… lets his imagination run wild, and imagines an ultra-altered ultra-orthodoxy. Shouldn’t the fact of their decimating themselves via a vicious virus they – whoops! – didn’t hear about because they think the rest of the world stinks and they never listen to it… shouldn’t that lurid fact prompt some serious thought about their suicidal folkways?
[Perhaps they might reconsider their monolithic] tendency to trust elderly rabbis on questions regarding which they have no clue…
This is a time when there is no external enemy, social trend or abusive regime harassing the community. The Charedi way of life is the enemy.
… The ultra-Orthodox are used to getting odd looks and to having a negative image. But they’re not used to their customs being the enemy. Who is that enemy? The rabbi that irresponsibly dismissed the orders of state officials. The tzadik who insisted on having a minyan of 10 at the synagogue. The funny guy who belittled strange laws of distant government men in suits.
… [M]aybe when the plague is over, Charedi society will no longer be the same. Maybe the Coronavirus will be like the fall of the Charedi Berlin wall. In other words, the plague is a good reminder that the world can turn on a dime. Charedim live in the world, they are part of the world. Change is not beyond them.
But this ain’t the way they think. The enemy is the evil godless haredim, whose viral suffering is god’s punishment for their evil godless ways. God will stop punishing them when they double down.
Ultra-Orthodox people [unlike non-ultra-orthodox Jews] do know Jewish law and therefore when they transgress religious laws it is seen as an intentional act for which divine punishment is much more severe. “The ultra-Orthodox who sin do not do so unintentionally and therefore [God’s] attribute of justice harms the ultra-Orthodox much more,” reasoned [the highest-ranking ultraorthodox rabbi in Israel].
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The voice of the ultra-orthodox:
It’s scary, but it’s true:
So do what the Good Book tells you to!
Breaking what rules? They’re following rules – the only rules that matter to them.
‘Rules’ like you need to vaccinate your kids, you need to educate your kids, you can’t steal from the welfare state, and you have to quarantine are … nothing.
[Illegal ultraorthodox] gatherings have led to disaster. Williamsburg, Borough Park and Crown Heights (the three major Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn) have experienced horrific death tolls. Other Hasidic Jews and I have heard of weddings and other mass gatherings followed shortly by a rash of infections and deaths.
This is a systemic problem that won’t go away just by pointing out that other areas of New York have had moments of people gathering, or that they are a minority within the community (both of which are true, but have little relevance in a discussion about communal dynamics).
Many leaders were slow to act, and even when they did, it has been clear that they were unwilling or unable to stand up to the extremists in their communities who refuse to listen.
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You can keep throwing it all at the wall – antisemitism, it’s just a few extremists, how ’bout those spring breakers doing it too, we have to gather outside cuz our apartments are stifling, we didn’t get the memo cuz we’re too pure for any form of communication with the outside world, our rabbi said fuck that, if I don’t keep going to the ritual bath my husband won’t fuck me and we can’t get me pregnant, etc. etc. Go ahead and throw it all at the wall. You’re still killing yourselves and others and deserve all the condemnation coming your way.
But it isn’t only romantic suicide, lad; it’s romantic homicide.
Throughout yet another opinion piece urging us to admire the haredim and castigate ourselves because we’ll never be the Jews they are, the writer stresses only the self-harm the haredim generate by breaking virus containment laws. It killed many of them. Yes, and continues to do so.
And, because they’ve carried the virus to the rest of us, it is killing many of us.
See?
The writer doesn’t see. His argument seems to be that because the haredim believe divine promises to the point of communal decimation, they deserve a kind of backhanded admiration, rather in the way one has to admire the fervor of Mad Mike, even if his belief that his steam-powered rocket would make him famous rather than dead was flawed.
UD loves to chronicle the high-minded excuses some Jewish studies professors offer for the sickening irresponsibility of many haredim amid a pandemic. Here’s her current favorite.
Dartmouth Jewish Studies professor Susannah Heschel contends that, for many Jews, the restrictions “brought to mind times when religious persecution closed down synagogues.” In this sense, she said, the Haredi response “is a sort of defiance and affirmation of Jewish identity combined.”
Let other Jews learn from our defiant and affirmative Jewish identity; and let the world catch the virus we’re so nobly helping spread.
Nu, you could forget that for a very long time the ultraorthodox have been among the most powerful voting blocs in New York City; but viral containment restrictions in that same city understandably send us right back to a horrific world of synagogue closures.
Many Jews, like UD, whose own Jewish identity is thoroughly denied by the ultraorthodox establishment, are rightly appalled. Not least because ultraorthodoxy is far from Judaism’s definitive form. It represents one iteration of the faith, and a rather recent one at that.
Continuity is the biggest ultra-Orthodox myth. Their belief [is] that their way of life is the thousands year-old Jewish tradition, and that all Jews in all time aspired to… study Torah their entire lives. Of course, this is an invention.
The Haredi ideology of voluntarily closing their community off from the world is about 200 years old and came about as a reaction to enlightenment and emancipation. The practice of every man studying Torah all day, every day, only exists from the mid-1950s when the concentration of most ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and the U.S. allowed them to live while learning, at poverty-level, but to live, in welfare societies.
It’s one of those more in sorrow than in anger pieces, but let’s concentrate on the anger.
The ultra-Orthodox are the victims of their own sociology. Many of the massive [coronavirus] deaths in the ultra-Orthodox community are, in large measure, self-inflicted. Many of them have no internet. They only listen to their rabbis. Their knowledge of what is going on beyond the pages of the Talmud is seriously limited…
This is what I want to say to them.
How dare you?
How dare you, my brothers and sisters, sacrifice your communal gains on the altars of your own stubbornness and/or lethal lack of knowledge and/or your cultic overdependence on your rabbis?
How dare you squander Torah this way? How dare you willingly let more Jews die?
How dare you endanger the lives of your fellow citizens — yes, rebbes, civic responsibility is a traditional Jewish value.
Far vus, I say in their native Yiddish: For what?
To paraphrase Dylan.
Mayor Bill de Blasio lashed out at Hasidic residents of the Williamsburg section in Brooklyn late Tuesday night after personally overseeing the dispersal of a crowd of hundreds of mourners who had gathered for the funeral of a rabbi who died of the coronavirus.
Hey, maybe now that the mayor has been willing to lash out, he could turn to Hasidic noncompliance with childhood vaccinations… Or, hey! How ’bout them education standards!
For decades, the communities have largely been allowed to evade government oversight, thanks to politicians who have enjoyed their support as one of the state’s most powerful voting blocs. The price of that support has been largely paid by Orthodox children.
As in, they get measles and coronavirus and as a special bonus are unemployably ignorant. What will it take, observers have wondered for years, for city and state government to lash out? And now we have our answer.
Yes, we know you do.
The question is why any rational human being, let alone a government tasked with protecting citizens, listens to a word you say.
Israel has, post-coronavirus, so much to answer for.
When a member of New York’s Hasidic sect “filed a complaint with New York City’s social distancing complaint hotline” after he found forty people gathered in a synagogue that was supposed to be locked, he became Hasidic Enemy Number One, his photograph posted all over town with words identifying him as a snitch.
So far, this is absolutely typical cult behavior, including the suggestion that he be killed. (Same stuff in Israel right now in similar cults: “On April 14, in the Kirya Haredit … police had to rescue a man from a mob angry that he informed authorities about a ritual bath that had remained open in violation of government regulations.”)
Oh but then the JTA found a Yeshiva University professor to explain it all!
“The origin of this situation is that in much of Jewish history, Jews weren’t treated fairly before the law,” said Moshe Krakowski, a professor at Yeshiva University who studies haredi Orthodox society.
“Ultra-Orthodox culture is a very learned culture, so everybody’s got exposure to the same texts. So you’ll have people who will accuse others of all sorts of things, including mesirah, on the basis of their understanding, but not necessarily sanctioned by any rabbinic authority.”
Moshe, Moshe, Moshe. Do you really want to go on record telling us that we have to understand that because Jews have been treated badly they flout public safety laws and talk about killing law-abiding fellow Jews who report them to the police? Does that make sense, Moshe?
And why are you telling people who know better that ultraorthodoxy is learned? Let’s go back to your second statement and see if we can make sense of it.
Point One: UItraorthodoxy is learned. Memorizing prose passages, reciting them aloud repeatedly, handing your children appallingly substandard educations, and blindly following the opinion of your rabbi ain’t learned, my man. The same text exposure, absolutely, which is of course the primary sign that they don’t know much – people of one book and all that. So let’s not have any learned bullshit, please. Even their rabbis, if we can judge by some of the most prominent in the US and Israel, are dangerous idiots.
Point Two: So you say ‘so.’ So – because they are all learned and all read the same texts, they’ll accuse others of all sorts of execution-worthy offenses because… uh… huh? Oh, because for instance in their learnedness they learn that Judaism sanctions death for people who call the cops on Jews who break the law. Others may disagree! But you have to admire the intellectual ferment here…
One other issue shaking up the Haredi community relates to promises made by its rabbis. During the campaign leading up to the March 2 election, United Torah Judaism released a video in which Rabbi Kanievsky’s grandson says to him: “There is this disease that is spreading in the world that they call corona. Many people in the world have died from it, and thousands of people are sick from it. And many people have great fear that it will reach them. So, people are asking: will voting for United Torah Judaism in the election be a protection for them that they won’t become sick from this disease?”
Rabbi Kanievsky nods his head in approval, and this video became part of the UTJ campaign. Many people who voted for the ultra-Orthodox party have died from corona, and hundreds if not thousands have contracted the virus. This has led to large-scale questioning of the guarantees made by the rabbis, who continue to promise that if people donate to specific charities then they will be protected from corona. The community is now challenging the validity of these blessings, to the point where Rabbi Kanievsky’s son had to go on the defensive in an interview with the ultra-Orthodox website Kikar Shabbat. Rabbi Kanievsky’s son explained the mechanism how this blessing works, saying that once the rabbi has issued this promise, then those whom God decrees will receive the virus will be prevented by God from donating to these charities.
When the interviewer pressed him further, pointing out that people who have donated to this charity are sick with corona, the son then gave a long and difficult to follow response that explained how one can lose the merit and protection because of their sins.
A Hasidic writer is incensed that the popular series Unorthodox depicts ultraorthodox sex as “aberrant… [and solely] devoted to producing babies … [a] procreation … done without any sensitivity, tenderness, or human emotion.” The show even features couples keeping their clothes on while procreating. Nonsense! It’s a “hateful libel… a voyeuristic libel.”
There are problems here. Nowhere does Eli Spitzer tell us the truth about Hasidic humpery… I mean, I gather he’s hinting it’s actually a stripped down hootenany, but, as Gwendolyn points out to Jack, yes, but you don’t say it.
I mean, I wonder what it is in ultraorthodox life, its attitude toward women, modesty, and – whisper the word – sex, that inclines audiences to grant credence to a very very twisted portrayal of men and women in bed, a portrayal characterized by such extreme depths of repression, ignorance, desperation, and shame as to beggar belief? Religious fundamentalists who erase the Chancellor of Germany’s image from their publications because she’s a woman… Who instruct their sons that women are to be erased, made invisible, because they are impure, or, as an ultraorthodox woman explains:
It’s very, very, very, very, very hard for a nonreligious person to understand the purity of eyes… By us, men don’t look at women’s photos, period. As long as you don’t know that, then it sounds ridiculous, or changing history or events. But we’re not here to get the events the way they are. We are here to keep the eyes.
I wonder why people assume the plausibility of sick sex among people who consider looking at images of women – or God forbid – sitting next to one on a plane – to be an act of impurity.
No. UD is sorry, but Eli is going to have to do more than shout libel in The Forward. We of the impure world have every reason to assume that women have as bad a time in bed as they do in most other ultraorthodox venues. Prove us wrong, Eli…. or hey! Maybe consider the possibility that a woman would be a more credible source on this particular subject – since you’re basically attacking as a malicious lie a formerly ultraorthodox woman’s account of her sex life with her husband. Does it seem odd to anyone else that a man considers himself the right person to defend female sexual pleasure? So let’s hear from the girls! C’mon, girls!
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Or maybe we could hear from the boys? Here’s one:
Aron had tried to leave the Hasidic community, but he struggled to assimilate into the secular world. Many of the yeshivas in Brooklyn teach in Yiddish and provide less than two hours of secular education a day. Aron had a heavy Yiddish accent, a rudimentary grasp of written English, and no diploma. In a video filmed by a friend, Aron complained about his limited education and social skills. He said that he didn’t know how to interact with women—he had been forbidden to mingle with them or look them in the eye—and no one had taught him “what your body is about.” He had struggled to process what was happening when [a sex criminal, Baruch] ]Lebovits, a pious man, put his mouth on Aron’s penis. “My head, like, exploded,” he said. “Call it an epiphany, I guess.”
Gently, gently, gently, observers begin to reckon with the unhinged haredim of the world, whose – okay, put it gently – measure of detachment from reality has unhinged so much coronavirus that haredi cities in Israel are now known as Corona Capitals, testaments to what one haredi dissident calls his community’s “terrible disregard for the immediacy of … danger to human life.”
But let’s unpack these sentences – the sentences in my headline – from an essay by a sympathetic insider. Let’s look at their elements and ponder them.
Cultural isolation as the best antidote to the ills of Western culture? What precisely is meant here? Isn’t it your sense – your gut instinct – that hostile, virtually total, isolationism is unlikely to be even a so-so antidote to anything? As with any other cult, haredi isolation accomplishes two things: It separates these people from a world they consider threatening and polluted; and it makes them increasingly insular and weird. It makes their relationship with the world outside themselves increasingly unworkable. (This dynamic is as true of individuals who radically withdraw from a world they hate as it is of cults. “Withdrawal” is, for instance, always prominently cited in lists of possibly suicidal behaviors.) Isolation from education, to take one notorious instance, poses, one haredi insider writes, an existential threat: “Economists, and anyone with common sense, recognize the looming collapse of a community in which too many children do not receive a basic general studies education. Yet, anyone who dares raise the issue publicly is decried in the Charedi press as an enemy of Charedi Jewry.”
No collective can truly sustain a completely autonomous life. It has to live somewhere; it has to reckon with a dominant culture. The actuality of haredi isolationism in Israel involves a steady, belligerent refusal to educate their children according to mandatory national standards; a refusal to serve in the armed forces; forced gender separation and the derogation/invisibility of women that always goes along with it; regular street demonstrations/riots opposing a vast range of actions of the Israeli state that do not accord with rabbinical edicts (gender-integrated public buses, for instance, where women aren’t forced to sit in the back), and much else along basic lines of profound civil disregard. “[W]here some level of government enforcement [of our illegal public activities under the pandemic] was expected, the celebrations were taken ‘underground’ with defiant, partisan spirit… [A]ttendees were urged to keep [large] event[s] secret,” notes another haredi insider, who continues:
As a minority, we must indeed occasionally fight for our observance and Torah values; yet there is a world out there of which we a part, whether we like it or not. Human lives are the price we ultimately pay when we deny the existence of a world beyond.
Of course, if you believe (perhaps the writer from whom I’ve drawn my headline believes) that “Western culture” is “ill,” then withdrawing from it into sanitary non-Western (really non-modern) enclaves makes sense, I guess… though everything depends on the nature of the illness. For their part, the haredim have made it clear that Western culture is ill with democracy and its institutions; with equality among peoples; and with Enlightenment principles of reason. A writer who left the community remarks: “[A]s an anti-rationalist community, they are suspicious of scientific authority. It’s only to be expected that the response to coronavirus would be deficient.” An insider writes: “[T]he Charedi public’s irresponsible conduct in the face of the COVID-19 crisis reflects our community’s ultimate failure to properly contend with modernity itself.“
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Coronavirus is an ill; Western culture is not an ill. If you are a collective that believes much of your existence needs to be devoted to resisting a culture you consider disgusting, the honest thing to do is live somewhere else. (UD has long felt that the best place for haredim to live is Salt Lake City, where the Mormons are likely to tolerate them reasonably well.)
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Next the writer refers to the haredi “detachment from reality” problem. In fact, he uses that phrase twice in three sentences. What does he mean?
I suppose on the simplest level he means that the haredim – in particular, the religious leadership most blindly follow – were fatally detached from the reality of a pandemic, fatally ignorant of the empirical reality of germ-borne disease. That is obviously true, but it’s the least interesting aspect of their lemming-like behavior. (Our gentle writer calls this a “strong collective spirit,” the word spirit patting the haredim on the back for what manifests in practice as mulish automatism. The haredim are the very opposite of a spirit squad.)
What’s more interesting is the relationship of the haredim to the unreality of their religious beliefs.
This is sensitive territory, because all religious people believe things that look bizarre to the non-religious, or to people of different faiths. The religious believe, after all, in another realm – of miracles, of transcendent visitations and ascensions … So why is it that the ecstatic Christianity of Francis Collins in no way undermines our reliance on him as arguably the nation’s most important scientist? This is a man whose faith was confirmed when “during [a hiking] trip he turned a corner and saw a frozen waterfall, perfectly formed into three separate parts. He took it as a revelation of Trinitarian truth, [and] he vowed to devote his life to the Christian faith.” It’s also a man in whose stewardship of our empirical world of health and disease we place very strong confidence.
And that’s because Collins manages to maintain at the same time both a private revelatory faith and a public rationality, a sane and steady commitment to shared, verifiable phenomena. He does not have a detachment from reality problem, because he is able to live at once in spirit and in matter. The haredim, on the other hand, believe there is no reality aside from their specific, peculiar, fundamentalist one; and this is where what the writer refers to as their pervasive “sense of moral superiority” comes in. They are not content to believe what they believe and practice what they practice for themselves; they must impose it on the country. The country is sick with modernity, and they must cure it.
I mean, think of another pretty withdrawn religious group here in the States – the Amish. They definitely go their own pre-modern way too. But they impose on the rest of the country not at all; and in fact they contribute generously to its well-being: The Amish pay arguably more than their share in taxes, while the haredim, for a variety of reasons, pay far lower taxes than virtually all other Israelis, and get abundant state subsidies. Their “exaggerated self-confidence, ” as the writer terms it, derives from their conviction that they alone lead holy, exemplary lives.
They deserve immense state handouts, for these are merely tributes to the greatness of the haredi way of life. They deserve military exemption because their davening is already protecting Israel from missile attacks. And from “an extraordinarily efficient virus in transmitting from one person to another.”
Indeed, the civilizational results are often (to use the writer’s word) dire when heedless, resentful, proud cults are not only ignored by the state, but encouraged. To unpack these sentences is to reveal the truly disastrous dimensions of Israeli state policy toward the haredim.
See Engels here. Compare the haredim of Israel, in the age of Covid 19.
I’m the eldest of 11 children, and it’s not even an especially large family. In my parents’ building in Beit Shemesh, there are around 200 children and lots of elderly folk. The option of assisted living or retirement homes barely exists… These are families with 10 to 15 children. Some households have children who are already married with their own kids, so there can be 20 to 30 people living in one home. The average size of a Haredi apartment is 60 to 70 square meters [700 square feet]. It’s like a small ghetto. On a normal day, everyone is out studying, but these days everyone is together 24/7 with nothing to do. There is no internet, no smartphones, no T.V., no leisure books, nothing. You can’t leave the house…
How did a modern democratic state let this happen?
When, in a few decades, half of Israeli children come from homes like these, Israel can give up any pretense of being a modern democratic state.
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Fun detail from this interview:
[A haredi website] called “Mevaser” … last week published a whole page of photos of [virus victims] from Borough Park, Williamsburg, and other places – with the women blotted out in black.
Dead in life; dead in death.