God may be the world’s most well-known reclusive celebrity author.

As is the case with any deeply popular celebrity, his fan club can somewhat intense and worrying, especially those who say that they met him personally and he Changed. Their. Lives.

Like it or not, God’s superfans are also his only available representatives, and that is a problem. Especially when those superfans attract and nurture a core of their own fans; people who worship at their feet in respect for the superfans’ stated positions as representatives of the Man Himself.

In the case of Judaism, the superfans are the rabbis, and occasionally the cult of personality surrounding certain rabbis can do very profound real world damage. This was the case with Rabbi Barry Freundel of Congregation Kesher Israel in Washington DC. I knew the man and his family, and I am now somewhat ashamed to admit that. People might want to ask me–hell, I’ve been asking myself–if I was ever able to catch the warning signs of what the man ended up becoming notorious for. The answer is no, not really.

Barry Freundel was a childhood friend of my father’s. He was always just “Barry” whenever his name came up, not some high-falutin’ Rabbi of Washington DC’s Most Prominent Congregation. My father used to laugh off tales of the man’s arrogance with “Well, that’s just Barry. Once a schmuck, always a schmuck.” My own interactions with the man were spaced years apart, and mostly from the perspective of a kid/teenager. It’s been over ten years since I last saw him in person, and his crimes (evidently) began in that period of time. What I didn’t know then, and I’m only just learning now, is the extent of the man’s larger-than-life persona.

He was not just a rabbi; he was the rabbi. He held enough sway in the world of conversions and Jewish education that even the overly stringent Israeli rabbinate would accept converts that he trained and signed off on. He was the Modern-Orthodox poster child; a man who firmly believed that Judaism is meant to move with the times while still staying faithful to its core tenets. He was, for many people wishing to join the Jewish religion without feeling like they were subscribing to a cult, the first and last stop of the process.

What Barry Freundel has wrought is an abuse of Jewish sanctity so staggering that few people in the world can fully appreciate it. There is probably no one else that could’ve done what he did to the same number of people for the same length of time without igniting some kind of suspicion. It was because he was who he was that such a thing was allowed to happen.

Think about it. If some male medical student asked a female patient to disrobe for “standard procedure” when she only came in with a sore throat, she would likely run screaming from the exam room and report the guy immediately. But if it was the foremost medical wiz in the US staring her down and saying that it was necessary to be naked for purposes of a sore-throat examination, those clothes would likely come off. Who knows what incisive medical intuition might be behind the request? What if there is something rare that the doctor suspects? Who would want to stand in the way of saving their own lives? It would be insulting not to comply.

The mikvah (ritual bath) is one of the oldest Jewish traditions, predating even traditional Sabbath observance. When a Jewish Temple stood in Jerusalem, anyone entering its bounds needed to first purify themselves in such a bath. Though some Jewish men still use it before the Sabbath and certain festivals, the mikvah‘s use as a means to ritual purification is relevant mostly to women nowadays. The primary use for a mikvah is to purify a woman who has just had her period; Jewish law deems her ritually impure and forbids sex during menstruation. It is supposed to be a place of peace, beauty and connection to the spiritual. Additionally, the culmination of the conversion process for both males and females is immersion in a mikvah. One enters a non-Jew and emerges a Jew; one enters impure and emerges pure.

When a woman uses a mikvah she is, as one of Barry Freundel’s victims stated, “at her most holy and her most naked.” There is meant to be absolutely nothing blocking complete immersion in the waters, and so the user needs to be as utterly naked as one can be. All clothing, cosmetics, nail polish, dry skin, dental retainers, contact lenses, hair extensions or press-on nails have to come off, as they are not considered under Jewish law to be intrinsic parts of the body and are thus impediments to purification. There in the private room, it is meant to be just the person and God.

But for scores of unsuspecting women, it was them, God and Barry Freundel in that room.

The rabbi held firm sway over his conversion classes and presided over a large mikvah that was constructed right across from his synagogue. He installed up to three hidden cameras disguised as household items such as a clock radio and a tissue box, none of which would look out of place in the building. Over a period of years, he recorded 150 women at their most vulnerable and their most naked. They trusted him; they took him at his word. If he said they should perform “practice dunks” to prepare for actual conversion, they did so immediately. If he asked them to do secret “re-dunks” because of a “problem” with their conversions, how could they say no? He was the rabbi after all, the ultimate authority on conversions and an advocate for women’s rights. Over and over, he found reasons for them to get naked on camera for him, and over and over, they listened. How could they not? How could anyone sincerely looking to get close to God disobey the recommendations of his devoted representative?

What has happened to Barry Freundel in the wake of his crimes is what should happen to every last overreaching member of God’s sometimes frightening superfan club. But abuse of power is hard to police, as a crucial aspect of the abuse is wielding that power without question. We don’t question other experts when they recommend things that seem strange, so why would we question a God expert? What if that very questioning means you will be looked at as foolish or insincere?

If anything, this tragedy underscores the need to emphasize critical thinking even within the bounds of faith, contradictory as that may sound. Belief in God should not equal belief in man; one can focus on connecting with spirituality without believing that any one person represents that spirituality better than everyone else, let alone that this person can dictate bizarre orders without explaining or qualifying them.

It is too late to undo the immense damage to the psyches of the women who became unwitting cam girls for a pervert at the moment they thought they were at their most private and spiritual. Sure, the departure of Barry Freundel’s job, his wife and his respectability are harsh punishment, as is the 6 1/2-year jail sentence, but the ripples of this crime will not fade away with the media coverage of it. Religion at its best is meant to foster a sense of connection to what is good, moral and spiritual. Religion at its worst is a weapon of suppression and, in this case, exploitation of innocents.

This must not be allowed to happen again. Religion must be reclaimed from the hands of those who seek to use it only to further their own agendas.

My heart is breaking for the women that have suffered and suffer still, and I hope that they will yet be able to draw the spirituality they once sought from the natural wonder and beauty that is our universe without it being sullied by the actions of one man whose own impurities will never be washed away by waters of any kind.