My Tisha B’Av Speech to the Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation

Today is the fast day of Tisha B’Av (the ninth of Av) when traditional Jews mourn the destruction of the two Temples and the many subsequent tragedies of Jewish history. In honor of the event, every year the Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation, a Haredi organization, sponsors a video presentation shown to thousands of Jews across the world. The video usually features prominent Haredi speakers such as Rabbi Paysach Krohn (apparently he is not on for this year), Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky, Rabbi Yissocher Frand and Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon. (For some strange reason when I played the ad for the event on their website they had music playing in the background. Music is certainly not something permitted today.) Usually, when I try to go, I find that the combination of my empty stomach and the rancid theology on screen proves too much for me and I end up having to walk out before the end. For all those with similar theological-gastronomical dispositions, I offer you the speech that I am confident you will not be hearing this year from the Chofetz Chaim Foundation; it is, though, what I would say if I were given the chance to speak as part of their lineup.

A good churban to all of you gathered here today from across the globe. The fact that all of you are here in the afternoon on a fast day is remarkable. I say this because I do not wish to come across as completely negative in my comments, as someone who ignores the good in our community. Now that we have gotten past that I would like to move on to business. I am not much of a storyteller nor am I the sort who likes throwing around little vertlach on midrashim, with no purpose other than to entertain and offer pithy moral value statements. I am afraid that if you are looking for someone to make you feel good about yourself you have come to the wrong speaker. By my nature, I possess a skeptical view of human virtue along the lines of Augustine and John Calvin. (You can look those people up later.)

By training, I am a historian and a contemplator of human politics and society. From this, I have become a strong believer in the importance of a bottom-up understanding of human affairs. Major changes happen in society because the vast majority of society agreed to go along with them. As Leo Tolstoy (You can look him up later as well.) understood, those at the top, those supposed “great men,” are not the ones controlling events but are being controlled by them. For example, in the case of Nazi Germany, if you ask me who was responsible for the murder of six million Jews I would not say Hitler or those who ran the camps. Every society has its insane murderous people; they should be mercifully placed in mental hospitals, protected from harm or from harming others. The people really responsible were those regular sane German people who allowed Hitler to come to power and go to war. Without millions of regular Germans agreeing to serve in the German army and run German factories there is no World War II and no Holocaust. These were sane rational people who came to the sane and rational conclusion that the removal of Jews and other undesirables and the expropriation of their property would benefit them. Going along with the Lebensraum policy, had the sanity and rationality necessary for an act of first-degree murder. If it were up to me, I would have put the entire German population above the age of eighteen on trial at Nuremberg and those who could not prove that they actively tried to stop Hitler would have received a sentence of death. (Whether or not it would have been feasible to carry out such a sentence is another issue. Most probably this death sentence would have needed to remain something symbolic.)

Similarly, with the problem of Islamic terrorism, the people responsible for Islamic terrorism are not the terrorists, such as suicide bombers and the hijackers of September 11. The real people responsible are those Muslim and liberals who act as apologists for Islamic terrorism, blaming the West and Israel for bringing trouble upon themselves. I see such people on a regular basis on the college campus where I work. These people get to pursue their vendetta against the West and they hypocritically Pontius Pilate their hands of the affair. (Look it up.) They correctly claim to not be terrorists and make a big show of taking offense at any implication that they are. In truth, they are something worse, moral scoundrels, who lack the courage to pay the true price of their beliefs.

The past few weeks have seen numerous scandals erupt from our community; whether it is youngsters from our community burning trash cans and smashing traffic lights or the arrest of rabbanim in New Jersey. The common refrain is that these are the sins of just a small minority and have nothing to do with the overwhelming majority of us who are good righteous people. My response is that these are precisely the sins not of the few but of all of us in the community for they happen because we, as a community, are making the sane rational, and immoral choices that allow for it. And let us not play innocent here, we benefit from these things. The least we can do is have the decency to openly endorse what was done.

Why do we have a population of youngsters with time on their hands and a lack of any concern for secular authority to riot? Should young men in their teens and early twenties not be in school, learning a useful trade, or in the workplace practicing a trade? No, because we created a system in Israel in which young men must sit and study Gemara and are discouraged from pursuing any other option. Most people, including people with high levels of intelligence and talent as it pertains to other fields, are not suited for Gemara. Such people might be well suited for other fields of endeavor, but they are trapped by the system they are in; the system we have created. People in such a situation might be tempted to leave the community to pursue other options, but refrain from doing so, in large part, because we have taught them to hate, fear and despise the outside world. Make no mistake about it, we did it with intent; we taught them this precisely because we knew that by doing so we could stop them from leaving, joining the ranks of the off the derech and becoming an embarrassing statistic. So we reap what we have sown in the riots. We can no more say that we did not want or endorse the riots than Arabs can denounce the state of Israel as a Nazi occupier and not support the terrorism used to destroy it.

Jewish life is expensive with tuition and large families. It does not help matters if you are less than enthusiastic about advanced secular education. (A necessary platform for many of the sorts of jobs that allow one to pay for such a lifestyle.) We can try giving tuition breaks to needy families, but that simply spreads the cost somewhere else. At the end of the day we, as a community, have to be able to come up with the funds to support ourselves. You are shocked and horrified that members of our community, even leaders in our community, turned to defrauding people of their kidneys? I am talking to the real criminals right now. No one here can play innocent. We just thought it would be best to look the other way and hoped that if we did not notice no one else would. And some Germans innocently thought that the Jews could all just be shipped off to the East and everyone would be the better for it.

For all of you so-called “Modern Orthodox” Jews sitting in this audience, feeling pretty good about yourselves right now; I mean you too. You have allowed yourselves the luxury of using systems built by others. Why are you sitting here listening to this lineup of speakers; why do you not have your own speakers, who actually believe in the sorts of things you claim to believe in? It is sheer laziness. You abandon the running of Torah-true Judaism to people who support an ideology you oppose. Do you think it actually matters that, when this ideology fails, you can claim that you did not support it; for all intents and purposes you did support it.

In conclusion, let us resolve ourselves to taking some moral responsibility for what goes on in our world. There is a churban going on right now. If you are one of those people who looked at articles in the press about Haredi rioting and complained that we are being picked on then you are responsible for our churban. If you are one of those people making comments on websites like the one run by Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, telling him that he needs to stop talking about what is wrong with our community and do more to tell us how wonderful we are, then you are part of the churban. My bracha to you all is that, if we take it upon ourselves to clean up our own mess, Hashem should bless us so that next year we will have the luxury of only having to mourn the burning of a building in the year 70 C. E.

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

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

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

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


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


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

Jonathan Rosenblum’s Non-Haredi Defense of Haredism

Jonathan Rosenblum is a highly gifted speaker and writer and is without question one of the most effective apologists the Haredi community possesses. There is a certain irony to this when considering Rosenblum’s background and mode of thinking. This is made all the more poignant in light of his recent speech at KAJ. As I will demonstrate, the fact that the Haredi community relies on someone like Rosenblum highlights a fundamental weakness within Haredi ideology.

In many respects, Rosenblum’s case parallels that of R’ Yakov Horowitz of Project YES, a Haredi organization that works with at-risk teenagers. As I have already discussed, in earlier posts, R’ Horowitz’s analysis of the problems in the Haredi community and his recommended solutions are insightful and to be admired. The problem is that, in practice, they go against the very basic fundamentals of the Haredi worldview; if the Haredi community was to seriously implement what R’ Horowitz suggests they would be finished. Rosenblum is, if anything, a more extreme example.

Rosenblum is effective as a Haredi advocate precisely because he is not a product of the Haredi world and is someone who, by definition, could never have been produced by that world. He did not grow up Haredi. In fact, he did not grow up Orthodox at all, but only became religious as an adult. Rosenblum is not a product of Mir or Lakewood but of the University of Chicago and Yale. Rosenblum’s background is important to understanding his work. If Rosenblum had grown up Haredi and had gone onto the University of Chicago and Yale he would have been cast out. More importantly, when reading Rosenblum’s work you find an American conservative, not all that different from William Kristol or David Brooks. Like them, he is a product of American academia, who rebelled against its liberal culture. While Rosenblum is not a secular Jew and has made common cause with Haredim, his mode of doing so is a product not of the Haredi community but of American conservatism.

Because Rosenblum’s mode of thinking is distinctively non-Haredi, it should not surprise anyone that his beliefs are somewhat different from what one would expect to find in the Haredi community. His speech at KAJ is an excellent example of this. Judging from his speech, Rosenblum is a Hirschian; he assumes that Hirsch’s methodology is legitimate in of itself and not simply as a tool to hook people into Judaism. This is not a position acceptable to the Haredi community in terms of what matters most, as a position to be accepted internally within the community. I would love to see him try to give the same speech at an Agudath Yisroel convention.

Rosenblum, because of the situation that he is in, seems to twist himself into all sorts of interesting positions. For example, during his speech, he talked about his teacher, the late R’ Nachman Bulman, and how Rabbi Bulman, a Gerrer Hasid, was a supporter of R’ Hirsch. After the speech, R’ Yosef Blau pointed out to me that Rosenblum was being somewhat disingenuous when he referred to Rabbi Bulman as being a Gerrer Hasid. Rabbi Bulman might have come from a Gerrer family and maintained contacts with Gerrer all his life but he also went to Yeshiva University and, unlike many others, he never denied it. So while Rabbi Bulman might have been a devoted follower of R’ Samson Raphael Hirsch, he was hardly a representative figure of the Haredi community and he did not pick up his Hirschian ideals from them.

As a final example of the incongruity of Rosenblum’s position I would point to a comment he was kind enough to write about my earlier post in which he defends Rabbi Mantel:

In any event, the central point that Rabbi Mantel made is, in my opinion, incontestable: no one should think that the Hirschian derech is one easily followed and unless one is vaccinated with Rav Hirsch's pure yiras shomayim [fear of heaven], it is fraught with danger. I felt that he offered a necessary corrective, or Hegelian antithesis, if you will, to some of my remarks.

First of all, Rabbi Mantel went much further than simply saying that to be a Hirschian one needs to truly be motivated by a fear of heaven; doctors, lawyers, and professors can also fear heaven. Secondly, I would like to call attention to the nature of the defense that Rosenblum uses, that there is a need for a Hegelian antithesis. Officially, in the Haredi community, one is not supposed to be familiar with the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) beyond what you need to pass the Regents exams in high school. My guess is that Rosenblum did not pick up his knowledge of Hegel in a Haredi yeshiva. More importantly, the notion that a society needs to be balanced by contradictory viewpoints is a distinctively non-Haredi idea. A Hirschian or a Modern Orthodox worldview can grant a legitimate place to its opponents, even to Haredim, but if you are going to be Haredi you have to assume that all other positions are inherently illegitimate; there is the opinion of the Gedolim and everything else must be rejected.

Ironically enough, while the Haredi community may reject Hirsch they need him, possibly even more than Modern Orthodox Jews do. Hirsch provides an essential loincloth for Haredi outreach because he can appeal to people outside the community. So, as with the theory of evolution, it is okay to accept Hirsch when you are trying to make people religious as long as you do not make the mistake of taking him too seriously and become a personal believer. Similarly, the Haredi community requires people like Jonathan Rosenblum to defend them. Rosenblum is very effective at presenting a Haredi world that irreligious people can respect and appreciate. The problem, though, is that Rosenblum’s Haredi community has little to do with the Haredi community as it actually exists; if they were, they would cease to be Haredim and become Hirschians instead.

Haredi Generation Gap

In my last post I raised the question as to how someone like Rabbi Horowitz could justify remaining in the Haredi world considering his views on the internet. Rabbi Horowitz is not the only person in this predicament of viewing himself as Haredi depite being open to the world. My father sees himself as part of the Haredi world, despite the fact that many of his closest friends are reform and conservative rabbis. My cousin’s father-in-law has a PHD in history and teaches gemara at Bar-Ilan, but lives in Bnai Brak. SB, the father of a good friend of mine, strongly indentifies with his Torah V’daat education despite the fact that he has an apartment full of books on philosophy, politics and history.

Because of my father, I identified myself as being part of the Haredi world through high school. Growing up in Columbus OH, I assumed that Haredi meant people like my father; someone who meticulously kept Jewish Law. It was very easy to make this mistake since, as I was growing up in Columbus OH as the rabbi’s kid, my family was the most religious family that I knew. It never occured to me, for example, that there were Yeshivot out there who would have rejected me because my family owned a television.

I believe that what separates me from my father is the generation gap. My father and all the other people I mentioned were born before the late 1960s. Back then the Haredi world was much more of a big tent. Being part of the Haredi world meant you were deeply committed to practicing Jewish Law. It has nothing to do with not seriously studying secular subjects, banning television and banning the internet. Haredim before the late 1960s were still raised as relatively normal American kids, albeit with tzitzit and kipput. They followed sports, watched television and movies and got an education. In my experience when dealing with Haredim from that generation, even those who support not having anything to do with the secular world, if you scratch below the surface you will find that they do have a background in secular culture and that they got it honestly. The interesting thing is when you talk to their kids. The kids have no such background, at least not any that they got honestly. Do kids raised in Haredi homes know about secular things? Quite often yes. The thing is that they have gained it, usually from movies, by breaking the rules and engaging in behavior that they themselves see as wrong.

So my father was not deceiving me when he raised me to believe that being Haredi meant being meticulous with Jewish Law; that was the Haredi world he was raised in. The problem, though, is that my father’s Haredi Judaism has disappeared. What is left are eccentric intellectuals or, as in my father’s case, people who live outside of New York and therefore failed to get the message.

I have no such option available to me and it is my father's generation's fault. They failed to preserve a big tent for Orthodox Jews and my generation has to pay the price.

Can "Walmart" Destroy the Haredi World? II

(This is the conclusion of my earlier article, “Can Walmart Destroy the Haredi World?”)

The rise of the internet, and in particular the rise of the blogosphere, has created a modern incarnation of many aspects of the Enlightenment. In an earlier post, I discussed how the act of blogging seemed to me to hearken back to the confessional style of autobiography exemplified most famously by Rousseau’s Confessions. A blogger puts forth his “private” thoughts before the public. This creates the persona of a unique self. By doing this the blogger is declaring that he is his own unique individual with his own vision of the world and that as such he has value in of himself without any recourse to any social institution or tradition.

This Enlightenment view of the individual was a direct challenge to traditional views and it can be seen as laying the groundwork for Kant. Once we have created the individual as something possessing its own authority then this individual, which we have now created, can turn around and challenge the traditional authority. The modern internet has repeated this same process. Ultimately the internet can be seen as Kant’s Enlightenment on steroids. The internet gives each individual the power to sit and judge traditional authority based on his own thoughts and understanding. The blogosphere is nothing if not precisely this. Now every Moshe David Jew, with a connection, has an open forum to criticize and judge the gedolim, religious sages, and be heard by people around the world.

Just as the traditional world of European Jewry proved ill-equipped to take on the Haskalah of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the modern Haredi world is ill-equipped to take on the modern “Haskalah on Steroids.” It is not just that the internet gives people access to opinions that are “heretical” and people might become convinced by them. The very act of confronting a variety of opinions and choosing between them, even if one chooses the “right” one, is a sword to the very heart of the Haredi worldview. For one is no longer submitting to received authority but is placing oneself as the authority before which all traditional authority most bow.

The only traditional European Jewish community that had any real success at confronting the challenges of modernity was the Hirschian community in Germany. While most people, when reading Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, focus on his willingness to incorporate secular learning within the rubric of Judaism, to me what was so crucial about Hirsch was how his vision of Judaism empowered the individual. For Hirsch Judaism was something a person chose out of something within himself. There was nothing in Hirsch about how you must listen to the gedolim, the gedolim are always right and if you do not listen to the gedolim God is going to throw you in Hell. For Hirsch, the important question was how to take one's moral ideals, theoretical beliefs in God, and put them into something concrete. For Hirsch, that vehicle was the performance of the Divine commandments found in the Bible and Jewish law.

Hirschian Judaism could survive the Haskalah, because it did not run counter to Kant’s Enlightenment. On the contrary, Hirschian Judaism was dependent upon it. It too believed in the authority of the individual. While Kant’s enlightened individual challenged traditional society to justify itself before the authority of reason, Hirsch’s individual Man of Israel challenged the enlightened world to live up to its own ideals and put them in practice.

For all of its faults, Modern Orthodoxy continues in this Hirschian tradition of individual authority. Modern Orthodoxy does not have authority figures which one must submit to without question. It has nothing to fear from the internet or any blogger. On the contrary, the Modern Orthodox world can welcome all bloggers, even those who attack Modern Orthodoxy, as people who are taking up their rightful mantles as individuals. The Haredi world could never accept bloggers, particularly bloggers who criticize the Haredi world. To do so means accepting the fact that these people have legitimate authority as individuals and do not have to submit to Haredi authority.

In the end, I do not understand how Rabbi Horowitz can speak of the Haredi world accommodating itself to the world of the internet. For the Haredi world to do this would mean that they would have to accept the notion of the individual being able to judge traditional authority instead of meekly submitting oneself to it. That would mean the end of the Haredi world and the triumph of Modern Orthodoxy. So what does Rabbi Horowitz believe? Does he really believe in the authority of individuals? If he does, how can he still call himself part of the Haredi world?

Can "Walmart" Destroy the Haredi World?

Rabbi Yakov Horowitz of Project YES has an interesting article, “Walmart is coming,” in which he uses the analogy of Walmart to describe the threat posed to the Haredi world by the internet. Walmart can provide a whole array of different products all at a cheap price. If you an owner of a mom and pop store in a small town, not used to any competition, Walmart is likely going to destroy you. The only way to survive is to innovate. You need to give people, who have Walmart to shop at, a reason to still shop by you. The internet is, as Rabbi Horowitz observes, “the Haskalah on Steroids.” It provides a world of options at the click of a button. The Haredi educational system is built around the mom and pop store model. It assumes that students do not have other options and that they will continue to accept what they are taught simply because that is the way things should be. Will the Haredi world learn to adept itself to this new world or will they go the way of thousands of small mom and pop stores around the country?
Rabbi Horowitz is without question the blogosphere’s favorite Haredi rabbi for his honest and insightful criticism’s of the Haredi world. What perplexes me, at times, about Rabbi Horowitz is how he still views himself as part of the Haredi world and has not declared himself Modern Orthodox. Many of the things that he criticizes Haredim for are not simply problems that the Haredi world has but things that by definition make the Haredi world what it is. This article on Walmart and the internet is an excellent example of this.
Rabbi Horowtiz talks about the internet as “the Haskalah on Steroids.” What made the original Haskalah so dangerous? One needs to understand that the Haredi world is built around a paradigm of obedience. A Haredi Jew submits himself to the authority of his community, the Gedolim and Chazal. There is no room of an individual, as an individual, to judge, let alone challenge, these institutions. The original Haskalah of two-hundred years ago built itself around a paradigm of the individual. As Immanuel Kant argued in his famous essay, “What is Enlightenment:” the enlightened individual is one who is not bound by the authority of tradition. Everything must be judged before the bar of reason. What is important here is not the acceptance or rejection of the claims made by traditional authorities, but the right of the individual to judge those traditional authorities. Once you admit that the individual can judge traditional authority than that traditional authority has already lost. It no longer has any real power and must bow before the feet of the individual. In a similar vein C.S Lewis, in his essay “God in the Dock,” argued there that the essential sift to modernity lay in how man viewed his relationship to God’s judgment. In the pre-modern world man viewed himself as standing in the dock, being judged by God. In the world of modernity the roles have been switched. It is no longer man being judged by God, but man judging God. God now stands in the dock and man sits in judgment.
I am not here to judge between these worldviews, that is a discussion for a different post. What is important here are the different worldviews and the stakes attached to them.
(To be continued …)