Sermon by Rabbi Julie Roth: Jeffrey Epstein, Leslie Wexner and Hillul Hashem (Desecration of the Name)

Honestly, it sickens me to even think about Jeffrey Epstein.  And it is hard to fathom how one man could orchestrate the sexual assault of 1,000 women and girls.  “I am one story of a thousand,” said Danielle Bensky, who was 17 when she first met Jeffrey Epstein in 2004, [when I was still in rabbinical school]. “Think of that number, 1,000.^[1] My daughter Noa is about the same age as many of the high school girls he lured into his mansion on Palm Beach Island for massages that quickly became criminal sexual assault and rape.

I am so deeply disturbed by the recent Netflix documentary, Filthy Rich, which tells the story of Epstein’s sexual abuse through the lens of survivors, the inextricable link of power, wealth, and abuse, as well as the failure of law enforcement and public officials to bring him to justice earlier, that I’m not sure I can finish it.  And I can’t get out of my mind, the image, of the bridge between the poorer neighborhoods of West Palm Beach and the mega-wealthy mansions on Long Beach Island where Epstein lived, depicted in the documentary covered in ‘Benjamins’, the 100-dollar bills Epstein promised these young girls in exchange for a ‘massage’.  Nor can I forget the image of the sprawling estate in Albany, Ohio where the young artist Maria Factor was assaulted in 1996 during an artist residency funded by Epstein at the guest house on the property of Leslie and Abigail Wexner.^[2]  Not to mention that smirk on Epstein’s face when he’s asked to list his many residences in a deposition, proud of his wealth, smiling to himself for a flashing moment, about the locations where he committed his crimes, in his primary residence in New York City and his vacation homes around the world.

* * *

The Ukrainian, Israeli poet Zelda wrote one of my favorite poems, l’chol ish yesh shem.  Each of us has a name.  I only noticed now that the Hebrew word for name, shem, sounds just like the English word, shame, that emotion we feel when we have done something terribly wrong.  L’chol ish yesh Shem, each of us has a name.  Each of us has shame.  The poem reads:

Each of us has a name
given by God
and given by our parents

Each of us has a name
given by our stature and our smile
and given by what we wear

Each of us has a name
given by our sins
and given by our longing

* * *

One of the names I carry is ‘Wexner Graduate Fellow’, named for Leslie and Abigail Wexner, the benefactors of the Wexner Foundation.     At the time I entered rabbinical school, the Wexner Fellowship was the most prestigious award one could receive in any field of Jewish Communal Service.  It marked you as an exceptional future leader of the North American Jewish community.   It was like the Rhodes Scholarship for rabbinical students.  As a Wexner Fellow, I received an extremely generous scholarship, including four years of tuition and a living stipend.  Leslie Wexner invested almost a quarter of a million dollars in my becoming a rabbi.

The vision of the Wexner Fellowship was to build a network of top Jewish leaders – across denominations and disciplines – rabbis, cantors, PhDs, filmmakers, MBA’s, who would together shape the Jewish future.  As part of the fellowship, Wexner Fellows attend leadership conferences and retreats twice each year to build a professional network and community designed to last throughout the lifetime of our careers.  It was at such a conference that I met my husband, Rabbi Justus Baird, who is also a Wexner Fellow.

Our orientation took place in Columbus, Ohio, the headquarters of Limited Brands,  the hometown of Leslie Wexner where he leveraged a $5,000 loan from his Aunt Ida into a clothing empire worth billions.^[3]  I can remember walking through the hallways of the Limited  headquarters with my fellowship classmates, two of whom were rabbinical students at Yeshiva University, feeling vaguely uncomfortable as we walked past larger than life-size posters of scantily clad Victoria Secret models, so we could learn about the values behind the corporation that was funding our graduate school education.

And I remember visiting Leslie and Abigail Wexner in their home in 1999, oblivious to the fact that just three years earlier, Maria Factor was sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein on the same property.  I remember how nervous I was to meet Leslie and Abigail, how awed I was by the Picasso paintings in their personal collection, and how deeply grateful I was for the incredibly generous funding that not only allowed me to finish rabbinical school without debt, but also allowed my father to retire from his job.

* * *

Jeffrey Epstein is an ultimate example of the principle of hillul Hashem, the desecration of God’s name. Originating in the Book of Leviticus, where the Torah explicitly states, “You shall not profane My holy name,”^[4] the concept of hillul Hashem, of desecrating God’s name has been expanded to include any incident where a Jew acts immorally in the presence of others.  Since our tradition believes that “Jews are representatives of God and of God’s moral code”, when a Jew acts shamefully, let alone criminally, they are misrepresenting God and the Torah, thus desecrating God’s name.^[5]  Sometimes we informally use hillul Hashem, to refer to the shame we might feel as Jews, when another Jew does something shamefully wrong in public.  And certainly, a Jewish public figure can desecrate the name of the Jewish people.   But such behavior is called hillul Hasem because it is considered an affront not to the reputation of the Jewish people, but to God Himself.^[6]

The opposite of hillul Hashem, the desecration of God’s name, is kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of God’s name.  In both terms, the name for God that is used is Hashem, literally the Name.  A traditional moniker for God, HaShem points towards both the inability to name God and the essential quality of God’s name.  Kiddush Hashem refers to acts of exemplary behavior that “bring honor, respect, and glory to God’s name”.   One way Leslie Wexner has sanctified his own name, and by extension God’s name, is by donating billions of dollars through the Wexner Foundation and the Wexner Family Philanthropies.  Beneficiaries have included thousands of professional and lay Jewish leaders in North America, as well as governmental leaders in Israel who train at Harvard’s Kennedy School.  In addition, the Wexner family has named several major institutions in Columbus, Ohio, and at Ohio State University, including the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Wexner Medical Center.  My own name was sanctified through the Wexner name, and the honor this name once brought me when listed in my biography or on my resume.  But Les Wexner’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, who was his friend and close financial advisor for decades, corrupted the Wexner name; what was once a Kiddush Hashem has become a Hillul Hashem.

* * *

This past Wednesday, Les Wexner spoke to members of the House Oversight Committee from his home in Albany, Ohio.  He stated, “I was naïve, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein. He was a con man. And while I was conned, I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide.”  Reports indicate that Leslie Wexner’s wife, Abigail, discovered that Jeffrey Epstein was stealing money from the Wexners and that Epstein returned 100 million dollars before the Wexners cut ties with him.

Wexner continues, “I completely and irrevocably cut ties with Epstein nearly twenty years ago when I learned that he was an abuser, a crook, and a liar. And, let me be crystal clear: I never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity. I was never a participant nor coconspirator in any of Epstein’s illegal activities.”

And yet Rep. Robert Garcia, “told reporters during a break in the deposition that Wexner was trying to “downplay” how close his relationship with Epstein was.”

News coverage from NBC News continues, according to Rep. Garcia, “There would be no Epstein island, there’d be no Epstein plane, there would be no money to traffic women and girls, Mr. Epstein would not be the wealthy man he was, without the support of Les Wexner.”

Another Congressional Oversight Committee member, Rep. Stephen Lynch said, “There’s no question in my mind, given the evidence so far, that Les Wexner knew about this and failed to stop it.”^[7]

Leslie Wexner’s statement continues, “To my enormous embarrassment and regret, I, like many others, was duped by a world-class con man. I cannot undo that part of my personal history even as I regret ever having met him.”

* * *

When Justus and I got married, we wanted a rabbi to officiate at our wedding who knew both of us equally well, a rabbi who had been an inspiration to us, who fostered our relationship.  We chose Rabbi Elka Abrahamson, President of the Wexner Foundation, who conveniently could drive up from Columbus to our wedding in Cleveland.  As part of our wedding preparation, she asked us to each write a biography of the other.  Rather than write a simple chronological of Justus’ life, I interwove Justus’ biography with one of my favorite poems by Zelda, Each of Us Has a Name.

Each of us has a name
Given by our enemies
And given by our love

Each of us has a name
given by our celebrations
and given by our work

Each of us has a name
given by the seasons
and given by our blindness

* * *

I have no idea if Les Wexner is telling the truth, the whole truth, about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, though I do believe without a doubt that he deeply regrets ever having known him.  And it saddens me deeply, to even have to think about it.  This is just one personal connection to an international web of connections to Epstein that point not only to greed and guilt, but also complicity.  I have been wondering how far that web of complicity extends.  If you knew Epstein, but truly did not know about his sexual proclivities, if you merely exchanged valuable social connections or worked together, are you responsible for his behavior?

In a famous, 1966 New York City Town Hall speech, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel addressed the plague of racism.  He said, “in a free society, all are involved in what some are doing.  Some are guilty.  All are responsible.”   This was a new application of the doctoral thesis in philosophy  he published as a student at the University of Berlin as the Nazis were coming to power,  “Above all,” Heschel wrote, “the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, all are responsible.^[8]”

As the Epstein saga unfolds, and as wealthy men and women and leaders across countries and industries are implicated, there is a broader indictment we must contend with, an indictment not only of the sexual predators at the epicenter, and the concentric circles of callous people from lawyers at top financial institutions to landscapers trimming bushes at Epstein’s estate who looked aside to curry favor or protect their positions.  We must also contend with an indictment of the very fabric of society itself.  We must ask ourselves, and I mean ourselves, how do we participate in and perpetuate actively or passively, a society in which truth is no longer a primary value, in which ethics can be sold to the highest bidder, in which materialism is god, in which the vulnerable and the poor are exploited, and in which women and girls are objectified, abused, and ignored?   How do we examine the ways in which –  “few are guilty, but all are responsible?”

At the trial of Nazi War Criminal, Adolph Eichmann in Israel in 1961, journalist Hannah Arendt was struck that the man who engineered the transportation of six million Jews to their deaths as part of the Final Solution was motivated not by “diabolical or demonic” evil, but by “sheer thoughtlessness.”  The “trouble with Eichmann”, she wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”  This ‘banality of evil’, Hannah Arendt writes, “this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.^[9]  “Part of Eichmann’s later defence against the charge of crimes against humanity was that he had not personally killed anyone or had anything to do with the death camps, only the transportation of the people to those camps.”^[10]  Epstein and his accomplices did not commit genocide, but they force me to contend anew with the ‘banality of evil.’

* * *

A few nights ago, Justus and I were discussing the debate that’s been raging on the Wexner Fellowship listserve.  Some people, including me, see Les Wexner through the lens of immense gratitude and don’t know quite what to do with that.  Others are striking the Wexner name from their resumes and bios and calling for the entire foundation to be burnt to the ground.

This debate, on the listserve and in my living room, was in response to an email Rabbi Elka Abrahamson sent to all of the Wexner Graduate Fellows, in her capacity as President of the Wexner Foundation, immediately following Leslie Wexner’s Congressional hearing.

Elka, my longtime mentor and the rabbi who stood with Justus and me under our chuppah wrote:

It will surprise no one when I say it has not been easy to manage the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein connection to Les. And friends, I am not writing to offer commentary on this entire horrific tale centered around a horrible human being. Epstein sickens me.

What we have built at the Foundation on the other hand, inspires me. You inspire me. And in this spirit I am writing to invite a conversation sharing what you believe the Foundation is to do now.

Both Justus and I plan to join these calls, and frankly, I am not yet sure what I am going to say.  But I am profoundly moved to be invited into the conversation, and I am proud that we are at least talking about it.  Too often, in our society, in religious institutions, in the Jewish community, we try to just sweep these matters under the rug.

But silence is where shame lives.  And we owe it to the courageous women who testified against Jeffrey Epstein to contend with the evil he caused directly and by association.  And as Wexner Fellows, we have to contend with the legacy of the Wexner name that once sanctified our names and now sullies them.

* * *

As Justus and I continued our debate about what to do with the Wexner name, and what if anything, we continue to owe the Wexner Foundation, I reminded him that we met through the Wexner Fellowship.  My loving husband paused his arguments, and smiled, and said with moral clarity, well, that part is priceless.

Shabbat Shalom.

^[1] USA Today, ‘1000 Survivors Victims not Politics’, 11/20/2025.

^[2] Wikipedia, ‘Maria Farmer’.

^[3] https://www.wexnerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Statement-of-Leslie-H.-Wexner.pdf

^[4] Leviticus 22:32.

^[5] Wikipedia, hillul hashem.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] NBC News, ‘Billionaire Les Wexner tells Lawmakers was Conned.’

^[8] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, chapter 1.

^[9] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

^[10] Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘Hannah Arendts Lessons for Our Times.’

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