The most insulting thing my older brother has ever said to
me was that he thought I would like R. Avigdor Miller (1908-2001). I had no
idea who R. Miller was at the time so I took no offense. My brother explained that
R. Miller was not his personal taste but a lot of people at his yeshiva liked
him and I might as well. Sometime later, when I started high school at Yeshiva
Torah Vodaath, I was at a local seforim store buying school books when I
came across a shelf of R. Miller books. I picked up one of them, Awake My
Glory. I got back to my room and eagerly opened the book. To my horror, I
discovered that I had spent $10 on a rant about the evils of atheism,
evolution, Christianity, Zionism, and Reform Judaism. Eager to demonstrate the
economic principle of loss aversion, I did not stop at the introduction, which
set out R. Miller’s agenda. (To his credit, one could never have accused R.
Miller of lacking clarity or of trying to hide his agenda.) Instead, I read the
entire book. Not satisfied with that, and perhaps desirous of raising my blood
pressure to new heights, I soon discovered that Torah Vodaath had a lending
audio cassette library with R. Miller’s lectures. I started listening to them
diligently to yell at them. This was still in the early days of the internet so
the ethos of “someone on the internet is wrong” was still new to my teenage
self.
I am sure I could write a book on the topic of why R. Miller
was wrong and, when I was a teenager, I dreamed of doing so. As I have gotten
older, I have come to appreciate the limits of trying to argue against people
like R. Miller. His books are readily available within the Haredi community and
you can read them for yourself. You can also find clips of him speaking on YouTube.
He had a rather distinctive voice. I use it as the basis for Professor Pippy
Poopypants from Captain Underpants and other such characters when reading to my
kids. Either you are going to be repulsed by R. Miller, in which case you
hardly need a book by me, or you are not, in which case there is something
deeply wrong with you and nothing I can write is going to fix that. My interest
here is to explore why it was that I came to passionately loath R. Miller
almost instantly even as it was hardly obvious that I would have such a
reaction.
I was a yeshiva kid, R. Miller’s target audience, and my own
brother thought I was the kind of person who would like R. Miller. I liked
being right and had little patience for people who disagreed with me. It was
around this time that I discovered Rush Limbaugh, who my teenage self found to
be perfectly congenial. So, what was it about R. Miller that I found so
repulsive? I suspect it was the fact that R. Miller blatantly espoused a
worldview in which people like him were good and the entire rest of the world
was bad without the cover of telling stories that only implied that.
The most important thing you need to understand about my
religious background is that I was raised Haredi but in Columbus, OH, where my
father was a rabbi, and in McKeesport, PA, in my grandfather of blessed memory’s
shul. While my father saw his “home planet” as Haredi New York, he was not
raised in that world and did not raise his children there either. I spent the
school year in Columbus Torah Academy where most kids were not Orthodox and
spent the summer in Haredi summer camps like Camp Torah Vodaath and later,
after it closed, at Camp Rayim. I was raised with American culture, including
movies, television, and regular trips to the public library.
There is an irony in this as it was my father, and not his
Haredi friends from his “home planet” who was being traditional. My father was
raised this way and so were his friends, even those who lived in New York. It
was not practical, in the 1950s and 60s to raise children any other way. There was
essentially no Orthodox publishing or music industry. Parents had no choice but
to allow their kids to consume American culture, which was less obviously
problematic at the time anyway. Also, keep in mind that the post-war generation
was still focused on entering the middle-class and gaining social acceptance
for themselves. Walling oneself off from American culture was simply not an
option for them.
It was my father’s friends who changed. They made the
decision, under the influence of people like R. Miller, to raise the children
of my generation without American culture. They had the luxury of living in
Haredi enclaves and no longer had to worry about what the gentile neighbors
might think. They had Artscroll, Feldheim, Suki & Ding, R. Shmuel Kunda, Mordechai
Ben David, and Avraham Fried to raise their kids. It was no longer necessary to
take the chance of exposing kids to secular books let alone movies and
television so those things could be disposed of. I find Haredi rabbis to be
quite open about this, apologizing for the “leniency” of their parent’s
generation as something necessary under the circumstances but no longer.
I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the early
educational value of many Haredi audiocassettes produced for my generation.
Thanks to my exposure to Orthodox media, Jewish studies in kindergarten and
first grade were largely a waste of my time. Like any good cultural education,
Orthodox media gave me the basics of Jewish life without my having to be
conscious of learning it. This is particularly useful for keeping people in the
fold. It is difficult to reject things that you never consciously learned in
the first place. What you never consciously learned is simply what “normal”
people do.
Growing up in Columbus, OH listening to religious story
tapes and only actually being in Haredi society during the summer, it was easy
to not realize that a major culture gap existed. An incident that does stick
out in my mind was when I stormed off from the dining room table because my
bunkmates were using the n-word and making racist jokes. The head counselor,
one of my father’s best friends, supported me and said that the kids were out
of line. He assured me that he was raised not to use such terms. What I took
from this encounter was that the yeshiva system was about producing people like
me and that my bunkmates were jerks whose values did not reflect the system in
which they and not I lived.
What I did not consider at the time was the protentional
Faustian bargain the head counselor and the Haredim of his generation were
making with my generation. If you had told him that the price of raising
non-racist kids was that these kids would not be religious, would he have been so
quick to oppose racism? It was not so farfetched to believe that there was an
inverse relationship between Jewish kids being raised with a strong
subconscious distaste for non-Jews and the religious drop-out rate. As an inner-city
black person, the “schwartze,” was a pretty useful stand-in for not-Jewish and
certainly not-Haredi society, why not use him as the embodiment of what you were
trying to oppose?
Being Haredi is hard. What can they offer kids to make up
for the long school hours, and the forgoing of American culture? In return, possibly, kids got to be rude to secular teachers and make racist jokes about black people.
To be clear, it is not that anyone ever openly made this argument. It is simply
a matter of following the incentives. If you have the kind of society you would
expect from such an agreement then it becomes highly plausible to imagine that,
at the very least, this agreement has been made subconsciously.
The camp culture was filled with more subtle forms of hate
that I failed to appreciate at the time. We were fed a steady diet of stories
in which Catholic priests kidnapped Jewish children in order to force them to
convert to Christianity or murdered Christian children to set up blood libels. One
of the rabbis gave his priest villains the name Father Schmutz (dirt). The Golem
was a popular character in the stories I heard at camp. The nuance of defending
the Jewish community against anti-Semites was often lost. One example I
remember had a golem going into a church to beat up Christians in modern-day
America. For those trying to understand this sensibility, I recommend R.
Gershon Winkler’s Golem of Prague, one of my favorite Jewish books
growing up. The villainous priest, Thaddeus, is obscenely over the top.
Murdering a Christian for the purpose of framing the Jews is the culmination
of a streak of villainous deeds. It is rather ironic that Haredim would turn
the blood libel around and use it against Christians.
During the year, the head counselor put out a radio show
called Chassidic Tales of Inspiration. He sent us a case of audio cassettes of
the show for my older brother’s bar mitzvah. My younger brother and I listened
to them to death and could quote long passages from our favorite stories. To the
head counselor’s credit, he really was a fantastic storyteller and he was not
even the best at camp. That being said, looking back, there was some really
problematic material. For example, one of the stories has a Father Francois
murder a Christian child in order to set up a blood libel. He gets caught by
the not-very-Jewish trope of being forced to shake the corpse’s hand which then
does not let go. The head counselor told this story not to a few friends after
getting drunk on Purim but on the radio as if anti-Semites do not exist and do
not pay attention to Jewish media with the intent of making the point that Jews
hate Christians.
Before anyone walks away with the impression that Haredi
summer camps are simple hate fests, it should be stated that this head
counselor was one of the most thoroughly decent, loving, not hateful people that
I have ever met. I am positive that, as with racism, he would have denounced any
attempt to use these anti-Christian stories as the basis for interacting with
actual Christians. He was not trying to convince us to hurt Christians or even
to hate them. That being said, as with racism, teaching us to not hate
Christians was certainly not his priority. Parents were not paying good money
to send their kids to camp so that they could become more tolerant of non-Jews.
If hating non-Jews was a side effect of an educational system designed to make
sure that, at a deep gut check level, there would be no plausible alternative
to Haredi Judaism then so be it. All the more so if the medium of story-telling
allowed him to Pontius Pilate himself of all responsibility. (If you do not
know who Pontius Pilate was, you have clearly never read the New Testament and
are a terrible Jew.)
That is what is so dangerous about stories. They are not
inherently normative, telling us what we should do, so you cannot say that a
story teaches people to do certain things. For example, it would be the height
of absurdity to claim that World War II-era Looney Tunes cartoons with Bugs Bunny killing Japanese soldiers teaches people to kill their Japanese neighbors
in the twenty-first century. And yet stories do have lessons even as their
authors can always deny them. Furthermore, stories can become even more
pernicious when you consciously disbelieve the message. It becomes all the
easier to miss how the subconscious still believes. You cannot rationally
escape a belief system that you never reasoned yourself into in the first place.
My father sent my
older brother to the Yeshiva of Scranton and then to South Bend. He was thrown
out of both of them for refusing to comply with school restrictions on secular
books and TV. By the time I was ready for high school, he was already leaving
Orthodoxy. My father was determined not to repeat the same mistakes with me. He,
therefore, sent me to Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, his and my grandfather’s alma
mater. By the time I arrived in the Fall of 1997, there were only a few high
schoolers in the dorm. This meant that the school would not be policing me like
a regular yeshiva high school student and I would be able to read secular books
without interference. In fact, the dorm counselor wrote me a note so I could
get a library card from the Brooklyn Public Library.
As I mentioned at the beginning, it was at this point in my
life that I discovered R. Miller. He did
not tell stories with a particular set of Jewish values to be simultaneously
consciously ignored and subconsciously accepted as an inarguable reality of how
the world works. Instead, R. Miller came right out with his ideology. It is not
as if I were an atheist, a Christian, or a Reform Jew. I was pretty neutral then
about evolution and my Zionism was, as it still is, more pragmatic than principled
yet I could not shake the sense that I, as a practicing Jew who valued general
culture, was R. Miller’s real target. It is not as if atheists, Christians, or
non-Orthodox Jews were ever likely to read his books.
Once I became alerted to R. Miller's existence, I began to
notice his pernicious existence all over the place. It was not just that his
lecture tapes were being lent out by the yeshiva. An older friend, with whom I
studied with on a nightly basis, informed me that he attended R. Miller’s weekly
lectures. I do regret that I never took advantage of the opportunity to join
him and contented myself with yelling at his tapes. I am sure I could have
found it in myself to behave in a public setting. One of the rabbis
recommended R. Miller to me when I got into a theological discussion with him,
unaware that I already detested the man.
As with the head counselor, I am willing to give R.
Miller’s fans at Yeshiva Torah Vodaath the benefit of the doubt. When I asked
people about R. Miller’s claim that Zionists and other secular Jews were
responsible for the Holocaust or his willingness to make sweeping general
statements about entire groups based on the problematic statements and actions
of some of its members, they acknowledged that R. Miller said things that were
out of line. He was a zealous person and the important thing to take from him
was not to cherry-pick his most extreme claims but to focus on the larger
picture, his love for God, the Jewish people, and his willingness to
unapologetically say things that other people would not. Notice how that last
statement implicitly defends R. Miller's most troublesome statements even as it
pretends to distance itself from them.
As with black jokes and blood-libeling priests, the point
was never really to convince us that non-Orthodox Jews caused the Holocaust.
Rather it was to inculcate us with a sense of disgust for the non-religious. The
fact that we did not really blame them for the Holocaust would simply make it
difficult for us to locate that disgust with such a claim and we would conclude
that our opposition was simply based on the “facts.” If some kids might go over
the deep end and take these claims literally, the rabbis could deny any
responsibility.
I did not last long at Yeshiva Torah Vodaath. This was not
the fault of the administration, which treated me with great indulgence. I look
back on my time at Torah Vodaath with great fondness. I certainly cannot blame
R. Miller as he never even met me. That being said, my lack of friendships with
anyone my own age took its toll on me emotionally and I became clinically
depressed. Later on in life, I would be diagnosed as being on the autism
spectrum. Coming to an awareness that society was not designed for someone
like me certainly did not help my mental well-being. By January my father had to
bring me home. For the rest of high school, I attended the Yeshiva of Greater
Washington in Silver Spring, MD where my parents had just moved.
Even here, I could not escape the specter of R. Miller. Our
Jewish History class used him as a textbook. As a historian, R. Miller
functioned as a kind of Haredi version of the 1619 Project in which
occasionally legitimate skepticism regarding mainstream sources was used as
cover for the wholesale acceptance of rabbinic sources.
There is an important lesson here about skepticism. Skepticism
and belief are not opposites but two sides of the same coin. To be skeptical
about something most always mean skeptical in contrast to something else. I
take science and the historical method very seriously as tools for
understanding the world. This is what allows me to treat the Haredi version of
reality with skepticism as lacking by comparison. Without such a sincere belief
in the methods of science and history, I would probably be one of those people who
actually like R. Miller.
As I have gotten older, I have mellowed a bit regarding R.
Miller. This is strange because I am significantly to the left religiously now
than I was as a teenager. I still consider myself religiously observant. This
is not the case with my older brother, who abandoned orthodoxy during high
school. The biggest difference between us was that none of the rabbis I
encountered over the course of my education ever truly wronged me. I respected
their decency and their kindness to me even as I disagreed with them about
theology. It was R. Miller who made me aware that I was not really part of the
Haredi world. Without him, I could have continued for far longer to focus on how
much I personally liked and respected my father’s friends from his home planet
(in contrast to most of the kids my age) and only hear what I wanted to hear
about their theology. In this sense, R. Miller deserves credit for his honesty
and willingness to openly say things that most people in the Haredi world had
the good sense not to say. If I came to despise the man personally, despite
never actually meeting him, that was me and my need for the Haredi world to be
something to serve my needs, something it was never designed to do.