Something to Yell At: R. Avigdor Miller’s Books and Audiocassettes

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.

Kalman Takes a Stand on Evolution and Bananas

This is Kalman Isaac Chinn, master of shloofy and stinky as well as parents. Over this past year, in between my very important work learning how to be a good very big Jewish boy instead of taking over the world, I have been hearing lots of talk about this theory of evolution. There has been much misunderstanding on all sides as even those who possess the truth fail to reach the proper logical faith-based conclusions. Being able to contemplate the wonders of myself has given me a special perspective, which I would like to share. 

Evolution is clearly a lie. I am much closer to being a monkey than my Abba. Do you see how cute I am? For this reason, though, my Abba should show me respect. Think about it; what is better, to be a near relative of a monkey or Moses? Which Charlton Heston would you want to be like, Ten Commandments or Planet of the Apes? Those rabbis, who take plane trips with their grandchildren and mysteriously sit next to high officials from the Israeli government need to rethink their conclusions. 

  

I am very impressed with the argument of the great theologian Ray Comfort to prove the existence of God from a banana. Comfort is even smarter than Rabbi Avigdor Miller as bananas are more delicious than apples. Comfort, though, fails to understand the full specificity of God's plan. Notice how perfectly the banana fits in my hands; how perfectly it fits into my mouth and can be mashed up in my mighty fist to allow me to glorify God through post-modern art. Obviously, God created bananas just for me so all bananas are mine. This includes the half banana Abba always takes for himself. God wants me to have lots of bananas in my tummy so I can get all constipated like Martin Luther and create a new theology based solely on my bowel movements.

Obama Winning the Noble Peace Prize: It is No Joke

Earlier this morning, a friend of mine sent me an email:

Did you hear about President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize? So far, I approve of Obama in general, but really, it's like awarding the prize in biology to SETI because, "Well, sure, there haven't been any results yet, but they might at some point."

I assumed that this was some sort of joke that I had missed the punch-line for. Just to be certain I did a search and lo and behold it was real and not even something out of the Onion. Now Obama can join Yasser Arafat, Al Gore, and Jimmy Carter in making this an absolutely worthless prize. One can only imagine what was going through the minds of the committee: “We are sorry you did not get the Olympics. Would a Noble Prize make you feel better?” This actually hurts Obama because it plays into the right-wing stereotype of liberal elites of the world just waiting to kiss his feet, making Obama look even more ridiculous. I have nothing against Obama. I did not vote for him and oppose his politics but I find him to be likable personally. He could make for a fine regular president if everyone agreed to stop making something historic out of him. Even his supporters have to agree that Obama has done nothing yet. He has not even pulled us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. He has not even made a serious attempt yet at bringing an end to the Palestinian conflict. I believe that Obama is smart enough and charismatic enough to do great things in this world and it would not shock me if, after serving two terms, he managed to do something that did deserve a peace prize. Now he will never get the chance.

As someone who long since lost faith in the value of the Noble Prize for many of its decisions in years past, I wish I would be able to cheer and say “see I told you so.” The problem is that I know that there are people in religious fundamentalist circles who are doing the same thing. One of the key elements of the Rabbi Avigdor Miller style polemic is to delegitimize secular authority, from politics to literature, to science. Rabbi Miller was very open about this: “If you wish to know the value of the Nobel Prize awarded to a scientist for ‘discovering’ how the Universe began, then consider the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to the writer of smutty Yiddish novels [Isaac Bashevis Singer]” (Awake my Glory pg. 108).

I am someone who is actively fighting the war against religious fundamentalism. This means not just writing polemics from afar to make me feel better about myself, but actually engaging those under the fundamentalist sway on a personal level in an effort to win hearts and minds. I am not sure to what extent this applies to other groups, but the religious fundamentalism of Haredim relies on a “great-men” model of authority. It builds up its leadership, gedolim, to an almost cult-like status. To reach out to Haredim it becomes important to build a counter edifice of great men. For me, this means not just non-Haredi rabbis, but secular politicians, writers, thinkers, and scientists. The moment that one’s list of heroes includes those “outside the faith,” one will have to formulate a theology under which this can be accomplished. This means the end for any religious fundamentalist system that operates on the model of saying that “we, by definition, have the truth, we are right and everyone else is walking in darkness." Whether I like them or not, I need for there to be secular institutions like the Noble Prize award to serve as models of excellence. Now that the Noble Prize has sold itself out for partisan politics, I am all the poorer for it.

Rabbi Avigdor Miller and the Neturei Karta

One of the issues that have come up with this discussion on Authentic Judaism is that of Rabbi Avigdor Miller and his role in influencing some of the more radical Haredi bloggers. I brought it up in passing and Parshablog has dealt with it in more detail. Whatever problems one may have with the late Rabbi Miller (and believe me I do) Rabbi Miller is of little value in of himself as a target. He is no longer alive and the Haredi world has by and large rejected his more radical views. Rabbi Miller is still useful for going after Haredim because, despite the fact that most would say that they disagree with him on specific points, they still revere him as a scholar. I see this as an intellectual dodge and a moral failure to treat certain issues with due responsibility. This was brought home to me when discussing the issue of Rabbi Miller with Not Brisk, who, while not wishing to defend Rabbi Miller outright, did not hesitate to try to interest me in some of Rabbi Miller’s less polemical work. According to Not Brisk, even I “who obviously can't swallow his [Rabbi Miller’s] world opinions, can still take the ‘good’”. I do not question Rabbi Miller’s intelligence and I have no problem acknowledging that he has written things that are better than his tapes and his books Rejoice O Youth and Awake My Glory. That being said, these things are the Rabbi Miller that I know and apparently this is the Rabbi Miller that bloggers like Authentic Judaism and Jewish Philosopher know. Nothing that Rabbi Miller said could change this.

Not Brisk would have me bifurcate between the populist Rabbi Miller and the scholarly Rabbi Miller. Do not get me wrong, I have no problem with having a disagreement with someone and taking what I like about them and discarding what I do not. There are two different types of opposition; there is the opposition where the opponent is still viewed as legitimate and then there is the opposition where the opponent is cast aside as something satanic without any legitimacy. For example, I accept that different people are going to have different views on the State of Israel. You may disagree with me about the army or about settlements but we can agree that we are all good Jews here. I will still give you an aliya in shul and agree to eat in your home. That being said, a Neturei Karta person, who believes that Israel should be destroyed, would not be legitimate. (The Neturei Karta are a small but highly visible group. You can often see them at Israel rallies in Hasidic garb and waving Palestinian flags. They also gained a lot of attention when members of their group attended the infamous Holocaust denial conference in Iran.) A member of the Neturei Karta could study Torah sixteen hours a day and be the nicest person you have ever met. All of that would mean nothing against the fact that this person has plotted with and aided those who wish to murder Jews. It is a moral stance for me precisely to not bifurcate between a Neturei Karta member’s actions as a member of the Neturei Karta and his actions when off duty. (Similarly, I would not say that someone is in the Ku Klux Klan but he is nice to his mother. A member of the Klan is a member of the Klan, no ands ifs or buts.) Anyone who simply says that they do not personally agree with the Neturei Karta but still wish to accept them as another Jewish opinion is taking a stance and is morally culpable in the continued existence of the Neturei Karta. (To their credit the Haredi community has been pretty good at expelling the Neturei Karta.)

Among the many repulsive things in Rabbi Miller’s writing, Rabbi Miller took certain Neturei Karta type stances in regards to Israel. For example, Rabbi Miller has this to say about Zionism:

346. Let us see what they [the Zionists] have accomplished. They have succeeded in gaining for Jews the hostility of the entire Arab world and of most of the “Third World” nations. They have fomented bad relations with Russ and to some extent with France and Mexico. They have created animosity in the United States and elsewhere.
347. These achievements are of small benefit to Jews, but the Israelis and their Zionist proponents are persistent, because they hope to make all lands untenable for Jews (as they did in all Moslem countries) so that Jews be forced to settle in the State of Israel which is losing the population race against the local Arabs (one million Jewish babies have been slain by abortion in the State of Israel from 1948 to 1976, equal to the number of Jewish children slain by Hitler). (Awake My Glory pg. 104)

So according to Rabbi Miller, it is the fault of Zionism, not Arab anti-Semitism, for Arab hostility. It is Israel’s fault and not the Arabs that Sephardic and Yemenite Jews had to flee their homes. This is the classic Jews are responsible for anti-Semitism line. Finally, because Israel has legal abortion, the Israeli government is as bad as Hitler. Not surprisingly the Neturei Karta has made use of Rabbi Miller. Because of this, Rabbi Miller should be about as kosher as a bacon sandwich; not just some of the things that he said but everything. It is not good enough that the Haredi world accepts some things of his and ignores others.

When I was in the Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, one of the rabbis there recommended to me that I read Rabbi Miller as a good source on Jewish thought. (Little did he know that I was already a fan of listening to his tapes and yelling at them.) I am willing to give this rabbi the benefit of the doubt and imagine that if I were to show him the above passage he would be quick to say that he did not agree with it. That being said, the fact that, of all the people he could have told me to read, he sent me to Rabbi Miller raises certain questions. In a more liberal environment, where one comes expecting to be exposed to many different ideas, this would not have been such a problem. For example, someone coming to this blog has to understand that I love and value ideas for their own sake. They should not assume that just because I link to something and say that it is worthwhile to read that I agree with it. The yeshiva system, though, prides itself on the tight control it maintains on its students. These rabbis were, in essence, guaranteeing my father that they would not expose me to any questionable material. As such they cannot play innocent in exposing me to radical anti-Zionism. (This is why you never want to operate an authoritarian system. No one can live up to the implicit responsibility.) So what does it mean when this Haredi rabbi showed significantly less diligence in not exposing me to radical anti-Zionism than he did in not exposing me to say the writings of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook? (I am still waiting for it to be a common Haredi position to say that Rav Kook was a great Jewish thinker who everyone should read even though we may not accept some of his political positions.) I can only conclude that people like this Haredi rabbi do not really oppose Rabbi Miller’s position on Zionism, not in a meaningful way. Of course, when engaging in apologetics with outsiders it is important to deny this position. But, when in private, it can be tossed around as a perfectly legitimate option; something to keep in the bag for when the situation calls for some selective self-serving outrage against the Israeli government.

I Got Spammed by Rabbi Raphael Bearmant of Authentic Judaism

Last week, Wolfish Musings posted on an unnamed Haredi blogger who sent him an email advertising his blog. Wolf refused to say who the blogger was. My guess was that it was Authentic Judaism. I ran into this blog recently as well. My reaction was “wow this guy makes Jewish Philosopher sound almost Modern Orthodox.” I think it is useful to notice the Rabbi Avigdor Miller playbook at work. We have a crude argument from design leading to the conclusion that Judaism must be the true religion followed by blanket condemnations of anyone who does to follow “authentic Judaism” and ad hominem attacks. I particularly found his swipe at Dr. Leiman amusing as I know him personally. It is comforting to know that I have never treated any Haredi godol as flippantly as he does a man who actually should be one of the people speaking for Orthodox Judaism.

To my surprise, I have just received the same email:


Dear Colleague,

I sincerely thought that the following new blog would be of interest to you:

Authentic Judaism

Please expect to be presented with some new ideas. I hope you are strong enough to rise above the mediocre thinking based on a materialistic world outlook and consider adopting an Authentic Jewish one.

Please forward the url of this blog to anyone you think could benefit from it.

We are proud to see that after much effort, this blog is number one on Google: Authentic Judaism Search on Google as well as Yahoo: Authentic Judaism Search on Yahoo

Sincerely,
Rabbi Raphael Bearmant


PS This is not spam or junk mail. This is a sincere endeavor to get this important information to as many people as possible. Don't worry, as long as our technology holds up, we will not be contacting you again.

I must be coming up in the blogging world if random lunatics are emailing me and asking for my help in promoting them. I do love that end part about this email not being spam. He calls me a colleague, without bothering to stick my name at the top, so this is clearly a form letter. Then he tells us that he is relying on technology to send out these emails and make sure he does not repeat himself. That sounds like spam to me. We can conclude from this that, not only is Rabbi Bearmant a loudmouth Haredi clown, and a blog hit whore, he is a liar as well. As you can see, Rabbi Bearmant was nice enough to give out his phone number. The area code indicates that he lives in Northern New Jersey. Since he so freely gave his number to me even though I did nothing to ask for it, I see no problem in giving it out to anyone else who wants it. 

I understand Wolf’s wish to not grant this person any publicity. That being said, with all due respect to Wolf, I am posting this piece. I do have my own self-interest to think of. If Rabbi Bearmant and his blog are going to be such hot keywords I want to get in on the act. I may not be enough of a whore to send out mass mailings to random bloggers begging them to check out my blog, but I do like getting hits and comments. Also, I believe that publicizing lunatics like Rabbi Bearmant serves a constructive purpose. The existence of someone like him is a challenge to more “moderate” and “intellectual” Haredi bloggers like Freelance Kiruv Maniac, Daas Torah, and Not Brisk by placing the burden of showing how they are not like him and that their positions do not inevitably lead to him. As someone who is trying to move Orthodox Judaism in a more liberal direction, I believe that it is important to raise the stakes and make it as damaging as possible to hold Haredi positions. Contrary to what Not Brisk might think, Rabbi Avigdor Miller was not all happiness and smiles. Authentic Judaism is an excellent demonstration of how there is nothing innocent about holding Haredi positions. Either you come out in the open to accept evolution and turn away from gedolim worship or you become complicit in fostering Rabbi Bearmant’s hateful ideology.

Michael Oren, Thomas Friedman and Other Random Flashes of Sanity this Shavuot

On the subject of good news and sanity within the Orthodox community, I spent the holiday of Shavuot at the home of Rabbi Naphtali Weisz, the rabbi of Congregation Beth Jacob here in Columbus, and his lovely family. Also staying at the house was Rabbi Elliot Kaplowitz, who was here as a scholar in residence for the holiday. Rabbi Kaplowitz heads a branch of the Jewish Learning Initiative at Brandeis. Over the holiday Rabbi Kaplowitz spoke about the question of the centrality of halacha (Jewish law) in Jewish life. He is firmly on the side that Judaism needs to be a lot more than just halacha. He also spoke about Serach bas Ashur, a female figure who is just a name in the bible but is given great prominence in rabbinic literature.

In one of our conversations, Rabbi Weis referred to an article by Michael Oren, which he then used in one of the sermons over the holiday. Oren argues that Yitzchak Rabin was influenced to support negations with the PLO starting in 1992 upon being informed of the potential threat from the Iranian nuclear program. The lesson that Rabbi Weisz seems to have taken from this article is that there was a certain logic to the Oslo accords, one that the public was not aware of at the time, and that even allowing Israel to be put under siege by suicide bombers was a calculated short term risk in the face of the long term existential threat posed by an Iranian bomb. It is not often that one hears an Orthodox rabbi acknowledge that the Oslo accords were anything other than a suicidal disaster. Rabbi Weisz also showed me his heavily highlighted copy of Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded. He has become interested in environmental issues and wants to speak out more on the topic.

I greatly admire Friedman despite the fact that he regularly veers too far into mainstream liberalism for my taste. If there is one book that can convince a conservative to go green it is Hot, Flat and Crowded. Its basic premise is that our lack of willingness to cut down on fossil fuels is enriching our enemies in the Islamic world and causing us to lose the War on Terror. Friedman also appeals to two basic bedrocks of, (or at least should be) conservative principles. One, that our challenge to solve the energy needs of the world is an opportunity for individual innovation; the sort of roll-up-your-sleeves pragmatism that is distinctly American. This book is nothing if not patriotic. For Friedman, it is America that can solve this problem and if America fails to lead the way then no one is going to be able to succeed. The second bedrock conservative principle is that sacrifices are going to be needed. We need to hold back on some of our short-term pleasures for the long term good. From my perspective (and I suspect that this is also Rabbi Weisz’s view) this is a call to action for every religious person. If we cannot get on board with the green thrift ethic than who will?

On the side of not so sane, I ate a meal at a member of the community kollel. He had a picture of Rabbi Avigdor Miller on his wall so that creeped me out from the get-go. I spent a large part of the meal flipping through a copy of Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon’s With Hearts Full of Love. The title brought to my mind the song from the musical Les Miserables, “A Heart Full of Love.” I assume this is just a coincidence. Then again there might be one very sneaky and subversive Haredi editor out there. The book was essentially a guide to how to brainwash your children and protect them from all the dangerous things in the world, like the internet, competitive sports, computer games, secular books, and secular libraries. (To be fair, he does have some nice things to say about playing chess.) I confess to engaging in inordinate amounts of laughter as I imagined myself as Richard Dawkins checking off passages. I am told, that my host got annoyed at the fact that I was getting so much entertainment out of the book. Apparently, the book is not meant as a joke. This is Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon, the mashgiach of Lakewood, after all. The same Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon who stood up in the middle of the Yeshiva sex abuse scandal and blamed bloggers for much of the evil in the world. So please hold your smirking and giggling to a minimum.

Secular Theodicy: A Review of Day of Empire (Part I)

The biblical narrative, particularly in Judges, Samuel and Kings, serves as a type of theodicy. The authors of these various books wish to convince the reader that the welfare of God’s chosen people rests on their obedience to God’s will. If things go well it is because the Israelites were righteous and if things do not go well it is because they sinned. While this may be true (And I am certainly inclined to think that there is something to this.), such a notion lies outside our knowledge as historians; historians are not prophets and can claim no knowledge about God’s existence, will, or plan for human history. Thus the biblical theodical model of historical narrative is unusable for the writing of history. Those who attempt to write such history (Be they Rabbi Berel Wein, Rabbi Avigdor Miller or Rabbi Yosef Eisen.) are not historians but intellectual frauds.

The problem is that we have no fixed standard with which to judge whether any given society is living a godly life. Our knowledge of God’s will, even from a religious perspective, is rather open ended so we have no clear-cut means of evaluating a godly society. How many points does a society have to score in order to count as godly and how many points are various actions worth? How many points does a society lose if they allow women to wear mini-skirts; what about if they tolerate club-wielding hooligans beating up women over the length of their skirts? Furthermore, since every society is a mixture of good and bad, we have no way of knowing if a given society is being rewarded for the righteousness of the few or punished for the wickedness of the few. Sodom and Gomorrah being the exceptions, every society can be assumed to have at least ten righteous people. So if a wicked, ungodly society succeeds it can always be passed off as due to the intercession of the righteous few. Conversely, if disaster strikes a righteous godly society it can always be passed off as punishment for the secret sins of the wicked few, hiding their idols/television sets behind their doors.

This sets the stage for radical levels of intellectual dishonesty if one wishes to try writing such a history. Since there are so many movable pieces one can fix the results to suit any desired conclusion. It is a heads I win tails you lose situation. God might have brought the Holocaust in order to punish secular Jews and saved the secular state of Israel in the Six Day War in the merit of the Orthodox minority. This of course may very well be true, but I could play this game to come up with anything that I want. For example, if you would indulge me in a little reductio ad absurdum, I could, with equal plausibility, argue that God is a Nazi, who treasures his German people, and wishes to lead them to greatness if only they would follow his will. In pursuit of this goal, God uses world Jewry to chastise the Nazis.

God gave the German people victory, as of the fall of 1941, over Poland, France, and the Soviet Union as a reward for obeying their divinely sent Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and to allow them to rid the world of the Jewish race. (God did not allow them to defeat England because he wanted there to remain a threat so that his German people would continue to cry out to him. Alternatively, God was being patient with the British people, also members of the German race, and was giving them one last chance to abandon the rule of Winston Churchill and return to the Germanic fold.) The fact that things turned against Germany can be attributed to the fact that they did not pursue the destruction of world Jewry with the proper zeal and show pure undiluted faith in their Fuehrer. The fact that the Germans had to turn to gas chambers and abandon the use of Einsatzgruppen as their primary mode of killing Jews showed a lack of Jew killing zeal. According to the Wannsee conference, the use of Einsatzgruppen as mobile firing squads was proving ineffective as it was having a negative on its members. Clearly, if Germans had been full of the proper Jew-killing zeal they should have been lining up for the honor of being able to personally shoot Jews and they should have been able to carry out this task with joy and a gladdened heart. Germans should have been able to kill Jews with the same gusto as the Poles and the Ukrainians, who, immediately upon being liberated by Germany, took it upon themselves to slaughter their Jewish neighbors. No German should have suffered negative psychological effects from carrying out such tasks. Later on, at the end of the war, many in the German high command thought that the elimination of Hungarian Jewry should take a back seat to fighting the advancing Soviet forces. There were even those like Himmler who wanted to make a deal with the Allies in order to save the Jews in exchange for protection after the war. It took a mere colonel like Adolf Eichmann to see that Hungarian Jewry was dealt with. Not only did the German leadership not pursue the murder of European Jews as they should they also failed to show the proper faith in their Fuehrer. Over and over it was demonstrated that Hitler was right yet there were those who questioned his decisions to hold the line on the Russian front and in North Africa. The lack of faith was so profound that members of the German high command attempted to assassinate Hitler. God miraculously saved Hitler by causing the bomb to be moved thus allowing for Hitler to survive with only some busted air drums and a withered hand.

Since the German people failed to properly follow God and their Fuehrer, God gave them into the hands of their enemies, the Americans, and the Russians, who put an end to the Third Reich and divided Germany up into East and West. Not only that but God allowed the Jews to rebuild their state and gain victory over the Arabs so that now world Jewry could exercise their power directly and not just through the banks and Hollywood. Next, God allowed for a wave of Jewish-inspired liberalism to sweep the Western world, forcing all proud lovers of the German race and ideals to have to go underground and live in secret. But even in these dark times, God has not abandoned his German people. As a comfort to the German race, he allowed them to kill off a third of world Jewry in the Holocaust. This serves to comfort the German people and as a sign of God’s promise to completely annihilate the Jews, restore the German people to their former glory and bring about the Final Reich.

(To be continued …)

Staying in the Haredi World is Good for Your Sex Life (Part II)

I can easily imagine my own life and the paths I did not take. I grew up identifying myself as Haredi. I started high school in Yeshiva Torah Vodaath. Now even at this point, I was hardly a poster child for the Haredi world; I had a library card to the Brooklyn Public library and I read loads of secular literature. I also read R’ Avigdor Miller and listened to his tapes, but that was mainly to yell at him. In essence, I was, at that point, not that different from my two Haredi friends; I lived within the Haredi world and more or less behaved myself, though, on certain relatively minor matters, I bent the rules. Now over the course of my high school years, as I came to the realization that I was separated from the Haredi world, I made a decision to cease to identify with the Haredi world and to openly break with it. This is an ongoing process, one that, even today, I am still coming to terms with. (Much of my thinking can be classified in terms of I have rejected the Haredi world and now have to figure out where to go from here.)

I could have made a different decision. I could have, like my friends, continued to operate within the Haredi world, saying the right things and going through the right motions. I am certainly capable of living up to the Haredi lifestyle. Like my friends, I could have done all this while bending certain rules and continuing to read secular books to my heart’s content. My rebellion was very minor; it is not as if I was interested in watching explicit television shows and listening to rap music.

If I had done this, come my early twenties, I would have been down in the Haredi matchmaking system as a nice smart yeshiva boy from a good family, a nice catch for any Haredi girl. The Haredi matchmaking system would have been particularly beneficial to me since it could have avoided the problems that arise due to my Asperger Syndrome. I am a smart, funny, and charming person, particularly over short periods of time. There is no reason why I could not have charmed a Haredi girl for a month or two, enough that she would have agreed to marry me. (What might have happened next is a different matter. She would have probably realized, after a few months of being married to me, that I did not relate to people in a normal fashion. At best I could hope that she would stick with the marriage as long as I never gave her a concrete reason to divorce me. As for me, one of the advantages of having Asperger Syndrome is that, while relationships are difficult for me, I do not need human relationships to the same extent that other people do. Admittedly, this would hardly be an ideal situation.)

I did not follow this path and I have paid a price for it. In another fifteen years, I can be the butt of the punch line of a certain film starring Steve Carrell. I do not regret the choices I have made. I wonder, though, if my teenage self would have made the same choice if he knew where it would lead. I have a hard time justifying telling moderately rebellious Haredi teenagers to disassociate themselves from the Haredi world and enter the nebulous world of the various Modern Orthodoxies; the price is simply too high.

If you think I am going over the top here, I will point out that the yeshivas themselves openly play on this. In high school, I constantly heard rabbis tell guys that if they learned and were good Bnai Torah they would get a good shidduch, marriage match. Let us translate this phrase into teenage boy: play along with the system and do what you are told and we will help you get laid in a few years. For moderately rebellious teenagers, people doing things that outside of the Haredi world do not even count as rebellion, this is a hard deal to turn down. Keep in mind that we are dealing with observant Jews here, who are not considering going outside of Orthodoxy, so their sexual opportunities are limited. If they leave the Haredi world then they are going to have to play by Modern Orthodox rules and that means that they are likely going to have to delay sexual gratification. Furthermore, we are likely going to be dealing with people who lack the social skills for conventional dating. I certainly did not have them. (I still do not have them, though I like to think that I am learning.)

To clarify matters, I am not arguing that my Haredi friends stayed in the Haredi world simply for sex, though sex is a big enough issue that one cannot pretend innocence. Particularly, considering the tactics used by rabbis to keep people in line. I would see the issue of sex as simply one example of the Rodney Stark model of religion at work. A clearly defined society, such as the Haredi world, offers certain social advantages to those remaining in the fold that has nothing to do with ideology. To the extent that it might even be in one's interest to be part of such a society even if one is not a full believer.

How I Won a Five Hundred Dollar Challenge and Helped Project YES

Jewish Philosopher is a Haredi blog which operates according to the apologetical methodology of the late Rabbi Avigdor Miller. This methodology is built around the following premises; firstly that the truth of Judaism is so patently obvious that no one but someone who is foolish, insane or wicked would ever deny it. Secondly that there is a war against “God, his Torah and his people” being waged by the majority of the world, who are foolish, insane or just plain wicked. The most prominent example of this is the modern scientific establishment, which seeks to advance an atheistic agenda under the cover of scientific objectivity. This is has mainly been conducted through the advocation of such patiently false claims as the theory of evolution. The obvious conclusion arising from these two premises is that Orthodox Jews, particular Haredi Jews, are morally superior to everyone else.

In this spirit, Jewish Philosopher, recently put up a post, Who is like your people Israel, a unique nation on Earth; it was a YouTube clip of a person talking about being sexually abused by his father. Jewish Philosopher challenged his readers: “Can anyone familiar with us imagine a father in the Orthodox Jewish community treating his sons the way the father described in this video clip (5:38 point) treated his sons?” To which a number of readers responded with: yes they could imagine Orthodox Jews abusing their children. In response, Jewish Philosopher put out a challenge: “give [him] the name of one American Orthodox Jew ever convicted of murder, forcible rape or armed robbery and you win $500.”

This seemed to me to be a pretty foolish challenge and I assumed that he was just talking hot air, but I thought it would be fun to call him on it. I just happen to be close to the Isaacs, an Orthodox couple in Columbus, who both work for the Ohio Department of Corrections. So I asked them if they could name someone. They came up with the name of an Orthodox Jew from Cleveland, who served time from 1985 – 2003 for “accidentally” shooting his father-in-law seven times in “self defense.” I presented this to Jewish Philosopher. At first he was skeptical that this person was an Orthodox Jew at the time that he committed his crime so he contacted the Isaacs and then he even got in touch with the person.


To my surprise, not only did Jewish Philosopher concede that I had successfully fulfilled the requirements of his challenge, but he also offered to pay up the $500 he had wagered. Instead of taking the money, I suggested that he donate it to Project YES, an organization that works with at-risk teens in the Orthodox community. The head of this organization, Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, has been a leader in discussing problems within the Orthodox community, particularly abuse. He is the sort of person that if Jewish Philosopher had bothered to read he might not have made the sort of outlandish claims that got him into this situation in the first place.


Jewish Philosopher made the donation and even posted the reply from the website.I must say, though, that I was really impressed that Jewish Philosopher actually kept his word and paid, not many people would. Of course not many people would have gotten themselves into such trouble in the first place by making the sort of claims that he did. In a sense Jewish Philosopher is a very good representative of the Haredi world. He is personally honest even if he is intellectually very dishonest. He may live in a fantasy-land, but he seems to be a good person.