Only he forgot a couple of things.

1. He gambled away $1.8 billion of Harvard’s money.
2. He made five million dollars working for a hedge fund while still Harvard’s president.

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!

************

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.“

********************

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.)

*********************

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.

***************

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.

A charity run by Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leader in the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism whose group is based in B’nei Brak, also known as the Israel’s “Corona Capital” because of all the infected people there, is running a scam that’s perhaps the worst one we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The group says that anyone who donates NIS 3,000 (roughly $836) will be granted complete protection from COVID-19 by way of an amulet and blessings.

When the plague’s wrath subsides, and the rest of Israel returns to its routine far from ultra-Orthodoxy’s ghettos, some within the ghettos will ask themselves two questions.

The first question will be how come ultra-Orthodoxy’s highest living authority, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, overruled the government’s order that all educational institutions be shut, and ordered instead all ultra-Orthodox schools and yeshivot to remain open.

… Then they will ask the second question: who maneuvered the ultra-Orthodox community into the cramped ghettos where most of its families live? Why does Bnei Brak, with 23,700 people per square kilometer – almost twice Gaza’s 13,000 – have to be among the world’s 10 most crowded cities?

… Yes, many of his followers, probably most, will not be fazed by their leader’s misjudgment and aloofness, but a critical mass will ask not only how he erred so colossally, but how he made his reckless decision, consulting no one, possessing no relevant knowledge, and overruling a battery of experts.

Once they ask this basic question, ultra-Orthodox Israelis will conclude that their sage was not equipped to make the ruling that 10 days later he was compelled to reverse.

And those who undergo this epiphany will then question everything else they have been made to do, like deprive their children of the general education and military service that threaten their rabbis’ rule of the ghetto they built; the ghetto where, the day corona invaded, ultra-Orthodox Israelis learned they are religiously blinded, socially chained and medically trapped.

****************

That last part – about change – is wishful thinking. A kind of generational mental retardation has been accomplished among these groups; coupled with an embrace of authoritarianism and masochism, it represents one hell of a potent, toxic brew.

But props to this writer for going there – for the language of maneuvering Jews into ghettos. Yikes.

As one of Washington DC’s highest-profile orthodox rabbis is released early from a six-year prison term (coronavirus), here’s a quick revisit of Rabbi Freundel’s 52 counts of sexual perversion against orthodox women in the ritual bath (scroll down). And here’s a look at the larger place of the ritual bath in female orthodox Jewish life, and in our current pandemic.

[B]eginning on the days when she anticipates her period, a husband and wife are forbidden from having any sexual relations until seven days following the end of her period. Considering orthodox law states that a period’s duration is a minimum of five days, this typically spans about two weeks or longer, depending on whether her post-menstrual discharge cooperates. In short, this means that for about half of every month, all aspects of an orthodox woman’s life, relationship, sexuality, and emotional health, are dictated by her vaginal discharge…

While the woman is required to count seven clean days before she may immerse herself in a ritual bath (mikvah) prior to reuniting with her husband, it’s not only a matter of days or time waiting. The woman must take an active role to ensure she is “clean” by wearing only white underwear and conducting self-examinations of her vaginal canal with special white cloths twice a day, every day, before sundown. The white cloth is inserted into the vagina so that any fluid or discharge is absorbed. The first examination of the seven days requires the cloth to be left in for about an hour, even if the woman is out of the house, and it is usually quite painful…

If during the seven days any of the examination cloths contain even a tiny spot darker than tan, or a spot on her underwear bigger than a penny and darker than tan, she must take the underwear or cloth to a special rabbi for further evaluation. This Rabbi will then examine the color to determine if it is light enough for her to keep counting, or if it’s too dark or too red tinted such that she must begin counting the seven clean days over, even if it is day 7.

Okay then! Now – what about the bath and the epidemic?

Well, even with all that rabbi-sniffing, the orthodox woman still can’t do the deed until she goes to the ritual bath: “[W]omen must visit the mikvah.” That’s must, babe.

(Does it get even kinkier than this? Don’t ask.)

But things like common baths are notoriously germy (the subject is an excellent vector through which to clarify the meaning of irony), and you desperately want to stay away from them at a time like this. “[W]omen are understandably petrified of going to mikvah: In order for the immersion to count as valid, you must immerse your entire naked body, so that the water touches you completely. One of the main ways of transmission of coronavirus is by touching surfaces that have the disease – and some people may have coronavirus and be asymptomatic, in which case they might show up to mikvah.” But… you MUST use them!

“There are a lot of fixtures of Jewish life that Jews can actually live without,” Rivkah Slonim, a Hasidic woman who has written and lectured extensively about mikvah use, told me. “We can be without synagogues. We can be without a Torah scroll. We cannot, in Jewish law, move forward as a community … without a mikvah.” Immersion is a commandment that comes directly from the Torah, and the punishment for violating it—being cut off from God—is severe...

Although people outside of the Orthodox community might say that these women should just stay home, going to the mikvah is not optional in the way that praying together in synagogue or attending family gatherings is, according to Ruth Balinsky Friedman, a clergywoman at Ohev Shalom, an Orthodox synagogue in Washington, D.C. “I very much understand the impulse to see religion as more symbolic—something that we do when we’re able to, but in a time of crisis, we put aside,” she told me. But “you can’t cancel” the commandments governing sex, she said. “That’s the word of God.”

So you go, girl! Get in there, get infected, pass it on to the old folks and the young. None of this symbolic shit when it comes to the sexual filth of women. That’s the word of God.

*****************

Useful background on the ultraorthodox mind:

[They] follow literally the biblical model in which God controls and does everything in history. They firmly believe that as long as humans please God by doing mitzvot, God will defeat their enemies and grant them victory… [Many of their leaders] dismissed medical considerations because God controls every detail of history… 

In the coronavirus case, this policy – which totally fails in reality − was applied to the community. The consequences are devastating… [T]he virus [, some of their leaders told them,] is a punishment for lashon hara (harmful gossip speech); people should stop and repent, and the plague would stop…

Some Haredim allowed themselves to be exposed to the coronavirus because God would protect them. Many Evangelicals around the world have done the same. Given the natural laws and medical evidence of a pandemic, this behavior is nothing but magical thinking. Magic claims that through certain words or actions − in this case, religious faith/behaviors − God is “compelled” to do what the practitioner wants.

… The sad outcome of a lack of secular education is that people more easily slip into pre-modern, magical thinking. The Haredi penalty for grasping at magic is greater contagion…  [T]he average Haredi Jew lacks understanding of the serious threat of the coronavirus and the urgency of taking preventive actions.

Unfortunately, the Gedolim − the Torah greats − who make the rulings that guide [haredi] behavior are just as uninformed as their followers. This explains their delayed and initially counterproductive responses to the threat. The community has paid a terrible price for its leadership’s ignorance of science and secular knowledge.. . [D]eprived of essential knowledge, mired in poverty [the haredim are now uniquely] vulnerable to disease.

… dark covid days (altering a Joni Mitchell phrase here), the Economist promises many corporate scandals once they’re over.

Given that the priorities of public health and Haredi leaders are not in opposition…

Uh, yes they are.  Examine long-standing haredi attitudes toward vaccines too, if you’d like.  And the physical treatment of women and children. Plus hey: No education in science plus patriarchal prudery equals raising people who don’t understand their bodies and how to keep them alive.

Public health authorities and Haredi religious leaders have seen that the price of not collaborating effectively is tragically high…

No they haven’t.  The authorities didn’t have to see this, because they already knew, having been educated in history and empiricism.  They had no need to ‘see’ the tragic price this go ’round because they are familiar with the tragic price paid in, I don’t know, the bubonic plague era.

As for the haredim (Why does the writer speak exclusively of haredi leadership, by the way?  Have ordinary ultraorthodox Jews no independent agency?  If they don’t – if the modern state of Israel has generated a large, growing minority of people who are completely passive morally – then the problem of coronavirus infection in Israel is really just an itty bitty problem.), like a lot of ignorant cults they don’t see avoidable death as tragic but as one of many mysterious divine blessings.

… UD‘s back deck. The deck features the newly-stained brown that both UDs, on seeing it completed, decided looked like diarrhea. They had already made preparations to have it redone when the virus postponed things.

In the time she’s been living with it, UD has gradually become fond of it… What wonderfully adaptive beings are human beings…

On a high branch in one of the very big trees in the distance, UD watched, yesterday afternoon, with her green and black binoculars, a Cooper’s Hawk. It perched there a long time. Good call. The name of the ground game chez UD is rabbit/squirrel/vole.

Recall the 2008 case of Stanford University med school faculty member John Borchers (scroll down), a long-term addict of many drugs, who continued to the very end of his life (massively drugged, he piloted a plane into a mountain) to see patients. To this day, Stanford has said not a word about why it felt okay retaining this wreck of a man in a position of enormous responsibility.

Then there’s hero-pitcher Roy Halladay.

Philadelphia Phillies Hall of Famer Roy Halladay was doing acrobatic stunts in his plane before his fatal crash in 2017… Halladay had 10 times the acceptable levels of amphetamines in his system as well as morphine and an unnamed antidepressant that can impair judgment. Just before he died, the NTSB found, Halladay had performed a series of dangerous maneuvers like high-speed climbs and dives as well as turns just five feet above the waters of Tampa Bay. One sequence of climbs and dives ended with his plane hitting the water, killing him, according to the report.

The Daily Beast calls this a “fatal joyride,” but you and I know that in both cases, these rides were precisely the opposite of joyful. These were suicides, just as if they’d gone the cheaper traditional route — accelerating hyperdrunk into trees.

Headline of the day.

********

Original headline (which I forgot to link to) has been altered.

As a few op/eds defending covid-flouting haredim straggle out of the gate, UD makes it a point to read them all.

They run the gamut from completely nuts to completely nuts.

UD has to read them for you because she knows you won’t read them. And why won’t you? Let us count the ways.

It’s just a few primitifs scattered here and there in the world… Maybe you saw Unorthodox and you know they treat their women like shit, but ladeedah… there but for the grace of god full stop. You’re vaguely aware welfare fraud rages and yeah ok their schools are a national disgrace but meh. The world is full of problems. Viewed from an anthropological lens, these people are certainly… interesting…

Oh, and here’s the most important reason of all. Play it again, Sam.

It is taboo in our society to criticize a person’s religious faith… these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I’m worried that our religious discourse – our religious beliefs – are ultimately incompatible with civilization.

Even when social practices are getting us killed, we don’t criticize them because they’re religious. Thus, indignant defenders of the haredim point out that these people live in appallingly substandard conditions, packed into tiny apartments without access to televisions, computers, or any news of the outside world, and that they get all of their instructions for how to live every aspect of their lives from a rabbi. These writers seem to believe that they are successfully arguing that since the haredim’s creation of some of the world’s hottest viral zones is simply an epiphenomenon of their faith, we are vicious anti-religionists to criticize them. But listen up, O Israel:

Haredi insularity, Haredi disregard for health authorities during a pandemic, Haredi poverty and population density — all the factors that render them especially vulnerable to the virus, and through them everyone else — are ultimately a choice. There are no external or environmental factors forcing Haredim into their isolation and poverty, only their own cultural and religious commitments. They are therefore not only victims of their current circumstances, but also perpetrators, in the full light of day and of scientific warning.

Rich countries like America and Israel have been rich enough to ignore/appease/tolerate ways of life belligerently at odds with everything modern democratic states stand for; but now that the anti-empirical, anti-state position of the haredim is literally killing us, something surely has to be done. No more bullshit about how it’s only a radical minority within a minority – that obviously doesn’t matter anymore. No more bullshit about how if you’re nice to them eventually they’ll assimilate more and more to normal society. No – as Sam Harris and Haviv Rettig Gur point out, these people believe what they believe, and it ain’t just ideas — it’s salvation.

In the full light of day, to quote Gur, socially destructive ultraorthodox practices must be exposed. We have to stop looking away.

Sing along.

If I were King of the Nation — not queen, not duke, not prince.
My regal robes of the Nation, would be satin, not cotton, not chintz.
I’d command each thing, be it fish or fowl.
With a woof and a woof and a royal growl.
As I’d click my heel, all the trees would kneel.
And the mountains bow and the bulls kowtow.
And the sparrow would take wing – If I – If I – were King!

Each network would show respect to me. Reporters genuflect to me.
Though my tongue would lash, I would show compash
For every underling!
If I – If I – were King!
Just King!
Monarch of all I survey — Mo–na-a-a–a-arch of all I survey!

Your majesty, if you were King, you wouldn’t be afraid of anything?
Not nobody! Not no how!
Not even a coronavirus?
Impossirirus!
How about a Constitutionus?
Why, I’d thrash it from top to boottomus.
Supposing you met an elephant?
I’d wrap him up in sellaphant.
What if it were a brontosaurus?
I’d show him who’s King of the forest!

How!? How!?
Courage.
What makes a king out of an ass? Courage.
What waves the flag on the mast? Courage.
What makes the elephant charge his tusks
In the misty mist
Or the dusky dusk
What makes the muskrat guard his musk?
Courage.
What makes the Sphinx the seventh wonder?
Courage.
What makes the dawn come up like thunder?
Courage.
What makes the Hottentots so hot?
What puts the ape in apricot?
What do they got that I ain’t got?

Courage.

You can say that again.

There I am, foreground, in a little white sweater, pacing the tree with my siblings. It’s 1960. We lived in London that year, but this moment has us in Sea Palling, beside an eerie old holiday house our parents had rented.

I remember little from that long ago, but distinctly recall crawling in and out of the strange hidden little rooms and crevices of the Sea Palling house on dreary days when we couldn’t walk the beach.

This woman for awhile mapped every monkey puzzle tree she could find in England, but no Sea Palling tree appears in her search engine. Is this one still there? They live for a thousand years and grow to over a hundred feet. This one looks to be about thirty feet. If it exists, it’s massive.

I’m in love with the name Sea Palling. Like pure music, it means everything and nothing — I mean, the words pulse with significance, yet when you actually look at them together they’re semantically silent… The town used to be called only Palling – Victorians attached “sea” in a bid for tourists – and could have meant anything even at the beginning. No one, that is, can tell you what the name of the town means. The two words compressed seem to become one – seapalling … appalling? The sea palling, fading in power or beauty, its waves receding… Or in a deathly (funeral pall) way, the sea whitening, blanching, as when Blake describes

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls.