Is it our responsibility to publicize a Chillul Hashem?

I kind of feel cool to have made the People’s Court Wiggin out video viral, well sort of viral, when I first received it via email from my friends brother Gabe it had 2,900 views – I sent it to Eliyahu Fink who posted it on Dov Bear and to Shmary Rosenberg of Failed Messiah, suddenly I had dozens of people emailing me the very same video. It now has 43,000 views and of course there is some debate as to whether we should even post such things in the first place and I am here to proclaim that anyone who wishes to hide a chillul Hashem is a douche and just as evil as those wishing to protect child molestors.

I am a firm believer in persumay chillul Hashem, I believe that the only way for people to realize that putting on a black hat and a wig doesn’t make you any less prone to scrutiny (although in the frum community it does) I particularly like how the couple featured in the video didn’t want to use their last names, so they cared about people who knew them, but nothing of the Lord – this is a classic mussar lesson and one I really like to abide by, God runs the show, you can try and hide all you want, but in the end your friends are nothing if God is pissed at you.

I received this wall post from an angry guy on Facebook:

Quite frankly, as entertaining as the clip was-it is a serious chillul Hashem. Its so cool to laugh @ the frumies trying to pull shtick-ha ha ha. But When israel becomes the 1st hospital to set up shop in Haiti and other powerful, valuble, and most importantly, positive Jewish stories, this hardly becomes viral. When something like this happens, its almost always inevitable that it will go viral. In our super saturated, gossip laden society, its our responsibility NOT to post these clips. Is it likely that folks may find it on their own? Of course it is. But this whole posting taught me a very valuable lesson-this is much like Loshan Horah, and its ripple effects it has. When we say something bad about someone, we can’t seem to understand the ripples we cause; thank to the net and the effect it causes literally(jumping from 2000 hits to 20k hits in a day!); that explains everything I need to know. I too re posted this on my wall-and then subsequently removed it-because I got that lesson. Thank you Heshy.

Something tells me that based on his reasoning it would also be our responsibility to keep shoving things like sexual abuse, drug abuse, domestic abuse and anything else that may make frum Jews look bad, under the rug. How could you publicize things like that yeshiva principal who, together with his 3 sons ages 15-24 were sexually abusing their relatives, including their sister (the principals daughter) Craziness! So should that be left to the “rabbis”, because that’s the opinion of many, but it seems that those Rabbis and community leaders like to just cover things up, this is why blogging is important to bring change and improvement to the frum community. It creates something that has never existed in the frum community before, it brings transparency and forces people to take responsibility by publicizing their sins and wrong doing.