Dogmatics – Lesson 21

Table of Contents

• Haredi identity as an essential definition through Maimonides’ principles
• The world as a corridor versus repairing reality here and now
• Talk about the World to Come, distress, and the piyyut “Fattened fowl, quail, and fish”
• For its own sake and not for its own sake as a category mistake, and the distinction between two kinds of “for its own sake”
• The Haredi world: discourse, charity funds, and a language mechanism relevant to the public
• Two voices in the Sages and the historical legitimacy of the “corridor” idea
• Zionism as a consequence of a worldview: acting in history versus avoiding major moves
• “Corruption,” separatism, and Noah’s Ark as a foundation and not as the product of theological debates
• Civic responsibility, large-scale thinking, and economy-military-demography
• Education, integration, and quotas: my child versus “what will happen to the children of Israel”
• Military enlistment, “Torah protects and saves,” and apologetics versus deeper reasons
• Hatred, radicalization of discourse, and internal pressure as a consequence of doubt
• Haredi activity: kindness, free-loan societies, politics, and outreach to the non-religious as maintaining a hothouse
• “Repairing” in the Haredi world: restoring principles rather than planned structural change
• Hardalim, Religious Zionism, and a difference that is not merely sociological

Summary

General Overview

The speaker defines Haredi identity as an essence and not merely a sociological phenomenon, through the attitude toward the last three of Maimonides’ principles: resurrection of the dead, redemption and reward, the Messiah and reward. He argues that a Haredi outlook sees this world as a corridor and a track of trials whose purpose is survival and reaching the World to Come in the best possible way, whereas a non-Haredi religious outlook focuses the mission on repairing this world and practical responsibility within history. From that distinction, he explains the Haredi attitude toward Zionism, military enlistment, integration, and talk about “corruption,” and emphasizes that most Haredi apologetics directed outward are not the deeper reason but pressure responses. He adds that this diagnosis helps one understand Haredi people as captives raised within a “world-picture” that is hard to change, and he presents the Hardalim as belonging to the Religious Zionist movement of “repairing the world” rather than to the Haredi side.

Haredi identity as an essential definition through Maimonides’ principles

The speaker presents two ways of relating to resurrection of the dead, redemption and reward, the Messiah and reward, and argues that they can define the concept of Haredi identity. He says that in the past he saw Haredi identity as only a sociological concept, and recently became convinced that it also has an essential definition. He describes a Haredi outlook that sees the world as a corridor in which a person survives, stands before the Holy One, blessed be He, and goes through a collection of trials in order to arrive safely at a destination that is not part of this world.

The world as a corridor versus repairing reality here and now

The speaker compares the Haredi world to an obstacle-course track where challenges keep popping up, and everything around the person is a test that he is supposed to get through in order to reach the World to Come intact. He argues that in this outlook other people become “extras” in the story, and a person deals with them as the Torah commands from a self-centered focus rather than by making the other person the center. He illustrates this with an amusing practical implication regarding gifts to the poor between an unwalled city and a walled city on Purim, and interprets it as reflecting the question whether the focus is the poor person or the fulfillment of the sender’s commandment.

Talk about the World to Come, distress, and the piyyut “Fattened fowl, quail, and fish”

The speaker argues that in the non-Haredi religious world you almost never hear talk about Heaven, Hell, and the World to Come, not because there is no belief in them but because those concepts are not present in practical goals. He says that in the Haredi world, where life goes on “less pleasantly,” with more poverty, distress, and limitations and with fewer pleasures and less cooperation with the surrounding environment, talk about the World to Come is more present. He brings his mother’s joke about the piyyut “Fattened fowl, quail, and fish” as reflecting longings that arise from experiencing the world as suffering and the need for the comfort of a better future.

For its own sake and not for its own sake as a category mistake, and the distinction between two kinds of “for its own sake”

The speaker connects the distinction to the discussion of serving for its own sake and not for its own sake, but says that identifying it as “the Haredim serve not for its own sake” is not necessary. He argues that his distinction is between two forms of serving for its own sake, in which even a Haredi person can serve for the sake of Heaven because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it and not because of reward. He says that a Haredi outlook, in which the World to Come is central, may be more likely to slide into serving not for its own sake, whereas in a non-Haredi religious outlook the eschatological reward is not present, and therefore it takes less effort not to serve for the sake of reward.

The Haredi world: discourse, charity funds, and a language mechanism relevant to the public

The speaker says that in ethics talks in yeshivot the phrase “World to Come” hardly appears, but in pamphlets and in Haredi social discourse it appears more than in the non-Haredi world. He presents the charity funds as reflecting an existing language rather than generating it, and argues that language about the World to Come is used in order to influence a public for whom that discourse is relevant. He adds that in the non-Haredi world, a request for charity would focus on the unfortunate person and the need to help him, and not usually on worlds of reward and punishment.

Two voices in the Sages and the historical legitimacy of the “corridor” idea

The speaker says that both voices are heard in the Talmud, including the statement, “This world is a corridor before the World to Come,” and emphasizes that the expression was not “born in Bnei Brak.” He declares that he is not claiming the Haredi outlook is absurd, only that he does not agree with it, and hints that later he will come to an “intermediate outlook.” He says that at this stage he is describing and not judging, even though at times he slips into sharp judgment against certain outlooks.

Zionism as a consequence of a worldview: acting in history versus avoiding major moves

The speaker argues that the Haredi outlook leads in principle to opposition to Zionism, because Zionism is a movement that seeks to change the world and return the Jewish people to historical and political action. He defines Zionism as a secular movement that Religious Zionism joined and colored in religious tones, while Haredi identity stood aside to different degrees. He mentions the controversy over joining Zionism and the split around Agudat Israel in Germany with activists like Rosenheim, and argues that the root of the opposition is not the Three Oaths, rebellion against the nations, the beginning of redemption, or the footsteps of the Messiah, but rather the assumption that “we are not supposed to make moves in the world.”

“Corruption,” separatism, and Noah’s Ark as a foundation and not as the product of theological debates

The speaker presents separatism and fear of corruption as the foundation of Haredi identity, more than its attitude toward Zionism. He explains that cooperation with secular people is threatening because it means being involved in the world and could harm education and fear of Heaven, and therefore the same pattern repeats itself with regard to military enlistment. He says that on the ideological level, arguments of “saving lives” in order to save a state do not work on the Haredi outlook, because the large scales are “handed over to the Holy One, blessed be He,” and a person is supposed to deal with his own four cubits and reach the World to Come.

Civic responsibility, large-scale thinking, and economy-military-demography

The speaker argues that Haredi thought does not engage in macro planning of the economy, military, demography, climate, and five-year plans, because these are not perceived as a task assigned to man. He says that Haredim can take money from the GDP without thinking who produced it, because long-term questions are not part of their map of thought. He adds that this approach continues the mindset of two thousand years of exile, whereas the Zionist outlook is the modern innovation of the last two hundred years as part of the Springtime of the Nations.

Education, integration, and quotas: my child versus “what will happen to the children of Israel”

The speaker explains the rejection of integration in the Haredi world by saying that the value itself is “not even on the map,” because integration is perceived as corruption. He gives the example of institutions refusing to accept Mizrahi children not only as racism but also as fear of a less-Haredi culture that will harm the children already inside, and emphasizes that the consideration “let the world burn as long as my child is not corrupted” stems from placing the judgment of the individual in the World to Come at the center. He argues that this outlook does not ask, “What will happen to the children of Israel?” but is focused on the spiritual survival of the individual and his family.

Military enlistment, “Torah protects and saves,” and apologetics versus deeper reasons

The speaker argues that the public Haredi claim about protection through Torah study is a defensive response in the language of the critics and not a deep motive, and he compares the reliability of “Haredi spokesmen” to a joke about Nixon. He says that the test is the attitude toward enlistment of those who are not studying, or toward proposals for a model similar to the hesder arrangement, and argues that the refusal reveals that the consideration is not protection but fear of corruption and avoidance of action in the world. He adds that when Haredi society becomes a larger part of the state, the outlook will have difficulty surviving in a reality of shared responsibility, and that change will come mainly through coercion or existential danger, because “hearts are drawn after actions.”

Hatred, radicalization of discourse, and internal pressure as a consequence of doubt

The speaker explains slurs and the discourse of “you are Nazis” as outward projection stemming from pressure, distress, and sometimes internal pangs of conscience. He argues that Haredi hysteria awakens when “Noah’s Ark” is shaken from within, for example around military enlistment or openness, and that zealotry is usually a sign of internal doubt and not of completeness. He uses a story by Chaim Grade about the Atlas plant versus “the playwright Abraham,” identifies “the playwright Abraham” as the Chazon Ish, and draws a lesson about ideological extremity alongside personal moderation when there is inner wholeness.

Haredi activity: kindness, free-loan societies, politics, and outreach to the non-religious as maintaining a hothouse

The speaker argues that Haredi voluntary activity is focused on the level of the individual: charity, kindness, free-loan societies, and organizations for fulfilling commandments, alongside political activism aimed at bringing in resources so that the Haredi hothouse can survive. He presents initiatives such as establishing neighborhoods and communities as acts of survival and not as repairing the state or the world. He explains that organizations like Ezer Mizion and Yad Sarah also operate outward because kindness is a commandment, but still do not express an ideal of systemic-historical repair, only commandment fulfillment and personal assistance, and he adds that laws regarding disposable utensils or sugary drinks are perceived in Haredi terms as hostility toward Haredim because they have no language of climate repair or future-generational repair.

“Repairing” in the Haredi world: restoring principles rather than planned structural change

The speaker says that Haredi repair means returning the world and society to principles that “were always there” and correcting deviations, not changing the principles or designing a new structure. He argues that coping with problems such as housing and dowries is done through lobbying and raising money rather than through systemic thinking and long-term planning. He explains that changes in the Haredi world happen “from below” in a metamorphosis and not through planning processes, and illustrates this through the discussion of the development of the modern yeshiva from Volozhin and of kollels that already existed before the Chazon Ish.

Hardalim, Religious Zionism, and a difference that is not merely sociological

The speaker states that the Hardalim belong on the Religious Zionist side and not on the Haredi side, because they are focused on repairing this world and not on discourse about the World to Come. He says that in the past he thought Hardal identity was “just another Hasidic group” within the Haredi world because of the similarity in halakhic conservatism, but the essential distinction he presented explains why the Hardalim are not an exception. He concludes by saying that he feels he is not entirely on the Haredi side and not entirely on the non-Haredi religious side, hinting at a “third path,” and emphasizing that his personal views are more radical than the agreed-upon guiding lines there.

Okay, last time I started talking a bit about—this is really kind of an off-topic aside, in parentheses—where I’m trying to show two ways of relating to the last three principles of Maimonides: resurrection of the dead, redemption and reward, the messiah and reward. And I’m arguing that the way one relates to these principles can actually serve as a definition of the concept of Haredi-ism. And I said that for many years it was obvious to me that this was only a sociological concept, and somehow suddenly I thought that wasn’t right—that it also has some essential definition. And the claim, to put it briefly, is that the Haredi approach basically sees the world as a corridor, and really we’re here in order to survive and arrive safely at the longed-for destination, which is the World to Come, or I don’t know, something that isn’t part of this world, something in the future to come. If you like, maybe also the messiah—some kind of perfect world that will be created in the future—and our world is basically what I compared to a Ringo course. Meaning, some sort of course where different challenges keep popping up, and you’re supposed to deal with them in the best possible way in order to arrive as whole as possible in the World to Come. And therefore all the people and events, the whole world around us, are basically just a collection of tests. And the people around us are extras in this movie, where my goal is to treat them in the way the Torah commands me to treat them. In that sense I see myself at the center, not them. I brought the amusing practical implication about gifts to the poor: if I’m in an unwalled city and the poor person is in a walled city, the question is when I send him the gifts to the poor. On the fifteenth, that means I’m really doing it for him. If I’m at the center, then I do it on the fourteenth. Of course that’s half tongue-in-cheek, but it reflects these two conceptions. And that basically means that the Haredi person in practice sees himself at the center; he stands before the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world is the testing ground in which he is examined, which he must get through. By contrast, a religious but non-Haredi person—call it Religious Zionist, modern religious, religious but not Haredi of all kinds—is basically someone who sees the focal point of his purpose in this world. The World to Come will come when it comes, and they’ll give me whatever reward they’ll give me, but I’m not working in order to reach the World to Come in the optimal way; I work because I have tasks to repair this world, in the world in which I live. Therefore, in the non-Haredi world you won’t hear a word about heaven, hell, the World to Come—these aren’t concepts that appear there at all. I don’t remember when I ever heard them at all, someone talking about them at all—they just aren’t present. And that’s not because they don’t believe in them, or not necessarily because they don’t believe in them, but because they don’t play a role here. We’re supposed to repair the world, and we’ll receive the reward we deserve in the future to come, but the goals we see before our eyes are the repair of the reality around us, the repair of the world around us. Whereas in the Haredi world, this world is also lived in a less pleasant way, I would say—more poverty, more distress, more limitations, less cooperation with what’s happening around you, fewer pleasures—so it’s no wonder that talk about the World to Come is much more present. My mother used to joke about that hymn, swans and quail and fish, that we sing on the Sabbath, with what sublime yearning and closed eyes we sing about eating swans and quail and fish. Let’s say I can imagine loftier spiritual aspirations than that. And that reflects the—yes—what are a Jew’s aspirations? You live in garbage, okay, so what can you yearn for? You can yearn for swans, quail, and fish. Meaning, yes, when this world is a world of distress, a problematic world, a world in which I suffer, then naturally I live in some alternative reality, I live in another world that will come someday. Yes, the consolation—this is my consolation in my poverty—someday a world will come in which I won’t suffer, there will be a good world, a world in which they’ll eat swans and quail and fish. And I said that it’s very easy to connect this distinction with the distinction between serving for its own sake and serving not for its own sake, because the Haredim serve not for its own sake and the non-Haredi religious serve for its own sake. That’s not precise; meaning, it’s not the same distinction. My claim is that the distinction I made is a distinction between two forms of serving for its own sake. There can definitely be many Haredim who serve entirely for its own sake. They don’t serve in order to receive reward. They serve because the Holy One, blessed be He, said one must do these and these actions and not do those and those actions. So they do it for the sake of Heaven, only because the Holy One, blessed be He, said so. Or they improve themselves because the Holy One, blessed be He, expects them to improve themselves. Serving for reward is serving not for its own sake. But serving where the focus is the World to Come, and here I really just need to fulfill the commandments and avoid committing transgressions—that is not necessarily serving not for its own sake. That’s a different conception of serving for its own sake. Meaning, what goal has been placed upon me? There are those who say the goal placed upon me is maximum commandments, minimum transgressions; the whole world is just the practical setup. Why do I do the commandments and avoid transgressions? Not necessarily for reward. I do it because I am a servant of God. I do it for the sake of Heaven. Therefore this connection between Haredi-ism and serving not for its own sake isn’t correct—it isn’t necessary, in any case. But what is true is that in a Haredi worldview it is much more natural to arrive at serving not for its own sake. Meaning, I can’t really imagine a non-Haredi religious person who serves not for its own sake. It sounds a bit strange, it’s the opposite of what seems logical, the opposite of intuition. But no, that’s how it is. A non-Haredi religious person generally serves for its own sake. What does “for its own sake” mean? He does things because he thinks that’s what needs to be done, that’s how the world should be repaired, and so on. The World to Come, as I said, isn’t present for him. So you don’t need to persuade him, or he doesn’t need to work very hard on himself in order not to serve for reward. Reward simply isn’t present in his world at all. That isn’t the point. He can of course serve not for its own sake in the sense that he does it to receive honor, or in order to gain profits, or for one interest or another. That, yes. But the World to Come, heaven, hell—that’s not in the conceptual world, it’s not present before our eyes. And therefore this type of not-for-its-own-sake won’t really appear here, meaning in the non-Haredi context. In the Haredi context, as I said before, the service can definitely be for its own sake, but it’s very easy to arrive at another kind of service, at serving not for its own sake, and therefore there it requires effort. Meaning, it’s not—you need to exert yourself in order to serve for its own sake and not do it only in order to merit the World to Come and as an escape from the troubles I have here in this world. And I have to say that, for example, in ethics talks in yeshivot, the phrase “World to Come” almost never appears when they speak about the central things, which for our purposes means Torah study—usually, if it’s in the Lithuanian sector. In the Hasidic sector they talk about the soul, but mainly, it seems to me, in the here and now, I think. But I think in the discourse—I’ll still get to some of these things. In pamphlets and things like that you do see it, but in the social discourse it definitely appears; it appears much more than in the non-Haredi world. It seems to me this is a trend that started with the charity funds around 2005 or so and stayed on the Haredi street and not in the—no, no, absolutely not, not really, not really, no, not connected. Connected, but that’s really not it. The charity funds reflect this issue; they didn’t start this issue. I experienced it there even before the charity funds, or before the flourishing of the charity funds, and it was totally present in the discourse. Meaning, the claim is that this is some sort of different perspective, which of course once you want to influence such a public to donate to charity, you use a discourse that is relevant to that public. So it’s not accidental that it appeared there, and the charity funds changed reality—on the contrary. Because that’s the reality, the charity funds speak that language. Yes, when you ask for charity in a non-Haredi world, you generally don’t mention the World to Come. You say—maybe you’ll say—it’s a commandment, yes. But no: there’s a miserable human being here, we need to help him. And that’s the discourse. Again, that discourse exists on the Haredi side too, but there the other discourse definitely also exists. And it doesn’t really exist in the non-Haredi discourse. Of course, these things are generalizations. There are always exceptions, there are always different degrees, but I think that broadly speaking this distinction captures something true. So you can’t… If we’re being honest, both of these voices are heard in the Talmud. In the words of the Sages, both voices are there. Those who say this world is a corridor before the World to Come—obviously. I use that phrase not by accident. That phrase was not born in Bnei Brak. Obviously. I’m not claiming the position is absurd. I don’t agree with it, but fine, I can understand where it comes from and what it’s based on. I’ll still get later to perhaps some kind of intermediate conception. Personal remarks at the end. In any case, that’s basically what I did last time. I want to continue just a little more with this distinction because I think it’s interesting. It reflects two ways of relating to our principles, but of course it’s also interesting in its own right, not only as a way to understand how one relates to the principles. I want to reflect this distinction in a few more places. For example, let’s look at the kinds of activity in the world in which these two societies, or these two types of Jews, engage. Okay, so I’ll start for example with the attitude toward Zionism. Okay, so why does a Haredi conception like the one I described before generally also go along with opposition to Zionism? On the level of principle—let’s set aside for a moment what I’ve said more than once, that in practice today this doesn’t have all that much expression. Here, Dov Lando suddenly woke up and the anti-Zionist issue suddenly matters to him. The man is stuck a hundred years ago. He was born roughly then, so it’s probably not all that surprising. Anyway, the claim is that the attitude toward Zionism also reflects this point. Because what does Zionism basically mean? Zionism is basically a movement that tries to bring about some change in the world, to repair the world. Okay. Now of course this movement was founded by secular people. Fine, the heralds of Zionism, yes, we all studied them, we understand. But this movement—even after apologetics—this movement is a secular movement. In that sense Rabbi Dov Lando is right. But Religious Zionism joined and colored the move in religious colors, but it joined the move, while Haredi-ism stood aside. It opposed it at different levels of intensity, doesn’t matter, but it stood aside. It certainly didn’t join. There was even a controversy over whether to join the Zionist movement, and the split in Agudat Yisrael in Germany. All the founders of Agudat Yisrael, of course, were not rabbis; rabbis don’t know how to do anything. Meaning, the founders of Agudat Yisrael were activists, German Jews—Rosenheim and so on. Later he became Rabbi Rosenheim because, you know, every Haredi activist is “the rabbi.” And they actually were—at least some of them—inclined to connect with the Zionist movement. There was some kind of split there, and as I understand it this was part of the consolidation of the Mizrachi movement. In any case, opposition to Zionism or support for Zionism both reflect the issue of how you relate to the world. Do you have a goal to repair the world, to change the world, to change the situation here, to act in the world? For Haredim, no. There is no such goal. They don’t engage in that at all. They need to fulfill maximum commandments, minimum transgressions. Meaning, that is the point. To make changes in the world, to establish a state—again, I’m not speaking at all on the plane of sins, whether it’s a commandment to bring the messiah, whether it’s forbidden to bring the messiah, maybe we’ll still talk about that. But whether it is rebellion against the nations and the three oaths in Ketubot, yes, and all those quotations—that’s nonsense with nonsense. Meaning, that’s not the root of the issue at all. The root of the issue is that we’re not supposed to make moves in the world. We’re not supposed to change the world. And “What have you to do with the hidden things of the Merciful One?” You do what you were commanded to do. That’s all. And therefore there is some sort of reservation even before… The theological arguments of the beginning of redemption and the footsteps of the messiah and cooperation with secular people and rebellion against the nations and all these arguments are, in my opinion, arguments born after the fact in order to rationalize the opposition. The basic opposition comes from somewhere else. We’re not supposed to act in the world. The whole Haredi idea is anti-Zionist. The Zionist movement wanted to restore the Jewish people—yes, as they always say—to being present on the stage of history. Meaning, to return and function as a nation within the family of nations. And that is exactly what Haredim would never want to do. We don’t belong to this world at all. To the family of nations—what family of nations? A bunch of extras that I don’t distinguish between at all. Meaning, all these moves whose purpose is to repair the world, to make changes in the world, are completely opposed to Haredi ideology and theology, I don’t know what to call it. I think that’s the root of the opposition to Zionism, not those quotations about rebelling against the nations. Rabbi, don’t you think the Haredi opposition is because the Zionist movement, as you mentioned, was mainly and almost entirely initiated by secular people? And among Haredim, anything that comes from a secular person is invalid from the outset. So no good initiative and nothing good can come from them. They were traumatized by the Enlightenment. I’ll tell you: obviously there is also something like that, and after all I’m speaking here in very broad and sweeping terms, and there are always more reasons and also different people assign different weights to different reasons. For some, that’s the main reason; for others, something else is the main reason. But there is one point that it seems to me we cannot escape. Even before the question of how I relate to Zionism—how can it be that Zionism was started by secular people? The Jewish people has existed on the stage of history for thousands of years, and for the last two thousand years it’s been in exile, in this last exile. There were religious people all along; until three hundred years ago or something like that, even less, there was an overwhelming religious majority. The entire Jewish people basically was, one way or another, religious and commandment-observant, and nobody made a Zionist movement. There were all sorts of messianic movements that smashed into the ground of reality, doesn’t matter, but there was no systematic movement to establish a state, to return to the Land of Israel—the whole idea simply wasn’t there. Now before the question why people opposed the Zionist movement, I ask: how can it be that there was no Zionist movement before? No, because they were obedient to the rabbis, and as you said, the rabbis wouldn’t initiate such a thing. Yes, but that’s not arbitrary. It stems from a conception. It stems from a conception that says our role is not to change the world here. And this conception that says the Temple will descend from heaven—yes, Rashi in Sukkah, we’ll get to him too—and that redemption somehow has to come to us, we are not supposed to take part in it—that is an essential conception. It’s not because there is this or that statement of the Sages. In the sayings of the Sages there are all sorts of things in all sorts of directions. It’s an essential conception that says we are not supposed to act in the world, not even to bring the messiah, not for any purpose. We are not supposed to act in the world; we need to make our way through the world. We’ll make our way through the world, do commandments, minimum transgressions, and that’s it. Of course, cooperation with secular people is also part of the issue, because cooperation with secular people means being involved in the world and of course with the fear that it will damage our education, our fear of Heaven, corrupt us—yes, corruption—what comes up today regarding military conscription. Same thing. What does that mean? It means we are basically deterred from coming into contact with the world. Now true, the fear of corruption is a real fear; it doesn’t necessarily have to do specifically with the world. But why among Religious Zionists is there not so much of that fear, although there is one—obviously there are prices to pay, nobody denies that the prices exist? So why doesn’t that bother this public enough to keep it from continuing to do what it does? Because from its perspective, if you have a role to act in the world and repair the world, that’s what you’re supposed to do. If there is a price, then you have to try to deal with it, try to minimize it, but it can’t change the basic role I have in the world. Yes, Maimonides writes somewhere—I don’t remember anymore—that if someone sees he can’t manage, I don’t remember whether he’s speaking about evil speech or something else, can’t manage to avoid sinning, he should flee to the deserts and live in a cave. There’s some Maimonides like that somewhere, I just don’t remember. Now the fact is that nobody does that. Nobody does that, and nobody even recommends doing that. Even though living in society often brings us to all kinds of things. Why not live in the desert in a cave and avoid all these fears and risks? So the feeling is that our conception says that we are supposed to fulfill the Torah within the world. And even if there are prices, that we’ll fail in transgressions and all sorts of things like that—there’s nothing to be done, that’s the role. If I had an option to sit and live in a cave and not sin at all—even suppose they guaranteed me that would be the case—I still wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it because it misses the whole point. Meaning, you’ll leave the world clean of sins, but you won’t have been in the world. You were created in order to be in the world and do commandments in it and avoid transgressions. Not in order—not in order—not, that’s something else, Menachem, Shoval, sorry, yes. In any case, the claim is that first of all you need to be in the world. Once you are in the world, you of course need to perform the commandments in the world. But to do the commandments at the price of avoiding being in the world, of acting in the world—that misses the entire story. Rabbi, I—we—it sounds like Judaism is not the Amish, the Amish in Pennsylvania, that’s what they do. They shut themselves off and so on, but Judaism, on the contrary, says—there’s that debate between Rabbi Akiva and one of those heretics there, where he comes and gives him the example of bread and of… after all it can’t be… But with whom—with whom are you arguing? Well, that’s what I’m saying. I don’t see the expression “Judaism says,” because I don’t know who “Judaism” is. I can tell you what I think or how I… Obviously, so that is the conception. I’m just saying, in the Haredi world the conception really is not like that; it’s an Amish-like conception. So you’re basically saying that Haredi-ism is something new and in a certain sense anti-Jewish. You could say that. Right now I’m dealing with description, not judgment, so I’m not getting into the question how correct or incorrect it is. Right now I’m trying to convince you that this really is the difference between Haredi and non-Haredi. The judgments each person can make for himself; I’m not getting into judgments right now. I’m not with the Haredim on this issue. In the end I’ll get a bit to the question of how I think it is right to look at this issue. It’s more complex than the dichotomy I’m drawing here, but right now I’m describing, not judging. Okay? So in the Haredi world there really is this kind of Amish conception, meaning you have to separate yourself, live in your Noah’s ark, and you certainly aren’t supposed to act in the world, and all the more so if it’s going to exact a price from you. You might, Heaven forbid, be corrupted. Now understand that a kind of consideration like when people say to Haredim, “You need to enlist, we’re in mortal danger”—that interests them not at all. Ideologically, I mean. Again, not personally. Ideologically, the mortal danger is of no interest. Meaning, you’re talking to me about some historical apocalypse that will happen here—we don’t deal with history. Those are not scales we deal in at all. We do not deal with saving a state, saving a people—that simply isn’t the point. We need to live inside our Noah’s ark, do maximum commandments, minimum transgressions, and hope we survive it and reach the World to Come safely. Even if sometimes we get there too early because we didn’t fight those who want to send us there. So the point is that there is something much deeper here than some ideology or another, or even fear of corruption. Fear of corruption is a symptom, it’s not the point. The symptom means—the point itself means—I’m not supposed to act in the world. No, that is not my role. The large scales, the large scales, are given over to the Holy One, blessed be He. You’re supposed to deal with your own four cubits. Actions on large scales—meaning to build things, change a state, a city, I don’t know, all sorts of things like that—Haredim don’t deal with that. That’s not our role. The world is supposed to happen to us. The world is not our handiwork. The world happens to us—“happens” in the end from God, yes. Meaning, these are things that happen, and somehow we need to maneuver within them. We are not supposed to produce these events. Meaning, I think that is the point. How does this fit with organizations, with the different organizations, like charity organizations, youth movements, institutional organizations? I’ll get to that, I’ll get to that too. And we also need to go back a few years and see that organizations for bringing people to repentance used to be much more dominant; true, that has weakened a lot. That too, that too I’ll get to. It fits well into this whole line of thought. Yes. Rabbi, maybe. And according to the principle of kindness, maybe to judge them favorably, perhaps there was some deep instinct here that the struggle in this world to improve it would turn the Jewish people toward nationalism, chauvinism, and what unfortunately we see today, that this… Chauvinism interests them not at all. Don’t project onto them what you think. Meaning, you are bothered by other things and the Haredim are bothered by other things. I’ll tell the rabbi why I had that feeling this week: because when I listened to Rabbi Lundin or Rabbi Gelbinstein regarding the hostages, both presented the same position—the deal is invalid because it harms the honor of the state, its honor and what… whereas among Haredim, for some reason, leaving aside the opportunism here, they, at least the Haredi politicians, seem to support the deal—maybe because this allergy, this supreme value of the honor of the state, simply doesn’t interest them. To that I do agree, but it’s not connected to what you said before. Their claim—they don’t operate on those scales of the honor of the state. It simply doesn’t matter. There are lives here in danger; they must be saved, that’s all. What will happen afterward, and what dangers, and the long term, and how we’ll build a state, and how we’ll defend that flank and that region—that’s not, that’s simply not the scale that interests them. They don’t deal with it. Again, I’m saying this is a conception, not a judgment. I don’t agree with them, but I’m not saying these things as a judgment, not negatively; I’m describing. This is the Haredi conception, and therefore of course the honor of the state interests them not at all. On that I fully agree. But that is part of the same move I’m talking about here. It’s not the concern here over the immorality inherent in chauvinism; that interests them not at all. That isn’t the point. The point is—they do, no—I mean it is true that they don’t deal with nationalism, national honor and… with establishing… They don’t deal in those scales at all. It’s irrelevant. It doesn’t interest them. But isn’t the tension built in between nationalism and religiosity? Meaning, didn’t it rest on some tension that was necessary at the time? I think that tension was not between nationalism and religiosity; the tension between nationalism and religiosity was created because religiosity opposed nationalism. It’s not built in. The Haredim are more to blame for this than the secular people. The Haredim created the tension. No, today the generation is already one where each side already knows the other side, but… Not today—in the nineteenth century, not today. I’m talking from the beginning. And from the beginning they spoke about this tension; that is, that’s how they presented things—there is nationalism or religiosity. They created this tension and then talked about it. That’s obvious. They also created the tension between enlightenment and faith or religious commitment, and afterward of course we collapsed because that tension killed us. But one has to admit that sometimes you see that those who didn’t create the tension did pay a price in one of the two things; that is, those who created the tension were the ones who paid all the prices. Exactly the opposite. From the most distorted Haredi outlook imaginable—here I’m already being judgmental—obviously the Haredi conception brought about the greatest secularization there ever was. If we look at the last sixty years, we can say that the public… Not now—I’m talking, on the contrary, at the beginning. The opposition to the Zionist movement and to the Enlightenment brought all the secularization you see around you. Not the Zionist movement—the Enlightenment. That’s what created secularization. What created secularization was that the opposition to the Enlightenment basically presented people, especially young people, with the following dilemma: either be righteous and stupid, or wicked and smart. Choose. I agree; I just think that this does refute what you said about the fact that the world doesn’t interest them. It does interest them, because they understood that, at least in what may have been a mistaken conception, the two contradict one another. Now the question is… I’m explaining again—you’re not right. You’re not right. It started with their unwillingness to make changes in the world. Period. After that, therefore, they oppose anything that is action that changes the world, that changes the situation. Because they oppose it, tension is created. But also in changing themselves, changing their own generation, that isn’t connected to changing the world—it’s not the world itself but change versus the old. No, no, I’m saying changing themselves is part of changing the world. Their claim is: we’re not supposed to change anything. The world happens to us. It simply happens to us; it isn’t us. We don’t—we maneuver within it. But there were also demonstrations every two days in the period when the Haredim in the Land of Israel held demonstrations every two days and each time went out for another activity that dealt precisely with conservatism and less with passivity. No, those demonstrations were for the sake of passivity. That’s what they demonstrated about. What do you mean? Again, I’ll get to activity—just let me move ahead a bit. I’ll get to all the examples raised here. Since looking at these scales—changing a world, establishing a state, changing the condition of the Jewish people—is simply completely foreign to the Haredi conception. And by the way, to the Jewish conception of the last two thousand years. It’s not a new invention. It is completely foreign. Jews did not perceive themselves as someone who had a role to do something, change something. You need to survive the world, acquire maximum commandments, minimum transgressions for the World to Come. That’s all. And this conception that says no, no—we have a task, we will change the world, we will bring the messiah, bring the messiah in the sense of changing political reality, in that sense, not in the eschatological-religious sense, yes, to which there are also objections, but I’m not speaking on that plane—so all these scales are simply not scales that Haredim deal with at all. And therefore you ask a Haredi person, wait, what do you expect to be here economically in fifty years or whatever? When you’ll already be a much larger percentage of the state, you’ll become a burden, you don’t work, you don’t serve in the army, you contribute hardly anything to GDP? They don’t look at that at all. In fifty years, who knows, the messiah may come. They don’t—it’s not the kind of thinking that occupies them at all. And again, I’m describing right now, not judging. Meaning, again, I don’t agree with it, but I’m trying to describe the mode of thought. From their point of view they see the world as something that, fine, somehow it’ll work out, I know, and if there’s an atomic bomb the Holy One, blessed be He, will help. What can I do? I need in the short term, in my own four cubits, to emerge as well as I can. That is my goal. National movements, changes, bringing the messiah, guarding the borders, establishing an army, conscription, contributing to GDP—what could be less interesting? Meaning, they can take lots of money from the GDP and not think for a moment where that GDP will come from. Who will bring that money that you want to take? And again, it sounds to you like criticism, but I really don’t mean to criticize. I mean to describe. It’s simply a mode of thought. They say: I work on the here and now, I don’t look at the large scales because the large scales are in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He. That is not my role. He will take care that there will be a treasury, that there will be GDP, that there will be everything; you bring it to me so that I’ll have yeshivot and I can study. That’s all. This is an outlook that I think, all in all, very much continues the accepted line from time immemorial, contrary to what people think. This isn’t a new outlook. The new outlook is the Zionist one. It is the modern outlook, also the modern religious one, doesn’t matter—that is the new outlook. The outlook that says we have a task, we want to repair the world, establish a state, establish an army, take care of the economy, think long-term with five-year plans and thirty-year plans and think what will happen when the demography is such-and-such. Have you ever seen any Haredi person dealing with demography? What is demography at all? Demography is the Holy One, blessed be He. Meaning, He takes care of how many children you’ll have and how many you won’t have. You simply don’t make such calculations. Have you ever seen a Haredi person worrying about the climate problem in the world? Maybe there’s someone, but as a movement, as an idea, it is not present there at all. It’s not relevant. But Rabbi, what about interpersonal ethics? In wanting that those strangers should see and discover—but you, what about, you depend on, you rely on that—You don’t need to persuade me; I too criticize this. But right now I’m dealing with description. Okay? Don’t persuade me, I share this criticism. But right now I’m trying to deal with description, I’m simply trying to show a certain mode of thought. And this mode of thought, I think, is something very deep and fundamental in the Haredi conception. I think that’s the root point. Everything else is external expressions. But Rabbi, sorry—when you say this is Haredi behavior for two thousand years, it’s a bit different because for two thousand years they were never a burden on society. Correct, obviously—they are continuing the old situation even though the situation has changed. That’s the swimsuit parable. Meaning, from their perspective that’s how it always was. Has reality changed? Now there’s no nobleman to take care of us and protect us or not protect us. We need to maintain the army. No—they don’t—what do you mean? We’ve been this way for two thousand years. It reminds me of what—again, my mother, now for the second time today. When I came back from the midrasha when I was in a yeshiva high school, I came home with the issue of tithes. She says to me: I don’t know, in our house they didn’t do that, in Hungary, in Budapest. Yes? In our house. Now go explain to her that we came to the Land of Israel. In the Land of Israel there are tithes; in Budapest there aren’t. She doesn’t know. She saw at home that they didn’t do it. A Haredi home, by the way. They didn’t do it. And that was that. So why suddenly do it now? The point is that you continue what was always done even if the circumstances have changed, and you’re right that the application is supposed to be updated. But no, that’s not the mode of thought. But if they took care of their communities, they were responsible for things, they worked, they contributed in their communities. On the small scale, yes. Obviously you maneuver within your own world, and if there is no state supporting you, you’ll go to work, otherwise you’ll starve to death. He’s not stupid. But if there is a state supporting him, he won’t think, wait, so what will happen to this state in another fifty years? If it keeps supporting me when I’ll already also be fifty percent of the population of the state and there won’t be an army to protect me and there won’t be anyone to maintain the economy. He doesn’t think about that. Because right now the state supports him, everything is fine, on the small scale he manages. Again, usually in constriction, meaning no, there aren’t many demands, but he survives. He succeeds in doing his commandments without being corrupted, without touching the world too much, and arrives as clean as possible in the World to Come. Why don’t Haredim accept, in their institutions, children for example of Mizrahi background? Now, many times they are accused of racism, and there is racism there too, but that’s not all. It’s not only that. Children of Mizrahi background on average—of course there are all sorts—on average come from a somewhat different culture, less Haredi, more open to the world, and so on; some of them have televisions at home or all sorts of things like that. Again, of course there are also many who don’t, but many do. And therefore somehow this idea developed that they’ll corrupt our children. Maybe it’s true and maybe it’s not true—they’ll corrupt our children. And then a stigma already developed and quotas on Mizrahi children, and yes, we know the whole Haredi numerus clausus. But the claim is that they don’t accept these children into their institutions even though by doing so, according to their own view at least, they condemn hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of children and families to lives that are not Torah lives. Why not receive the education that, according to your view at least, is the proper education? Now true, sometimes they do go out and establish schools for them and so on—Talet, the movement for spreading Torah, those who know, things like that—they did that. But they will never enter my institution. Now why not? Because they corrupt my children. Or again, I’m not entering at all into judging whether this really counts as corruption or not. Here, by the way, I’m not sure I’m entirely critical. But it doesn’t matter, that is the conception. Now if the price is corruption of my own child—never. The world can burn and my child will not be corrupted. Why? Because the world burning is the Holy One, blessed be He’s problem, but my child being corrupted is something for which I will have to give an account in the World to Come, or he will have to give an account in the World to Come. I need to arrive as whole as possible in the World to Come; the task is mine in my own four cubits. And if the social consideration—the whole concept of integration—the concept of integration of course exists in general education, it also exists in religious education, there are criticisms, of course, everything’s fine, but that value is a value that exists. In the Haredi world there is no such value. The concept of integration doesn’t exist there. It doesn’t exist, simply doesn’t exist, it isn’t on the map. Why not? Because what you call integration will corrupt me. Now again, I’m not saying this judgmentally—I’m presenting a conception. I keep repeating that because there is a lot of judgment here; these ideas sound problematic, at least to the ears of people who are not Haredi. But no, I’m really only trying to describe. Meaning, if people are starting from such a point of view, then from their perspective they are right. They aren’t thinking about the question of what will become of the children of Israel. And again, one can bring verses and Jewish laws and why it is very important, and “do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood,” and “you shall surely rebuke,” all true, mutual responsibility and all kinds of things like that. I don’t know—I don’t think on those scales, what will become of the children of Israel. I don’t know what the Holy One, blessed be He, will decide. I need to worry about my child reaching the World to Come in the best possible condition. That’s all. But Rabbi, what about Haredim in the United States, for example? According to you, if it really is like this, then they have no reason at all to go vote either for Trump or for Kamala Harris. Why should they care? If everything is in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He, then they also won’t go vote. No, I didn’t say everything is in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He. I said the big tasks are not placed upon us. To go vote—fine, you go vote and there in the ballot box there’s this slip or that slip, so you put in the slip that seems better to you. But to make a movement that is going to change something—they won’t run for president of the United States. They’ll vote for someone who’s running for president of the United States. They won’t—it’s not because they have no chance; true, they have no chance, but that isn’t the point. They won’t make a practical move. They’ll put a slip in the ballot box; you have the right to vote and you can choose between two slips, you put in the slip that seems better to you. Fine—we’re not going to the extreme of saying they abstain from the world completely, but the conception, the ideological conception, is that action in the world is not something placed upon us. And that is the point. We are supposed to survive here; we are not acting here. This is only a corridor. We need—an unlit corridor, I don’t know what’s going on here—you somehow have to reach the banquet hall safely at the end, to the light at the end of the tunnel, and arrive as well as possible. And therefore the concept of corruption in the Haredi world, which you hear also with respect to integration in education and of course with respect to conscription—the concept of corruption is so essential. People don’t understand that this is the Haredi infrastructure, not the attitude toward Zionism. Separatism and the fear of corruption are the essence of Haredi-ism, not the attitude toward Zionism. And fear of corruption means: listen, my child will go to the army. Now there’s a chance my child will be corrupted if he goes to the army. Among Haredim corruption is measured, in general, at a finer resolution too—an even greater chance that he’ll be corrupted. And then what? So he’ll save the Jewish people? I don’t know what “save the Jewish people” means; one fewer soldier in Golani won’t make any difference. So many times I’ve heard from Haredi people, both on my website and in person, things that make me tear my hair out when I hear them, and they say it completely innocently: what do you want? They don’t really need them, you see that things are working out. There are soldiers, they’re managing, what’s the problem? They really don’t need us. What do you mean they don’t really need you? What does that mean? So they don’t really need me either. Fine, everything’s fine, then nobody should enlist because nobody is needed. Meaning, their assumption is that if there are suckers who go, then that means they don’t need us. Again, they do not perceive—and this is not criticism, this is description—that this task of defending the borders is imposed on them too, like on everyone else. That simply is not the point. It happens—that is, the borders are somehow defended, it happens, I don’t know exactly how, somehow—and we’ll somehow survive this. Right now I need my child not to be corrupted, because my child needs to reach the World to Come, and one more fighter in Golani won’t change a thing. But my child’s World to Come—that fills the whole screen for me. And again, notice, this is a coherent ideological worldview. I am not describing something here in order to smear it. This is the perspective. And therefore all these concepts of repairing the world, acting in the world, are foreign to Haredi thought. And by the way, they were always foreign. I think that in this sense the Haredim definitely reflect the most prevalent mindset that existed in the past as well. The innovations that Jews need to repair something in the world, improve, change, build themselves up, help themselves—those are innovations of the last two hundred years, hundred and fifty years. “Aleinu” is older than two hundred years; the word “repair” appears there. What do you mean? I didn’t understand. “To repair the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty” means to do commandments. Well, that’s the plain meaning, of course. That repairs the world; we do the commandments. No, but they really do conceive of that as repairing the world; that’s real. The concepts of repairing the world in the sense we speak of today are foreign to them—that simply is not, that’s for gentiles, it’s the laws of the nations altogether. Repairing the world—think about communism, the Bund, all kinds of general movements like that—they look at this as something like, what is this, some gentile business. They are dealing here—and from their perspective this world is the arena. We need to get through it and reach the World to Come. Not because they oppose communism or support communism; that doesn’t occupy them at all. None of them thinks about what economic system the State of Israel should be run by—should there be socialism or capitalism? That interests them not at all. It doesn’t matter, because we are not supposed to manage things on that scale or to act; we don’t think on that scale at all. We think on the scale of my own four cubits. And the parties and organizations and all the rest, their role is to make sure that the private individual in his own four cubits can continue to function. They have no goal of repairing the environment. Haredi parties are not meant to repair the environment, and not even to repair Haredi society. They are meant to bring money so that people can continue living in their own four cubits and reach the World to Come in the optimal way, that’s all. They have no other goal. They do not do activities for other goals. The organizational activities too are activities meant to ensure that we can somehow survive and continue being Haredi inside our Noah’s ark and reach the World to Come safely. All the concepts of free-loan societies and kindness and all the rest—partly that’s because it’s a commandment, partly because it really is helping people, and a large part of it is because that’s what sustains this society, because this is not a society that can really sustain itself. So in the final analysis, all these major activities that are done a lot in Haredi society are activities whose role is maintenance of the individual. There are no activities there meant to repair something on the large scales. There is no such thing. There is no Haredi activity… Is the difference in the boundaries of the arena? Whether it’s Haredi or Israeli, I mean? Because many Israelis too are not interested in the world beyond the Israeli arena. I’m talking about conceptions, not about people. People—there are such people in every place. Yes, okay, I’m speaking—and the Israeli national conception too is occupied with Israeli nationality, not with universalism, environmental quality, and things like that, at least much of it. Israeli nationalism is a very large scale. Repairing the world—and by the way, there are not a few Israelis who also engage in repairing the world. Yes, I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the more popular thing, what’s called nationalism in its narrower sense and so on. But I am also talking about them. Because in the end, when you examine ideologies and not the people, the ideologies are like this. Now once there is an ideology, all sorts of people engage in it on all sorts of levels. There are bigger people with a wider horizon who are willing to save the world—notice Biafra and Doctors Without Borders and soldiers without—I don’t know what, with that trip, yes, to help; there’s also an organization like that of discharged soldiers and so on. These are people who really think on the scale of the world. Other people think on the scale of the state. Other people are just egoists who think only of themselves. But in conception, the conception is yes—we are supposed to act in the world. State, world even, everything. Among Haredim that is not the conception. It’s not a weakness of people that they don’t deal with the large scales. It’s simply not the conception; they don’t want to deal with it. It’s not that they want to but they are too weak. No, that’s simply not the model. I’m talking about conceptions, not about people. But I think that on the issue, for example, of conscription, your thesis isn’t quite right that they aren’t interested in what’s going on. They present an argument in which they say: one needs to defend the state, but we defend it because we study Torah. Meaning, here they are indeed addressing the defense, indeed addressing the problem, except that in their view they are fulfilling their duty. And therefore in this point you can’t give them that sort of stamp of approval that they have always been uninterested. Yes, you know, people once said—and yes, I have to slip into judgment anyway; sometimes I can’t restrain myself, not only description. The old joke about Nixon—how do you know Nixon is lying? What’s the indication? The answer is: when he moves his lips. Meaning, the moment he speaks, he’s lying. He doesn’t know what truthful speech is. And it’s the same with Haredi spokesmen. Meaning, how do you know a Haredi spokesman is lying? When he moves his lips. Meaning, all these ridiculous arguments about protection and all that collapse immediately the moment you see how Haredim relate to the conscription of those who don’t study. Or how they relate to the possibility of enlisting and studying in periods, like the hesder yeshiva students also study Torah. So enlist for a year, a year and a half, two years, three, I don’t know how much. You have your whole life to study Torah; in the meantime others will study in your place, what’s the problem? Do you specifically have to study for seventy years and not sixty-seven years? Meaning, three fewer years because of military service? Will the world collapse if you do that? You understand that this is not the consideration. Nobody really… But publicly, openly, and always when people argue with them, that’s their main argument. Obviously that’s what they say publicly, because they need to defend themselves against you. That’s why I say—when you attack them, they need to give you an argument, they need to give you an argument that explains to you why they don’t enlist. So they explain to you: what do you mean? We protect you; you don’t protect us. But Rabbi, Rabbi, but what you’re actually presenting here is the opposite—there is some conception here that is completely apologetic. You’ve actually given a description that is more a description of a Haredi worldview, some kind of cognitive process or something that is part of the ideology. On the contrary, it sounds like in another moment we’re supposed to understand them and say it isn’t even their fault, it’s just their way of thinking. First of all, there is a lot of truth in that. The blame, in my opinion, is blame on the society, on the conception. A person who grows up within such a conception genuinely sees the world that way. And therefore I think this is indeed a mitigating argument, so to speak, or at least an argument for taking into account the distortions there. Yes, I entirely agree. At the same time, I entirely oppose these conceptions. But the conceptions are collective there; they are conceptions that accompany them in a terribly deep way. It’s hard to judge an individual who grew up in a society that pumps these conceptions into him from age zero, and say to him: how do you not see how distorted this is? He really doesn’t see it. He truly looks at the world that way. And in that sense I think—if there is here a favorable word on behalf of Haredi people—I think it’s true, it really is true. I have very strong criticism of these conceptions, but these really are their conceptions. Meaning, one has to understand that when they look at the world, they see it this way. They really do see it this way. They are not—on the contrary, this view as though “we protect you because Torah study protects you” and so on—that’s nonsense. Nobody really believes that. Sometimes they convince themselves and maybe even really believe it, but that’s not the argument. They also go to the doctor. They don’t say my Torah study protects me from needing a doctor. They go to the doctor to get healed. Why? Where’s the Torah study? Torah study is supposed to protect you; why are you going to the doctor? In short, these are old arguments, not things I invented. That is not really the argument. The point is that they are trying to deal with you in your language because they need to explain to you what… their position. But in truth, truly, they really and sincerely see the world, I think, the way I described it. They really see the world that way. And you understand that when people really see the world that way, then all the crazy distortions—in my eyes, crazy distortions—but they really are natural derivations of their worldview. That’s really how it comes out. They really and sincerely see the world that way. Therefore you’re right that this indeed makes it very hard to judge the ordinary person, the average individual. He grew up inside such a conception; all his guides keep pumping these conceptions into him all the time; the people he most admires and esteems tell him all the time that this is the correct conception and ignore the rest, it’s all the evil inclination’s advice. I have a problem with the conception itself, with the Haredi collective that developed such a distorted conception. But that really is the conception. They really see it like that. They’re not just some gathering of wicked people who all assembled under long coats. As if somehow all the wicked people gathered in Bnei Brak. They’re not wicked. They are no less good than anyone else. That is not the point. They live within a distorted conception. And I criticize the conception. Rabbi? Yes. According to what the rabbi is now saying, then really the main guilt is… they’re a bit like captured infants. נכון. Right. And who could have saved them and guided them, or at least debated with them, is us and people like the rabbi. But how many people like the rabbi spoke in this way before the last war—yes, when we were facing a broken cistern? We felt it, but not… nobody said it openly, no rabbi and no one else did; they didn’t go out and polemicize across the board, and the result is what it is. Fine, here we’re already entering disputes and judgments and so on, which really is less my goal here. I just want to say: first of all, I think the diagnosis is important. And I think very few people have formulated for themselves the diagnosis I’m talking about here. Because many times you really argue with them—wait, does Torah indeed protect and save or not? For example, people argue with Haredim about conscription and tell them, but it says “the bridegroom from his chamber and the bride from her canopy,” and all sorts of things like that, and it’s a commanded war and “to save Israel from the hand of the oppressor.” What are all these things? Basically they speak to the Haredim in a language they’ll understand. What do you mean? They tell them: look, there’s a halakhic source that says you must enlist. It’s a commanded war, after all it’s a commandment. You also do commandments, right? But you understand, it’s not a commanded war and not anything of the kind—it’s all nonsense. It has nothing whatsoever to do with a commanded war. If I were in Belgium, and Belgium were in distress and needed soldiers to enlist, and I were a Haredi Jewish resident of Belgium, I would have exactly the same claim against a Haredi person who doesn’t enlist in Belgium as against the Haredi person here in Israel. It has nothing to do with Zionism, with a commanded war, or with saving Israel from an oppressor. It has to do with the duty of a citizen to the state and society of which he is a part. And if that state is in distress, then everyone, anyone who can, must enlist and try to defend it. But that kind of thinking is completely foreign to the Haredi world. You can’t speak to them in that language. So people tell them “commanded war” and “the bridegroom from his chamber and the bride from her canopy” and all these quotations and other quotations—it doesn’t begin with quotations and it doesn’t end with quotations. It has nothing to do with quotations at all. But the way of thinking you’re presenting to us has one problem, at least for me. It can’t explain the hatred we feel from the Haredi side. When they allow themselves to call us Nazis, when they allow themselves to call us insulting names and show expressions of hatred, that’s much more than just “leave us alone and let us sit quietly.” It’s not more than that—it’s exactly that. Those cries come out when they feel distress. When among some of them there are also pangs of conscience because they begin to understand they are not in the right. And the way to deal with someone outside—or with your own pangs of conscience inside—is basically to project outward. And projecting outward says: you’re Nazis, you’re persecuting us, you want to destroy us, and therefore we won’t cooperate with you. Because you need somehow to explain to yourself too, not only to others, why you are not doing things that are a basic obligation for every mortal human being, every reasonable person. So you escalate the discourse, and little by little you also convince yourself that it is true. Yes, Dov Lando, with his latest outbursts there, about how Zionism was born in order to secularize, and therefore one must leave Zionist institutions—the man has completely lost his mind, in my opinion, or perhaps he never had it, I’m not sure. But, but, but—that’s a reaction to pressure being exerted there. And the pressure exerted there, by the way, is also exerted from within. Because the fact that military enlistment is rising a bit there and suddenly becoming more legitimate, and the Haredi Noah’s ark is beginning to wobble, throws them into hysteria. And again, I’m saying it throws them into genuine hysteria. This is not merely cynical wickedness driven by interest. It throws them into hysteria because their Noah’s ark is being shaken. They are going to mix with the world. Mixing with the world means becoming people of this world. In other words, losing the image of the Haredi human being. You stop dealing with Torah, spirituality, the World to Come, and suddenly start dealing with this world. And therefore this really and sincerely constitutes a major threat to them. And Zionism came not to secularize the Jewish people, but to de-Haredize it. And that is true, because Zionism, the whole idea of acting in the world—I’m not talking about the fact that there were also trends toward secularization and so on, I’m not naive. But I’m saying the Zionist move as such is a move whose essence was to dismantle Haredi-ism, not religiosity. To dismantle Haredi-ism because it says: we are returning to the stage of the world. We are beginning to act on the large scales. We are becoming a nation like all nations in the sense of—in the sense of a normal nation in history, yes—not a nation like all the nations that behaves like all the nations, but one that functions in history. And that is a threat to Haredi-ism. In itself, regardless of whether you keep the 613 commandments in that state. Besides that they also don’t keep the 613 commandments—that’s another story. But this latches onto something deeper. And in that sense there really is here some essential opposition to this worldview, to this theology. This is not a local matter. And don’t get stuck on the arguments they make—they have nothing to do with the truth. Meaning, the arguments they make—sometimes they lie to themselves, sometimes they lie to us. But the arguments are arguments for apologetics. You see it—made-up arguments come up there; you can’t believe that intelligent people can come up with such idiotic arguments. They can come up with such idiotic arguments because obviously the arguments aren’t really theirs. They are somehow trying to present a plausible apologetic to represent something they can’t really explain to others—how they live. They’re sort of Amish. Meaning, you can’t explain your conception to others, so you say: no, no, I protect you and I contribute too and I’m here and I’m there, and all sorts of theories that they also contribute to GDP, don’t even ask—I’ve heard everything already from Haredi spokesmen. There’s nothing I haven’t heard. It’s unbelievable, really, and some of them are intelligent people. So it’s obvious that what we have here is some kind of distress, some kind of struggle they aren’t able to manage properly. Because their conception cannot survive in a world in which responsibility is already imposed upon them too. When you’re twenty percent or thirty percent or will later be even more of the state, you can no longer feel: fine, I’m in my own four cubits and we’ll see. When the state truly begins to collapse—not like now, when we make calculations about what will happen in twenty years or fifty years—when the state truly begins to collapse, they too will wake up. That’s obvious. But by then it may already be too late, because then it will already be short-range. These aren’t actions you can think about on the large scale. If there is danger now, I assume they will do something to defend themselves against the danger. But when you think on the macro level—yes, how the economy will behave and how the army will look in thirty years and what will happen with demography—that’s not the sort of considerations they make. But Rabbi, that’s very—it’s actually much more pessimistic, because it describes a situation where this is part of their whole picture of the world, if one can use Wittgenstein’s term. Completely. A picture of the world—it’s part of the language. It’s not something you can change. It’s not an outlook. It’s not an outlook; it’s a picture of the world. It’s the language. It’s something deep. I completely agree, but “you can’t change it” is too deterministic. You’re right that it’s very deep, and therefore of course change is not one bang and it’s over. But I think you need to understand what you’re up against. And you really are facing a completely different perspective. It isn’t some specific value or some specific problem where if you organize the army properly then there’s no issue and they’ll come. They won’t come even if you organize the army properly. They won’t come because they do not believe in this kind of activity. They’ll come only if you force them to come. If they are in existential danger—either from the Arabs, when they’ll understand that if we don’t take up arms we all die now, not in some long-term calculation—or if the money won’t come and they’ll have no way to live in their Noah’s ark. That’s the only way. And I think that deeds shape the heart. Meaning, if you force them to act differently, then their worldview too can change, undergo a metamorphosis. I think you can also see this a bit in specifically Haredi problems, like phenomena that exist only in Haredi society, for example giving apartments to daughters and things like that, which is an extremely serious problem that is exploding much earlier than other problems. And there isn’t some cabinet meeting up above saying, okay, let’s change the system. Let’s reverse it, let’s do something dramatic differently. I don’t mean reduce a hundred thousand shekels, but simply change. What they do, they do activism and intercession—that’s the craft of Jews from time immemorial. To bring more money from the state in order to solve that problem. That is exactly the point. We solve problems through activism and intercession. We don’t solve problems through thought processes and five-year plans. That isn’t the way they work. No, I’m not talking about the daily need—that they do try to solve that way. These problems are a much more serious issue; the state—the state can’t help on such a level that a kollel man… Certainly it can. A kollel man who gives for four of his daughters, gives a quarter million shekels for an apartment, he can’t. I’m not saying they solve all the problems, but I am saying that certainly housing in the Haredi world is supported to a large extent by budgets coming from outside. All the special programs and construction specially for Haredim, and all the arrangements that what’s-his-name, Goldknopf, manages to direct in large measure toward Haredi channels—all of that is part of the same intercession meant to address these problems. It doesn’t answer them entirely. The private person in the end still has to pay for an apartment, and even if he pays less for it, an apartment is still a huge amount of money, and four apartments is much more money. I agree. But clearly at the moment the mode of action—how they cope with this problem—is local intercession. Get me money, I’ll try to raise more money. There is no thought of: okay, there’s some systemic problem here, let’s try to think about the system. What are we supposed to do? “Repairing” for Haredim, the Haredi repairing of the world, means returning the world to the correct principles that always existed. When there is a deviation from the correct principles, one needs to repair the world and return it to those principles. To think about the principles themselves, to think about a different structure, social too and not only halakhic, a different structure—that simply is not their mode of thought. It isn’t. But the structure of kollels—isn’t that a new structure that didn’t exist before, and that is actually a change that Haredi society made to itself? Yes, changes happen all the time, and they happen from below, not from above. No, but that one specifically—wasn’t it conscious? Wasn’t it the Hazon Ish who spoke about it and it entered very strongly into Israeli rabbinic leadership? Kollels did not begin with the Hazon Ish. There was a kollel in the days of the Chafetz Chaim, a kollel for sacrificial-law subjects, there were various kollels and yeshivot that were already established back then. And these were local initiatives, and they arose from below because they saw that there was distress and children were under threat from the Enlightenment and so on. There are many, many reasons for the emergence of the modern yeshiva. It happened in Volozhin. There were no such yeshivot before. And these things arise from below, and obviously eventually things do change. Again, don’t take these things too black-and-white. Of course changes happen there, but the thinking that we are supposed to act and bring about the changes and plan them and think in five-year plans—that doesn’t exist there. Okay? Does the rabbi not feel—the rabbi spoke about these bottom-up changes—does the rabbi not feel that in the end only the shell is being left? That the inner content of this Haredi-ism, of truly not dealing with this world—when I was a youth and was in Haredi yeshivot, and today when I visit, I hear a different discourse. They have become very much a this-world discourse, with a facade of the World to Come. I don’t agree. I don’t agree. I agree that every society is of course made up of all sorts of people. I think the ideology exists, and not a few people really live it. But much less than in the past. That I don’t know. I didn’t do statistics, but when the public is larger, naturally the margins are also larger. Is the Torah creativity today, the Haredi analytical Torah creativity, like it used to be? Today it’s harder to build Noah’s arks. The world is stronger; the world penetrates into your private domain. There are many people who are not really identified with this, so they are on the margins of the matter—they are this-worldly within Haredi limitations. But that is not the conception. The conception really is a conception of the World to Come, and it is an authentic conception. It is an authentic conception that definitely has an avant-garde group or a leading group that truly lives it. Truly lives it. Even Rabbi Dov Lando, who in my opinion is completely detached from the world, is a clear expression of this conception. He genuinely lives it. He is not speaking it merely from the lips outward. He says infantile things, but he really lives this conception authentically; this is really how he sees the world. And I think there are not a few Haredim who are really like that, and this is their spiritual leadership. Now there are of course politicians and activists and many, many other things, like any society; it is made up of many parts. And obviously there is also a lot of indulgence as in every society, and many other things. And in the Haredi world it’s more conspicuous because it contradicts the worldview even more, so criticism is much easier to hurl there, because there it pricks the eye even more sharply that you live like this when your worldview is the opposite. But I still think it exists there. That really is their worldview and it’s genuine. They really think this way. The excuses and apologetics in response to external criticism—leave it, don’t be impressed, there isn’t a word of truth there. It has nothing to do with it. Sometimes they fool themselves and sometimes they fool you, but there’s no connection—it’s not really connected to the thing itself, to the real reasons. I just want to continue a little more with this matter; it took me more time than I thought. The voluntary activities, say, of the Haredi world are activities at the level of the individual. Charity, kindness, free-loan societies, organizations for fulfilling commandments, redemption of a firstborn donkey or separating dough, or all sorts of things of this kind, or making sure the hothouse survives. Here you can maybe somewhat see activities on larger scales, namely the politicians. They need to make sure the hothouse survives so that inside it each private individual can continue to live and reach the World to Come safely. So there is political activism, there are parties, sometimes they also establish Haredi towns or Haredi neighborhoods or building projects; in that sense there are Haredi initiatives. But that isn’t to repair the world. Those are initiatives so that we survive, so that the individual can continue to survive and reach the World to Come safely. So there is no choice; here and there one has to deal with short-term problems of this world. That they do. Even bringing people to repentance, by the way—which ostensibly is the clearest activity that does look like activity to repair the world—is also not entirely like that. And again, I don’t want to sound too dogmatic, but it’s also not entirely like that. Because first of all, there is a commandment here, so doing a commandment is easy. I’m talking about repairing the world in a broader sense—that’s something else. Second, obviously once you bring people to repentance, and you will always bring them back into the Haredi world, you are not satisfied with merely bringing them to observe commandments—so this actually strengthens Haredi society. Meaning, you know, in the yeshiva where I studied, Netivot Olam, there was a spiritual supervisor—maybe he still is, I don’t know—who told people there, I know that when you as people who returned to repentance go home, you try all the time to bring your whole family and all your friends back to repentance. Stop it, don’t do it. First of all, it won’t let you function well with your family; it’ll tear your relationships apart. Second, you’re not doing it for the sake of Heaven, he told them. And I took that very seriously—it’s very true. You’re doing it because you lack confidence in what you are, in the step you took. And the lack of confidence in the step you took—how do you deal with it? You explain to everyone: we’re the most right, we’ll bring everyone back to repentance, all the truth is with us. Because deep inside you feel that you aren’t really whole with the path, or that you have self-criticism about what you did. Someone who has inner self-confidence is more relaxed in relation to other people too, even if he disagrees with them. The example that always comes to my mind in this context is the books of Chaim Grade, yes? “Tzemach Atlas” and “The Agunah”… no, sorry, “The Struggle of the Evil Inclination.” Whoever has read them—I think they’re good books. Chaim Grade was a Yiddish poet who may even have seen himself, at least, as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, and was angry at Bashevis Singer who allegedly stole the prize from him. Doesn’t matter. In any case, he grew up as a child in the Novardok yeshivot, and in his book, in those two books, he describes a certain head of a yeshiva named Tzemach Atlas, which is a literary name. Once Professor Avelin wrote an article trying to identify who Tzemach Atlas really was, who he was in reality, but it doesn’t matter, it’s a literary name. He was a young Novardok type, a kid of twenty or something like that, who became head of a yeshiva, because that’s how it was in the Novardok yeshivot: he gathered around him the children of the village and protected them from the dangers of the times. And you know, when a wild kid of twenty—Novardok people are all wild men—and he is twenty, and he educates children of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, nothing good will come of that. Now he describes there that this head of the yeshiva, Tzemach Atlas, was consumed inside by doubts in faith and urges and all sorts of things of that kind, and outwardly he was a zealot who persecuted every hint and trace of such phenomena. And little Chaimke—that is, Chaim Grade himself—who was a student in that yeshiva, was thrown out of the yeshiva because of all sorts of things like that. Then he went to live for a few months in the house of “the man of vision Abraham,” which was a Jew who used to come vacationing in that village—it was some village called Volkenik, I hope I’m pronouncing it right. He used to come there in the summer to vacation in this village, and when Chaimke was thrown out of the yeshiva he went to live with him; he took him into his house, this man of vision Abraham. And this man of vision Abraham was a Jew who would sit and learn all the time and was completely whole within himself. Meaning, little Chaimke, thrown out of the yeshiva with all his questions and contradictions and heresies and urges and everything, laid all his questions before this man of vision Abraham. He discussed them with him and talked to him and encouraged him—maybe yes, maybe no—and gave him room. Fine, that’s what you think, all right. And it’s amazing because everyone knows who this man of vision Abraham was—that was the Hazon Ish. Meaning, Tzemach Atlas we don’t know exactly who he was, but the man of vision Abraham was the Hazon Ish, and indeed Chaim Grade lived in his house for a few months. And I think I don’t know any description so beautiful of a great Torah scholar as the description of the Hazon Ish in those books. And that description is given by a man who once observed and then left, abandoned everything, and after the Holocaust was completely shaven and secular. And there are all kinds of legends in Bnei Brak that he wanted to return but didn’t make it and the Hazon Ish had already died—doesn’t matter, those are Bnei Brak legends I assume. But in any case, he writes this already as a mature writer. And you see how he describes the Hazon Ish—this is an ethical work. It’s literally an ethical work. And the main lesson that I at least see in these books is this analogy between the man of vision Abraham and Tzemach Atlas. The Hazon Ish was a man very extreme in his views, but very moderate in his conduct. He accepted every person, related to everyone, did not impose his opinion, and he had very extreme conceptions; yes, he did try to spread them on the public level. On the private level—I didn’t meet him, of course—but people who did meet him, people who knew him, say that he really was an easygoing man, a pleasant man; he accepted anyone of any kind, any type. Obviously with questions—questions. I once heard from Rabbi Yogel: he said that he studied as a study partner with Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel, and they would come to the Hazon Ish every week to talk with him about the things that came up for them during the week. And Rabbi Gedaliah—or perhaps also he, I no longer remember exactly the details of the story—would ask the Hazon Ish, wait, but you wrote this way here and it doesn’t seem right to me; in reasoning it seems to me this way, or there’s another source. And the Hazon Ish said to him: Gedaliah, you think differently? Then act differently, what’s the problem? Fine. There is no commandment to accept what I say. Meaning, if you think differently, do what you think—that’s what I think. And that’s also what he says in his letters: it is not my way to enter into arguments, it doesn’t help; there is a very famous letter of the Hazon Ish. And at the same time there is also the letter about extremism, and his conceptions were indeed very extreme, without doubt. And the point that I think distinguishes him from Tzemach Atlas is what is going on inside. Meaning, if he is completely whole within himself, then despite having extreme views, he will relate with Olympian calm even to people with different views, including heretics. But Tzemach Atlas, who is eaten up from within by doubts and struggles of that kind, fights against every trace of heresy or sinful thought or something like that with jihad, with crusade. Because he is consumed within. Usually, when you wage wars outwardly, you are really fighting with something inside yourself. That’s a principle of mine, at least—it’s very clear. A person at peace with himself is usually a person who behaves with considerable moderation toward people outside, even if they think differently. Meaning, he’s at peace with himself, he’s not disturbed by it; he’ll try to persuade you, argue with you, not argue with you, but fine—if you think differently, then you think differently. A person consumed within is fighting himself, and the war with himself is done by projecting onto someone else and then fighting against him, while that other person really represents what bothers you within. You fight yourself through him. And usually zealots, in my opinion—zealots are people who have doubts about the path. That’s usually what characterizes zealots, contrary to what people think. People who are whole with their path do not usually behave zealously. They may have zealous conceptions; they do not behave zealously. And therefore I think that if you look also at the Haredi world as a collective, when they go out to world war, to world wars, it’s usually when the problem they are fighting against exists within their own camp. So then they’ll go out, then it will be world war. If the state collapses, becomes apostate, I don’t know what—this will not produce any war among Haredim. Including not spiritual things. Meaning, even if the state becomes apostate. But if people inside the Haredi world begin to enlist, or become apostate, or think Zionistically, or something like that—that’s world war. Because you always fight what is within you; you don’t fight the one outside. You fight the one outside technically, but that is really a way of fighting against what is happening within you. And Haredim always fight against phenomena within the Haredi world. They never engage in wars against the outside. They are not interested in repairing the outside, repairing the world. That isn’t the point. Okay, I went on a bit here. I don’t know if next time I’ll continue a little, because I still have more things here, but okay—I think this is still a perspective—think about it. I think—I don’t know—I became very convinced that I’ve really grasped a very correct point here. For many years I thought Haredi-ism was only sociological. And now, really in the last month, the coin dropped for me; I suddenly understood that there’s another point here. Organizations like Ezer Mizion, Lev L’Achim, Yad Sarah—those organizations, the main part of their activity is not inward toward Haredim. Correct. So how does that fit? And those organizations… Charity and kindness, as I said before. Charity and kindness, obviously. No, not inward within the Haredim. Not only within the Haredi world. Charity and kindness not only for the Haredi world. I said two things. First, charity and kindness—without that the Haredi world would not live, because it cannot really sustain itself. The private individual there is in distress and you need charity and kindness so that society survives. That is inward-facing. But also outwardly there is a commandment of charity and kindness, to do charity and kindness. They engage in commandments. Obviously. That’s not repairing the world. So maybe there one should speak more about orientation to actions and less about orientation to results? Meaning, Haredi society is action-oriented and not result-oriented? No, I don’t agree. It is oriented to results in the short term, in the private arena, and not in the large arena on the large scale in the long term. Yes? Of course it wants results. The question is only which results you are looking at. The results on the large scale—the long-term results—that’s the Holy One, blessed be He. We need to deal with our own little divine plot. We need to deal with maximum commandments, minimum transgressions, certainly to help others. To help others because it’s a commandment. And again, the Ringo course. So of course there will be organizations of charity and kindness also outwardly. But everything is on the personal level. Help a person, fulfill this commandment, fulfill that commandment. It won’t be to repair the state, repair society, repair the climate, repair this. So for example, when they look at laws like Liberman’s laws on plastic utensils and the tax on sweetened drinks and disposables and things like that, from their perspective this is simply a crusade against Haredi-ism. It was obvious to them. Why? Because they don’t even grasp that there are people who are genuinely trying to repair the climate. Leave Liberman aside; I’m not getting into what is in Liberman’s heart right now. But in many places in the world there are such laws. And these laws come in order to help future generations, to ensure that our planet survives, or our health, doesn’t matter—to repair the world in some sense. Among Haredim, they don’t see at all that such a thing exists. From their point of view, if you do this it is simply in order to harm Haredim, that’s all. So that’s an outlook… And to repair Haredi society itself—is there interest in that? What? And to repair Haredi society itself—is there interest in that within…? To repair Haredi society—that is the maximum there is, and even that, as I said before, means to restore it to its former strength. Not to change it. Do you understand? Meaning, there are principles that are always correct; we do not touch the principles. But there is deviation from the principles—that we will fix. That there won’t be deviations from the principles. Or to find… say, transferring economic welfare to Haredi society? Yes. I also spoke about this in the column where I said that in the Third Way that we… there is partnership between Haredim and non-Haredim. Suddenly it dawned on me—that’s where the coin started to drop for me—because the Haredi discourse, including among modern Haredim, who by nature are the ones who partner there and who are active and do activities to repair Haredi society and so on, is always: first, activities in order to solve people’s hardships, and not in order to repair what the society looks like. That isn’t the point, but rather to solve people’s hardships, and only toward Haredi society. It isn’t to repair—even the religious society, not to mention the state or society in general. But all the ideas of society are ultimately the hardships of people, if we look at it in a somewhat generic way. Fine, but you understand that when you say you establish an organization that tries to deal with sexual harassment, then obviously you see before your eyes people in distress. One has to find them an answer. When you want to deal with climate, you don’t see before you people in distress. The distress will be created in another two hundred years. You only know that if you don’t act now, it will be created then. That’s a type of perspective you won’t find in the Haredi world. Again, the boundary is not sharp; you’ll always be able to catch me here or there. As a characteristic, this is a very clear characteristic, very clear. Rabbi, I think there’s another implication from what the rabbi said. Even when it comes to those acts of kindness the rabbi spoke about, my feeling—and I was personally really struck by this—my feeling was many times that when you see a person, and this is a generalization, obviously there are the greatest people, you have Aryeh Levin and others, but as a certain generalization, when they do kindness toward the suffering person, he somewhat becomes an object. There is some compassion here and real sharing with him to the end—but without spoiling things, it’s much less. That’s the track I spoke about before; that’s where I started. But again, this is a real, authentic conception—meaning, it’s for the sake of Heaven. It’s not serving not for its own sake. Their “for the sake of Heaven” means I do it because it’s a commandment. But not “I do it for you, only it also happens to be a commandment.” No—I do it because it’s a commandment, and you are the object through which the commandment is fulfilled. Yes, the poor person is the object of the commandment of charity, as someone once told me: the poor person is the object of the commandment of charity. The commandment of charity is an obligation on me as a subject, and the poor person is the object through which I fulfill the commandment. Wasn’t that obvious to the rabbi? I’m exaggerating, I’m exaggerating, but I’m saying this element really is present in the Haredi conception. Is it simply obvious to him that this is how Haredim see the world? That the world is for the Torah, and not the Torah for the world. Okay, fine, that’s part of the issue, right. There’s the well-known joke: are there women for the sake of the Order of Women, or the Order of Women for the sake of women? Yes. Who needs women? We wouldn’t have what to study if there weren’t women, yes, known joke. Yes. Rabbi, throughout the lecture you emphasized that you don’t agree with the approach and the principles. I too personally am from the Religious Zionist public and don’t identify with this starting point, but I do ask myself where it came together from—whether it crystallized only from the sociological aspect, the place where you grew up. That’s a historical-sociological question, I don’t know, one has to think about it, but factually right now I feel that this is what distinguishes between the groups. How it happened, how it crystallized, I don’t know. I think two thousand years of exile naturally lead to this. This really was the mode of outlook throughout the years of exile; that was the prevalent outlook. On the contrary, the question is how the Zionist conception crystallized, or the Religious Zionist and also the nonreligious Zionist one. How did it crystallize? It is probably part of the Spring of Nations, because it is obvious that Zionism is part of the Spring of Nations. And the whole Spring of Nations is some kind of emergence toward repairing the world and large ideologies. Communism too was born with it, all of modernity. Modernity is basically repairing the world, and Zionism is part of that process. It came from outside, not from within. It is an influence from outside. Rabbi, when you personally say that you think we are here also in order to repair the world—is that something that comes from some sort of analysis? I’ll get to that, I’ll get to it. I feel that I’m neither on the Haredi side nor on the non-Haredi religious side. The Third Way? Some sort of middle, yes exactly. But I’ll get to that at the end after I finish describing. It took me a long time; I think I’ll finish with it today, but I think this is an important point, worth lingering over. This point—spoiler alert, I’m asking—is this connected to the whole organization of the Third Way? It has a connection, yes. For me—again, not all the partners there would agree to this—but yes. Meaning yes, because there you are addressing people who, you say, don’t know where to place themselves identity-wise. Correct. But again, I am not the Third Way. I always have my own views; those views are not the Third Way. The Third Way is made up of many people; it doesn’t even yet have institutions. There are agreed guidelines. My views are more radical than the agreed guidelines of the Third Way. One hundred percent. Thank you. Okay, we’ll still talk about that, because notice, for example, that the distinction I made here, in the division I made here, the Hardalim for example are entirely on the Religious Zionist side and not on the Haredi side. Meaning, as part of my conception that Haredi-ism is only sociology, it was obvious to me that Hardal-ism is simply another Hasidic group within the Haredi world. So these wear white socks and those say Hallel on Independence Day—so there’s no real difference between them. And that is true in their attitude toward Torah and commandments and interpretation of Jewish law, it’s the same thing, and in their conservatism. But in the commitment to repair the world, and in the fact that you don’t live for the sake of the World to Come, the Hardalim are entirely on the Religious Zionist side; they really are not on the Haredi side. In that sense I think this description is even more convincing because of that, because it really succeeds in describing those two groups too without exception. The Hardalim are not an exception; in this matter they really are on the Religious Zionist side and not on the Haredi side. There too they don’t speak about the World to Come; there too it’s obvious that they are trying to repair this world, in their own way, doesn’t matter, but they are trying to repair this world. All right, we’ll still have to deal with this a bit next time, and I hope that then at least we’ll finish. Okay. Good night.