A truly cruel April Fool’s joke

If they gave out an award for the sickest April Fool’s joke, the current White House crowd most certainly would be among this year’s finalists, if not the winners.

April 1, of course, is April Fool’s Day, but it is also a day on which all manner of formally recognized annual month-long civic observances are presidentially proclaimed — observances only a fool would turn his or her back on. These include, among others, Child Abuse Prevention Month, Autism Awareness Month, Deaf History Month, Donate Life Month, Cancer Control Month, and National Volunteer Month.

In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined with state and local governments and various civic groups to create the non-governmental National Sexual Violence Resource Center, which it helps fund, although perhaps not for much longer. Its founders wanted to increase national awareness of sexual violence and to help develop effective ways of preventing it. To that end, in 2001, the NSVRC introduced what it called Sexual Assault Awareness Month, which it has run ever since.

In 2009, President Barack Obama issued the first presidential proclamation making SAAM an official national observance. Every president since then has followed suit, including President Trump, who did so for the fifth time on April 1 this year.

This is where the sick April Fool’s joke comes in, however, because immediately after issuing this year’s proclamation, he cut the legs out from under every federal agency and department dealing with sexual violence in some way, the CDC especially, because its work is indispensable in dealing with this scourge.

There is no question about the pervasiveness here of violence of all kinds, but sexual violence almost certainly tops the list. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network estimates that someone in our nation is sexually assaulted every 68 seconds. That comes to around 463,765 cases of sexual violence every year. Primarily because more than two-thirds of such incidents go unreported to police, researchers must rely on various national surveys to approximate the actual number of cases and their motives, with the CDC being a principal provides of the needed data.

That, too, may not be the case for much longer, either, given that the CDC is losing approximately 2,400 employees thanks to Trump’s Elon Musk-imposed budget cuts. Among the hardest hit CDC entities is its Division of Violence Prevention, which lost nearly three-quarters of its staff on April 1. Such a catastrophic reduction in the DVP’s workforce is a severe blow to its ability to function.

That was only one part of Trump’s actions that day. In issuing the SAAM proclamation, he put nearly all the blame for sexual violence on immigration policies and “illegal alien crime,” for which no statistical support exists. Most victims of sexual violence report that they know their attackers.

This is not a surprise, considering Trump’s own history. Since the 1970s, almost a half-century before he entered the political arena, Trump has reportedly engaged in various acts of sexual misconduct, some of which border on or step over the line into criminal acts. There are at least 26 women who have accused Trump of such outrageous behavior.

Trump himself even bragged about it in September 2005 during a disgustingly explicit private conversation that he had with the TV personality Billy Bush, neither of whom realized that they were being inadvertently recorded because the microphones around them were live. In that conversation, Trump admitted to a failed attempt at seducing the wife of one of Bush’s colleagues. He also admitted to being “automatically attracted to beautiful [women] — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet.” He also crowed about taking aggressive physical action directed — without consent — at a sensitive area of a woman’s body.

Trump began watering down the federal government’s efforts regarding sexual violence during his first term, albeit at a much slower pace and not as destructively as he did in declaring April 2025 to be Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Almost from the dawn of human history, men claimed the “natural” and absolute right to violate their wives and concubines at will. Sir Matthew Hale, a 16th-century Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, codified this in British law when he wrote, “The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife hath given herself up in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.”

Even today, many believe this to be true. Several fundamentalist Christian denominations, for example, continue to insist that wives must be subservient and submissive to their husbands. Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Amy Coney Barrett may believe that. She is either connected to or a member of a charismatic Christian group known as People of Praise, which has among its key teachings that women must be “absolutely obedient…and submissive” to their male partners. The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood states this view in its 1987 foundational document, the Danvers Statement. So does the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.

Sadly, over the millennia, Jewish thinkers were not immune to divining similar positions based on their misguided interpretations of biblical texts. A number of authorities, at least in medieval times, even ruled that a man was free to beat his wife if she failed to keep their home clean.

It would appear that Maimonides, the Rambam, took that “right” away from the husband and gave it to the court (Mishneh Torah, The Laws of Marriage, 21:10), although some would argue that he, too, permitted men to beat their wives for their domestic lapses. That Rambam also codified stringent penalties for the wife-beater works against that belief.

The fact that he codified any kind of wife-beating, however, prompted swift response by other halachists, such as Rabbi Abraham Ibn Daud. The Ravad, as he is known, said unequivocally that such a rule was unheard of.

Ravad’s view eventually became the prevailing one. Thus, when Rabbi Joseph Caro compiled the Shulchan Aruch, he left in the right to compel a woman to perform housework (see Even Ha’Ezer 80:15), but he left out any mention of beating her into compliance. (One acceptable way of obtaining compliance, according to various authorities at the time, was threatening to sell a woman’s ketubah, or marriage contract, in order to hire a maid.)

This ambivalence within Judaism, however, was an aberration because it was unsupportable based on the Talmud, the traditional first reference in trying to determine halachic positions. True, the Talmud does not deal with wife-beating per se, but that is only because it makes no distinction between beating your wife or beating anyone else — and it takes a dim view of beating anyone. Rabbi Moses Isserles, a/k/a the Rema, codified this for Ashkenazim in his gloss to Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat, 420:1.

Indeed, despite the fact that some rabbis over the centuries have displayed an ambivalence toward and even tolerance of spousal abuse, Judaism never had such doubt. In fact, it displays zero tolerance for it. From the Torah on, Judaism’s basic texts have made it clear that a woman is equal to a man and must be treated with dignity and respect.

The late 19th-century biblical commentator Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the founder of the Neo-Orthodoxy movement, left no doubt of that in his commentary to the creation of woman in Genesis 2. The Torah’s narrative, he wrote regarding verse 18, “expresses no idea of subordination, but rather [it grants women] complete equality, and on a footing of equal independence.”

This “complete equality” applies especially to the sexual life of a married couple, as he noted in his comment to verse 21. That is because “the human female is a part of the human male…. The man is helpless and lacking independence without his wife. Only the two together form a complete human being.”

It is also telling to note that the word for woman, ishah, appears in the Torah before the word for man, ish, ever appears. Adam means human, not man, and the first human was a hermaphrodite. In a real sense, therefore, the creation of woman came before the creation of man.

The Babylonian Talmud tractate Eruvin 100b tells us that ”a man is forbidden to compel his wife to the [marital] obligation” because she has all the conjugal rights; the man has none. (See also BT Kiddushin 19b, BT Yevamot 62a, and BT P’sachim 72, among other mentions.)

Finally, in the anonymously written kabbalah-inspired 13th-century document Iggeret Hakodesh (the Holy Letter), a treatise on the sanctity of sexual relations within marriage that is subtitled “Chibur ha-Adam v’Ishto” [“The Union of Man and His Wife”], there is this statement:

“A man should never force himself upon his wife and never overpower her, for the Divine Spirit never rests upon one whose conjugal relations lack desire, love, and free will…. One should never argue with his wife, and certainly never strike her on account of sexual matters.”

How sad it is that the current federal government has no regard for such views, just as it has little or no regard for the public’s health and safety generally.

May the last days of Pesach bring you all much joy.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

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