Thank you very much, Rabbi. Forgive the request, but we’d be happy to see a proper column on this one day…
It’s a complicated and charged topic, and in my opinion it very much deserves a systematic discussion.

Joining the request

Daniel, if you want, contact me privately; I think I may be able to help resolve your doubts

I too, the little one, join in 🙂

I join the requests for a discussion about correcting Haredi education and Religious Zionist education.

That’s certainly true, but will they listen to us?
By contrast, here the question is from our side, assuming no one will listen to our opinion anyway…
So Y.G., are you also joining the request?
The Religious Zionist public vs. the Haredi public vs. the Hardal public

I think the first person who joined the request after Daniel Koren is the strongest proof for Michi that changing Haredi to the left is hopeless, and enough said..

Muhammad, specify and explain 🙂
Rabbi Michi, so what finally happened with the request for this column? Will we merit to see it? You haven’t denied it so far, and your wording in the answer was carefully precise — "There are many other considerations too, but this isn’t the place." Meaning that here, in this question, this isn’t the place, but in a column coming soon it would indeed fit.

It requires further analysis, because in the Talmudic interpretation of the verse, "the pit was empty; there was no water in it," they didn’t expound, "but in another pit there is water"; rather they expounded, "but there were snakes and scorpions in it." So if there’s really something to this close reading, then he’s saying that here in the answer they’ll address other matters (snakes and scorpions), not that elsewhere they’ll address the matter under discussion (water in another pit). But they also expounded, "he goes out free without payment" — "there is no payment to this master, but there is payment to another master," and according to that, here too the same matter under discussion (payment = an answer to the topic) will be elsewhere. This needs clarification.

There’s a mistake here. Education in the State of Israel is not bipolar but tripolar—
Torah study
secular studies
military service
And each of them can be at a low level or a high level. A discussion of education has to speak about all three sides and cannot make do with only two of them.

I have things to say about proper education, but in my opinion it isn’t right to do so as a comparison between sectors. Each of them has advantages and disadvantages. The question is how to build an optimal model, regardless of how it would be classified.
For that I need time in order to define and conceptualize things, and of course practical experience in education matters as well (and I have never been directly involved in it). I also think education cannot be detached from the structure of society itself. A given social structure may require a form of education somewhat different from the optimum, since society as a whole is certainly not in my hands.
In short, this is a question that may not even be answerable.
To present a full model, one has to present religious values and goals as I understand them, then the optimal structure of a religious society, and from that derive a form of religious education. Problematic.

A note on exclusions. Regarding exclusions, it’s not correct to assume the common Talmudic assumption that one derives only one thing from a verse. When there is an exclusion, it excludes everything not stated in the verse. So "there was no water in it" excludes other pits that might have water, and also other things in this pit. And by the way, this is not an exclusion but an inclusion ("an exclusion after an exclusion serves to include" — this is the logical example of that hermeneutic rule. See the article "A Good Measure" on this verse in Genesis).

Following the Rabbi’s remarks, it’s worth noticing that not only Haredi and Religious Zionist education are in the picture, but also secular education. In the religious world it’s customary to badmouth it, but there’s no doubt that the academic level and the depth in secular studies in secular education are higher than in Religious Zionist education, and certainly than in Haredi education. Only among secular people will they talk about evolution or reason or about religion as a phenomenon in itself (although there they’ll characterize it as a primitive temptation that modern man needs to overcome).

Religious Zionist education is very technical both in relation to Torah and in relation to science and reason. There is almost no substantive or analytical discussion of these subjects. The main thing emphasized is connection to the Jewish people and participation in national enterprises like settlement and the army. As a result, almost anyone who doesn’t belong to those areas gets the shallow form of Religious Zionist bourgeois culture. There are many positive sides to that bourgeois Religious Zionist culture — enjoying the fruit of one’s labor, decency, affection for Torah, and more — but there is no depth there, and the result among the young is sometimes becoming non-religious on the one hand, or a romantic Hardal rebellion on the other.

Regarding exclusions: true, I was just chattering as I went along, but since in your kindness you addressed it, I’d genuinely be glad for an answer to the question: what is the difference between "free, without payment" (where they didn’t expound, for example, "but he does have shoe-removal") and "empty, there was no water in it" (where they didn’t expound, "there is water in another pit in which the firstborn of the captives in Egypt died"). The explanation that an exclusion excludes everything doesn’t answer a question of this sort — what the difference is (unless I didn’t understand).
I just read the article on Vayeshev and didn’t really understand what it contributes to the issue. Along the way, though, we were privileged to get a logical perspective with types of negation and the distinction between a positive commandment and a prohibition, which is nice (and known from your writings elsewhere).
And furthermore, from the words of the commenter above, Rabbi Rachitzna, may he live long, it is clear that he rules in practice that one infers "this isn’t the place" but "it does have a place elsewhere" (and not that there is room here for other things), even without an exclusion after an exclusion — and who can come after the king?

There is no difference at all. In every such case, one excludes everything possible and reasonable in every direction. True, there are situations where one of the exclusions doesn’t yield something reasonable, and then one doesn’t make that inference. But in principle, one can exclude everything that is unlike what is written. In the example of "free, without payment," it makes no sense to derive shoe-removal, because there is no reason to assume specifically shoe-removal rather than standing on one foot. In such a case, if the Torah wanted shoe-removal, it would have had to say so explicitly. Therefore they excluded "payment to another master," which is the more reasonable inference.
In the article on Vayeshev (I no longer remember the details), I discussed the rule of inclusion by force of two exclusions, and the fact that the pit example is the logical example for it (and there are others that are not logical)

Ah. Understood, thanks. [Though I still need to think about whether it’s really that clear to me.]

Dear Y.D., I very much enjoyed reading your last comment. I too made the calculation you presented and came to the conclusion that the more secular the education is, the more necessarily high-quality it is as well. Of course, by education I mean teaching and learning, but from experience it seems that the higher the levels of teaching and learning, the more the inculcation of quality values is drawn along with them accordingly.

P.S.: Of course I reached this as a practical conclusion and not only a theoretical one, and I transferred some of my children to the state-school stream (of course, to especially high-quality schools)

* theoretically

Binyamin,
You won’t get a bad word out of me about Religious Zionist education. In my opinion, for a person who sees himself as a simple person without special pretensions, Religious Zionist education for children is an excellent option, if not preferable. I myself send my children to Religious Zionist schools and I am satisfied. And what is lacking on a general or analytical level, I try to make up myself as best I can. If anything, what is missing in Religious Zionist education is this self-understanding of its target audience — and that causes it to get dragged into Hardal corners and live in unrealistic fantasies (for this reason I like the proposals of Shmuel Shetach from the Torah and Labor Faithful movement).

By the way, most education in the state stream in Israel is basically Religious Zionism at its very lowest level. For the simple reason that the teaching staff, like most of the students, are basically traditional Jews, and as such they believe in the Torah literally. It is admittedly very low-level (they don’t even learn Rashi on the Torah), and still, from their perspective, that is how they learn Torah. At one point I asked an acquaintance from work who became non-religious what it’s like in the secular school his children attend, and his answer was: "They start the day with prayer…"

In my opinion, anyone who examines Rabbi Michi’s claims about Haredi society will find an implicit assumption that there is no absolute certainty that God exists.
If one assumes that there is certainty, then it seems to me that his claims collapse [perhaps one needs to add one more assumption for all his claims to collapse — namely, the assumption that a Jew’s deepest desire is to serve his Creator, but even without that assumption his main claims collapse].
Even if he is correct in his claim, basic fairness would require presenting that his dispute with Haredi society is over whether there is absolute certainty that God exists.
I’d very much appreciate it if Rabbi Michi would confirm whether he agrees with what I wrote.
P.S.: Even if there is no absolute certainty that God exists, one still has to discuss whether Rabbi Michi is correct, and perhaps it depends on the degree of tendency in that direction; this requires further analysis.

I personally don’t have the faintest idea what the connection is between the collapse of the arguments and certainty about God’s existence and the giving of the Torah, but in general too I still haven’t heard of a single practical difference between certainty and non-certainty in central issues (all kinds of synthetic a priori stuff, and God may He be blessed and exalted). Ninety-nine percent moos just like one hundred percent, and this whole formal distinction between 100 and not-100 — which in any case is relevant only to a few claims where one might think their truth shines forth on its own — is probably much ado about nothing. And the listener will wonder.

Dvir, you’re tossing out general claims. If you want to conduct a discussion, you need to present a formulated argument. Explain where there is a claim of mine that depends on that assumption, and then we can discuss it. I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong, because I don’t know exactly what you mean. I can only say that your statement that all (!) my claims collapse is utter nonsense. In order to say that, I don’t even need you to spell out your argument.
One thing I’ll add: if we’re talking about fairness, it seems to me that I’m far more fair than the other side. All my assumptions are on the table in the clearest possible way. So to accuse me of lack of fairness is itself unfair to an extreme degree. Not to mention accusing me of not putting my assumptions on the table, when you formulate your own claim in a sloppy generality that doesn’t even make discussion possible. So remove the beam from between your own eyes.

Here is a comment on column 331 that is exactly my claim — and your response to that comment is: "Agree with all of it."
So I see that you already agreed with my claim, so why the great anger?
[Since I saw that you agreed with this claim, I didn’t see any need to spell it out.]
Maybe you’re right that I exaggerated and wrote that all your claims collapse if one assumes the two assumptions I mentioned, but since a significant portion of your claims do collapse [as you replied to the commenter that you agree with him], then it’s right to raise this assumption.
And here is the quote [I brought only part of what the writer said]:
.I think that you .and also Nadav (who commented here and linked to his post .if he reads my comment). live with a completely different consciousness than the one in which Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu and almost all the conservative Hardal rabbis live (and probably too, at least on the declarative level, most rabbis in general). The considerations of giving autonomy and allowing a person to form a position different from yours even if you think it is completely mistaken. stem from .at least from what I understood. a certain conception of humility. That even if I became convinced that observance of the commandments is binding, that doesn’t mean this is a fact that is true one hundred percent. And because of that there is also room to let a person decide and choose his path
This is not something most Haredi rabbis, Hardal rabbis, and in fact most rabbis, at least on the declarative level, would sign onto. The standard thesis is that Jewish religious obligation is an absolute truth just as surely as the sun rises in the morning. And anyone who believes is fully aware of that. Therefore he must protect the youth, and the Jewish people in general, lest they fall, Heaven forbid, into what we know with certainty is false. Therefore preventing people from becoming non-religious is parallel to preventing exposing a child to the option of choosing other things that are clearly bad, such as drugs and a life of debauchery, garbage cults like Hare Krishna, Scientology, Mormonism, and the like

Also the statement in the post (which you emphasized in several other places too) that in a certain sense it may be preferable for the child to become an explicit heretic because he investigated matters that brought him to that conclusion, rather than a robotic believer who observes commandments and parrots words only because he was never exposed to other arguments (because in fact this may be an agnostic skeptic and perhaps even a covert atheist)

. is not an assumption that Hardal society would accept. Here too the thesis is that usually there are spiritual sparks in a Jew that long to reach truth, and accordingly his “natural” state is commandment observance. And there is value and reward in a commandment even if the person performs it for completely mistaken reasons. And unbelief and doubt and questioning are only mental dullness and spiritual corruption of that pure natural divine spark. Even in cases where they come from places of intellectual honesty or good arguments

But if necessary I’ll spell out a bit:

Claim 1.
Yossi assumes a priori that the main purpose of our lives is the service of God, and for that it is proper to sacrifice everything. But that itself is the question under discussion when we open the matter. Exposing a person to all the options is supposed to allow him to make that decision itself (whether indeed his purpose in life is the service of God or not, and what proper service of God is). Closing off the options from him means that I am making decisions for him, and then of course we will conclude that the service of God is the most important thing, because that really is my position, but not necessarily his.
I’ve already written more than once that a person who chooses has an advantage over a person who does not choose, and that is so even if the chooser chose incorrectly (in my eyes) and the non-chooser does the correct thing (in my eyes). Something like this was written by Maharal in Netiv HaTorah chapter 15: that preferable in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He, is one who decides Jewish law on his own understanding even if he errs, over one who decides from books even if he is right. The path is no less important than the result, and in fact the path is what gives the result its main meaning. Therefore the very assumption that we are speaking here about Haredi success is, in my eyes, very problematic. Success is when people choose (!) the good and the proper, not when they simply do the good and proper.[1]

Response to the claim:
You assume there is a "question" here, and therefore there is reason to open a discussion. If there is no question, there is no discussion.
Sorry for the cliché, but after all, you too would not put Nazi theories and the like up for discussion.
I agree that the analogy is not correct, but the basis for refuting it is that there are theories that I think with certainty are incorrect [such as murder, whether because of intuition or because of rational argument].
But Haredi society claims that there is an absolute basis for faith, both rationally and intuitively, and therefore the analogy is valid [unless you will argue that you also open discussions about matters that are absolute for you both rationally and intuitively, but if so the sting of your claim collapses…

Claim 2
In another formulation, an education built on concealing the problems and sweeping them under the rug, and on preserving religious commitment by means of severe economic and social pressure, creates a façade of a believing person. The result is not necessarily a believer. Even if the product of this education is full of confidence (and usually it is not), this is fake confidence based on ignorance. Can such a person be called a believer? He simply has not really examined his position. A person like that, if he encounters real problems in his faith, will fall quite quickly and with high probability. To me this is similar to someone who says he didn’t fail in a race at the Olympics because he never competed. Is such a person an outstanding athlete? In this sense I even question the very data about secularization. In this view there are not a few secular people in Haredi society, even if they walk around wearing a caftan and a hat. Beyond that, Haredi society does not discuss the problems and does not put them on the table, and therefore it is hard even to know the data about secularization.

Response to the claim: if there really is a divine spark in a Jew, then a person is indeed a believer, because he has reconnected to that spark. [I know this is strange, and I myself do not hold this way, but Haredi society and its thinkers certainly do hold this, and therefore the main dispute is on this point.]

Claim 3
Under the previous assumption, does improving Reuven’s condition not justify a risk to Shimon? If I assume that choosing to be religious and observe commandments is my main goal (and not merely the observance itself), then the open education that allows people to choose justifies the risk that other people will not choose and will deteriorate into living wrongly not out of choice. It does not seem reasonable to me to sacrifice those who choose out of concern for the welfare and condition of those who do not choose. One who does not choose
Response to the claim — I am sacrificing the chooser only if there is some possibility that he is supposed to choose another path, but if it is certain that he is going on the right path, then I have sacrificed no one.
Claim 4
There are several additional considerations regarding these comparisons that I have brought up in earlier places where I dealt with these questions (see, for example, here, in chapter 44 of the third book in my trilogy, and many more places). Among other things, I pointed out there that in the long run there may be far heavier prices for Haredi education (the Haskalah itself was entirely the product of conservative-Haredi education, when the students became disgusted with the religious worldview presented to them and rebelled against it). I also argued that the Haredi “successes” are built on bodies and individuals who are not partners to this approach, who help the Haredi system survive on the security, economic, medical, legal, and even intellectual planes (answers to theological questions of Haredi youth that the Haredi system does not manage to answer). In other words, their successes are built on the very failures they criticize. If the entire religious public had adopted the Haredi path, I do not know how many religious Jews there would even be today. Therefore the categorical imperative, too, says that this Haredi critique is unfounded. But I won’t expand more here.
I do not understand this claim sufficiently.
Haredi society does not criticize doctors and the like; rather, since it holds there is risk on the way there, it is dangerous to walk that path.
Indeed, a fully Haredi society cannot come into being, but even according to the Haredi view it is not supposed to come into being, since if there were a fully Haredi society then afterward it would be possible to study external subjects.

Dvir, I think I explained what the (great) anger was about. Read my message again — the one you did not address at all in the entire scroll you wrote here — and I’m sure you’ll understand. The sweet revenge you took by posting your own scroll here changes nothing about those points.
And just because I wrote something in comment 119 on some column from dozens of columns ago, that means you don’t need to spell things out? If I’m accused of not having a photographic memory, I confess to the charge and the facts.
But when I read your reference, I do not find there what you put into my mouth. The fact that you point out that in my view there is no certainty and in their view there is — that is, of course, trivial. Obviously I criticize from within my own assumptions, and they stand on different assumptions. Among other things, I criticize those assumptions themselves. Of course there is no statement there that all my claims collapse (I am running the claims before my eyes, and in my opinion it is a fairly small minority of them).
If you want to defend a position against criticism by saying that it rests on its own assumptions, that is not a very impressive defense. The question is how justified those assumptions are. Nor did I write that when I raise claim after claim after claim, there are altogether only three claims here (that is, I did not spell out the assumption 1+1+1=3).
The assumption that "there is a spark in every Jew" is indeed also disputed between us. It’s interesting where you know my hidden views from if I didn’t spell them out, in the lack of fairness so characteristic of me. I’m sure that Hardal rabbis, by contrast, every time they raise a claim spell out their entire ideological and logical infrastructure, so as not to be afflicted Heaven forbid with a lack of fairness.

You asked whether there is a need for detail, so no. There is really no need to spell it out, because the details are not of the essence of my complaint against you. But even in a superficial glance over your details, even in the examples you bring you are gravely mistaken.
For example, in the first point you are basically claiming that if I say one should open people up to different views and they say one should not, then underlying the matter is the assumption that there is a question here. If you are right, then what is there to spell out? Why, you yourself caught that without much difficulty. That itself is the discussion here. Besides that, you are mistaken in two ways: 1. First, the claim that there is a question here is itself what is under discussion. A person cannot defend against a claim by saying there is no question here. Let him explain why there is no question here. 2. Even if some rabbi thinks there is no question here, he cannot make decisions for other people. That is a conclusion he reached. Any person can shut the door to questions on the pretext that there is no question here. Someone who believes that the earth is flat will not expose his students to other views because in his opinion there is no question here (why expose them to conspiracies?). Are you sure you’re serious? For your own good, I very much hope not.
But really I see no point in entering into these empty pilpulim.

1. First of all, that was four columns ago.
But you’re right — even though it was not long ago, I should have expanded.
The reason I didn’t expand is because I remembered that you agree and think this way [at least until two weeks ago].
2. You’re right that Hardal rabbis do not present all their assumptions, but because you do emphasize them [and that is why I have great appreciation for you], I would have expected you to emphasize that this is an important point in the discussion between you.
3. From your response to the comment on column 331 — where the commenter mentioned the point of the divine spark as a dispute between you and the Hardal world, and you agreed — I understood that this is what you think.
4. You are absolutely right that one must explain why there is no question regarding God’s existence. But what can one do — the Haredim hold like the Vilna Gaon and the Noda B'Yehuda, that one does not engage in these questions [they even forbade reading a book with weak arguments like Duties of the Heart in the Gate of Unity].
I completely agree with you that one should open things up. But the Haredim [at least their thinkers], since they hold that there is absolute certainty in their faith, and they have great regard for tradition, do not see fit to open this for discussion. Even if they are mistaken, that is their view, and the Haredi outlook is built from there.
Indeed, if one does not adopt this claim [and in my opinion rightly so], then there is room for your claims.
5. You wrote, "If a certain rabbi thinks so," etc. — again, according to Haredi society it is not that a certain rabbi thinks so, but rather, in its view Jewish tradition holds that God exists, and certainly these great sages are right. One should add [as appears in Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman] that their thinkers hold that if a person detaches himself from his biases, he will certainly arrive at recognition of God — but there are biases that prevent us from doing so.
And this is the difference between the question of the earth and the tradition of faith—
1. Regarding the question of unbelief, there are interests pushing a person toward unbelief [human desires], and if one engages in it, the purified intellect must believe. But since a person has biases that interfere with the intellect’s arriving at that recognition, in order not to reach a situation where he ruins his life for the sake of desire, we do not bring him into this.
I must emphasize that I really do not agree with this view.
But again, in Haredi writings it appears often [even before Haredi society, as appears before the Gate of Unity in Duties of the Heart and in the ban on the Guide for the Perplexed].
And in my opinion, the dispute between you and Haredi society is founded on these points, and they are what need to be placed on the table