… sets NY on fire (while shouting “TRUMP! TRUMP!“), an Israeli journalist offers a fascinating account of the escalating violence among ultraorthodox Jews in both countries.
[T]here are elements in the Haredi community intentionally generating hatred of Haredim among the rest of the Israeli population.
The “barriers should be higher,” these people believe; you can never be too separatist a cult, and making people outside the cult loathe you guarantees they won’t get anywhere near you. So — refuse basic health measures in a pandemic. To be sure, a lot of cult members will die; but this is the will of God. What’s more important is that viciously, insistently, imperiling the life of anyone anywhere near you keeps appalled outsiders far, far away.
But is this really a good way to guarantee the flourishing of your cult?
Well, consider your hero, Mr Trump. He and his vile advisor, Giuliani, obsessively say and do things that make people sick. Does this work to repel and intimidate their enemies, so that they stay hands off?
No. Reason? There’s an escalation written into the strategy. Almost all human beings respond strongly to cruelty; cruelty attracts sadists, to be sure, but there aren’t that many sadists. Mainly there are normal people horrified by cruelty. When you intentionally generate hatred by your cruelty, you eventually mobilize some outsiders against you.
If you’re an ultraorthodox Jew, your cultic paranoia may overreact to these mobilized people and double down on that which sets you apart, which builds the walls higher: You look and act increasingly bizarre (your mohels refuse to stop sucking infants’ penises, for instance); your contempt for state authority becomes more and more violent; your disbelief in the germ theory of disease becomes more and more adamant.
Trump and the ultraorthodox take the path of escalating grotesquerie – and the grotesque certainly stops people in their tracks.
But then we recover from being stunned, and we realize that there are basic human values we need to defend against Trump and his battalion.
Unlike Trump and his battalion, we hate war. But we are willing to fight.
… (as Elizabeth Bennet says about herself and Darcy) so similar. Both can be acidly vindictive rule-breakers; both live in a world of their own. Why so vindictive? No one will ever know.
Why in a world of their own? Eh. Who knows why many damagingly out-of-it haredim can’t think of anything better to do than stew in their super-spreader isolation?
As to the belle indifférence on Trump’s face as he flopped around, the other night, like the dying Quilty at the end of Lolita (“We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.”), he has always lived in a grandiose fantasy world, and no one did the guy any favors, mental health-wise, to crown him the actual president of the United States. By this point, in his head, he’s Napoleon. (“The man has spent years at war with reality: living in delusions, perpetuating fantasies, imagining hoaxes, constructing conspiracies, accruing debt, rewriting history constantly as self-serving myth. At some point, reality was going to get personal in return.”)
*************
Both Trump and many ultraorthodox pretend that they are victims. Both sometimes seem drawn to violence. Both are nihilists – the atheist Trump poses for pious pictures with his evangelical Christian base and then tells his WH associates that believers are dumb pricks, losers; and the minutely ritualistic haredim often in fact seem spiritless, passively accepting their own and others’ untimely deaths.
Both Trump and many of his ultras, I mean to say, have ripened to something close to madness, and need to be subdued in the name of public safety. Mayor and governor have indeed stepped it up with the ultras, threatening a lockdown.
Is there, among Republicans, a Duke of Wellington?
Covid emergency in Israel.
A group that violates emergency government regulations in a pandemic cannot be allowed to make decisions for the rest of the observant public who follow the rules...
Most of the people who pray and most of the synagogues are responsible and governable and follow the government’s decisions… [T]he most important task in preserving Judaism in Israel is for the state to stop letting the Haredim dictate the religious order.
**********
Headline, Haaretz opinion piece: Haredim Are Willing to Get Sick and Die, With the Help of Israel’s Leaders
The shuls of the hardcore Hassidic sects which make up the community that opposes any formal cooperation with the secular Zionist state were packed with men and boys. There were no “capsules” or even bubbles of polystyrene sheeting. And the police, despite being stationed very near by on the invisible border with Palestinian east Jerusalem had no thought of intervening… [A] large proportion of other ultra-Orthodox groups, in particular other Hassidic courts, have also been flouting the pandemic prohibitions on gathering in crowds in synagogues for months now, and on Rosh Hashana as well. Not only in Israel. Similar scenes exist in New York and elsewhere. And the infection levels in these neighborhoods are correspondingly higher…
Can [we] stand up to the unyielding nature of Jewish fundamentalism? …
The Haredim have a strategy for dealing with the plague. Change nothing. It may cost more lives in the short-term, but once this is finally over, they will have preserved their institutions and communal framework.
Many of New York’s ultraorthodox true believers can hardly wait to leave this world of sin. But for them there’s an extra verse to the gospel standard:
And I won’t be alone
When I fly to that throne
I’ll sneeze and spread disease.
Let’s leave this world of sin
Where we have too long been
And to heaven have the keys!
Trump’s most solid voter bloc (a huge majority of America’s ultraorthodox will ultra-enthusiastically vote for Trump) has “embraced” his “views on masks and the pandemic.” “No major Hasidic rabbis in New York City have been seen wearing masks.”
To some, the disregard for masks is evidence of an outlook in which everything in life is up to God. “I don’t sense a lot of fear,” an administrator at a network of clinics in Williamsburg said. “I think there is a fatalistic attitude, like if it’s meant to be, I’ll get sick.”
The obvious results have multiple haredim dying of covid in NY hospitals in a short time-span – and not all of them are elderly. Deaths are growing. Fast.
“There’s rampant COVID denialism and misinformation … in the community,” one person familiar with the situation said. “People are not getting tested and are refusing care even when sick. This is deeply distressing.”
________________________
[I]f the outbreak spreads further in the Orthodox community, it could begin to take hold elsewhere, with even more serious consequences. If the city’s overall positivity rate hits 3 percent, that would trigger a new [citywide] lockdown, including the closing of public schools.
________________________
“In the absence of our doing the right thing, we will need to be in a lockdown type situation, as occurred in Israel because they haven’t been able to control the spread of the virus.”
________________________
“It took them seeing deaths – and unfortunately that community saw many deaths – it took that to change,” he said of the decision to close schools and synagogues in March and April. “When it gets to that point, it’s already too late.”
_______________________
The fanatics among the haredim of Israel and New York are ignorant, sadistic, and suicidal. Add to that, now, homicidal. The sane among this sect have never been able to control the insane, and governments fear looking bigoted. So take a deep breath, New York.
Or wait. Don’t.
An Orthodox Israeli, desperate to find evidence that the haredim are something other than catastrophic for the state of Israel, quotes an article that, far as I can tell, has been taken down, in which a haredi person claims big improvements are in store for that cult. Yeah, turns out the haredim are even angrier than we are about their having spread covid all over that country because they’re too ignorant to credit the germ theory of disease. Dump our wretched rabbis and replace them with benevolent enlightened leaders!
On March 23, well-known haredi activist Avigayil Heilbron wrote a piece on the liberal news site Ynet entitled “The Criminals Among Us: We Are Angrier At Them Than [You] Secular Jews Are.” “Something historic is happening now,” wrote Heilbron. “Rabbis of perhaps a lesser status [than those who called for schools and synagogues to stay open] are openly expressing [their objection] to blind obedience to a leadership that has for years been a sad joke. There has been an unbelievable fear to voice criticism, but now, little by little, it’s happening…The majority of us are law-abiding citizens, and we are also angry.” These are strong words, of a kind rarely heard.
Right. Rarely. As in never. Babe, you don’t know what godly submission is, do you? (See this post for details.) Remember what haredi means. It means tremble. These are the people who above all, as their basic identifier, tremble before the word of God as expressed by that pale little coot in the corner over there. They don’t rebel, babe. They tremble.
Her other piece of evidence for exciting changes among the haredim? Mr One-Man Fraud Op himself allows as how all those haredim killing themselves and everyone around them because they’re too ignorant to credit the germ theory of disease maybe should do a little reflecting on the carnage their community has caused.
Ooh la la!
Meni Schwartz, a prominent ultra-Orthodox communications strategist who served as a special adviser to the Health Ministry regarding the ultra-Orthodox community during the height of the crisis [comments]:
“The ultra-Orthodox [members of Parliament] should have gone from house to house amongst the rabbinic leadership telling them what was happening, each one should have gone on every single radio station to tell the public,” he says, and angrily juxtaposed this torpor with the alacrity with which the MKs take to the media regarding political campaigns and elections. “Since they are connected to the wider world, and understand that there is a danger to life from the coronavirus and saw that it was taking time for their community to understand the danger because they are disconnected from the media, why didn’t they do anything with urgency when they saw that this disease was life-threatening?” he demanded. “How did they not turn the world upside-down to do everything to get the information out and inform the rabbis? Why did it not bother them? Why wasn’t it the first thing on their agenda? Why did you not want to save the lives of your brothers?”
Our old friends, the haredim.
Those who closely track the politics and culture of the Hasidic community speculate that one reason that Trump has gained popularity among some of its members is very specific to the way Hasidic life is organized. For generations, the ultra-Orthodox religion and communities have been structured around a strong central leader, a rebbe or rabbi, who controls nearly all aspects of their life.
“How we operate on a daily life is to follow a certain rabbi and be inspired by him and do whatever he orders without questioning him,” says [Jacob] Kornbluh.
Trump represents a similar type of leader, who promises plenty of great solutions if the country just follows his example. Explanations of how, exactly, he’ll achieve those solutions come later. (See: “Make America Great Again”). These similarities between Trump and the rebbe style of leadership could be “why a lot of Orthodox Jews are inspired by him without questioning what he says or what his views on certain issues are,” said Kornbluh.
America’s poorest, least educated, most cultic minority will vote for Trump in huge numbers this November. The rebbe will make sure of that.
“He” is one of many clueless coots running the haredim and everyone they come in contact with into the ground. Literally into the ground. All because Israel has allowed – encouraged – a large group of people to live in contemptuous ignorance of a world of other people.
Israel as a Jewish gathering-in. Quite the joke. At the moment it’s a Jewish cult-factory, and that country is living – dying – with the consequences.
There’s the baseline chosen – Jews like me, I guess – and there’s the SOOOOper chosen among Jews, the ultraorthodox, whose existence founds itself on two things: Denying spiritual legitimacy to all non-ultraorthodox so-called Jews, and adhering to the very, very highest of heavenly standards every second of their day and night. This religious elite strenuously attempts to please God with every breath…
So why aren’t they able to breathe? Why has covid decimated them, tearing through much of their rabbinate and many of their non-rabbinic tremblers before the Almighty?
This article, into whose theological whirlpool we will now plunge, reviews the explanations for this incredibly sad turn of events that these same people are now providing for themselves and for the world.
********************
Yes, let us eke go, as Stephen’s friend Lynch says; let us embark on the idiocy and the oddity of ultraorthodox theodicy.
*********************
For why would the being we propitiate with every cell in our body blast those cells with a fatal cytokine storm? What have we done to deserve this?
*********************
But first: lunch! UD needs to fortify herself for this faith journey.
********************
Hokay. Let’s start with this:
“The Torah protects us. We don’t need to do anything,” one yeshiva student [said].
Indeed the entire ultraorthodox response, for a lethal length of time, was to double down on large gatherings of daveners, this constituting the only immune response that mattered: Entreaty to the divine.
Aryeh “Longest Rap Sheet Among the Elect” Deri was one of the first u-o leaders to wonder why, despite his in-group’s exemplary behavior, the Lord was leaving profane people alone and slaughtering the sacred.
“We need to do very deep soul-searching,” the ultra-Orthodox politician said, asserting that God was “telling us something.”
Yeah but like man like what.
First explanation: God is telling us that we are great. The best.
Secular Jews [aren’t] as prone to divine retribution as the religious, whose sins are judged more harshly by God.
Ya bum! Go walk around hatless and fuck your brains out! You’re not worth killing! … Now this guy, this guy over here, him I can choke to death on a ventilator.
********************
Him? Did I say him? If you want to know why God punishes his most beloved, look no further than the hopelessly whorish among us.
“Horrifying discovery: Corona epidemic = lack of modesty,” [a] poster seen in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem announced, using gematria, or Jewish numerology, which ascribes a numerical value to letters and words and draws significance from words or expressions with equal values.
According to the poster, both “corona epidemic” and “lack of modesty” have a numerical value of 900, indicating a conceptual link.
Using an analytical method made famous by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, some of the Lord’s designated coronavirus sufferers blame their women for it all. We’ve tried killing them off through contempt and overwork, but if you do the math, they’re killing us.
*******************
Or is it something higher? God’s had it up to here with Jean-Francois Lyotard and thinks killing haredim because people like UD find postmodernism interesting is a good idea.
[T]he disease could be a divine response to “moral relativism or postmodernism…“
God’s elect are called upon to sacrifice themselves so that Verso and Routledge will publish fewer books with the word meta-narrative in their titles.
Let’s see. Anything else?
So much else. God is quarantining us to bring families closer… But when you live in a hovel with ten kids, four in-laws, and a set of parents, you’re already pretty close! God hates our materialism. But we don’t have any money or any material, so his motives are pretty obscure … God is issuing a “wake-up call” for Jews who don’t want to live in Israel… by… making several regions of Israel horrifying corona hotspots…? The virus forces naughty us into much-needed meditation on our sins and … then the … rapid shutting down of all of our vital systems…?
Of course the most dearly held theory of all is that everyone’s dying, the whole world’s dying, the messiah’s finally on the chimney tops. This is the one; this is the one that’s finally going to blow this fucking place to smithereens. Geloybt gat. Bend down and kiss your ass goodbye.
… 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].
****************
The voice of the ultra-orthodox:
It’s scary, but it’s true:
So do what the Good Book tells you to!
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.
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.
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.