Q&A: The Haredi World Appeals to Me
The Haredi World Appeals to Me
Question
Hello Rabbi.
I don’t understand what the big problem with the Haredim is. I think they win every argument with one simple claim:
Fine, we’re not so much into independent thinking and we let the leading rabbis of the generation think for us… True, our actions don’t always follow logic, and maybe we’re completely naive, but so what? Isn’t it much more likely that our children won’t go secular in our sector? Isn’t it very likely that our actions aren’t so severe that they’d land us in Gehenna? So it’s worth investing a bit and making yourself somewhat naive in this world in order to receive endless reward in Heaven and merit the World to Come with much greater certainty. It’s like in the investment world. You lose a little now in order to gain much more after a few years. Only for us, that’s after 70/80 years…
Also, I didn’t understand the Rabbi’s insistence on faith based on understanding rather than naivete. After all, this is a dispute among the medieval authorities, and each side has what to rely on.
But back to our matter… What does the Rabbi think about the Haredi claim I brought? It’s very hard for me to attack it… If the Rabbi thinks Judaism is true and reached that conclusion, why require the child to reach it too? He relies on his father, who is a sufficiently smart and capable person…
Thank you and have a good day
Answer
You can search here on the site, since I’ve already been asked this more than once. There are so many problems in this warped society that I’m amazed anyone even needs an explanation for it. I think that with the Torah observance and commandments of the Haredim, you get only to Gehenna. No Garden of Eden and nothing of the sort.
As for naive faith, I also wrote about that here. And the fact that it is a dispute among the medieval authorities is irrelevant. The question is what you and I think, not what the medieval authorities thought. You understand that before I accept the view of the medieval authorities, I have to decide whether I’m obligated to the Torah at all. Does it seem reasonable to you that the medieval authorities would forbid me from that? The pagans, too, can forbid their friends from examining the foundations of their faith. By the way, I have no insistence on faith based on understanding as opposed to naive faith. On the contrary, I’ve written more than once that each person has his own path.
Discussion on Answer
You remind me of the objections people raise against Bibi—that he released over a thousand terrorists in the Shalit deal and now doesn’t want to make a hostage deal. A very strange question. Simple: he learned the lesson from the previous deal (aside from many other considerations, of course, against a deal today). Or the Vilna Gaon, about whom people claim that he erred in his assessment of Hasidism, and his students explain that Hasidism did not deviate, among other reasons, because of the Vilna Gaon’s war against it.
I was young and not yet formed in my views, and my conclusions today are due in part to the period I spent in the Haredi world.
Even though the change is so drastic? At first to reach the conclusion that truth and the World to Come are there at such a high level that you changed your way of life because of it, and then to a situation where the Rabbi says they inherit Gehenna? It’s very hard for me to grasp… Is the Rabbi revealing here between the lines that in his youth he went by emotion and was not a rational person?
I see no point at all in this kind of ad hominem investigation. Make your decisions according to your own understanding. Why do you care what motivates me and what was in the past? When they do research on my life and teachings, they’ll discover the early Michi and the later Michi, and I’m sure then they’ll examine all the details, come up with hypotheses, and there’ll be a living in it for everyone.
I’m done.
Most of the medieval authorities held that the World to Come is acquired through correct beliefs / intellectual apprehension / cleaving to God, and not through actions.
So the Haredi approach is itself a distortion.
You can train even a monkey to perform certain actions—would it also receive the World to Come if it did them?
I don’t know where you got that claim from. But beyond that, the main problem with the Haredim is not their beliefs but their actions and commandment-observance.
Thank you for the answer, Rabbi. But if you are so opposed to the lack of logic in this society, I didn’t understand why in your youth you embraced it and entered its yeshivas. As far as I know, and according to Wikipedia, the Rabbi became religious in a Haredi way and studied in prestigious Haredi yeshivas and kollels…