Recently the Torah world was scandalized by the arrest of three people, Orthodox Jews, who were accused of planning to kidnap and perhaps murder a husband who refused a GET to his wife. The whole story is very terrible and strange, but it seems that somebody has come forward to make it even worse.
To understand the "worse" side of this, at least some of the people who were arrested, until this happened, had good reputations. The ones from Israel were known as MACHERS, that is, people who talked to husbands to convince them to give a GET. For years, they worked honestly, not doing anything forbidden by Jewish law, and succeeded many times in convincing husbands to give a GET without violating any Torah or moral rules.
For years, these people were worked as a small and select group of people who succeeded where nobody else could, to get certain husbands to give a GET when there were problems. Thus, anyone who deals with divorce and ran into a blocked GET could contact these machers and perhaps succeed to free the wife with a kosher GET. This went on for years. Nobody ever heard anything nasty or illegal about at least some of the MACHERS. And now that MACHERS who were arrested are revealed as evil people, perhaps murderers, this, to some people, means that those who worked with them for years, honestly and without any negative doings or reputation, were really aware of the evil in these men and are now to be shunned and banned. But there was no evil for years until now.
What happened shocks all of us. But the rabbis who worked in Gittin and sometimes worked with a MACHER, surely are not to be blamed for not having RUACH HAKODESH and knowing what these men would do years down the road. And those who announce to the world that these rabbis always knew, before anyone else, that these people are capable of great evil, violate basic laws of the Torah.
First of all, if somebody is arrested for a crime, as horrible as it is, this does not mean he is guilty. You have to let the process of law operate without making statements that so and so is guilty. Surely you should not claim that anybody who did not shun him previously is also guilty. All of us have people we work with regularly and sometimes we are surprised or shocked when they do something wrong. But we are not guilty for not knowing this would happen.
Second of all, since the guilty of the arrested has not been decided, anyone who writes publicly that they are criminals are guilty of a terrible sin called "creating an evil name". Yom Kippur is a time to forgive sins but there is no obligation to forgive somebody for "creating an evil name" or MOTSI SHEM RA. Thus, the people who invented these lies about people who knew the MACHERS to say that they were involved in attempted kidnapping and murder or they knew about it and accepted it have a truly hideous sin.
Let us, as Yom Kippur approaches, not get carried away with what some people did. The guilty ones will be punished when their guilty is proven properly, and those who had no idea that people had such capacities should not be publicly humiliated for being evil people when they had no reason to suspect this.
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