Last Sunday I started a blog post that I didn’t yet share. I will now, with some edits since then. For 40 days and then some we have written about joy. For 35 years I have tried to find joy during Sukkot. This is yet again not that year.

The sukkah is up. It is quiet in the house. Sukkot has begun. The quiet is a welcome respite.

This Sukkot is unlike any other. It always comes just 5 days after Yom Kippur, barely giving rabbis and congregants a chance to catch our breaths.

This year was no exception to that. Since taking off my white robe on Wednesday, we’ve had two Shabbat services, Hebrew School out at Pushing the Envelope Farm with 3 other synagogues, Sukkah building and brownie baking. Even a baby naming, definitely one of the best parts of my job as a rabbi.

Then the Crop Walk together with local churches to support our soup kettles and food panties, Church World Service and American Jewish World Service. I was asked to pray at the beginning of the walk.

It was a nice honor. I talked about the walkers being our harvest, our crop and I tied it into Sukkot. I reminded people that the harvest starts with a seed, some sun and water, a little hope. And I taught Ufros Aleinu Sukkat Shlomecha. Spread over us the shelter, the sukkah of Your peace. One of my favorite songs. Because peace, like a sukkah is so fragile.

Then we walked. Mighty humid for a mid-October day. The car thermometer read 79 when I got back to it. This is the kind of work I do all the time. Build bridges between people. Create safe, non-judgmental spaces. This is the kind of work I love to do.

When I finally got home it was time to get our own sukkah up. But shalom bayit, peace in the house is hard to maintain. It’s up. But not without some fights at the house. This may seem odd to you who know me.

On Friday morning I was honored with a Partner in Peace award by the Community Crisis Center. It seems like a lifetime achievement award. For 35 years I have worked for peace and for safety of women everywhere. The fact that it is almost Sukkot adds to the joy and pride that I feel with this award. Listening to my own biography brought me to tears and I was speechless when I began to make my speech. I speak in public all the time. It is part of the job of rabbi and teacher. So I was surprised when I forgot what I was planning to say. I wanted to tell people there that while I received the award, I don’t do this work in a vacuum. It represents the work so many of us have put in to make the lives of women better, safer. And I really mean that. This award is a group award.

Instead, I told a piece of my story. And why I do the work that I do.

You see, 35 years ago, on the very day I received this unexpected award, on the 2nd Night of Sukkot, which would be Monday this year, I became one of the 1 in 4. One in four women who are sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime. That was me.

I have read this past week that every woman has their story or one or two or three. And it is not OK.

• It is not OK that I was gang raped on a kibbutz while celebrating Sukkot, the harvest festival, known as the time of our great joy.
• It is not OK that as part of this election cycle we have been subjected to discussions of “locker room banter” that is anything but locker room talk, having spent lots of time in locker rooms as a woman athlete and as a sports journalist.
• It is not OK that men in power think they have the right to do anything to any woman they want, because they have power or money or celebrity.
• It is not OK that some worry about transgender people will attack some unsuspecting woman in a bathroom, when in fact, the statistics are precisely the opposite. Trans people worry that they will be the ones attacked. I was attacked just outside a bathroom because I went into that bathroom.
• It is not OK to joke about sexual assault.
• It is still not OK.

I have spent the next 35 years dealing with it. And sometimes not dealing with it. And I still deal with it. And it is still not OK.

I have worked on it by working for women and girls everywhere.

• I have been a domestic violence and rape counselor in Boston.
• I have worked to end gun violence, all the way back to the Million Mom March
• I have worked for peace in the Middle East
• I have served on the Jewish Domestic Violence Taskforce in Massachusetts.
• I allowed my story to be told as part of a film made by Bimah at Brandeis students about Mayyim Hayyim, the Community Mikveh and Education Center in Boston which has been instrumental to my healing.
• I chair the Faith Committee of the Family Violence Coordinating Council for the 16th and 23rd Circuit Courts here in Illinois.
• I have partnered with the Community Crisis Center and the Long Red Line—One Billion Rising.
• I even wrote part of my rabbinic thesis on domestic violence.

And none of it is enough. If people continue to joke about sexual assault, none of it is enough. If people will not believe survivors, then none of it is enough. If people continue to think that rape culture is funny or isn’t real, then none of it is enough.

When this first happened to me, I was told not to talk about it, because there was shame attached with being a rape victim. Newspapers didn’t print victims names for that reason. That is slowly changing by each individual the survivor’s choice. We, as survivors, get to choose how we tell our story and when. And I know that for me there is always a personal risk and cost, that I have learned how to manage over the years.

This past week has been brutal. I thought I had worked through most of it. Over and over and over again. I have had very good counseling and a very good network of friends and a wonderful support team at home. The news this week about sexual assault has been troubling at best. Triggering at worst. It has no place in the election. The worst, for me, was a high school classmate claiming, joking on Facebook that he was assaulted by Hillary. He may not be a Hillary supporter. He may support Trump. As I told him, those are his rights in this democracy. But joking about sexual assault is not funny.

There are now 9 women as of this writing that have come forward to claim that Donald Trump made unwanted sexual advances. He claims he didn’t know them or that they fabricated their stories or that they were put up to it by the Clinton campaign or that they simply were not attractive enough. Those are not acceptable responses. Those responses are a blame the victim (or anyone else) stance.

Some have never told their stories before. They are not unlike Holocaust survivors or army veterans. They wondered who would believe them and if they would they be vilified in the press.

I am like Michelle Obama. These events have shaken me to my core. This is not the world I want for my children and grandchildren. This is not the world that I have worked tirelessly for.

I can no longer remain silent. I cannot be silent.

I liked the meme that was posted by a friend who is a Church of the Brethren pastor months ago.
“They came for the Mexicans and I didn’t speak up I wasn’t a Mexican. They came for the Muslims and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Muslim. They came for the disabled and I didn’t speak up, I wasn’t disabled.” It is based on a Niemoeller quote that I used as part of my Yom Kippur sermon on the power of speech.

I didn’t post it at the time, because I am a congregational rabbi and I am not allowed to tell people from the pulpit who to vote for. I worried about each of those groups and worked quietly behind the scenes. I couldn’t find my voice. I felt paralyzed. Then I felt ashamed for being late to the debate. As I type those sentences I realize that is the feeling that many sexual assault victims have.

I can no longer be late to this debate. I can no longer feel paralyzed. I can no longer remain silent.

I have watched the election get more and more heated. More and more bizarre. I live in a neighborhood with Confederate flags, one nearly on my block that I see every day. I wonder what they are teaching their children in that house. I helped take down a Nazi flag at a flea market that was being sold as “war memorabilia” by a documented white supremacist. I spoke up quietly and behind the scenes.

But now, they came for the women and now I have to speak up. I cannot remain silent any more. I am one of the one in four.

There have been moments of peace this Sukkot. We have enjoyed warm weather, lots of meals in our sukkah and guests. But this is not yet the time of my joy.

I pray that the taste of blood disappears again but fear it will not until after the election. I pray that one day I can truly sit in my sukkah and none will make me afraid. Unfortunately, that night isn’t tonight. This is not yet, the time of my great joy.