Ultra Unorthodox

Rabbi Joel Landau is sitting on a gold mine, and he’s not sure how to promote it. This gold mine is something he believes can change the face of Israel — a way of building bridges between the ultra-Orthodox Charedi community and the secular community.

Over the past few years, the mutual mistrust between these two worlds has only gotten worse. One of the reasons is that Charedim are often portrayed in a negative light in the media because of their uncompromising and sometimes overly aggressive defense of Torah laws.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. At the founding of the state in 1948, when Prime Minister Ben-Gurion gave the ultra-Orthodox an exemption from serving in the army to allow them to continue studying in their yeshivas, the Charedim were a relatively small and low-profile community in Israel. Today, they number over half a million and have gained significant political influence.

Because most Charedi men spend their days learning in yeshivas, and since Charedim live in cloistered communities, contact between them and the rest of Israeli society has been minimal, and opinions on both sides have been formed mainly through images.

This is the perfect recipe for the creation of ugly stereotypes.

Charedim see secular society as a threat to their Torah way of life and are deeply offended by anything that smacks of the desecration of Torah laws, whether that be immodest ads on bus shelters or cars driving near their neighborhoods on Shabbat. They see their continuous prayers and Torah learning as providing “spiritual security” for the Jewish people.

Secular Jews, from their end, don’t understand why Charedim don’t tolerate other lifestyles as long as they are allowed to practice their own, and are offended that Charedim generally don’t serve in the army or pay their fair share of taxes, as most of them don’t hold traditional jobs.

There is just enough truth to each of these views to encourage both sides to dig in their heels. So confrontations have gotten louder and stereotypes uglier.

Enter Rabbi Landau from Ramat Beit Shemesh.

Landau, a sharply dressed man in his late 40s who wears a black hat and has an engaging smile, is one of those Orthodox rabbis who can fit in anywhere. Trained in Charedi yeshivas, until recently he was chief rabbi of the Modern Orthodox Beth Jacob Congregation in Irvine, where for a decade he was known as a bridge-builder among rabbis of all denominations.

He was one of the early founders of Efrat in the 1970s, before Rabbi Shlomo Riskin turned that Jerusalem suburb into a high-profile community. For several years, he led the only Orthodox synagogue in Charleston, S.C. When I met him for coffee the other day, I discovered that he also knows a whole bunch of great Sephardic melodies.

Like I said, this is one frum Jew who really gets around, which must surely help him in his work for The Kemach Foundation.

Kemach is a Charedi organization based in Jerusalem that arranges professional job training and placement for Charedi men looking to enter the work force. Since their inception two years ago, they have helped enroll more than 2,000 Charedim for training in all kinds of professions, from law and real estate to computer programming and PR. According to Landau, because of their extensive background in talmudic studies, the Charedim are in high demand in professions that require an analytical mind, like law and computer programming.

Kemach might be growing fast, but it keeps a low profile. Candidates are referred to Kemach by heads of yeshivas. Since private and government funding for these yeshivas has sharply decreased in recent years, there is now a growing need for Charedi men to move into the marketplace to make a living.

But here’s Landau’s problem, which is why he’s leery of attracting too much press attention: While he believes deeply in the goodness of his cause, he’s concerned that the Jewish community at large might see this new endeavor in a condescending way — as a type of “secular triumph” over the Charedim. This would undermine the support Kemach gets from the highest levels of the Charedi world.

He’d like the Jewish world to see his cause the way he does, as a noble one, as Jewish men seeking “parnassah [a living] with dignity.” Torah study will always be the defining mission of the Charedim, he says, but for those who want to make traditional parnassah, his organization can help pave the way.

Either way, press or no press, he sees a major upshot to the Kemach program: building bridges between two worlds.

“Dislike of the unlike is inbred on both sides,” he told me. “By creating a common interest forged through the workplace, we can begin to create common ground.”

Landau has already seen results. “I’ve seen secular workers expressing shock that their new Charedi co-workers don’t throw rocks on Shabbat.”

He realizes that it won’t be a journey free of misunderstandings. But at least, he says, it will be a journey where disagreements will come not from images and stereotypes, but from human beings encountering other human beings.

For the Jewish world today, that kind of human engagement is indeed a gold mine, one that Landau shouldn’t be afraid to promote — loudly.

David Suissa is the founder of OLAM magazine. You can read his daily blog at suissablog.com and e-mail him at dsuissa@olam.org.