I’m about to tell another lie, Lord. Please do not rain brimstone on my head.
You could live a whole life inside a dream, inside a small, every-moment-busied world where everyone looks and acts alike and you never have to think for yourself or imagine a free identity for yourself. You could live in a cult.
Imagine it: An entire life dictated by other people, by unquestionable holy writ embodied in an authoritarian figure, by – above all – the imperative to breed new adherents. Your entire adulthood could be engrossed in the production and maintenance of ten or thirteen children.
It seems a strange brew to those of us outside the haredi dreamlife; but if, for instance, you attend an ultraorthodox school “where the only history taught [is] Jewish history” — wrap your head around that: the only history — your bizarre ignorance and withdrawal, your almost comical hyper-provinciality, doesn’t seem bizarre. It constitutes an ordered, heavily populated world. It is the only world you’ve ever known.
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Henry James put it best: “[T]he world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.” The most successful cults must labor every moment to tamp down the world as it is; they must illude and stupefy and above all keep their members very very busy every moment, so that these benighted people can, against all odds, forget, deny, and dispense with the world. Rabbis must keep alive among sect members the delusion that they are special, anointed, in exclusive possession of the truth. (“I grew up with a sense of the Haredim being special and different. …I discovered I’m not so special or different, that there are millions like me. That’s what suddenly made me say ‘That’s it, I’m leaving.'”) They must even include regular violence in that busy-making mix, as we see in constantly rioting haredim in Israel, and in the national shame here of ultraorthodox Jews having been part of the Capitol insurrection.
Anyone could have predicted that the current pandemic would shake a lot of haredim awake; its own authoritarian rabbis predicted it, which is why many of them defied – continue to defy – the lockdown and other covid-related laws of Israel. If you don’t keep your people very busy and very inside a dream, they are going to begin to perk up.
By definition, pandemics are global, unignorable, penetrative, realities; surviving them depends on a respect for and understanding of science — the great enemy of any cult. The despicable way in which panicky rabbis have endangered the lives of their followers by attempting to disallow simple health measures among them has certainly attracted the attention of the secular world; but it has also nudged awake the moral conscience of elements of their own sects.
“When I had a lot of time to think [under lockdown], the questions flooded up again,” [one ex-ultraorthodox woman said]. “Suddenly, the rabbis didn’t know what to do. They aren’t doctors.”
And now, as this New York Times piece notes, an already discernible drift away from ultraorthodoxy has become outright flight, so that Israel faces a strange and terrible social problem: The sudden emergence into its secular world of significant numbers of isolated, traumatized, and ignorant people. People who cannot do simple math, may speak only Yiddish, and have never used a computer.
[D]eserters often find themselves in a netherworld, estranged from their families, community and the only way of life they knew and, lacking a secular education, ill-equipped to deal with the outside world.
Most Haredi boys’ schools teach little or no secular subject matter like math, English or science.
Out of one netherworld, into another: An exquisitely horrible fate. But the Israeli state holds the blame: They let – continue to let – the haredi sect remain etherized. They have not been willing to awaken it, and now it’s nightmare time.
A spreader scene worthy of Bosch.
These days, it’s no joke: Don’t live in a theocracy if you don’t have to.
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Sample headline in the Israeli press: WHEN FUNERALS ARE FATAL. Read the article accompanying this headline and ask yourself: Do you want to live in a country where tens of thousands of massed, violent fanatics, “helpless” in the face of God’s command that they and the unfortunates who live near them die of disease exposure, take to the streets undeterred by any government?
Mercer’s rich benefactor, namesake of its Lin Wood Courtroom, has been told that in order to retain his law license he must “undergo a mental health exam.”
Wood, who is the Second Coming of Christ, fails to understand how some measly licensing entity dare approach Him, much less threaten his livelihood. His own family’s in on the persecution too… Everyone’s hanging him out to be crucified…
Last month, Wood shocked even his allies by suggesting former Vice President Mike Pence could face a “firing squad” for certifying the election results. Wood has allegedly referred to himself as the son of God and the second coming of Christ, and suggested Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is a murderous pedophile.
At least Mercer University continues to emblazon His Holy Name on its walls! All praise that saving remnant, yea even faithful to the end of days!
[S]ecular critics fail to acknowledge the changes for the better in the haredi world (albeit at a slow pace), with more of them working and joining the army, and with the birth rate per woman dropping from 12 to around eight.
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With covid putting these socially corrosive bitter-enders right there in everyone’s face (not that non-cultic Israelis haven’t been seeing haredim for what they are for years), it’s maybe possible that …
No. Things won’t improve. In Israel, things are much too far gone. As large numbers of haredim begin to drift away from their once-authoritarian rabbis, that country will find itself with scads of unemployable uncontrollable disaffected and often quite violent people out and about on its streets.
… feast your eyes. We’ve followed the appalling haredim on this blog forever. We have zero sympathy for those, like Nathan Lopes Cardozo, who are shocked and devastated and yada yada because this wonderful pious group of Jews turn out to be – to a significant degree – a twisted cult, indifferent to their own well-being and the well-being of everyone who shares a world with them. “It’s enough with using the term ‘small group,’ because this is nonsense. These are thousands of rioters who are uninterested in Israeli laws, they look to rabbis and to no one else.” A former police chief speaks. Haredi leadership, writes Israel Hayom, is “not condemning the attacks on the cops, and thus are full participants in the [violence.]”
“[M]y whole world is falling apart; [it is] as if Judaism has become a farce,” moans Cardozo in the face of a community dying in droves from a pandemic they think doesn’t exist because they think science doesn’t exist; a community torching buses and injuring police as a state they loathe (because they don’t believe in the existence of states) attempts to make them recognize, much less obey, its laws. Cardozo didn’t notice any of this in the last twenty years or so? Didn’t notice the way they treat women, fail to educate their children, fail to contribute to Israel’s defense, fail to seek employment of any kind?
Weepy demands that the haredim suddenly transform themselves right now into rational law-abiding contributors to civilization are pathetic. More than any religion with which I’m familiar, ultra-orthodoxy displays the death-wish Christopher Hitchens believed a feature of all religions. He was wrong that this characterized all religions. But the evidence is in; he could have been writing about large portions of the haredim when he wrote:
[L]urking under it at all times in all its forms is a desire for this life to come to an end. For this poor world to be over. The yearning, the secret death wish that’s in all of it: ‘let this be gone!’
Another writer on Hitchens notes him singling out as characteristic of some religions “a contempt for all things of this world… [which amounts to] an acceptable form of nihilism.”
Even more insidiously, demands that the government of Israel stop enabling this miserable lot are hopeless. It will get much, much worse.
… but the Australian ultra-orthodox school teacher accused by multiple students of sexual abuse has finally been flown back there. She fled to Israel as soon as charges were brought against her in Australia, and Israel’s powerful ultraorthodox establishment did what it could to protect her from facing justice.
Israeli police … have recommended charges of fraud and breach of trust against former Health Minister Yaakov Litzman for suspicions he pressured ministry employees to skew Leifer’s psychiatric evaluations in her favor. [She claimed she was too mentally ill to be tried.] Litzman, a powerful ultra-Orthodox politician, denies wrongdoing.
And Litzman… ah, Litzman! Helluva health minister!
UD‘s had what to say about allowing female ISIS fighters (not all of the posts I just linked to are relevant; scroll around) to return to Europe and America. She certainly agrees that an entire life in a camp for ISIS prisoners in Syria doesn’t sound very nice, but allowing terrorists trained to kill Americans into America doesn’t sound very smart. Allowing people who held and abused slaves, who broadcast propaganda calling for the death of America, who were party to the beheading of people and the blowing up of buildings full of people all over Europe, etc., etc., to live among us is … I’d call it suicidal.
Bring them here and put them on trial? Convicting people who lived in a whirling bloody chaos, doing disgusting, undocumented things, for years and years, will be difficult, ja?
But after all she seems to be sorry for what she’s done and says she’s changed – why not believe her?
You go ahead and set up your own country where the population is willing to take risks like that.
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It can therefore be no surprise that, in the case of one of these women, one US court after another says unh-unh. (Here’s the latest failed appeal. The authors frame it as a sad event.) Hoda Muthana grew up in Alabama, daughter of a Yemeni diplomat, but left when the clarion call of the butchery of the innocent became too loud to ignore. She was a “prominent spokeswoman” for ISIS. Now that ISIS as a territorial thing is no longer an option, she’s ready for Option Two: the USA. She brings with her a son who, one presumes, she’s raising to be as dangerous as she is.
About that son – he had a Tunisian father, which might allow him to move to Tunisia as a citizen. (The father died long ago while in the process of trying to slaughter as many evil idolators as possible.) And it’s possible that Yemen – where Muthana would feel right at home, because Yemen still has slavery – would be willing to take her. Goes without saying that the kid would be far better off in Tunisia, but separating them would be an obvious cruelty.
[Sen. Josh] Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared — paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper — “There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.
“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the Lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”
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Every night I hoped and prayed
My dream lover would come my way
A man to rule in Jesus’ name
To blacken freedom with his holy flame
Cuz I want
The state
That Christ
Will bring
And I found Josh Hawley
To crown our Savior’s earthly king
Someday, I don’t know how
I hope he’ll hear my plea
Someway, I don’t know how
He’ll rule both you and me
Dream lover, until then
I’ll pray to God and dream again
That’s the only thing to do
Til my Rule-by-Jesus dreams come true
Cuz I want (repeat chorus)
Although grainy, the image clearly shows a distraught president being comforted by the spirit of George Harrison.
Go deep. Use every ounce of pornographic imagination you have for this one. What are you envisioning?
You’re holding back. You’re not letting yourself go there. But think of it this way. Desecrating the Capitol is nothing, killing and injuring people is nothing, almost destroying our democracy is nothing. It’s time for Trump to desecrate the delicate, vulnerable, spiritual lives of millions of Americans.
See him grab randomly at one of the fundamentalist idiots – his equivalent in tricksterism among the bible thumpers – who still think he’s god. See him go in front of the cameras clinging to this person, introducing her as his spiritual advisor, and then crying like Jimmy Swaggart (the men look identical – Trump doesn’t even have to do the theatrics – he can release Swaggart’s tape and say it’s him).
America, I have sinned before thee. Look upon me, a broken man with only his Lord and Savior to love and redeem him. More than half of America hates me! Hates my children! Hates my grandchildren! [Wails.] Have pity on the innocents, my fellow Americans! My grandchildren are not to blame for the sins of their grandfather. Do not scar their lives with rejection and contempt. I know you hate me but Jesus loves me and it doesn’t matter what I do he will always love me!! Right here and now I will be baptized again in the healing waters! [Spiritual advisor lowers him, fully clothed, into a bathtub.] Watch me! Watch the lord transform me into a born-again, humbled, leader! I let power go to my head I fully admit it! And the lord saith pride goeth before a fall and lord I have fallen so low! [Returns, dripping, to microphone.] I hereby renounce Satan and all his ways.
… is one of many lucky people to have been sprung from jail by The Genius of the Carpathians. A lifelong thug, Esformes committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history.
And here’s the best news: He’s only 52! Decades of thuggery and thievery lie ahead of him, thank God.
Thank God, for the crime-ridden Esformes family (Esformes’ crooked father established the Esformes health care fraud business) also presents itself as way way way godly.
Not that certain branches of Orthodox Judaism (the religion in this case) need any more bad publicity, what with their anti-vax, anti-mask, pro-large-gathering, pro-welfare-fraud thing; but the newly-sprung Esformes will significantly add to the enlightened, law-abiding profile of this group.
My posts about Esformes can be found here.
V. DIS!!appointed in Jesus. Would have thought BETTER of Him had our prayer on behalf of our fraud claims worked. WE HAVE PLENTY OF OTHER OPTIONS.
Not only did God immediately forgive Paul Ewell for writing that post; no less than the President of the United States enthusiastically tweeted said post. Despite these votes of confidence, Dean Ewell finds himself out on his ass because Jesus Saves, Moses Invests, and Virginia Wesleyan University Fires. It’s a university, see. Totally close-minded punitive fanatics are not really what most universities have in mind. As such.
What holds [evangelicals] together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world… The point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for a politics of total obstruction, in preparation for the return of a “legitimate” ruler. The best guess is that religious authoritarianism of the next four years will look a lot like it did in the last four years. We ignore the political implications for our democracy at our peril.