Six years ago, at the height of the Jewish #MeToo conversation, we wrote about restorative justice and teshuvah. We discussed how it might help different parties affected by sexual harm, including community members, come to terms with the harm itself, their role in it, and repair efforts. Since then, we have educated, trained and consulted on, as well as facilitated restorative justice (RJ) processes across more than 15 organizations in the Jewish world. This means that we have worked with individuals and groups who have been harmed, sexually and otherwise, in our Jewish spaces as well as with institutional leaders who run the organizations in which harm occurred. In responding poorly to these survivors, institutional leaders have also caused them harm. Institutional RJ can give institutional leaders and others an opportunity to take accountability for and repair that harm.

As we approach the High Holidays, it is customary to engage in personal accounting and reflection known as cheshbon hanefesh (accounting of the soul). This summer found us deeply engaged in that work, specifically around our restorative justice practice, which includes accountability and repair in faith-based places and communities. The result is an auto-ethnographic report, Reflections on Restorative Justice: The Messy Magic, which elucidates the duality and tensions of this work. These tensions are also reflected in the name of the organization Ampersands Restorative Justice, under which we do our work.

Long after we had agreed to write the report, we found ourselves in a crisis of faith about the possibilities and limitations of RJ for survivors, institutions, and harm-doers. We questioned whether our work was causing harm or enabling harm to continue. We feared survivors were not getting enough out of the RJ processes we ran. We worried that institutions were not following through on their commitments to survivors or making systematic changes so that harm did not recur - or so that they would respond differently when it did. We noticed community members relegated to the sidelines of RJ processes. These concerns animated our report and helped us refine what we wanted to offer the Jewish community as we thought about harm, accountability, and repair.

Our personal and reflective report outlines what RJ is and how the process differs when it involves an institution rather than an individual who has caused harm. It expounds on a particular dynamic in the Jewish community, the ”Living Room Syndrome”, that we believe greatly impacts harm and repair in Jewish spaces. Operating as if we are in our living rooms can lead us to act without the appropriate behavioral and other boundaries. This can also lead to a lack of reflection and awareness when harm occurs, which limits accountability and repair responses. We compare the steps of RJ and teshuvah and explain that RJ can help jumpstart the teshuvah process. Because of our work, we list the patterns and trends we have noticed in accountability and repair efforts in Jewish spaces that impact survivors, harm-doers, institutions, and community members - all of whom are affected by harm and repair. Importantly, we outline the misunderstandings people have about RJ and its very real limitations. We also describe the magic that RJ can bring when done properly with willing and ready people.

A colleague recently noted that every training she sees for Jewish organizations is about psychological safety “because the Jewish world is unsafe.” The Jewish community continues to grapple with having difficult conversations around generational divides, gender-based harm and inequities, 2SLGBTQIA+ identity, racism, bullying and harassment, Israel, and more. RJ can be a model for sitting together with discomfort before it escalates. We also struggle with harm and trauma that happens in our midst. RJ can be a model for how to stand accountable for the harm we cause and how we can offer repair to those we have harmed.

We hope that reading our report helps people understand that RJ processes are deliberate and require patience and preparation. It is in that patience that magic can happen. But this requires self-awareness, courage, and honesty.

Importantly, RJ processes also require adequate funding. Funding is necessary to cover the costs of seasoned facilitators to work with institutions and survivors. Because survivors have already paid for the harm they were made to endure, we never charge them for our time. Funding is also required to compensate survivors for the ripple effects of the harm on their lives and to meet their very real needs. Their needs may include reimbursements for therapy they have already paid out, as well as funds for therapy they may need to engage in a process. In our experience, survivors have other financial needs that Jewish institutions are not meeting. Funds are also required for organization-wide changes that help make institutions safer and help survivors feel that coming forward was worth it — that doing so has resulted in tangible changes that will protect others. These changes may include policies, investigations, training, consulting, and more.

Research also needs to be funded. So much of what we know is anecdotal. There is no solid data on harms, impacts, survivor needs, or institutional willingness to repair harm in Jewish spaces. As such, we are launching a comprehensive online survey later this year that will capture the numbers and kinds of harms that have occurred across Jewish spaces and denominations to understand the nature and scope of sexual and gender-based harms, and institutional responses to those harms. We will also ask survivors about their restorative, justice, and healing needs so that this evidence can inform our practice and that of the Jewish world.

We thank SRE Network for investing in our work and commissioning this report. Writing it gave us the opportunity to stand in accountability ourselves. In our report, we name some of our mistakes and the corrective actions we have taken. We invite you to learn from our errors and to stand in accountability with us by imagining what you can make possible for our Jewish world using an RJ framework.

Shana tova.

“Faith is not certainty; it is the courage to live with uncertainty. Faith does not mean seeing the world as you would like it to be; it means seeing the world exactly as it is, yet never giving up the hope that we can make it better by the way we live.” – Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, Letters to the Next Generation: Reflections for Yom Kippur

Click here to read Reflections on Restorative Justice: The Messy Magic.

Dr. Alissa Ackerman is the co-founder and owner of Ampersands Restorative Justice and a professor of criminal justice.

Dr. Guila Benchimol is the Senior Advisor of Research and Learning at SRE Network and the Director of Faith-Based and Community Accountability at Ampersands Restorative Justice.