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 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 ...) 

  

Camp Chimerical Anti-Christianity: Facing the Consequences

A few years ago, for the fast day of Tisha B'Av, I wrote a hard-hitting post, raising some uncomfortable questions about the Jewish community. As that is one of my personal favorites, I decided to follow it up for this Tisha B'Av. My purpose is not to attack anyone and, for that reason, I have avoided names. I hope that my ambiguous feelings about my camping experience rather than hatred should be clear. As is often the case with me, I am more interested in asking questions that I find myself struggling with than in offering solutions.    

When I attended Haredi summer camps, I once played a villainous Spanish Inquisitor in a play. While waving a torch, I gave a speech about Judas Iscariot as the model traitorous Jew, which included a joke reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as well. I remember watching another play in which a priest murders the prince, who started asking difficult theological questions regarding Judaism, in order to set the Jews up for a blood libel. Both performances can be seen as anti-Christian. The difference between them is that while I expressed a "rational" opposition to Christianity, the other person made a chimerical assertion. Spanish inquisitors are historical facts. The figure of Judas did play an important role in medieval Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric. Even Christians would agree with me on this. By contrast, there is no evidence of Christian priests murdering Christian children in order to frame Jews just as there is no evidence of Jews murdering Christians for their blood. Christians can hope to negotiate with someone possessing a legitimate negative impression of historical Christians. Such a person can be convinced that modern-day Christians are different and not a threat. A person with a chimerical opposition to Christianity will never be convinced that Christians are not a threat even by the evidence of his own eyes as he already believes things about them that he never had any evidence to begin with. Such a person will inevitably sink into the black hole of conspiracy theories to the point where the lack of evidence for his beliefs will simply prove to him that there is a vast cover-up.

In regards to this story of a priest murdering a Christian to cover up the fact that Christianity is false, I am reminded of Israel Yuval's argument that Christians came to believe in the blood libel because they saw Jews kill their own children during the Crusades. If Jews would kill their own children so that they do not fall into the hands of Christians, might Jewish mothers poison their children's kugel if they thought they were attracted to Christianity? If Jews hated Christianity this much, surely Jews would gladly murder Christian children. Thus, Christians had "no choice" but to kill Jews in self-defense. Similarly, it would be reasonable for impressionable Jewish children in the audience, like myself, to conclude that if priests would kill Christian children to stop them from converting to Judaism, they would gladly kill Jewish children. The logical conclusion from this would be that, if we ever found ourselves in a position of power, we should kill Christians.

Let me be clear, this play about a murderous priest was in no way exceptional in how Christianity was portrayed at this Haredi camp. One of my favorite rebbes used to tell stories with his stock villain, "Father Schmutz" (dirt). When priests were not trying to start blood libels, they kidnapped Jewish children and held them in secret monasteries to try to convert them. In case you were wondering if this was just a matter of some overzealous teachers, the head counselor of this camp used to have a radio show, "Children's Stories of Inspiration." In addition to blatantly idolatrous stories that endorsed human sacrifices to angels and a Satan capable of acting independently of God, one of his stories involved a Father Francois murdering a Christian child in order to start a blood libel. His plan was thwarted when he was forced to take hold of the hand of the dead victim, who then refused to let go.

Installing the campers with a visceral hatred of Christianity as a religion and a fear of Christians as people were part of a conscious top-down effort. I doubt the camp administration wanted us to actually go out and harm any Christians. That being said, their jobs depended on demonstrating to parents that their children were being protected from outside "negative" influences. In an exercise of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, the fact that these administrators were, ever so slightly, putting every Jew on the planet in danger clearly took a back seat.

What are the consequences of this kind of education? When the Passion movie came out, I told my father that I could not call it anti-Semitic for the simple reason that its portrayal of Jews was not worse than the portrayal of Christians that I was regularly fed in camp. My father, the assistant-head counselor of that camp, agreed with me. On a more serious note, consider the role played by Islamist schools in installing a pathological hatred of Jews, directly leading to Jews dying in terrorist attacks.


      


It is clear to me that not considering the children in this video and certainly their teachers as legitimate military targets (the kids are even in uniform and practicing military maneuvers) will lead to dead Jews. The problem is that any non-Jew can respond that Jews also indoctrinate their kids to hate and I have simply too much personal experience to point-blank deny that fact. So the administrators of my camp have real Jewish blood on their hands. Their actions have made it harder to form the necessary alliances needed to fight Islamic terrorism and save Jewish lives.

Now it needs to be said, that the people I am talking about are warm wonderful people that I gained much from. These are not anyone's stereotypes of hate mongers. I loved camp and many of my fondest memories come from there.  Coincidently, the staff member who played the murderous priest later became my tenth grade English teacher at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas and taught me Julius Caesar (he was even good at his job). At the time, I did not see myself as being indoctrinated to hate and I still have my doubts as to calling this hate. Everything was framed in such a positive and loving way, which may have made it all the more insidious. There was much good to my camp; that being said, beyond the fun times and spiritual growth lay a dark side that needs to be faced.

In Defense of a Maimonidean Judaism: A Response to Rabbi Ysoscher Katz

Dr. Alan Brill just published an intriguing guest post by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz, who grew up in the Satmar community and now teaches at YCT. A running theme in much of Dr. Brill's work has been the presentation of different approaches to "Modern Orthodoxy," the attempt to formulate a Judaism that is faithful to halakha while maintaining an ability to engage modernity at either an intellectual or social fashion. Rabbi Katz offers an intellectualized Hasidic version of this project. (I would be curious as to how he sees himself in relationship to Rabbi Abraham Heschel.)

What particularly caught my attention were Rabbi Katz's comments regarding Maimonides. In middle of the post, Rabbi Katz declares his personal sense of betrayal by Maimonides:

I for many years was the object and fool of Maimonides “the seventh reason” as presented in his introduction to the Guide by not seeing his philosophic views.  In that passage, Maimonides condones misleading the masses for their greater good, even to the point of advocating contradictory ideas for different audiences and then obscuring those contradictions.

He ends the post, by arguing that Maimonides has led Modern Orthodoxy into a trap:

Contemporary Modern Orthodoxy is struggling; a significant number of its adherents are abandoning yiddishkeit and many who stay no longer find it meaningful; inertia has set in. I suspect that Modern Orthodoxy’s rationalist ethos is partially to blame. Current Modern Orthodox theology is Litvish and hyper-Maimonidean, it lacks a native spiritual core, and does not satisfy people’s search for meaning. 

There is an irony here in that much of my knowledge of the Guide comes from a class taught by Dr. Brill more than a decade ago back when I was a student at YU. This class profoundly affected me and helped make me the kind of "litvish hyper-Maimonidean" that Rabbi Katz criticizes. As such, I feel it is prudent to offer a response.

As with a number of self-described Maimonideans I have run into over the years, the main attraction of this path for me is that it allows me to actively engage academia without ever risking my commitment to halakha. I could read a book on biblical criticism at night and never worry about my decision to put on phylacteries in the morning. It is not that I am so smart that I will figure out a way to disprove what I have read. On the contrary, it might turn out that I agree with the author. The reason for this is that, as a Maimonidean, my understanding of things like God, prophecy and the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai is so theoretical as to be impervious to modern scholarship. The price I pay is that I must tentatively accept their truth even before I have examined them.

Now one might accuse me of being a secularist, who enjoys Orthodox practice and does not want to upset my family and my Asperger equilibrium by stopping to be religious. My counter-punch is that being a Maimonidean has given me a positive spiritual program in recognizing the manifest law in the world. This is put into practice, at a personal level, through ritual observance and an active opposition to idolatry. It is not that, as a Maimonidean, I am as religious as other Orthodox Jews. On the contrary, I denounce the larger Orthodox community as idolaters. If you accept Kupat Ha'ir then you are an idolater. If you have any energy leftover from denouncing the Haredi leadership for their blatant idolatry (or you believe there is really a meaningful difference between them and King Ahab) to denounce more liberal movements over their acceptance of biblical criticism then you clearly lack appropriate zeal for monotheism and cannot be considered a true believer. This makes the confrontation with potentially "heretical" ideas in academia and their non-denunciation, a great spiritual act. It confirms my relationship with the One God I theorize about as I recognize how utterly I reject the idolatry of those who would denounce me as a heretic.

I think there are two major areas of agreement between Rabbi Katz and myself. First, we both dislike the label "Orthodox" as it implies schism and a rejection of the wider Jewish community. In its place, we want something that places the emphasis squarely on traditional observance. This leads to the second area in that Rabbi Katz wants to separate Judaism from theology in favor of a lived experience. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, Maimonideanism might be helpful in this regard. Judaism as ritual and community is distinct from Maimonidean theology. This is necessary considering all the idolatrous Jews out there.

This leaves plenty of room to allow Hasidism to influence Jewish society and the experience of ritual. My father likes to say about Torah Vodaas in his day that the learning was litvish, but the spirit was Hasidic. I am certainly open to the idea of a Modern Orthodoxy that is Maimonidean in theology, litvish in its learning and Hasidic in spirit.

Madlik on Jewish Education

On the topic of interesting blogs discussing in Judaism in ways that break down some of the traditional ideological boxes, I would like to point my readers to Madlik. The author, Geoffrey Stern, is a graduate of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, got a degree in philosophy and now considers himself post-orthodox.

This week Stern has a post on the potentially corrupting influence of "high holiday" Judaism. The usual objection, when discussing the high holidays is that for so many that is their entire Judaism. For Stern the danger is in how the high holidays can become, despite it only being three days a year, the model for Jewish education.

But as anyone who has experienced the whole scope of the Jewish calendar knows, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur do not represent the mainstream of our tradition. By far the historical – experiential holidays of Sukkot, Shavuot, Purim and most of all Passover trump, or should trump the service – pietistic bend of the so-called High Holidays.



So too with education… The educational philosophy manifested by the four sons/children of the Passover Seder, their questions and sometimes snide comments remind us of what Jewish education is at its best. A noisy, rambunctious and irreverent endeavor in which each participant finds his/her own place and stakes his/her own position. ...


The vigorous, in-your-face debate of the Study Hall (Beit Midrash) of any traditional Yeshiva, where every point is debated, every premise questioned and every issue remains unresolved.. this is what is preserved at the Seder and is the bulwark of Jewish intellectual curiosity and vitality.



Just as the High Holidays have insipiently penetrated and monopolized the Jewish calendar, so too, a focus on sacrifice, service, ritual repetition (aka “continuity”) and blind-pure devotion to our beliefs, have sadly permeated Jewish education. With regard to an emphasis on Holocaust studies and the “They died in Service” mentality, it’s ironic (or is it?) that the word Holocaust comes from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, “whole” and kaustós, “burnt” and is ultimately a Leviticus term for a wholly burnt offering.

Why are the Haredim Holding Up? A Response to the “Would Haredim Make Good Terrorists?”

Reuben Seligman sent me a response to my review of Radical Religious and Violent and was kind enough to allow me to post it.

I read your posts regarding the Berman book and I was disappointed. I would have preferred that you focus on the economics of Haredim. Economics is the science that deals with how people make choices and this science has been extended by several economist and sociologists (including Rodney Stark) to religious choices. Berman focuses on the structure of religious societies that make place barriers to exit, including Haredim. What I find interesting is how successful they have been. The best way to bring it out is the contrast with the terrible situation of Orthodox Judaism in prewar Europe which you had posted in the last few days. In contrast, both in the U.S. and in Israel, Haredim have managed to establish themselves in communities that are largely successful in retaining their children and are in fact growing. You may be correct that you have had contact with many people who grew up in the system and would leave if they could, but there are many who had many opportunities and chose to go into the system despite pressure from their parents.
To me, the question is how did we get from where we were fifty years ago to where we are now. You posted correctly that many of the Satmar Chasidim today are descended from what were considered Modern Orthodox Jews. Why is it that they were not successful in perpetuating their way of life; their descendants became Chasidim. The issue is not whether you are happy about it or not, but how people made choices that led to that result.

Another example, you may ask your father, but in my generation of Torah Vodaath, the parents universally wanted their children to go to college and were largely successful. I believe that about 70% of my class went to college of some sort. Yet many of the children of my contemporaries who went to college are not going to college. What were the choices that my contemporaries faced in raising their children and how did their choices lead to that result?

I can best speak about my own choices. I did go to college, but I spent two years in yeshiva after high school before going to college and went to Brooklyn College at night. In doing that, I gave up on my chances of going to a better college, but it was worth it to me because I wanted to study torah. To use a neologism (coined by the economist Herbert Simon) I satisficed (combination of satisfy and sacrifice).  My question is why wasn't I able to reproduce myself. I see people studying torah and they have no education; Faigy tells me that there are no people in her generation who replicate me: a decent knowledge of Torah and a good secular education. Why is it that way? Is it that choices that were available to me are no longer available? I don't claim to know the answers. 


To recapitulate: I don't believe in the historic inevitability of the collapse of the Haredi world. I believe that there are many problems with the sustainability of Modern Orthodoxy, but it is not collapsing either. But in order to make decent predictions about the future, a study of the religious economy, i.e., how choices were made in the past are essential.


My response:  
 Fair enough that I did not focus on the economics question. I am not an economist. My field of interest leans more to political theory and the mechanics of creating movements. My doctoral thesis deals with the worldly political issues that go into creating apocalyptic movements. This was what interested me about Berman's work and formed the bulk of my review

You ask two questions. What has allowed the Haredi community to be successful in the United States and in Israel in ways that they were never able to in Europe? The second question is essentially about the failure of the "Modern Orthodox" option; why are we unable to create people who are masters of both Jewish and secular subjects?

I would argue that ironically enough, the Haredi situation has been made possible by the rise of modern multiculturalism. (I think Samuel G. Freedman was fundamentally correct in regard to this, in Jew vs. Jew, when he argued that the big Jewish winner in this shift in American culture over the past few decades has been the Haredim and the big loser has been the secular Yiddishists.) Modern liberalism is far more willing to tolerate men with long beards and funny hats than early twentieth century America. While modern liberalism may give more tolerance to its favored groups, they are still trapped into at least making a show of tolerance. You cannot deny someone a job because of a beard and peyos and because they want to leave early on Friday. Modern liberalism has also helped in that it created the welfare state. This is one of the reasons why I oppose modern liberalism. What most people do not see is that this does not serve to create a more liberal society, but to bring out all the worst superstitions of the Old World. (The willingness of hard leftists to jump into bed with Islamic radicals is a more extreme and dangerous form of this same problem.)

What has benefited Haredim has to a large extent hurt Modern Orthodoxy. Modern multiculturalism devalued the "Great Books" and classical culture. If Modern Orthodoxy was the commitment to a dialogue with the best of the surrounding culture then modern multiculturalism robbed Modern Orthodoxy of its partner in dialogue. If, in sophisticated gentile society, it is no longer absolutely necessary to be able to know something about Shakespeare why should boys learning in Yeshiva have to? The difference between Modern Orthodox society and Haredi society is that Modern Orthodoxy society is premised on the working man (preferably a doctor or a lawyer), even if it acknowledges the necessity of having individuals sitting and learning. The Haredi world is built around a society of learners. Obviously, it requires people to hold down jobs. The jobs that pay the sort of salaries needed to support a Haredi lifestyle and hold up this community of learners require an advanced secular education. Even the more conservative members of the Haredi world can accept that there may be a value in having individuals with knowledge about the humanities. This Haredi society could only function in Eastern Europe as a rabbinic elite, one of the reasons why Eastern European religious life was so dysfunctional. Before the 1960s, in essence, almost everyone had to be Modern Orthodox so Modern Orthodoxy did not have a serious competitor. Comes modern liberalism and the modern welfare state and now there is another option.

The situation in Israel is slightly different. There the main issues are government welfare, in a more extreme version, and the army. I think Berman is right on in his discussion of how government subsidies only serve to encourage men to sit and learn and not work. As Libertarians know, government welfare is really simply government funding poverty and when you fund something you get more of it.

As to why we do not see more people who can do both, I do not have any good answers. It is hard enough for someone to be able to do one let alone do both so I suspect that, in any age, such figures are going to be few and far between. To what extent was your generation better at this than ours? I suspect this is largely a matter of the eye of the beholder. Obviously, the Haredi world is not going to be producing switch hitters. Your generation's Haredim were still in many respects "Modern Orthodox." They were raised as part of American society and they still operated on a worker model. That was a world that could produce you. Can the Modern Orthodox produce switch hitters? I would argue that they can even if not many. I admit that the Modern Orthodox suffer from a major limitation that it lacks a culture and model of intense Torah study. This will limit the amount of serious Torah scholars to come out of this society.

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.

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.

SB's Response to Haredi Generation Gap

SB, who was one of the people I talked about in my post, Haredi Generation Gap, responded to me via email, which he was kind enough to allow me to publish here. I think it demonstrates my point wonderfully. Last I checked Yeshiva Torah Vodaath has no interest in producing graduates who have read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.


First, the nomenclature … of the word “haredi.” I don’t believe I heard the word until my late adolescence. The word is an Israeli term and indicates Israeli influence. We referred to ourselves as “yeshivish” or “litvish.” There was no term encompassing Chasidim and yeshivish people. This is not just a nitpicking point, since arguably yeshivish people moved to the right because it became de rigueur for guys to learn in Israel after high school.

When you stayed with us, I tried to expose you to the ideas of Rodney Stark regarding the sociology of religion. (I know that he has written several bad books recently, but that doesn’t negate the quality of his good works.) I believe that Stark has dealt only briefly with changes in Jewish life and not at all with changes in the orthodox community, but I believe that you have to take an “economic approach,” i.e., thinking about changes by looking at the alternatives available at the time. For instance, the orthodox world was much smaller then. Yeshivos were more tolerant because they were expected to take everyone. In contrast, in the current world, yeshivas can exclude anyone who has a tv at home.

Another change involves the economic concept of making tradeoffs. In my day, people went to Brooklyn College; now they go to Touro. I cannot comment much about the education at Touro, but I had several professors who were radical Marxists; I don’t think a Touro student is likely to have that exposure. Assume that a parent who went to Brooklyn is choosing a college for his son. He is very likely to be aware of the advantages of sending the son to Brooklyn, yet choose Touro because it will be easier for him to learn in yeshiva while going to Touro.

I don’t want to go through many examples, but in each case we can look at individual choices based on the “market,” i.e., the options available. In any case, what I want to stress is that rather than blaming my generation, you might want to consider how we got from the situation, say in 1969, when I started Torah Vodaath high school. You may not agree with my economic approach. That is ok. You may want to use Toqueville’s concept of the Unlimited Power of the Majority. But the point is, as an aspiring historian, you should try to understand historical changes, not bemoan them. While I threw out a few ideas, I cannot give you a complete explanation of the changes. That would require a book length treatment that I have no desire to complete, but I certainly would appreciate reading if you were to do so.
Lastly, the Unlimited Power of the Majority usually is not manifested by tarring and feathering, but by simple disapproval. The only negative consequence that I have experienced personally is that my daughter Dasi was rejected by Bais Yaakov of Brooklyn. However, that probably was the result of her behavior, not mine.

I hope that this email does not offend you, but encourages you to study contemporary Judaism as a historian. After all, Haym Soloveitchik did write a seminal article about contemporary orthodoxy, although as you know, I disagree with his interpretation.

My response: I use the world Haredi because unlike ultra-orthodox it has no negative connotations. I admit that, as with all human categories, it is flawed.I don't think we are disagreeing here. I was describing the situation that we have gotten ourselves into. You deal with how we have gotten there. Your economic explanation makes a lot of sense. I would love to hear you elaborate on it. (I guess I have to come visit you next time I am in New York.) Personally, I tend to look at history more through the lens of intellectual history but that is just my personal taste. If I had to explain how we got here I would focus on 60's multiculturalism. Something for a future post, I guess.