Critical Anti-Semitism Theory: The 33 Project

 

Growing up with one foot in the Haredi world, I was surrounded by a particular narrative about Jews and gentiles. The non-Jews around us might appear, at first glance, to be decent people but, in reality, they are all vicious anti-Semites ready to murder us at the first opportunity. "Esau hates Jacob" was a historical metaphysical fact much the same as the notion that Jacob and Esau were twins. To be clear, it is not as if we ever had a hate non-Jews class that demanded that we recite some catechism about the diabolical nature of gentiles. What we had was something subtler and more pernicious. We were surrounded by songs and stories that took this assumption as a fact. You can never argue with a story because stories do not make arguments to be responded to. Things are even trickier when we are not even dealing with things that are not even said but merely assumed. For example, Father Schmutz is a scumbag by virtue of his name in much the same way as the Malfoys in Harry Potter are literally people of bad faith.  

This negative view of the outside world was an essential part of keeping us within the fold. If we were going to be hated no matter what then assimilation could never be an option. We were fed a diet of stories where assimilated Jews were rounded up by the Nazis while attempting to deny that they were Jews. The fact that Jews have managed to survive living among such dangerous enemies was an argument for the Truth of Judaism; it could only have been through divine providence. We have a deal with God, going back to the Bible; follow his commandments or he will allow the nations of the world to murder us as they are naturally predisposed to do. Therefore, our only chance of survival was by being as religious as we could while reaching out to irreligious Jews to make sure they learned to carry their weight and not get us all killed.

It is worth noting that this narrative flipped the script on anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was not caused because Jews made themselves stand out with their strange clothes and customs. Being like gentiles and even intermarrying with them would not cause them to like us. On the contrary, it was the secular Jews, who caused anti-Semitism. While gentiles cannot help themselves but hate Jews, it is the secular Jews who truly rouse them into a murderous rage as such Jews violate the natural order of things.    

My academic training in history has served to tone down and add some nuance to how I view non-Jews. This is particularly the case for how I relate to Christianity. At the time time, it has also made me more dangerous as I can better monologue on the particular details of crimes against the Jews if I so choose. Alternatively, this can all be used for some ridiculous fun. In this cause, a new weapon in my arsenal is critical race theory with its assumption of structural racism and privilege. This allows for the condemnation of Western Civilization as a whole as being fundamentally racist as opposed to merely containing racist elements to be purged. At a practical level, critical race theory allows us to convict individuals of racism even without being consciously motivated by any hostility toward people of color. Merely not actively trying to tear down established culture makes you complicit in racism. As Kendi argues, it is not enough to not be racist, you have to be an anti-racist.

In order to help my readers become anti anti-Semites, I should write a history of anti-Semitism that uses the logic of CRT against Christianity, Islam, modern secularism, and ultimately the contemporary left. We could call it the 33 Project. The essential points of the book would be as follows. 

Anti-Semitism is the foundation of both Christianity and Islam and by extension all of Western Civilization. The true foundation of Christianity may be the year 33 C.E. but it is not the Cross but the accusation of deicide where Jews were supposed to have forced Pilate to crucify Jesus, claiming that his blood would be on their hands and that of their children. In truth, it has been Christians who have been the crucifiers of Jews. The Jews are the Christian Other, who are to be implicated and ultimately even murdered for Christian vices in order to allow Christians to claim to be virtuous. 

At a fundamental level, Christianity is an act of cultural appropriation. The vast majority of Christians today have no ethnic connection to Judaism and yet they have no objection to taking Jewish scriptures as well as the narrative of choseness reinterpreting it not only to make themselves God's chosen but to cast Jews as the ultimate other, the people who God rejected. 

In a similar fashion, Islam was founded not only upon Mohammed's mass murder of Jewish tribes in Arabia but also his appropriation of Jewish choseness, replacing Isaac with Ishmael as the chosen son of Abraham. Today Muslims have the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. Here we are going beyond cultural appropriation to outright cultural eradication. The idea here is to eliminate Jewish history by denying the existence of the two Temples. 

What this means is that anyone raised within a Christian or Muslim environment is, by definition, an anti-Semite. Christians and Muslims simply cannot help themselves, it is who they are. In fact, anti-Semitism is so infectious that anyone who believes there is anything valuable about Western civilization becomes tainted with anti-Semitism. Considering the ubiquity of Western Civilization today, even seeming non-Christians and Muslims (such as Indians, Chinese, and the Japanese) should assumed to be anti-Semites as well. 

As a Christian or a Muslim (and therefore an anti-Semite), you have an obligation to educate yourself about the history of anti-Semitism. This does not simply mean that you should acknowledge the existence of the Almohads or the Inquisition but that you should actively declare that all Christians and Muslims are inherently guilty of structural anti-Semitism by the mere fact that they are Christians or Muslims. (Obviously, when pressed, I will pretend, using Motte and Bailey tactics, that all that I am trying to do is teach about the Almohads and the Inquisition and I will accuse my opponents of trying to cover up these historical facts.)  

Even people who try to help Jews are really anti-Semites. Such anti-Semites believe that it is possible for Jews to improve themselves by reading anti-Semitic works like Aristotle and Kant or even the Old Testament. This implies that Jews are not perfect and that any seeming imperfections are not the fault of non-Jews. As we know from the doctrine of converging interests, whenever non-Jews look like they are helping Jews, it is only to better serve their own interests. For example, non-Jews might wish to pretend to not be anti-Semites and therefore avoid having to reckon with the anti-Semitism inherent within themselves and their civilization.  

Secular people might wish to congratulate themselves on not being anti-Semites on the assumption that they have distanced themselves from the anti-Semitism of their ancestors but this is not so. As we can see from Shakespeare and Dickens, Western literature is inherently anti-Semitic. If you have ever read Shakespeare or Dickens you become an anti-Semite much as you would from watching a passion play. It does not help if you try to censor any offending material. Doing that simply proves that you know that they are anti-Semitic but simply want to cover it up. This makes you not only an anti-Semite but a dishonest one at that.  

Obviously, Christians and Muslims who do not abandon their faiths are guilty of anti-Semitism. That being said, if you abandon your religion, you are still an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is so ingrained in Christianity and Islam that not even apostasy will be able to cure Christians and Muslims of its taint. In truth, a true gentile anti-anti-Semite would recognize that they can never be cured of anti-Semitism and would not desire that his Jewish allies should have to demean themselves by pretending he is not an anti-Semite. (It is psychological violence enough that Jews should even have to be in the same room as an anti-Semite so gentile anti-anti-Semites should do their best not to spend any time with Jews.)

Since Jewish victimhood is the foundation of Western Civilization, only Jews can ever be victims of bigotry. Anti-Semites (a category that includes all non-Jews) can never be victims. If they appear to be victims, it is merely their anti-Semitism coming back to harm them. In a world in which anti-Semitism did not exist, there would be no oppression. Because of this, any discussion of oppression, say, for example, the Trail of Tears, outside of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitic. Obviously, the reason why the Cherokee were forced off their land was because they failed to make an intersectional alliance with Jews to fight against the anti-Semitic United States government. Clearly, the reason anti-Semites would wish to cover up this anti-Semitic facet of Native American history is that, as anti-Semities, they wish to pretend that anti-Semitism is not the foundation of all oppression. 

Because Jews (assuming that they are not anti-Semites) are inherently victims, it is not possible for them to ever be oppressors. This applies even when Jews do things like use the N-word. When Jews use that word they are simply reacting to being oppressed and are bravely standing up to anti-Semitism. Anyone who objects to Jews using the N-word is really an anti-Semite as they are implying that there can be a type of oppression besides anti-Semitism and are trying to rob Jews of their moral high ground as inherent victims.  

It should be noted that most Jews are anti-Semites. This is hardly surprising considering that Jews have lived for more than a thousand years within the structural anti-Semitism of the West and have imbibed its hatred for Jews. When we think of Jewish anti-Semites, it is not enough to point out Jewish Voices for Peace or If Not Now. Any Jew who refuses to recognize that Western Civilization is inherently anti-Semitic and believes that it is possible to interact productively with Western Culture without becoming tainted with anti-Semitism is an anti-Semite. Even for Jews, it is not enough to refrain from active anti-Semitism. One must be an anti anti-Semite by working to tear down all structures of non anti anti-Semitism. 

As one of the world's only true anti anti-Semites, it is a lonely task. I bear the weight of so much oppression and it is the fault of all you anti-Semites. Maybe corporations can hire me to offer seminars to help cure their workers of anti-Semitism (or at least to make them feel really guilty about it). This will include classes on why you are an anti-Semite for thinking that I am a greedy Jew taking money from anti-Semites in exchange for moral cover or why you are an anti-Semite if you found this piece funny. (Since anti-Semites have no sense of humor, if you did not laugh at this piece, you are also an anti-Semite.) 

Haredi Education and the Heroic Teacher

 

Abie Rotenberg's song, "Ninth Man" tells the story of a class of troublemaking kids who turn themselves around because their rebbe steps in as a replacement in their baseball game after the catcher breaks his leg. (One hopes that this was after the ambulance or the boy's parents were able to take the kid to the hospital.) Recognizing that they owe the rebbe a favor, the kids start paying attention in class and find that the material is actually interesting. It strikes me that this song is remarkably useful as an introduction to Haredi pedagogy. The yeshiva system relies on charismatic teachers, who are passionate about the Talmud in the hope that kids develop a close personal relationship with the rebbe and become interested in the Talmud as well. 

In essence, what we have in the song is the heroic model of teaching. The rebbe proves to be a likable person, who cares about the kids and teaching Talmud. In the end, the students come to like him and therefore become interested in what he teaches. While waiting for that to happen, though, the rebbe spends months simply lecturing even though the kids are not learning anything. This itself is part of the education. The rebbe is making the point that he cares about engaging with the Talmud so much that it is worthwhile to do so even if no one is paying attention to him and he might as well be talking to the walls of the classroom. 

There is no attempt by the administration to regulate what the rebbe does in the classroom. The principal simply puts the rebbe in the classroom and then goes out of town. In the yeshiva system, there is no set curriculum of specific things that students are supposed to have mastered by a certain time. An extension of this is the lack of organized testing. If there is no agreed-upon list of things that students should know and a timetable for when they should learn it, there is little point to test students to figure out if they are on task. Any testing that takes place is going to be largely symbolic, serving the need of putting a grade on a report card rather than any pedagogical goals. 

The point of a yeshiva education is not really about mastering material. The goal is to put kids in a room with a charismatic individual, who, if given enough time, might get the kids to want to be like him. Think of it this way. A student who graduates from a yeshiva without being able to read any Hebrew but comes away admiring the rabbis and wanting to be religious is a success story. The student who leaves yeshiva having mastered a decent amount of Talmud, which he then uses to enroll at JTS is a failure. 

It is important to stress for those who have not gone through the boys’ track of the Haredi yeshiva system, how utterly Talmud-centered it is. If you are a teenage boy who is not prepared to study Talmud for several hours a day, regardless of whatever genuine talents you possess, you are royally fracked. Whatever talented individual rebbeim are out there who understand that not everyone is going to fit the model, at an institutional level, yeshivas are not equipped to handle kids for whom a Talmud-centered education would not be appropriate. In a strange way, Haredi girls have an advantage here. Girls are not supposed to be studying Talmud in the first place so girls, at least as teenagers, have more flexibility as to how they can fit into the system. There is no we are going to continue to try stuffing you into our Talmud-shaped hole and if we fail to remake you in our image, it is your fault.  

Considering, my own not particularly positive experience with the yeshiva system, it is strange to recognize the extent to which my instinctual style of teaching history is essentially a secularized version of the rebbe model. The students do not need me to memorize names and dates. They can get those from their textbook or the internet. Furthermore, I recognize that these bits of information are, in of themselves, going to be of little value to the students as they go out into the world. The important thing that my students should experience is the fact that I am truly passionate about history. History is not simply something that I talk about for a class period but what I live and breathe. Catch me out of class and I am really the same history-centered person you see in class. Beyond telling me to stop talking, I do not have an off switch; even then my internal monologue will continue. 

Since my teaching is really an extension of the running conversation in my head, I am prepared to teach even when students are not paying attention. There are some things that are so important that they should be said even if no one is going to listen. One thinks of the Calvinist minister who preaches not because he believes that he will convince anyone, God has already decided before creation who is going to believe and be saved anyway, but to make sure that those listening will not be able to claim that they never heard the message. They were told the truth and decided not to pay attention.

This can be quite disturbing for many students but there is also a certain charm to it. My inclination is to teach what I genuinely find interesting and what I think is important to understand rather than check things off a curriculum. Admittedly, this leads to my getting sidetracked. It is my conviction that my tangents, particularly if initiated by students, are usually the most important part of any lesson. The fact that I find myself talking about something even though I did not plan on it and it is not part of the curriculum suggests that it really gets to the soul of what I am trying to convey to students. 

If I find something interesting, there is a chance that I will be able to convince someone else that this is interesting as well. At the very least, students are going to be forced to face the question of what it is with this history that has me so enthralled. 

Note that what I describe here is my inclination when left to my own devices. This is not necessarily how I actually teach nor what I think makes for genuinely good teaching.

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And Reporting on Rabbis She Knew Was a Sin

 

I recently introduced my eldest to the dark comic songs of Tom Lehrer. He particularly likes the Irish Ballad which is about a girl who brutally murders her family. The song includes the lines: "And when, at last, the police came by, her little pranks she did not deny. To do so she would have had to lie and lying she knew was a sin." At one point, my son came over to me and in a very serious voice explained to me that he understood what was so funny about the song. "She knew that she should not lie but did not know that she should not kill her family." 

Humor is a very difficult art to master even for smart kids because to be funny requires that you have a baseline understanding of social expectations and how they may be illogical or subverted. For example, familicide is something so horrific that it should not be the subject of jokes. Part of what makes Lehrer funny, though, is precisely his transgressiveness in violating such a taboo. We find ourselves laughing because we know that we should not laugh. This is such an incredibly difficult balance to strike that no consistent rules can be given for doing so. Sometimes jokes are funny because they strike at a truth that we may not wish to admit to so we laugh and pretend that it is a joke. The power of the girl caring more about honesty than murder lies in the fact that it strikes at a real hypocrisy where the petty rules we use to instruct children can come to outweigh actual crimes. 

I bring this up because we are seeing this routine play itself out in the case of Chaim Walder (may his name and books be erased). For those unfamiliar with what has transpired, Walder was a popular children's author within the Haredi community until he was revealed to be a serial abuser. Rather than face judgment, Walder committed suicide on his son's grave. In this final act, Walder displayed a diabolical genius. He was a masterful writer and I confess that I liked his books and had been reading them with my son. As such, Walder understood the importance of an ending for giving readers an emotional body blow and affecting how they think of the entire story. By killing himself before the full extent of his crimes could be publicized, he got to end his story as the "victim" driven to kill himself by his accusers. Did his strategy work? One of his victims committed suicide herself and the Walder family was visited by many prominent rabbis during their period of mourning. By and large, the Haredi press chose to report on Walder's death as we might have expected them to before his downfall. 

One gets the sense that for many in the Haredi world, Walder's accusers, by going public, committed an even graver sin than Walder's abuse. There have been jokes circulating about how if only Walder had only touched girls to ordain them as rabbis then we could have had a real scandal. This joke stands on the shoulder of an older joke of how if activists wanted to get people's attention they should have lied and claimed that Haredi abusers were really handing kids candy without a good kosher certification. It needs to be understood that, underneath these jokes, lies the frightening truth that a large part of the Haredi leadership is not simply naive or lacking in empathy but honestly believes that speaking out about abuse really is worse than the abuse itself. 

This sounds absurd until you realize that there is a perfectly logical argument to be made here that speaking out about abuse, unlike actual abuse, undermines the entire community. The practical conclusion from this is, of course, utterly monstrous but if you are willing to accept the argument on its premises then you should be willing to bite the bullet and truly believe that it is worse to speak out about abuse than even to commit it.  

To start, we have to understand that Haredim, like most traditional societies, lack a category for a sexual abuser. Instead, what we have are the categories of rape and adultery. Walder clearly was not a rapist in the sense of jumping his victims in dark alleys. This means, that we are left accusing Walder of committing adultery with his victims, who were his "willing accomplices" and not victims at all. Obviously, what is being left out is a category to describe middle-aged men in positions of power who can intimidate and manipulate emotionally vulnerable teenagers, destroying their lives even to the point of causing them to commit suicide. 

One would still hope that adultery would be treated as a serious offense as it is in the Ten Commandments. The truth is that adultery, particularly when practiced by men, is treated as a minor sin. What needs to be understood is that adultery is a private sin and, as such, it can be left to the individual as they bang their chests on Yom Kippur. As long as the adultery takes place behind closed doors and does not reach the general public, the sin, in no way, threatens community authority and, by extension, the survival of the system. 

Not only do male adultery and even rape not threaten the system, but they can even actually help strengthen it. Rape sends girls the message that it is their responsibility not to be in certain places or behave in certain ways otherwise "bad things" will happen to them and it will be their "fault." Traditional societies have long tolerated prostitution on the logic that turning a blind eye to men sleeping with strangers made it more likely that they would consent to staying in loveless marriages and not divorce or have affairs with their neighbors and cause a scandal. Instead of prostitutes, what we have are vulnerable teenagers, who can be relied upon to stay silent knowing that they really "wanted it" and they will only destroy themselves and embarrass their families if they speak up.  

In contrast to the adulterer who has only committed a "minor" private sin, the abuse victim who speaks out has committed the ultimate "sin." Their action is public and directly threatens the survival of the system. Make no mistake, there are going to be teenagers who will read up on scandals like that of Walder and find the strength to tell their parents that they do not want to be religious and the parents will find themselves silenced because they are too ashamed to speak up for their faith. One thinks of the example of Ireland, where there has been a mass exodus from Catholicism among the youth because of abuse scandals within the Church. 

It should be recognized that the truly deadly scandal with clerical abuse scandals (whether Jewish or Catholic) has not been the fact that religious figures abused children. The real scandal has always been the wider coverups and the fact that the system cared more about its reputation than helping actual victims. The rabbis who gave Walder the funeral he desired, have likely done more damage to Judaism than Walder ever could. Even with this being the case, those rabbis clearly cannot shake the idea that if only Walder's victims had remained silent the "real" problem would have been solved and the Haredi world would be able to show itself to the world and its members in a desirable light

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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.

I Am Traditionally Observant, Not Orthodox: My Religious Evolution (Part III)

(Part I, II)

As someone committed to traditional practice while still interacting with Western thought, it should come as no surprise that I would eventually find my way to Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed. Taking Alan Brill's class on the Guide introduced me to the writings of Leo Strauss and the possibility of reading Maimonides in a highly "unorthodox" fashion. On the flip side, I came to recognize that, if we were to take Maimonides doctrinally seriously, we would have to condemn most Haredim as heretics. This, along with Marc Shapiro's Limits of Orthodox Theology got me to start questioning whether there was anything particularly authoritative about Orthodox beliefs. My high school self, if asked about Orthodox beliefs, would have recited Maimonides' Thirteen Principles as something accepted by all traditional Jews going back to the Bible. Now I had to consider the possibility that these were the creation of the Middle Ages and that Maimonides himself may not have believed them. 

The Slifkin affair helped give these issues practical weight. Much as with the Republican Party, I could identify as Haredi for a long time after it stopped making logical sense because I convinced myself that most Haredim were like me. For example, I assumed that most Haredim really were ok with evolution even if they liked to take potshots at it. Haredi outreach literature assured readers that evolution was not a problem for Judaism. The ban on Rabbi Natan Slifkin changed that. It quickly became clear that the opponents of Slifkin were not some fringe group but mainstream Haredi society itself. It was not just evolution at stake, what was being rejected was the entire Jewish rationalist tradition itself. In essence, either, over the course of less than a decade, Rabbi Avigdor Miller, reaching out from his grave, had taken over Haredi Judaism or I had been deluding myself as to what Haredi Judaism was really about. 

As with my conservativism, leaving Yeshiva University for Ohio State in 2006 affected my Judaism. I was isolated without a strong sense of community. Living inside my head without the feeling of being answerable to anyone else, it could only be expected that I would put together a Judaism to suit me. Readers may be surprised to learn that I continued to wear a black hat and jacket through my first year at OSU. Even though it was several years since I had identified with the Haredi community, I continued to wear a black hat as a matter of habit. During the summer of 2007, I fractured my clavicle. For several weeks, it was not practical for me to wear a jacket. If I was not going to wear a jacket, I might as well not wear a hat either. Now that I had stopped, I had the perfect excuse not to take it back up again. 

What led me to stop identifying even with the Modern Orthodox community was biblical criticism and women in the rabbinate. The funny thing about these issues is that I am actually pretty conservative on both of them. It is not as if I believe that biblical criticism refuted the Bible. I know enough Orthodox apologetics to defend against the obvious attacks. Furthermore, as a historian, I know to be skeptical as to what we can say for certainty about the ancient world as well as to the agendas that people bring to interpreting evidence. 

As with many religious scientists confronting evolution, I recognize a distinction between methodological and ontological naturalism. History and science are both games played by rules, one of which is to do research as if the supernatural does not exist. While this means that neither history nor science can ever be used to directly attack religion, it does force one to go about one's day to day studies sounding distinctly irreligious. 

That being said, as the historical method became critical to how I navigated the world, I felt I needed the freedom to go where the historical method might take me even when it might go against orthodoxy. There was a tipping point where I decided that I was not going to stretch orthodoxy just far enough to say that I was just ok but anyone to the left of me was a heretic. From this perspective, it no longer mattered if I had really crossed any lines or not. As long as I believed that one needed the moral legitimacy to do so, I might as well consider myself not Orthodox. 

My opinion as to women rabbis followed a similar course. I am of a very conservative sensibility. I believe that society benefits from having distinct concepts of men and women and can therefore accept that this can even spill over to men and women having distinct roles, including women being excluded from the rabbinate. If pressed, I might employ some version of G. K. Chesterton's anarchist argument against women's suffrage. The moment you give women the vote, you are admitting that government has full legitimate authority over them. As opposed to recognizing the existence of a women's sphere of existence which is outside of politics by virtue of the fact that women cannot vote. Similarly, putting women in the rabbinate means that rabbis are the only legitimate religious authorities. 

It is one thing to acknowledge that if it was up to me to vote on whether to have women rabbis, I might allow myself to get distracted by other issues that might assume greater importance. It is another matter entirely to make the essence of Judaism about opposing women rabbis to the extent that this would be an issue worth throwing people out. If you are putting more effort into denouncing women rabbis than Haredi claims about the power of gedolim, as exemplified by Kupat Ha'ir, then you clearly lack proper monotheist zeal and might even be an idolater. 

The reality of Orthodox Judaism today, including Modern Orthodoxy, is to denounce biblical criticism and women rabbis at the same time as it winks and nods at gedolim worship. That is not me. So I am ok with being considered not-Orthodox. It simplifies things for me not to be tied down by that label. I prefer to think of myself as a traditionally observant Maimonidean Jew. If there was an intellectually serious Conservative community in my area, committed to halakha and untainted by modern leftism or tikkun olam rhetoric, I would join them. I do not have that so I am stuck doing the best I can without a community in which I really feel comfortable in. 

People who have met me sometimes comment as to how shocked they are when they see how I look and live my life and hear what I sound like when I start talking about religion. One friend, after knowing me for several years, found out that my  father is an Orthodox rabbi and commented: "oh, that explains so much about you." Hopefully, these pieces I have written, will help readers confused about where to place me religiously and offer some context for understanding this blog. 

Live Not By Godwin's Law: A Book Review

 

According to Godwin's Law, as an argument continues on the internet, it becomes inevitable that someone will accuse their opponent of being a Nazi. There are two important implications for this. The first is to recognize that the moment that reductio ad Hiterlum arguments are put into play, all hope for civilized discourse ends. One thinks of the infamous example of the William F. Buckley Gore Vidal exchange in 1968, decades before Godwin's Law or the internet. 

The second implication is that whoever makes the Nazi comparison first loses. This is a necessary outgrowth of the first principle. Once you recognize the destructive nature of implying that your opponent is a Nazi and how tempting it is, it becomes necessary to heavily penalize anyone who goes down this path.   

I bring up this issue because it gets at the problem of Rod Dreher's otherwise excellent new book, Live Not By Lies. Following up on his earlier work, The Benedict Option, Dreher continues to develop the idea that conservatives need to recognize that they have lost the culture war and that they face a society that is increasingly actively hostile to them even to the point of not being willing to show them traditional liberal tolerance. Dreher's particular concern is the potential for corporate soft totalitarianism. What is to stop corporations from using online data to create their own version of China's social credit system? One could imagine that the fact that I bought Dreher's book and listened to it in a day might put me on a blacklist. Amazon could send their information about me to my bank, which then drops my credit score. 

Under these circumstances, religious people, if they want to pass on their faith to their children, are going to need to form small close-knit communities with fellow believers. Voting Republican is not going to help as this corporate soft totalitarianism does not require government assistance.  Your local mega-church is also not going to save your children. On the contrary, it likely is already taken over by people under the influence of woke ideology and will cave the moment it finds itself under pressure. 

The problem with Dreher is that he allows himself to get trapped comparing this soft totalitarianism to the Soviet persecution of Christians. To be fair to Dreher, he acknowledges that these situations are not identical. His point is that there is a lot that Christians in the United States can learn from former Soviet dissidents. That being said, he is left in a bind. Without being willing to violate Godwin's Law, at least in spirit, the book loses its coherency. If Soviet persecution really was something different then there is little point in putting Soviet dissidents at the center of a book about contemporary leftist persecution. 

I feel that Dreher would have been better served writing one of two alternative books. He could have written primarily about Soviet dissidents based on his interviews. I certainly would have loved to hear more about reading Tolkien from behind the Iron Curtain. The fact that many of these interviewees believe that some form of leftist totalitarianism is coming to the United States should be left as a point to take seriously with readers asked to imagine how their local church might handle being declared a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, let alone if Soviet tanks drove into town. If nothing else, this should help Americans appreciate the truly impossible dilemmas that people under Soviet rule faced.  

The second book that Dreher could have written might have been about leftist soft totalitarianism. Instead of talking about Soviet dissidents, he could have used examples of people who stayed religious on college campuses by forming small social groups with fellow believers. The spiritual challenge of college for many people is that they arrive on campus at the age of eighteen and find themselves, for the first time, in a setting in which the basic assumptions of their faith community are not taken as a given. To survive, a student needs to find a network of fellow believers and be willing to be part of an underground counter-culture. If campus extremists have gone out into the world and taken over corporations, turning the entire country into a college campus, the solution is to imitate small campus fellowships.   

Even here, there is room to bring in the example of Communism. One of the major surprises in the recent collapse of conventional liberalism in the face of woke ideology has been the willingness of people to confess to the most absurd charges. One thinks of the recent example from my alma mater, Ohio State, where a professor apologized for writing positively about college football in a way that does recall Soviet-style confessions.

Why would someone confess to something that they knew was false? Perhaps they were threatened with torture and death. Another possibility is that they were trapped by the logic of their own belief. Imagine that you are a good believing communist who supports the party and Comrade Stalin. You are accused of treason. There are two possibilities. Either you are innocent and the party is really just a scam to allow men to seize power by falsely accusing their fellow comrades or you are guilty and the party is right. A true believer would accept that it is not possible for the party to be wrong even if that meant that he was guilty. It must be that he really committed treason, perhaps even just subconsciously by not submitting himself thoroughly enough to party discipline.  

I could imagine the professor who defended college football making a similar calculation. Here he is, a man who probably spent his life verbally supporting civil rights and denouncing racism. Now he finds himself in a situation where civil rights leaders are calling him racist. If he were not a true-believing leftist, it would be easy to ignore his accusers. He did not intend to suggest that blacks should be sacrificed for the entertainment of whites. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be locked away for psychiatric treatment, not given an apology. The problem is that this man probably is a true believer. Either he could admit that civil rights, despite its lofty moral goals, is a scam used to blackmail people and seize power or he could confess that he really is a racist. Perhaps he is not consciously racist but, by failing to sufficiently educate himself, he fell prey to his white privilege and subconsciously allowed himself to indulge his fantasy of sacrificing blacks for his own entertainment.

This professor was vulnerable the moment he accepted that campus civil rights activists had the legitimate right to judge him and that he needed to live up to their standards. Since these activists control the university system, he would have needed to accept the fact that the university, as a whole, no longer held any moral authority, undermining his own authority with it. Because of this, denouncing these activists was never an option. If they accused him of racism, it must be because he really is racist and should apologize. 

Religious people are going to have to be willing to avoid getting ensnared by this line of reasoning no matter the cost. I used to think that Haredi objections to college were absurd and hypocritical. What is the difference between going to a secular college and getting a job in the secular world? Furthermore, many Haredim go to night school to get a degree. As I have lost faith that our university system reflects even my secular values, I have come to realize that going to college, particularly pursuing elite schools as opposed to taking some classes to get a degree, implicitly grants moral authority to the system. You are saying that you care what they think about you and that they have the right to judge you. Do that and they already have your soul even before you walk on campus. Part of what makes the Haredi system effective is that it has its own standard of judgment that is not connected to getting a degree and a respectable job. The secular world has no ability to blackmail them into giving up their children freely. If you want those kids, you are going to have to send in the government to seize them. 

I Am Traditionally Observant, Not Orthodox: My Religious Evolution (Part I)

In discussing how I went from being a conservative to being a libertarian, the critical subtext was my religious identity, which itself changed in ways that mirrored my political journey. It seems worthwhile to explicitly set forth that side of the story. Just as my high school self did not realize that he was not a conventional conservative, he did not realize that he was not Haredi. As he moved left religiously as he did politically in college, he was no longer able to ignore this fact. That being said, much as I never made a clean break with conservatism and my libertarian turn was an attempt to rebel without any desire to leave, my religious thinking has been dominated by the simultaneous intellectual rejection of Haredi Orthodoxy and emotional desire to remain within the fold.

In retrospect, I was precisely the kind of kid one would expect to abandon the observance of Judaism. I did not fit in with yeshiva schools. Whether it was the Chabad Yeshiva of Pittsburgh in middle school or Torah Vodaath and the Yeshiva of Greater Washington in high school, I had a terrible relationship with my classmates and was actively bullied. Granted, this likely had more to do with my then undiagnosed autism than with Haredi Orthodoxy. (I first heard about Asperger Syndrome from my father at the end of high school but did not get a diagnosis until graduate school.)

Furthermore, I was an academically gifted kid with no interest in Gemara. Worse, by the time I reached high school, I developed a mental block for the subject to the extent that the several hours a day, I was forced to spend on the topic were a complete waste of time for me that I spent mostly starring into space and twiddling my thumbs. 

It was not as if the idea of abandoning observance was unthinkable. I had ready examples in my older brother and my mother, who both stopped being religious during this time. It was not as if this poisoned my relationship with them. So, why did I not end up like them? One factor was that neither of them had the kind of influence over me as my father, who stood for me as a model for me as to what it meant to be a sane and reasonable religious person. I saw the Haredi world through the lens of my father and never considered that he was a highly sui generis individual. 

With my mother, one could say that not being religious was good for her emotional health. For this reason, I never held a grudge against her for her actions. That being said, I never really imagined that I would be happier if I were not religious. The reason for this, and this is the crucial point here, is that I never felt wronged by the system and bore no grudges. Even if I was bullied by other students, the rabbis were always good to me. 

This marks a major difference between me and my brother. His yeshivas refused to allow him to consume secular media and threw him out when he did not comply. He was wronged by the system and was, therefore, justified in outright rebelling. By contrast, I was treated with great leniency. For example, when I was at Torah Vodaath, the dorm counselor wrote me a note to allow me to get a library card at the Brooklyn Public Library. No one stopped me from reading books like The Godfather, Exorcist, and Pyscho. And it is not like I even had to hide the books. I had them out openly to see. An older friend objected to my reading a biography of Mother Teresa. Beyond that, no one said a word to me or tried to confiscate any of these books. 

I honestly had no idea that I was doing anything wrong even from the perspective of the school administration. This gave me a sense that there were different kinds of Haredi Jews. Some preferred to avoid secular books. I could understand why secular knowledge might not be good for everyone. And then there were Haredim like me whose strength was precisely in secular matters. We were all working together as part of the Torah camp. 

Even now, I do not think I was completely wrong on this point. The Haredi world is perfectly equipped to tolerate eccentric individuals with peculiar interests, including secular books. For example, a Haredi relative once told me that he thought there was something about my soul that I needed to read things like Shakespeare. This position works as long as the individuals in question are personally observant and never organize themselves around any kind of movement with an ideology. 

So, I could have been an eccentric Haredi with an autodidact's academic education. As long as no one kicked me out or made me feel unwelcome, I was going to try to work within the system. If I had intellectual disagreements and doubts, I was going to work through them. Listening to Rabbi Avigdor Miller tapes in my room so I could yell at him did not challenge my faith because I honestly believed that I was the mainstream Haredi Jew and he was a lunatic cult leader. Haredim were people like my father. He did not raise me with Avidor Miller Judaism so it could not really be Haredi. I readily grant that it is the mark of insanity to insist that everyone else is driving on the wrong side of the road and that I, to this very day, have a particular talent for such arguments. Clearly, I was not looking for a reason to leave. On the contrary, I was set on finding a reason to stay.  

It probably helped that the Torah Vodaath dorm was not designed for policing the actions of a non-post-high school kid, from outside of New York who never had been made to feel guilty about reading books. Almost by definition, if you were a post-high school student there, you already bought into the school's ideology and did not need to have the rules explained or be forced to follow them. It probably also helped that, as both my father and grandfather were alumni of the school, the name Chinn commanded a certain respect. My brother had the misfortune of going to schools with no connection to the Chinn family, designed to police the actions of high school students and expel those who refused to comply.

There are two important lessons, I believe, that Jewish educators should take from my story. First, there needs to be a track for academically gifted kids that does not involve Gemara. You cannot have this sense of Gemara for every boy unless they are drug addicts in danger of falling prey to the streets. Second, do not underestimate the importance of making kids feel that Judaism is their home in which they are loved and accepted for who they are. I would even say that this is even more important than offering apologetics. I was a pretty intellectual kid but if my teachers had tried to convince me that Torah was true, I would have rebelled. Instead, I was offered a place in which I felt accepted. I did not need anyone to defend Judaism for me because I was already prepared to do it myself. Of course, Haredi Judaism was true. I was a good smart kid and I was Haredi so how could it be wrong? 

(To be continued ...) 

  

Joseph's Adventures in Communism and College

Previously, I talked about my great-grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Eliezer Shapiro, and the late Prof. Louis Feldman of blessed memory as examples of antifragile Judaism, people who created Jewish lives for themselves under unplanned circumstances. In the world of antifragility, what looks good on a day-to-day basis is not necessarily what will work in the long run because what makes such systems look good is precisely what can bring it down in a once-in-a-generation disaster. I would like to return to this issue of antifragility and its implications for Judaism.

Critical to Jewish survival has been its ability to adapt to situations to which our faith, as envisioned by previous generations, was not designed to handle. The most extreme example of this was the rabbis after the destruction of the Second Temple, who reimagined Judaism without its central sacrificial cult and without the majority of the biblical commandments. This requires us to rethink who the heroes of Jewish history are from those who lived ideal religious lives under ideal circumstances to those who lived non-ideal lives precisely because their circumstances made such ideals impossible. 

The biblical Isaac is someone held up by the rabbis as a person who was able to live his life in Israel in purity without sin. As Rashi teaches, Jacob wanted to live that life but God sent him the calamity of Joseph. Joseph lived his life in Egypt as a slave, a prisoner, and finally as viceroy. Joseph had to carry on for all those years under the assumption that he had been cast out by his brothers and that there was no future for him as part of the Children of Israel. It is Joseph who not only physically saved his family but also made it possible for Israel to spiritually survive 210 years in Egypt. It is not for nothing that, every Friday night, Jews bless their sons to be like Joseph's children, Menashe and Ephraim, who grew up in the court of Egypt. Similarly, we have the later models of Daniel and Esther in the courts of Babylon and Persia, cut off from Israel and with no hope of being able to return. In Esther's case, she even intermarried.

Let us be clear as to what the challenge is here. Ignore the strawman argument that Egypt or Persia (or America) is different. This is easily countered by "we, the faithful, do not change." This strawman argument, though, covers an alternative utterly devasting attack of not that the world has changed but that you have changed. The moment a person wakes up and sees themselves as different and irreparably cut-off from their former selves with no hope of returning, then casting off one's former beliefs and practices becomes natural. One realizes that the hard act of changing has already happened and now it is only a matter of accepting the reality of the situation. In fact, the very tenacity that one held on beforehand, insisting that the new circumstances did not matter, will come to work in favor of giving in as it will make the break, once it happens, that much more obvious.  

Imagine trying to train a twentieth-century version of Joseph. It is the year 1900 and your newborn student lives in Czarist Russia. You have him until he is seventeen. In 1917 the Bolsheviks are going to take over and put an end to open Jewish observance. Your Joseph will have to live out his life without the support of a Jewish community and his observance will be compromised at best. What can you give him that will allow him to maintain a Jewish identity in his own mind and pass it along to his own Menashe and Ephraim to the extent that when he dies in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it will be as a Jew surrounded by a Jewish family?

The members of my family who came closest to living out this story were my maternal great-grandparents, Yitzchok Isaac and Feigy Schwartz. (Note that both my father’s father and my mother’s grandfather were named Yitzchok Isaac.) They survived the Holocaust only to go back home to a Soviet-controlled Hungary where they raised three daughters. As a teenager, my grandmother took advantage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution to flee to the United States because there weren't any good Jewish men to marry. My great-grandfather passed away when I was a kid. I only knew him as an old man sitting in a dark corner of my grandmother's house, who did not speak English. Frankly, he scared me. (I confessed this as an adult to my father and he laughed telling me that I had no idea what a kind man he was.) If I could talk to him now, I would want to ask him how he found it in himself to raise a Jewish family with no Jewish community to rely upon and offer hope for a future.  

The 20th century gave us Communism, the Holocaust, and ultimately the destruction of Eastern European Jewish life. Jews in 1900 could not have prepared for this but, at the end of the day, all of their efforts to build up Judaism that were not centered around the United States and Israel were going to be little better than futile. I have no idea what this century will bring. That being said, is it not unreasonable, for those in the United States to construct an educational system on the assumption (whether or not you are Haredi and oppose college on principle) that students are going to go college for four years without meaningful Jewish support. You have kids from the age of 5 until they are 18. What can you teach that will allow a student to go to college and, regardless of the compromises that they might make there, they will have a Jewish identity that will persevere to the extent that they will seek to rejoin the Jewish community afterward and raise a Jewish family? Anything that is not clearly focused on this goal needs to be cast aside as a waste of time and a distraction.  

Whether we are dealing with the extremes of Communism and the Holocaust or the mundane challenges of college, I assume that a successful pedagogical strategy will try to build a strong Jewish identity backed by theology and a deep emotional attachment to Judaism. Jewish identity here means a knowledge of ritual practice as well as a sense of Jewish history. Theology means having open and honest discussions about God and not simply assuming that kids believe in God just because they are ritually observant. Developing an emotional attachment to Judaism means getting away from threats of hellfire and, instead, making sure that Jewish practice is both joyful and meaningful. This is not to be confused with being fun and entertaining as that will have little staying power. A Passover Seder is not very entertaining but it can be effective if conducted by adults who understand what the Seder is about and are not simply going through the motions. Discussions about identity and theology should best be conducted over a Shabbos cholent or during shabbatons/summer camp along with plenty of singing. 

Take away a Jewish community and a person with a strong Jewish identity will continue as a Jew because, at a fundamental level, they see Judaism as essential to who they are and not merely a culture they grew up in or a set of practices they used to follow. To abandon Judaism would become unthinkable as almost a form of suicide. For all intents and purposes, it would be a different person living that non-Jewish lifestyle. A strong identity can allow a person a continuous sense of self that is not broken by anything that happens on the outside. Defending a Jewish identity requires a theology in the sense that our Joseph should be able to answer the Wicked Son's question of "what is this service to you." Having a theology is useful precisely when there is no community to give meaning to your identity. One thinks of the example of Maimonides, who lived for several years as a Muslim and developed the first list of Jewish doctrines. You could have a person living their entire lives without ever being able to practice Judaism. They are still Jewish because they are able to believe certain things even if it is only in their heads. Finally, all the arguments in the world are not going to keep an intelligent person Jewish if they do not already love Judaism. If a person sees Judaism as a burden to be carried in the hope of getting into heaven, a college campus will provide plenty of intellectual justifications for discarding that burden.  

If we accept this model of Jewish education then it raises some difficult questions about Haredi education. Frankly, Talmud, at least how it is conventionally taught, becomes a kind of "spork," in theory good for a lot of things but fails to do any one thing particularly well and is better replaced by alternatives. For example, there are better ways to teach halakha. It is even more difficult to use Talmud to teach theology. Talmud, with its jumping across generations, lacks a clear narrative in contrast to the Bible. The Talmud's strongest selling point would be that it can build Jewish identity by allowing students to develop a sense that they are a continuation of the rabbis with their discussions. Note, though, that while this form of Jewish identity, is well suited for people operating within a Yeshiva system, it is likely to crack precisely when that community is no more. Our Joseph, whether in college or under Communism, is not going to be a rabbi. That option is closed. If our Joseph is to remain Jewish it will be precisely because his sense of himself as a Jew transcends his being a rabbi. 

I readily acknowledge that the Haredi system is better at producing Jewishly knowledgable and fervent kids than the Modern Orthodox schools. Clearly, if the question was keeping kids religious tomorrow, Haredim would win easily. But the lesson of antifragility is that you have to prepare for the extreme. Breaking Haredi kids should be relatively easy. There is no need to argue with them. Take away their tzitzit and yarmulkas; clip their peyos and let them see themselves in the mirror. No need to force them to eat non-kosher, just let them feed themselves from a dining room not designed for kosher eating and make their own compromises. The fact that these compromises may be quite defensible will not change the fact that they are compromises. Once you create a break with their past selves, the rest should follow easily. 

Remember that Haredi kids have not been trained to imagine themselves living outside a Haredi community. On the contrary, they have been conditioned to make that imaginative leap impossible. Thus, the moment you take them away from their community, they will likely see themselves as different people. This is not the case with Modern Orthodox kids, who have identities distinct from their Judaism. This might make them less fervent and more likely to abandon the faith on a day-to-day basis. It also might allow them a stronger sense of continuity even under difficult circumstances. As long as mental continuity exists then Jewish identity stands a fighting chance. 

Needing the Secular World: A Thought Experiment and Some Rodney Stark

In the last post, I discussed the idea that Haredim, while they might possess individual scientists, are incapable of creating their own genuine scientific culture. This brought up an argument from the late Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz of the necessity of being able to fill out all jobs required by a society. It is not enough for Haredim to say that other people should be doctors or lawyers and, for that matter, policemen and garbage collectors; Haredim need to be able to fill these positions themselves. The fact that Haredim cannot do this, in the long run, poses a major ideological challenge far beyond any particular scientific argument. I would like to further develop this idea with a thought experiment and consideration of the Rodney Stark model of conversion. 

Imagine a town divided between secular people and Haredim. No one has a political advantage to allow them to force their values on anyone. Both Haredi and secular parents are keen to pass on their values to their children and keep them from going over to the other side. One major advantage that secular parents would have is that, ironically, it would be easier for them to raise their children without ever interacting with the other side. The reason for this is that there is no job that they require that they cannot simply fill in with their own people without recourse to Haredim. They can make sure that their children only visit secular doctors and have their trash picked up by secular garbagemen. Haredim, for all their talk about maintaining their purity, are forced to lead relatively open lives. Every day Haredi children will walk past secular policemen and garbagemen. If they get sick, they will be hard-pressed to make sure that they are seen by a religious doctor. It will not only be that these people happen to be secular, but the children will be conscious of these facts as they have been taught to think of these as non-religious jobs.  

Haredim, of all people, should be able to instinctively appreciate how such casual contact with the outside world can become spiritually dangerous. To understand the problem at an intellectual level, it is useful to turn to the sociologist Rodney Stark and his model of conversion. Stark argues for the importance of social relations in causing people to convert to a different denomination or even to move outside of one's religion. People are unlikely to be converted and even more importantly stay converted due to some argument made by a stranger in the street. By contrast, they are very open to their friends and family. 

There are two major reasons why a personal connection is so much more valuable than an intellectual argument. Human beings are social creatures. Even if we wanted to, we are unlikely to be able to change our lives around an argument, even one we believed. By contrast, we do readily change our behavior to match those around us. Furthermore, it is social relations that are going to keep a person within a movement. An argument can be countered with another argument. By contrast, you cannot will a new set of social connections into place; it takes years of work (particularly if you are not a neurotypical).

A good example of this kind of thinking can be found in Mormonism. The LDS Church, decades ago, recognized that having missionaries try to "cold call" strangers was essentially useless. By contrast, having a potential convert meet with a missionary at the home of a Mormon friend was very effective. Hence the LDS Church has now built its entire missionary program around this premise. 

Everyone has their moments of crisis. People with a strong spiritual sensibility are likely to have more of them and they are likely to involve their chosen faiths. Keep in mind that, if you never expect much from your religion, it can never disappoint you. It is precisely the true believer who can become disillusioned. When that happens it can only benefit the LDS Church if you have a Mormon friend that you can find yourself falling into a theological conversation with. This friend can then suggest that perhaps you might want to come over to his house sometime to continue this conversation with some of his other "friends."

This idea that people are ultimately converted by their friends leads us to a particular narrative of conversion. There is a first stage in which a person "socially" converts in the sense that they take on a group of friends, who happen to follow a particular religion. At this point, there is nothing intellectual involved. In fact, the person would likely insist that they have not converted or changed in any significant way. That being said, this is the truly crucial stage. At some point, a person is going to realize that he has come to associate with people from a particular religion and that religion carries a particular ideology that needs to be taken into consideration. A person who fully converts is likely to look back and reframe their narrative to make themselves seekers who found their faith when, in truth, it was the religion that found them.  

This idea of social conversions can be seen in Chabad. The society around a Chabad house consists of a series of circles. At the center is the Chabad emissary couple. Around them, you will have some observant people. But most people at a Chabad house are not Orthodox. You can have people who have been associated with Chabad for years as an important part of their lives without ever becoming Orthodox. They like the Chabad rabbis and perhaps recognize some need for Jewish spirituality, but have no interest in being ritually observant. 

This state of affairs is possible because Chabad emissaries tend to be both remarkably nice and tolerant. Non-religious Jews are amazed at how tolerant Chabad emissaries are and want to be friends with them. In the long run, this model has proven to be incredibly effective even if that is hard to see on a day-to-day level where it appears that what you have is an observant rabbi surrounded by a non-observant congregation just like you would see in a Conservative synagogue.

My wife an excellent example of this. As a teenager with a non-Jewish mother, she started going to the Chabad in Pasadena on Friday nights mostly as a matter of convenience as it was easier to get there by bus than the Conservative Temple. Her taking on ritual observance and then realizing that, if she ever wanted to get married, she needed an actual Orthodox conversion was a process that took years. This process was made possible by the kindness and tolerance of the Chabad emissaries for someone who was not halakically Jewish.

As to ideological conversions, consider the example of C. S. Lewis. The most dramatic moment of Lewis' journey from atheism to Christianity was a late-night conversation with a number of religious Christians, including J. R. R. Tolkien, in which Lewis argued that the main ideas of Christianity came from ancient paganism and therefore should be taken with equal seriousness. One might enjoy Greek and Norse mythology and even see it as a source of great moral teachings, but one cannot be expected to seriously believe in these religions. The response was that the ancient pagans intuitively understood certain truths that were ultimately fulfilled in Jesus. 

Now what can easily be lost in this story is that Lewis did not simply walk up to some random Christians at his favorite pub, the Eagle and Child, and start an argument with them. At this point in his life, he had started believing in God largely because the writers he most identified with were theists and he found that he could not disassociate what he admired from that theism. He had even started going to church as an exercise in being part of the theism team. This led him to become friends with a number of intellectually serious practicing Christians and it was with these Christian friends that he had his famous late-night conversation about pagan mythology.    

To bring this back to our earlier thought experiment, in order to keep their children in the "faith," both the secular and Haredi parents are going to have to keep an eye out for alternative social circles as opposed to some guy handing out leaflets. The secular parents have nothing to worry about as there is no reason why their children would consciously ever have to interact with Haredim. They will know that Haredim exist as theoretical abstractions walking in the streets in strange clothes almost like philosophical zombies. There will never be a reason to take them seriously as individuals with names. Haredi parents will be able to work with no such advantage. Their children will have to interact with secular people, such as doctors and policemen, as individuals with names. This can form the basis for a friendship or at least enough of one that, when that inevitable moment of crisis comes and they feel frustrated with the Haredi community, they might think to go talk to that secular person in their life. The moment we cross that line, the child might still be a long way from leaving and may have no conscious desire to do so, but his soul is now in play.