and not one voice is raised, even softly, even for a fleeting moment, to object in the name of G-d and his People. For Him, for us, if for no one else. We object.”

Many readers appreciated that I had given voice, and thereby given them a voice, to reject the intolerable, to go on record that as children of Hashem, we condemn open rebellion against Him. Now, in a very different context, permit me to give voice to a dissent of a very different but no less important kind.

Events of this past week opened a new and uncertain chapter regarding the nation’s president. There’s a great deal to comment and speculate about from a political standpoint, and anyone who’s interested in that can read all about it to his heart’s content — elsewhere. I will focus on just one aspect of these events, which is relevant to us as frum Jews and which is absent in our community’s media coverage.

A brief synopsis of the week’s events: In Virginia, in a case brought by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — whose sordid background includes making millions serving a former Ukrainian dictator and other thugs — was found guilty of eight felony counts of tax and bank fraud. A lone holdout on the jury prevented it from convicting him on ten other counts.

In response, the president used his phone to make a presidential address to the nation: “A large number of counts, ten, could not even be decided in the Paul Manafort case. Witch Hunt!” He has used that latter term publicly 124 times. Juror Paula Duncan, a Trump supporter, told reporters that “finding Mr. Manafort guilty was hard for me. I wanted him to be innocent, I really wanted him to be innocent, but he wasn’t. That’s the part of a juror, you have to have due diligence and deliberate and look at the evidence and come up with an informed and intelligent decision, which I did.”

On the same day, in a case brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan unconnected to Mueller’s team, Trump former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to a campaign finance felony, which he said he committed at his former client’s direction shortly before the 2016 election. Given the standards of this publication, I won’t discuss the factual background of that felony, but for those who blessedly don’t know about it, perhaps you can ask your children.

Two days later, in an interview in which he called the eight felonies of which Manafort was convicted “not a big deal,” the president said this:

One of the reasons I respect Paul Manafort so much is he went through that trial. I know all about “flipping.” Everything’s wonderful, and then they get ten years in jail, and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go. It almost ought to be outlawed.

Here I thought Manafort, as his campaign chairman, was “as high as you can go.” Apparently not.

Commentary’s Noah Rothman had this to say:

The gall of this assertion from the president of the United States is staggering. The chief executor of the nation’s laws has, in effect, come out in opposition to turning state’s evidence.

Using informants and alleged criminals who testified for the government and against their associates is how the Italian mafia was finally broken, as Trump’s legal spokesperson Rudy Giuliani could readily attest. Gambino clan thugs… decision to break the mob’s Omerta put behind bars some of the worst criminals the nation has ever seen…. The fact that an American president would speak with such contempt about the practices of his own Justice Department — indeed, the essential nature of law enforcement in the United States — verges on a violation of his constitutional authority.

Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor who won convictions of over 100 Mafioso, observed that “this is lunacy. Do you know who hates cooperating witnesses most? The leaders of criminal organizations. Drug traffickers hate cooperating witnesses. Mob bosses, corrupt CEOs and politicians — because that’s how they get brought down.”

I DON’T CARE ALL THAT MUCH about these statements for their relevance to the fate of this president or any other political consideration. Politics and politicians come and go. But I do care very much about those statements, and many similar ones by this president regarding the rule of law and the authority of law enforcement, for how they affect my community’s behavior, its reputation as one dedicated to living our lives as ovdei Hashem and its role in representing Him to the world.

To be sure, the vast majority of frum Jews adhere to high standards of ethical and legal propriety. But the too-frequent exceptions that land on newspaper front pages are troubling for their perceived recurrence and for the apathetic communal attitudes of some toward our societal neighbors, law enforcement, and government, which give rise to those exceptions.

A trustworthy individual recently told me that a major frum organizational leader was told by federal law enforcement officials that experience has led them to no longer regard the Orthodox Jewish community with the trust it formerly enjoyed. And before we reflexively rush to protest that characterization, we might do well to consider whether at a minimum, this isn’t an inside-out version of the well-known story of a Polish lawyer who, after the Chofetz Chaim appeared in court, told the judge a story about the tzaddik’s saintly conduct and added, “Whether it’s true, your honor, I don’t know; but about me and you they don’t tell such tales.”

With the unfolding of last week’s events, America is entering a period fraught with great danger for the very fabric of the nation’s civil society. The president’s former campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, national security adviser, and personal lawyer have all been convicted of crimes. His chief financial officer and another longtime ally have accepted immunity to testify. The list of what may yet lie in store is long: potential pardons of convicted criminals in an attempt to evade justice; possible firing of the much-humiliated attorney general and other public servants; and revelations about crimes committed or, perhaps even worse, things that aren’t technically crimes but ought to be morally unthinkable.

But for us, it is a time of spiritual nisayon. Only the Eibeshter will determine what the various players in this drama will say and do and only He knows how it will all end. But we alone decide how we will relate and respond to the coming events, and whether we will be seen, and see ourselves, as standing for emes and yashrus and support for the laws of this malchus shel chesed.

The fact that the Orthodox Jewish community is perceived as the religious group giving the second highest percentage of support to the president, after Christian evangelicals, raises the stakes of this challenge. We have to get it right, for our image in the public eye, but even more importantly, for ourselves and our families and students.

Even at this point in the saga, it cannot be that in response to what has been said, not a word of dissent is written and not one voice of critique is raised in our community. I believe I speak for many in saying, “I dissent.”

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 725. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com