Public Judaism: Chabad's Outreach Playbook

 

In the previous post, I discussed Charles Taylor's argument that the Protestant notion of privacy led to the rise of modern secularism. Here, I would like to use the example of Chabad as a model of how Taylor's version of secularism can be countered. Once one understands the extent to which modern secularism relies on the privatization of religion, Chabad’s style of outreach begins to make a lot of sense. In essence, the primary goal of Chabad’s outreach is to get Jews to do publicly Jewish things. By taking Judaism out of people's heads, into their homes, and out into the public sphere, it becomes possible to reverse the presumed slide into secularism where every generation is less religious than the last.

Chabad's strategy of bringing Judaism into the public sphere starts with the very idea of sending out shluchim in the first place to cities one would not normally associate with traditional Jewish observance. Back in the 1950s, the Lubavitcher rebbe actually had a difficult time getting his followers to become shluchim. You want me to leave the New York area, a place where I might have a fighting chance at keeping my kids religious to go where? It should be noted that an essential part of Chabad’s success has been that they have been able to keep the children of their shiluchim religious. In turn, these kids have grown up and have gone on to become shluchim themselves. At this point, Chabad has multiple generations of shluchim, making it a family business. None of this was obvious back in the 1950s and it is certainly foolhardy to believe that people are automatically going to be able to do successful outreach simply because they are thrown out into the secular world. I suspect that a large part of Chabad’s success with their own children comes from the fact that, since the parents are doing outreach, they are more likely to apply what they are doing to their own children without falling into the traps of believing that their kids are automatically going to be religious or that it is a lost battle so there is no point in trying. 

In keeping with the principle of "the medium is the message," the bulk of Chabad's message is quite effectively articulated by the mere fact of having someone with a hat, jacket, and a beard setting up shop in a place outside of New York or Jerusalem. By showing up dressed in their distinctive outfit, the Chabad rabbi is demonstrating that they do not accept the premise that Judaism is merely a set of practices relevant only to the privacy of one's home. In fact, they are going on the offensive and believe that a place with little previous association with Judaism can be claimed as a Jewish space. 

This can be effective as it takes away people's excuse to not be openly Jewish. One cannot argue that people over here do not openly do Jewish things. There is a friendly Chabad rabbi here who is doing Jewish things and he is now challenging you to not just claim to be Jewish but actually put that Judaism into practice. This usually involves simple actions that take only a few minutes like men wearing tiffilin and women lighting Shabbat candles. These street corner tiffilin and candle stands have their counterparts in Chabad's efforts to create major candle-lighting spectacles for Chanukah challenging the notion that a public space must be a secular space. What seems like a minor gesture can have large consequences. Human beings are fundamentally influenced by their lived reality; what you do controls what you think. 

It should be noted that, unlike most Orthodox outreach organizations, Chabad's model of outreach is not built around getting people to become Orthodox. Instead, Chabad focuses on small victories while they play a long game by establishing permanent Chabad house synagogues. These welcome all Jews even those who drive on Shabbat. Chabad rabbis are going to spend decades embedded in a community building personal relationships as opposed to looking for a more prestigious and more lucrative pulpit. If Chabad rabbis were looking for respect, in the traditional rabbinic sense, they would not be serving as shluchim in the places that they do. 

By establishing communities premised on Orthodox observance even if most of the people there are not observant, it becomes possible to reverse the expected trend of secular modernity and create a situation where kids are more religious than their parents. By taking their kids to Chabad programs, parents send the message to their kids that it is not just that they are Jewish but that they are part of a Jewish community and, regardless of what they personally do or do not observe, they are striving to become more actively Jewish. Children raised in such an environment are less likely to assume that the march to secularism is inevitable and, therefore, may choose to not follow that script.      

This interpretation of Chabad's outreach is effectively summarized in a far more entertaining fashion than I could ever offer in Benny Friedman's music video Ivri Anochi. 

The story that plays out in the video is someone being blatantly Jewish causing other people to shift their behaviors in subtle ways that add up to make the neighborhood a more Jewish place. 

Protestantism, Privacy, and the Rise of Secularism

Charles Tayor’s Secular Age is one of those rare books that are nearly a thousand pages but demand close reading. At the center of his narrative regarding the rise of secularism is the rise of privacy. Ironically, as with much of the origins of European secularism, privacy was a creation of Protestantism. In contrast to the Catholic model where one was saved by being part of the visible community of the Church and physically entering the local church to confess one’s sins and receive communion, Protestantism held up the individual reading their Bible and discovering that they are sinners who can only be saved through Jesus.

As a matter of practical application, a church service came to mean something different for Protestants. The Eucharist became incidental. Instead, one came to church to reinforce the lessons that proper Bible reading should have provided. One sang hymns that explained the basic message of sin and salvation and listened to a sermon provided by a minister to explain the Bible. This provided our Christian with the proper tools and frame of mind to go home, read the Bible, and be saved.

This focus on the private individual had unintended consequences. If we require this personal acceptance of Jesus as the only source of salvation, what is the use of religious coercion? For that matter, why bother having the state involved with religion at all. If people are not going to be saved as a community, what is even the use of public displays of religion that might provide a sense of a community bonded by faith. Ultimately, once we make the individual alone with their private thoughts deciding what to believe the central player in the narrative of salvation, we are on a straight path to Kant's Enlightenment where each individual is answerable only to their own reason for what they believe.

The ultimate danger of privacy is that it allows for the process of secularization to unfold without people realizing what is happening. One simply decides to take a more private approach to religion, first taking religion out of the public sphere into one’s home and then into one’s head. This is easy to do because all of this can be justified on religious grounds. One can honestly believe that they are not abandoning their faith but, on the contrary, are deepening their faith and becoming more spiritual.

This claim is quite plausible for the individual. The problem comes when we insert children into the equation. Religious belief is going to be of little use if it is not passed down to the next generation. Any break in the chain and it becomes difficult for the faith to be recovered. What happens to a kid raised in a society in which the public sphere is free of religion. At best, religion becomes a quirky hobby that their parents engage in that the younger generation is free to abandon when they grow up and become their “own people.” The parents might believe that they are raising their kids in a religious home and will not realize until it is too late that their faith was something in their heads and not something they ever bothered to seriously share with their children.

Protestantism is particularly vulnerable to this as it fundamentally rejects works and, therefore, cannot demand adherence to ritual practice. All too easily a Protestant can lead a completely secular life except for the hour a week they spend in church and, since that can never be made mandatory, even that can easily be dropped.

Orthodox Jewish religious practices obviously offer their own challenges as they create more head-on conflicts with secular society that children will become conscious of at an earlier time. Judaism does not let me watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat McDonalds; I, therefore, hate Judaism. That being said, the children lost in this fashion will likely be lost anyway. What ritual offers though is precisely the ability to make the conflict clearer and avoid slipping away without realizing, at an early stage, what is happening. The Christian freshman who stops going to church can pretend that they simply are looking for one that fits them. The Orthodox Jewish freshman who starts eating the regular cafeteria food knows that they have crossed a red line.

The process of secularization gains even greater power through people seeing it as inevitable. If parents do not really expect their children to follow them in their faith it becomes all too easy for parents to Pontius Pilate themselves of any blame. If no one’s kids are religious, then I cannot be blamed if my kids are not either. I can do my private religious thing without having to do something out of my comfort zone like actually trying to engage my kids.

Keep in mind that very few people have ever lost their religion because of a book they read. Losing one’s faith to a book would require actually reading a book as well as coming to that book without any preconceptions as to what the book contained. The number of people throughout history who have read through the Origin of Species after innocently pulling it off a shelf has to be somewhere around zero. People who have read Darwin have presumably done so because something caused them to pick up his work. Furthermore, judging by membership, ideological secularists remain a minority even as most people today are assuredly secular. Most secular people never lost their faith. Instead, they, or their immediate ancestors, were raised in homes that were de facto secular without their parents realizing it. As such, they became adults who took secularism as a given and never even needed to go through the trauma of abandoning a faith.  

I am From Palestine

In the previous post, I spoke about how Paulo Freire uses his made-up problem of banking education as a deceitful Motte and Bailey argument in favor of turning education into ideological indoctrination. In the following video, we see a similar use of Freire’s tactic on behalf of Palestinian propaganda. 

The basic story we have here is about a little Palestinian girl named Samidah who goes to school and is faced with the fact that the class map only shows Israel so she does not know which country to mark as her country of origin. When Samidah tries to explain the problem to her teacher, she simply responds that Samidah must be from Israel. When she goes home, her father explains to her that they really are from this wonderful place called Palestine and that one day they will return. Samidah imagines herself in this special place called Palestine, buying food in a marketplace, and seeing the sunset over the Golden Dome. The next day, the girl goes back to class with additional Palestinian gear than just the necklace she wore at the beginning and unfurls a map that has Palestine instead of Israel.

What struck me about this video was that I have been in many American public school classrooms, and I have never seen them use a map that did not differentiate the West Bank and Gaza from Israel. Furthermore, I have a hard time imagining a teacher so ignorant as to not know the difference between Israel and Palestine. This is not Azerbaijan versus Armenia.

Why would the filmmakers make a film about a made-up problem? The purpose is to distract us from the solution. Contrary to appearances, the film's solution is not that we should acknowledge Palestinian identity and even that they have a legitimate claim to part of the land. When the girl goes back to class, she does not bring a map that shows the West Bank and Gaza and explain how these places are not part of Israel. Instead, her map eliminates Israel and replaces it with Palestine.

This raises the question of what the girl and by extension the filmmakers imagine is supposed to happen to all the Jews in Israel when it is replaced by Palestine. It is interesting to note that the imagination montage does not include any obviously Jewish people. One gets the impression that they have mysteriously disappeared. As with most Palestinian activism, its real purpose is not that Palestinians should be able to live in peace, dignity, or even independently but that the State of Israel should be eliminated. Ever since October 7^th, there should be no illusions that this means anything but mass murder.

What if this movie was about a cute blond-haired German girl who imagined living happily on her Lebensraum farm in Ukraine with other Germans, whose ancestors had been “unjustly” forced to flee their homes after World War II? It would be obvious that this was Nazi propaganda and that the film, even though it never says so explicitly, is calling for millions of Ukrainians to be murdered. Ukrainians presently living on the land are not going to simply leave to rectify a historical injustice and will have to be killed. As such, there is no moral difference between such a film and one that explicitly glorifies mass murder beyond the fact that the latter has the virtue of being intellectually honest.    

Paulo Freire's Bank of Motte and Bailey

There is a type of Motte and Bailey argument where you offer a strawman version of the opposition that no serious person believes. Having presented a problem that does not really exist or at least has been greatly exaggerated, you then offer a solution that sounds innocent, mainly not to do the thing that no one is really doing anyway, but really is quite radical. Then, in true Motte and Bailey fashion, when called out as to what is really being argued for, you then retreat into the claim that you are only opposing the thing that no one actually supports anyway.

Paulo Freire is a good example of this. It is clear to me that the education teachers who had me read his work did not really understand him. In all fairness, Freire is not an easy author to understand. Reading a work like Pedagogy of the Oppressed, most readers are only going to come away grasping his opposition to the banking model of education where the teacher is seen as depositing knowledge into the heads of students who are rendered passive figures in this process.

To be clear, I am not saying that Freire is wrong on this issue. On the contrary, the problem with Freire’s position is that he is saying something that just about anyone who has ever taught has agreed with. While it should be acknowledged that teachers presumably have knowledge about material that students do not and that the job of a teacher is to convey some of that knowledge, no one seriously believes that this is all that goes into teaching. There is still the issue of how you convey that information and also the building of a personal relationship with students combined with incentives to offer the circumstances where students are likely to want to learn. This is all the more so in modern education where information is so readily and cheaply available. Every teacher needs to constantly ask themselves the question: what am I giving students that they cannot easily get through Google and YouTube?

Competent teaching is going to be a combination of giving over information as part of the formal hard education and the creation of systems to offer informal soft education. Reasonable people are going to fall along a spectrum. Different students will benefit from different teachers depending on their personalities and a variety of other factors.  

If all Freire was saying was that teachers should not try to simply stuff facts into their students’ heads, his work could be considered trite but innocuous. The problem is that Freire has a deeper agenda hidden in his rather dense prose. For Freire, the true purpose of a teacher is not to teach people practical skills like reading, enabling them to get jobs and function within a capitalist economy. In truth, teachers are not really supposed to teach anything. As Marxist revolutionaries, the teacher is supposed to go among the people and arouse their innate revolutionary spirit. That being said, what teachers are supposed to discover is that the students already possess the revolutionary spirit in contrast to the teacher who is tainted simply by the fact that they went through the capitalist education system. As such, there is a dialectic/contradiction in Freire’s work in which it would seem that the teacher is not even supposed to be teaching the students Marxism, but rather is supposed to be learning from the students, undermining the dichotomy of teachers and students.  

As I mentioned previously, I do not believe that even most education teachers, let alone teachers in training, understand Freire. I assume that a Straussian model is at work. A handful of activists have pushed Freire into the curriculum precisely because they understand his esoteric agenda. Most education professors agree to teach him because they only understand the exoteric mask. The teachers in training end up being corrupted by Freire but it is not because they understand even much of the exoteric material. This would require that they bother to do the assigned reading. They understand enough to recognize that knowledge of their field is not that important so they do not have to read much beyond the textbook. Thus Freire becomes a license for teachers to do what they were already inclined to do mainly to remain ignorant of what they are supposed to be teaching while imagining that they are somehow teaching higher critical thinking skills that transcend their field. 

What one should take away from this is that if you see someone raising a problem that does not really exist or is greatly exaggerated, pay close attention to their solution. You can count on the fact that they have no intention of solving the problem; why would someone bother to solve a non-existent problem? The solution is not going to really be not to do what no decent person is doing anyway but something fundamentally indefensible in the light of clear language.