Q&A: What Really Drives the Haredim? Between the Great Torah Sages and Social Norms
What Really Drives the Haredim? Between the Great Torah Sages and Social Norms
Question
I’m writing in reference to your latest column,
but since my claim is a general one about your journalistic writing regarding the Haredim, I’m not writing this as a response to that specific column.
You write criticism of the “great sages of the generation,” the supposed leadership figures of the Haredi public, in order to attack the scandalous ideas and conduct of the sector.
But in my opinion, by doing so you are making a diagnostic assumption about the Haredi public that misses the main point.
The Haredi public is not led by the great sages of the generation, but by social norms.
That may sound like an academic-sociological analysis, but it’s the truth. The Haredi public, with its whole range of behaviors and ways of conducting itself, is subject to one authority only: the community. The obsession with appearances, “what will people say,” the neighbor, the cheder principal.
The great sages of the generation are appointed at an age bordering on death precisely so they can function as brands, not as reformist leaders.
And when they really are strong, like Rabbi Elyashiv for example, they can decide appointments and esoteric matters, but on general policy—the public is the one that decides.
When Rabbi Elyashiv declared that funding should be denied to seminaries that do not accept Sephardi girls, not a single seminary principal obeyed him. For one simple reason: the public and the norms determine things, and the public wants sterile Ashkenazi institutions.
Sometimes the public behaves in a certain way, and then the great sages of the generation say: amen.
As for example, academia for women, etc.
Therefore, any criticism of the public should be directed at the ideas themselves. At the public as a whole. Maybe in journalistic criticism it’s easier to latch onto the leadership. But that only works if there is, by definition, a leadership that actually determines things.
Apparently, when in analysis a certain pattern of conduct shifts from being the responsibility of the leadership to being a phenomenon that is really nothing but a social norm, that is moving from politics to sociology. More boring, less cannon fodder, more abstract, and less convenient for offering ideas for improvement.
But what can you do—that’s the case!
These are matters that it’s clear to me are also intuitive and obvious to you, but as you always say—sometimes a thinker comes along and gives it definition, conceptualization, and validation.
So I recommend watching the following podcast episode (which I think you were interviewed on in the past) — the sociologist Nechumi Yaffe brings no less than amazing data and analyses of the phenomenon.
(It’s worth watching from about the middle of the episode; the beginning is biographical description.)
Answer
There is of course a lot of truth in this, but it isn’t the whole truth. If Rabbi Elyashiv had gone to war against discrimination, he would have won. He tossed out some statement and that was it. On the issue of military conscription, for example, this is definitely led to a large extent by rabbis. And also by operatives. The leadership. If the leadership were to decide something clearly and fight for it, it would win.
Therefore infantile leadership is an important component of the problem. The infantile norms are also caused and sustained by it. And from this it follows that it is very important to shatter the myth of the great Torah sages, because it does indeed have a major influence.
Discussion on Answer
You’re exaggerating again, a lot, but we’re repeating ourselves.
I defined the outlook of the average Haredi in one short sentence: instead of having fear of Heaven, he has fear of the female neighbor. That is, what will she say.
As an outside reader of both the post and the thread here, and having listened to the entire program you linked here with the doctor, there is no doubt that the truth rises on its own to the side of Shmuel and Dr. Nachum, whereas Michi is more polished slogans, but without deep truth at their foundation, because like it or not, research that is built on statistics and data always always gives the picture that is closest to the truth, because at the end of the day the world is built on mathematics and statistics. Even so, something good came out of this, since in the end this blog provided a platform—even if it showed that the other side was right—but in the end it served as a platform for seeing the truth, even if that was not the intention of the poet, the one who wrote the post, and he deserves thanks also for the very platform he gave, even if the conclusions are the opposite of what he wanted.
A Thinking Haredi, in short: the Haredim have no personal responsibility. They’re messed up, but it’s sociology.
****** Consider yourself warned. If you continue with this kind of ugly way of speaking, you will be deleted. ***************
When you become someone who understands from the outside instead of merely a reader from the outside, it will be possible to talk. In the meantime, it is clear that you do not understand your right from your left—neither the role of statistics and data, nor what is lying in the balance in this argument.
Sit down with a young Haredi man and do an in-depth investigation into why he doesn’t enlist. Why he doesn’t work.
The diagnostic conclusion will be: because his friends don’t enlist. He has a lot to lose—socially and within the family.
Ah, and nothing more.
Not Rabbi Hirsch and not Rabbi Landa.
The claim is that the great sages of the generation are supposed to create reforms.
But they too are subject to that same social authority.
If they stick their necks out, they’ll simply be pushed aside. The normative social force will reject them—
on the personal level, and also… the reformist decision itself.
This isn’t like a prime minister making a brave decision against his base, where it passes legally and is accepted, and at most he gets voted out in the next election.
Rather, here it simply won’t be accepted.