Q&A: Response to the column on "the contribution of the Haredim"
Response to the column on "the contribution of the Haredim".
Question
Mainly regarding what you wrote, quote:
I have no doubt that every decent Haredi person feels distress, since it is clear to him that as a society they behave in a parasitic, immoral, and distorted way. Therefore any excuse, flimsy as it may be, may or can help him come to terms with his conscience.
About the cognitive dissonance, and the feeling of immorality among Haredim.
There is no such thing. It doesn’t exist.
I’ll explain: imagine a child born into a family of musicians. The mother lectures and writes about Bach’s music, and the father performs Bach in concerts.
In the living room hangs a picture of Bach. And from age 3 he is already taught to listen to Bach’s music; at a more advanced stage, he also learns to play his music.
His whole life he lives, breathes, admires, and is part of a very large community that admires him, studies in institutions where Bach is the central motif.
At the same time he is exposed to a group that rejects his music. He grows up and is educated that “they” — the bad people — are plotting to turn him into one of them too.
That other group has nice arguments and logic. But he was educated to label them anti-Bach, hostile, and coming from bad motives.
And in any case, he will always have the embracing family, and the supportive community (and pressuring, on the other hand) that will back him up — in the deepest parts of his psyche.
Bach’s music = the Haredi doctrine (Torah, the leading sages of the generation, separatism)
The only thing I would expect from our young man is confirmation bias, internal persuasion, etc. — in order to justify his education, his family, and his community. In other words: his stability.
Especially when he has “ideological backing” in the form of figures like the Chazon Ish, Rabbi Shach, and today’s great leaders.
From his point of view, against their legitimacy, any other claim is heresy against the Torah itself.
That’s the situation.
It’s deep, it’s rooted, it’s the common inheritance of the whole public.
To illustrate the scale of it — the municipal elections.
In Haredi cities that are for the most part run terribly, you hear sharp criticism among Haredi residents, focused on the representatives they themselves elected.
And yet, those same parties and those same failed candidates won, and even gained strength.
What makes that kollel fellow take what seems like a masochistic step and vote against his own opinion?
Answer: the feeling of belonging / being part of a community / the demand of the leading sages of the generation / fear of threats from yeshiva heads, etc.
The issue of the draft is deeper.
If elections are a “frog he’s willing to swallow” despite the dissonance with his inner feeling,
on the issue of military service, all of the above affects him much more deeply. There he will truly abandon all rationality (and certainly any feeling of immorality). He won’t look for excuses. And if he needs one, he’ll pull out some line from the last talk of the spiritual supervisor. And that’s it.
The attempt to persuade (the Haredim? yourself?) is comparable, with all due distinction, to the government’s plan to change the education toward terror among the residents of Gaza and Judea and Samaria.
It won’t succeed. You can starve them, deny budgets.
But certainly not appeal to their moral sense or rationality.
Answer
Responses to a column are best made as a talkback on that same column.
What you say fits some of the Haredim. But definitely not all of them. The Haredi world is not foreign to me, and you are not right about everyone.
Discussion on Answer
Rabbi Michael,
the Haredim you’ve encountered are a very small minority. It reminds me of people like Tom Friedman and the like who in 2011 were sure Egypt was about to become Sweden because the people leading the uprising at the beginning were English-speaking young people (one of them was a senior Egyptian at Google who flew in especially from the U.S. to demonstrate). But anyone who knows Egyptian society knows that underneath that there is a society of tens of millions of illiterate fundamentalists living on a dollar a day and circumcising women. And reality proved that the moment the Egyptians were allowed to choose a ruler democratically, they chose Morsi.
With a thousand thousand distinctions, the Haredim you met are a very small minority, foam on the water, covering over complete ignorance — the very thing you described so skillfully in that column.
And if you ask whether all secular people are Leonardo da Vinci — well, absolutely not. But the Haredim lack the common sense that every redneck on a farm in Montana has; what he grasps intuitively, a yeshiva head in Hebron Yeshiva will argue with you about all day.
And the fact is that these Haredim you’re talking about have been hiding for thirty years only behind anonymous nicknames in obscure internet forums, exactly like Thomas Friedman’s imaginary Egyptian liberals.
Itai,
there’s no doubt they’re a minority, but you’ve gone completely overboard.
I also know quite a few Haredim who feel distress over the injustices they grew up with. Of course these are a minority, but they’re definitely not just foam on the water; I know very many such people. The statement that one needs to enlist is heard more and more on the Haredi margins (I attended a Sabbath sermon by a rabbi in a Haredi synagogue in the Ramot neighborhood of Jerusalem who said it is obligatory to enlist, and I know several Haredim who indeed enlisted, some of them at a very inconvenient point in life, with a career, family, etc.). I’m fully aware that I’m exposed to this side in a quantity that isn’t representative, and God forbid I’m not trying to defend the public as a whole. It’s just necessary to look truth in the eye, with all its nuances. The wisdom is to allow for small losses within a point that is much larger than them by several orders of magnitude (just as it would be foolish to insist in an argument that “there are no innocents in Gaza” — as many do — one should say, “There are innocents, and that shouldn’t stop me from…”)
David,
I still stand by my opinion that they are a very, very small minority.
I’m conservative in my worldview, and I too prefer small, hesitant steps over a sharp and decisive revolution. But it may be that we’ve reached the point where it’s no longer possible to wait. For over thirty years Israeli society has been waiting for the Haredim, both on the issue of the army and on the issue of core studies — and them? They’re taking their time. What’s the rush? For the simple reason that they just don’t feel like it, and COVID proved that completely. There too, huge parts of this society went wild and infected the whole surroundings in the name of the sacred right to eat cholent in a crowded indoor gathering without a mask.
As I wrote here in another comment, this is a mentality that will each time latch onto different excuses. So now it’s that the army is a progressive body that listens to Americans and not to Rabbi Steinman, and during COVID it was that the Health Ministry gets money from Pfizer to inflate the number of dead, and in another crisis it will be another excuse. The common denominator is that in the end they can sit on the couch and justify their behavior. They will cooperate only with a utopian, flawless system that doesn’t exist even in science fiction books, while Haredi society itself is a system run by the standards of Somalia. That of course does not include Knesset elections and local authorities, government jobs through affirmative action, and high-tech jobs for kollel wives — where suddenly there is no problem at all rubbing shoulders with secular men and women on the way to the coveted salary.
I move around within the open and modern crowds (but these are graduates of the elite yeshivot).
My statistical “research” is based on a considerable number of people.
The overwhelming majority of them argue, and are genuinely horrified, by the idea I raise about immorality (on enlistment, economic burden, etc.).
And again, I’m not dealing with the extremist groups, the Jerusalem Faction, etc. (three yeshiva boys I gave a ride to from such a yeshiva explained their reason for not showing up to receive a deferment as being that it is “collaboration with Nazis”),
but with Haredim who have Western inclinations, like internet at home, etc.
Even there, the whole array of foolish arguments is very common — arguments that are really part of a deep and internal outlook.
With no trace at all of a moral conscience.
A person who once a month goes with a checking cloth to the rabbi, and calls him to ask him about a dairy meal after meat,
also relies on him in the claim that: enlistment = be killed rather than transgress.
And that is pretty much the inheritance of the public as a whole.
Exactly what Shmuel says.
These are graduates of completely modern yeshivot,
with a wife who works at Microsoft with Tel Aviv men, and some of them know Western culture very, very well. It’s entirely possible that some of them have a smartphone, and they spend Passover in Dubai.
This is an education so deep that there really is no chance of changing it.
These are people who grew up in a society that educated 20-year-old children who had not worked a single day in their lives to demand, as a condition for a match meeting, a commitment to an apartment in central Jerusalem or Bnei Brak, even though the economic and health price for the father-in-law and mother-in-law is obvious to any normal person.
People died from these things.
People went on fundraising expeditions abroad.
People mortgaged their apartments so that the celebrated kollel fellow would have an apartment of his own. Does it seem to you that for most of them this bothered them?
The answer is no.
This is the only state of nature they know:
other people work for me.
It has nothing to do with enlistment in the IDF.
It’s an entire mentality.
So what is it to such a person that half the country is going to grind through reserve duty in the coming years, be killed, be wounded, or come back scarred for life?
He just booked a table for himself and his wife at the new restaurant in the Tel Aviv port.
But the army is something to be killed rather than transgress.
Maybe I wasn’t understood correctly.
The public and the ideology here have already been around for much more than 30 years, and apparently they will remain for a long time yet.
My question is whether the margins of this public are expanding and breaking away from it entirely, and then again and again — there are quite a few indications that they are (and therefore I’m optimistic regarding fears of demographic change. By the way, the same thing is happening in the Religious Zionist public too, and therefore despite much higher birthrates there will probably always be more secular people).
As for the core of the ideology, I have a theory (I’m not asserting it enthusiastically or forcefully) that there is a process here of defensiveness and afterward softening of positions. On the macro level, historically, when society became secular-progressive, the religious people (who turned into Haredim) closed themselves off and hardened their positions. Now it seems to me that there are first signs of a stage of softening positions.
Of course extremists will always remain; the question is what will happen to the mainstream.
I was born into Haredi society and didn’t know anything else,
but later the Master of the world, His Torah, and the conscience He planted in me caught my eye,
and I took my wife and children and we left Haredi society and our place of residence (Kiryat Sefer)
back to Judaism.
Apparently there is choice in this.