Adam S. Ferziger is a professor and holds the S.R. Hirsch Chair for Research of the Torah and Derekh Erez Movement in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, and is co-convener of the Oxford Summer Institute for Modern and Contemporary Judaism, Oxford, UK. He is the author of Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity and Jewish Denominations: Addressing the Challenges of Modernity.
This exchange focuses on Professor Ferziger's new book, Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism. Part one can be found here, and part two can be found here.
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Dear Professor Ferziger,
In your book you devote a chapter to what you refer to as “the Chabadization of Haredi Society” – a process in which the Haredi world, following Chabad’s precedence, is beginning to engage in far more outreach with non-orthodox elements in the Jewish world. The process you describe seems to show that the Haredi world has become much more willing to take the risks that having more connections with other streams of Judaism might carry with them.
But in your second round answer you discussed “the Haredi campaign against liberal elements within American Orthodoxy,” and this could imply a risk-averse attitude toward other streams and more lenient attitudes towards modernity.
How do you see mainstream orthodoxy navigate the inherent contradiction between wanting to have more influence (chabadization) and fearing new modernizing trends that could fracture its coherence?
Yours
Shmuel
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Dear Shmuel,
Once again you have alighted upon an important sub-theme that emerges from my book Beyond Sectarianism. Namely, that the effort on the part of the American Haredi sector to influence the broader Jewish community does not necessarily result in a one way conversation. Inevitably, it precipitates reciprocal influence. The more Haredi Jews engage their non-Orthodox and unaffiliated Jewish brethren, the more the Haredi activists themselves and their families are exposed to social and cultural norms that differ or even contradict the worldview that they cultivate in their homes and educational institutions. This, then, has the potential to trickle down back to the core Haredi Orthodox enclaves. To be sure, no group in today’s connected western world can isolate itself completely from “external” influences. But the classical Haredi orientation – reiterated in post-World War Two America and Israel – was to set-down strict boundaries that would minimize as much as possible any meaningful interactions with ideas and people that digressed from the elite standards established by the rabbinic leadership.
The term haredi, as applied to Orthodox Jews, is most often associated with the Biblical verse “one who trembles [before God’s word]” (Isaiah 66:2). But in Modern Hebrew “hared” literally means fearful or anxious – which also expresses aspects of this stream’s long-held posture toward those Jews who choose alternative paths. In the latter connection, as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, one of the dominant rabbinical figures in Hungarian Orthodoxy, Maharam Schick (Rabbi Moses Schick, 1807-1879), was quoted by a student as saying that in modern times, a committed Jew must adopt the words of King Solomon “blessed is one who is constantly in fear” (Proverbs 28:14). Even relatively moderate voices within the turn of the twentieth century Lithuanian Yeshiva world were ambivalent about interactions with ostensibly positive non-Orthodox forces. One witty expression of this stand is attributed to Rabbi Eliezer Gordon (1841-1910), the leader of the Telz Yeshiva. When asked why he refused to allow rabbis who supported Zionism to speak in his yeshiva, he acknowledged the positive effects that Zionism could have on those who were already on an assimilatory path. Nonetheless, he could not countenance the social dangers to his own “uncontaminated” students that would inevitably result from cooperation with non-observant Jews. In his words, “Zionism is like the red heifer, it purifies the impure and defiles the pure” (cited in Ehud Luz, Parallel Meet [1988], p. 212).
As elaborated upon in Beyond Sectarianism, beginning in the 1940s, the Lithuanian Torah scholar Rabbi Aharon Kotler (1891-1962) along with other refugee co-founders of the non-Hasidic Haredi yeshiva in the United States, championed an Americanized version of this enclavist approach. As the initial trepidation of disappearance began to dissipate in 1960s and1970s, the second generation of Haredi leadership demonstrated some limited willingness to move outside its natural constituency but for the most part this meant involvement with Jewish communities populated by Modern Orthodox day school products. It was only in the final decades of the 20th century that the third generation of the Haredi camp began to invest concerted efforts toward strengthening the Jewish identities of the non-Orthodox and unaffiliated majority. No doubt, there is a correlation between this about-face and the overall sense of triumph and success that was felt by many Haredim at having “defied the odds” and spurned a vibrant and growing “Torah world” – especially when in parallel the broader Jewish population was increasingly intermarrying with their non-Jewish co-Americans.
Of course, already in the 1950s the Chabad Hasidic movement had rejected the dominant Haredi approach to American Jewry, and this accounts in part for my introduction of the term “Chabadization” to describe aspects of the reversal of the mainstream Haredi outlook. As a matter of fact, along with criticisms of Chabad’s activist messianiac ideology, the Lithuanian stream was also highly skeptical about the ability of Chabad’s young emissaries to detach themselves from their core neighbourhood and institutions without losing their own commitment to pious Hasidic norms. Thus, the irony that their non-Hasidic cohorts have now become deeply worried about these same issues.
It comes as little surprise, therefore, that in parallel with the massive expansion of Haredi outreach and internalization of its ethos, there have arisen multiple voices from this sector that question the high place it now occupies within the spectrum of Haredi priorities. When kollels, yeshivas, and day schools need to meet expanding enrolments, so-called “off the derekh”(those who have deviated from the path) kids who grew up in observant homes demand attention, and multiple other social welfare and cultural challenges confront this community, some wonder why so much time, energy, and resources are invested in the weakly connected Jewish population. Presciently, such doubts were expressed openly as early as 1997 in a “Symposium on the Priorities for the Years Ahead,” published in the now defunct official magazine of Agudath Israel of America The Jewish Observer. While twelve of the seventeen participants raised outreach as a major priority, others demanded that the main focus be on strengthening and serving the core Haredi constituency. More radically, Professor Marc Shapiro has noted that the late Hungarian-born Hasidic Halakhic authority Rabbi Menashe Klein, author of the eighteen-volume Shu”t Mishne Halakhos, openly opposed outreach to the non-observant due to halakhic problems regarding marriage to those whose parents did not observe ritual purity laws.
While the mainstream non-Hasidic Haredi leaders do not abide by Rabbi Klein’s exceptional ruling, they have sought other ways to hedge against the reverse influence of broader society on their core constituency. One of them is to articulate a hierarchy of sorts in which a distinction is made between strict “internal” standards that are to be upheld in exclusively Orthodox settings and a less rigid spectrum of religious behavioral regimens that facilitate the ability of the Orthodox to interface more seamlessly with those outside the inner circle. As Rabbi Sholom Kamenetsky, the son of one of the most revered Haredi authorities and himself a leading figure in the Philadelphia yeshiva, wrote in 2012: “No one should go into kiruv (Orthodox outreach) imagining that he will always be able to preserve ‘West Point standards’ in the field. We are not talking about doing anything in contravention of the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law), just the fact that any kiruv professional in the field will find himself engaged in many types of activities that he never imagined himself doing in yeshiva or [regular] kollel.” In point of fact, such conscious willingness to step out on a “halakhic limb” for the sake of outreach actually encourages an especially monolithic and demanding approach to the internal framework. For it is the Orthodox core setting that is meant to provide the ongoing insulation of Haredi society that will neutralize the potential deleterious effects of expansive social and cultural connections with the non-Orthodox majority.
Through this hierarchical/dualistic context, the extensive Haredi intervention into the seemingly intra-Modern Orthodox debates regarding the role of women and approaches to Biblical criticism, for example, is better understood. Once Haredi authorities give justification to more lenient religious behavior in certain circumstances (i.e. outreach), the need to clarify the proper “Orthodox” level in more homogeneous Orthodox surroundings becomes especially keen. Ironically, then, expanded tolerance for the lifestyles of the non-Orthodox, and especially the recognition that Haredi adherents who go out into the field will need to make compromises, actually inspires less acceptance for those who are fully committed to halakhic observance but seek to widen the spectrum of accepted halakhic behavior within their familiar Orthodox settings.
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