I don’t think we’re seeing anything that smart going on here. They are essentially just adopting that the MO the charedim use in Israel to the United States.
Well, yes, I don’t think that their rabbis have studied The Encyclopedia of Public Choice and gleefully deduced an ingenious plan for hacking the American political system. However, even though their MO has had a complex and curious cultural evolution and draws on prior art from Israel, it works in both countries because the relevant aspects of their political systems are similar. It really is a workable plan for rent-seeking in any system that values disciplined voting blocks.
Also, do you think these ultra-Orthodox groups would not be able to adapt to participation in the regular economy if their sources of government support dried up? I have the impression that they would be able to adapt very well, and are presently just taking advantage of their exceptionally favorable position to take advantage of government support. However, I’m sure you know more about them than I do, so I’d be curious to hear what you think.
The social pathology is there, it just is getting covered up and not addressed.
Obviously, they don’t live in a utopia; some pathologies are the inevitable lot of every human society. However, when it comes to those measures of social pathology that do vary a lot among different communities, most notably violent crime and breakdown of public order, it seems like they are doing exceptionally well.
Also, I should note that when it comes to some kinds of inevitable social pathologies, I have a very unfavorable view of the ways they are handled by modern institutions, so this could make me biased in favor of more traditional communities. But these are complex and difficult issues.
Also, do you think these ultra-Orthodox groups would not be able to adapt to participation in the regular economy if their sources of government support dried up? I have the impression that they would be able to adapt very well, and are presently just taking advantage of their exceptionally favorable position to take advantage of government support. However, I’m sure you know more about them than I do, so I’d be curious to hear what you think.
The short answer to this is I don’t know. Over the last hundred years the ultra-orthodox have adopted a set of attitudes that has little in the way of historical precursors. Those attitudes include 1) a much more negative attitude towards secular schooling than existed previously and 2) an attitude that any line of work other than constant study of religious texts is bad 3) a strong aversion to interacting with people outside their own groups, even for business purposes. This makes it very difficult for them to do much other than this sort of rent-seeking behavior. However, in the other direction the more moderate end of the charedim have had some success getting jobs. A fair number are now doing work in IT or some actuarial jobs that minimize interaction with other people, and there are some lawyers as well. They actually have some advantages in that regard, in that the constant study of classical Jewish legal texts has trained their minds to think precisely given specific sets of constraints. But that’s the moderate end of the ultra-Orthodox and you won’t find almost any of them in a place like Kiryas Joel. Many people in places like Kiryas Joel consider such people to be borderline heretics.
Note that I’m glossing over here some complicating issues. The Kiryas Joel community is chassidic which is a proper subset, not a synomym, for ultra-orthodox. The specific group that controls Kiryas Joel and makes up the majority of the population are the Satmar chassidim, which are seen by many as more reactionary and conservative than most of the other chassidic sects or any non-chassidic charedi group. Moreover, the Satmars have had a complicated schism in the last few years which I don’t understand in detail but my impression is that the less moderate faction is the one which ended up with control over Kiryas Joel, while the more moderate Satmars are in Williamsburg and Borough Park (which while largely Orthodox are both much more diverse areas among the Orthodox population than Kiryat Joel, and have some non-Orthodox population).
Thanks for the answer! Looking at your comment and googling around a bit, it seems like I may have some significant misconceptions about various groups within the contemporary Judaism and their relations between each other and the wider world, especially on the Orthodox end of the spectrum. (For example, I just realized that my imagined Venn diagram of several of the groups you’ve mentioned was flawed.) Do you maybe know of some good book that has a comprehensive explanation of these divisions, preferably with reference to the historical context of their development, and also their ancestral geographic origins?
Do you maybe know of some good book that has a comprehensive explanation of these divisions, preferably with reference to the historical context of their development, and also their ancestral geographic origins?
Not really. As far as I’m aware most of the history books on this sort of thing are either books which focus on a specific group, or are books about the history of Jews from a very long time, and thus don’t have as much focus on the last few hundred years when the modern divisions have arose. I’ve been told that Hayim Ben-Sasson’s “A History of the Jewish People” is in general a good book written from a modern, scholarly perspective. It has a section on the modern era which should be good. I haven’t read it myself though. I’m not aware of any book that focuses specifically on the chassidim which is what one would probably want. I suspect such books exist, but you can do a Google search as easily as I can, and I’m not going to be able to evaluate the books in any useful way.
However, the main divisions aren’t that complicated to summarize, and one doesn’t need much detail to have the context to follow things like New York Times articles about them. Data dump follows:
In the late 1700s, the Ba’al Shem Tov started the chassidic movement. The movement initially emphasized song, dance and prayer over religious study. This was a big deal because it gave the regular Jews, not just the bright scholars, something to do. The movement also had a strong mystical element and a focus on charismatic leaders. The movement quickly split into groups based on separate charismatic leaders whom the members would refer to as “Rebbe” (which literally means “my Rabbi”). The different groups were divided up by essentially geographic lines, and became named after the various cities where they were centered. Lubavitch had the Lubavitchers, Satu Mare had the Satmars, etc. A humorous aside is to note that the very late formed Boston chassidim are stuck with a very American sounding name; that is sometimes made up for by calling them “Bostoners” with
a heavy Yiddish accent.
There was a strong reaction against chassidic movement which disrupted the pre-existing social norms, and power struggles. Moreover, there was perception (of some but not much justification) that the chassidim were ideological descendants of Sabbatai Zevi, an extremely disruptive individual who claimed to be the messiah about a hundred and fifty years before. The people against the chassidim were often called “misnagdim” from the Hebrew word for “against”, and a complicating factor arose that some people used misnagid to mean non-chassic (and chassidim still use it that way sometimes with very negative connotations).
This all took place during the general emancipation of Jews in Europe. Restrictions on their businesses and where they could live were dropped. The rise of the chassidic movement was thus one of a number of factors which severely disrupted the pre-existing social structure. In that chaos, other groups arose also, including Reform Judaism (around 1900 the Conservative movement would break off from the Reform, trying to return to more strict beliefs and practices but not nearly as strict as the Orthodox). At around this era, the notion of Orthodox started to arise as a separate term (prior to that no one needed a separate notion).
At the same time, in reaction to the Reform movement, the so called “ultra-Orthodox” or “charedi” arose becoming more religious and increasing how strict their observances were. At the same time, this group sort of pulled the chassidim along in some ways, making the chassidim more focused on learning and studying of classical texts, and at the same time, the chassidic movement started producing its own texts which became very important for each of the corresponding chassidic groups. Thus the chassidic groups as they exist today are more intellectual than classical chassidim. At the same time, some of the ideas that the chassidim had (especially about singing and dancing being fun things that are good in religious settings) became more common among the general Orthodox population. In that sense, the original chassidim in many ways won, in a similar way to how over time the Catholic church has adopted many ideas that the early Protestants were calling for.
The modern Orthodox also arose, which believed in keeping the classical laws while interacting with the secular world. In principle, this meant also accepting scientific knowledge about things like the age of the earth, however, studies (especially those by Alexander Nussbaum) show that among Orthodox students at secular universities, the acceptance of evolution, or the age of the Earth and similar issues is surprisingly low. The so-called “Modern Orthodox” have been more or less pulled in the last few years to the right in many ways, and attitudes about science is only one aspect. To complicate matters further, many Orthodox people don’t like the large set of connotations that either “modern Orthodox” or “charedi/ultra-Orthodox” brings (the issues are similar to those of what constitutes a blegg) and so self-identify as only Orthodox or observant. Some sometimes use the Yiddish word “frum” or occasionally “shomer mitzvot” which is Hebrew for “guards the commandments”. Also, some people when they hear the word “charedi” think one means non-chassidic ultra-Orthodox, this is especially true in Israel. And this can lead to some confusion if one isn’t careful.
And now that I’ve typed all this I’ve realized that I haven’t dealt with any of the different groups’ attitudes towards the State of Israel, which is actually really important to understanding them in any modern context. So, um yeah, I guess this is a lot more complicated than I realized and I’ve just internalized it. If there’s a real need I can explain that (there are a lot of misconceptions about this among both non-Orthodox Jews and non-Jews. In particular, the ultra-Orthodox are not generally the people who are pushing for right-wing policies in Israel regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
Thanks for the informative reply! As you note, however, the topic really is too complex to address in a single comment. For one, if I understand correctly, you’re writing only about various Ashkenazi groups—and one of the issues I find most puzzling is how they relate to the other geographic/linguistic/ethnic Jewish groups and their subdivisions. Another question where I can’t find a clear answer is the relationship of various local Jewish groups with national governments, both in Israel and in other countries. In particular, in many countries there is the institution of “Chief Rabbi” that enjoys some government recognition, but which Jewish groups stand behind those?
As for the attitude towards the State of Israel, my understanding is that religious Jews generally support it, except for an ultra-Orthodox fringe who believe that Zionism is an irreverent mockery, since it lacks explicit (Messianic?) signs of support from God, and it has created a secular state, which they dislike for obvious reasons. However, I have no idea where exactly on the Orthodox spectrum these ideas become prevalent, and I also don’t know whether there is a significant opposition between more moderate anti-Zionist Orthodox groups and Neturei Karta (and perhaps other such groups that I don’t know about?).
Of course, I’m sure all these questions are further complicated by the contrast between the official leadership proclamations and the situation on the ground, just like it is for various conflicts between Christian denominations.
As for the attitude towards the State of Israel, my understanding is that religious Jews generally support it, except for an ultra-Orthodox fringe who believe that Zionism is an irreverent mockery...
This is a good (even the best) first step in the process of going from confusion to knowledge, but it’s mostly wrong, somewhat less enlightening than replacing the concept of a banana with the concept of molecules, while ignoring atoms and quarks.
“Support [Israel]” doesn’t mean only one thing without more context, even in most people’s minds, any more than “like people” would if I asked if you “like people”. About half the self-identifying Orthodox Jews in Israel and far fewer than that in America do not find any religious justification or basis for the modern state of Israel and are the Chareidim. This includes almost all Chasidim. Worse than not finding warrant for it, there is Talmudic justification for opposing its creation, while reactions to finding it created predictably differ.
The most noticeable members of this group are the dozen or hundred or so portion of the Neturei Karta who spend a lot of time and effort seeking to replace the state with another state, any other state, even an Arab one, at any cost. They are better known in the West than influential or representative people for the same reason an Afghan might be more likely to know about the Westboro Baptist Church than the Anglicans.
The reaction of most Chareidi Jews to the state is more similar to their reaction to most things without scriptural warrant, such as glasses or air conditioning, i.e. little concern. At least, it would likely be so, if not for a few other important factors.
Sticking with religious issues for now, it is a largely secular state. It is not obvious how religious or coercive any religious person should want their government, but it’s easy to see why autocratically minded theocrats could reach a (deceptively unanimous) consensus that the current state isn’t religious enough, details aside. This widespread opinion is a theoretically defeasible concern, unlike the narrowly-held pure religious opposition to any non-Messianic state.
The next issue is a social reaction to the rest of the Jewish world, particularly the Religious Zionists but more broadly the Modern Orthodox in general. Religious Zionists find that the current state meets their religious criteria to deserve their full backing. This position is more popular among the less religiously extreme. Reaching it requires a more expedient and flexible reading of religious texts and understanding of what the tradition entails. The conclusion that Israel is A-OK is what the judge should feel in his heart before inquiring into the religious texts. To quote Barack Obama, “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.” It is no coincidence that the “living constitution” branch of Judaism that decided to go along with what the other Jews were doing had previously decided that it wasn’t necessary to wear fur hats in the summer.
The identification of the secular state of Israel as religiously significant is regarded by Chareidim as akin to idol worship, a reductio ad absurdum of deciding what the tradition says before examining it, and it is to Religious Zionism that the Chareidim are opposed, along with their opposition to the domestic policies of the state.
It is these less extreme religious Jews who are the “settlers”, attempting to graft biblical injunctions of foreign policy to Israel. Interpretations of these vary widely, perhaps the most widespread interpretation absolutely forbids surrendering territory but is very lenient and practical regarding how hard one must try to conquer all of the designated land. Relatively fewer of these live in America, as they see it as necessary to dwell in the state, particularly where it advances Israel’s strategic interests.
Less literal and more liberal Jews who are still Orthodox are more likely to have a standard set of liberal positions, including regarding Israel and church-state separation.
It is in one sense very unfair to call extremists more religious than non-extremists. Many self-identifying Orthodox Jews might even assert and/or believe that the greatest rabbis of the other camps are more religious than they are, even for less extreme camps. In another sense, it is of course quite fair.
So we see the flexibility of interpretation has led to the centrists being the most irredentist, a position one expects to find religious extremists occupying. It is generally false that the extremists compensate by having logically irreconcilable differences with the state, though this notion can be forgiven since the most visible do and the rest have practically irreconcilable differences with the state as it is.
Demographically, Chareidim in America are less extreme than those in Israel, particularly among the non-Chassidim. Religious Zionists are far fewer, and the Modern Orthodox form a solid continuum from Religious Zionists to the secular American left. The mainstream Israeli left is probably to the right of the American left’s statements, though perhaps not to its actions, if you consider Obama representative or if you think important the left’s non-response to Guantanamo staying open, drone strikes in Pakistan continuing, undeclared action in Libya, etc. American non-Chassidic Chareidim are somewhat more pro-Israel than one would expect from the extent to which they are less extreme than Israeli non-Chassidic Chareidim, and are probably less cheated by conflation with Chrisitian fundamentalists than any other Jewish group regarding their beliefs and degree of nationalism.
Sephardim never collectively went through the shock of the enlightenment and have more traditional social forces, such as social cohesion around place of origin rather than level of observance and extended families with all levels of observance represented. Even the less religious are generally unlikely to see Reform or Conservative as at all valid and consider Judaism as degrees of Orthodoxy, and Israeli Ashkenazim are similar in this respect. Sephardim generally have little sympathy for active anti—Zionism and behave more like liberal somewhat nationalistic Modern Orthodox Jews with mildly Religious Zionist Rabbis, the top leaders of whom are actually mildly anti-Zionist and confederate with Chareidim.
This is all intended to be an enlightenment for those who know only of bananas as fruit, in which I explain bananas are made of little bricks called molecules. If anyone wants to correct or add anything, or take this as a starting point for explaining how bananas are really made of quarks (but first we really must teach you atoms as if they were billiard balls...) feel free. This isn’t the type of thing I have done any formal study of but it’s the type of thing one develops a perspective on, however biased, and I find that regarding this topic there is so much confusion that I think reading this will help many.
Thanks for the details. It’s unnerving to think that there’s drastically more detail behind the details, but I’m interested in whatever you want to write about them.
This just came to mind, in honor of the Passover holiday. As the Paschal sacrifice was/is an individual rather than communal sacrifice, it doesn’t rely on having an intact temple or valid religious authority and certainly not a Messiah. Three types of issues prevent it from being done today.
First are the religious ones as the exact nature of things now is not what they were then, but they are of a kind that are well within the limits of what precedent would call solved. The analogy between the past and present does not break down in a meaningful way as it does for other sacrifices and rituals.
Second are the tradition-based ones. Just as the Religious Zionists go to the sources with the bottom line of “go along with what the non-Orthodox Jews are doing” already written in pencil (not ink), Chareidim have the bottom line of “change nothing”. For example, weather and calendar century are not considered good enough reasons to change one’s manner of dress from one’s parent.
As the Chareidim consider Religious Zionists blasphemous idol worshipers for writing their bottom line before reflecting on the will of the LORD, so too may Religious Zionists consider Chareidim derelict for deciding not to change their bottom line of continuing to not bring the Paschal offering.
(Look for this type of issue to come up again [in snide remarks over kiddush] in the fall between Chabad and the rest of the Orthodox world as Chabad has developed the tradition of not sleeping in Succot booths, since the law clearly exempts one from doing so when it is cold and it was cold that time of year all the time in Russia. Now their custom is to never sleep there, and they do not, regardless of local weather.)
It would be a change for Chareidim to conclude it was important to fulfill this commandment, and they do not so conclude, or lobby for the right to do so.
That brings us around to the third reason, that Israel forbids it. The secular state annually blocks Religious Zionists from offering the sacrifice with legal action, physical police presence, and arrests.
So we see the flexibility of interpretation has led to the centrists being the most irredentist, a position one expects to find religious extremists occupying.
This is actually more or less how I imagined it (though of course I’m nowhere as familiar with all the details). Thanks for the very informative comments.
A certain historical factor is important here, I will try to expand on it.
World religions are similar in that many have more liberal branches, more mystical branches, more conservative branches, more textualist branches, etc. For example, Sufiism and modern Breslov (Breslev/Bratslov) Chassidism or original Chassidism are similar mystical responses to institutional monotheism (however, the similarity here might be partially caused by direct Sufi influence on Judaism rather than convergent development). Similarly, different religions have produced people believing variously that: modern dating methods are fatally flawed, the Earth was created as if billions of years old, scripture was meant allegorically, scripture was not divinely given, or that the whole tradition is invalid. It is a matter of playing whack-a-mole in which one must admit to some unpleasant conclusions, but not all, and interpretation determines which.
Religious Zionism was the centrist movement in religious Judaism around the founding of the state, the median and mode Orthodoxy, and probably the mean as well, to the extent that means anything. It was the result of biased interpretation of tradition and text to be in accord with the majority of Jews. This happened due to historical exigency and under circumstances that may well have been extreme enough to invoke such a reading under the tradition’s own principles. What’s important is that a secular twentieth-century movement was justified in a religious community.
For a while Religious Zionists were heroes of the state and people, the secular majority’s link to traditional Judaism, traditional justifications for Israel, and its evidence its conflict with the Chareidim wasn’t simply the result of secular anti-Orthodox prejudice. This is what one would expect, considering that creating this unity was the justification for non-traditionalism. Yet, like all religions, Religious Zionism got stuck. Once the social milieu changed, it could not alter its ideology to match, at least not at great speed. In any case, it did not want to and would never have wanted to—secular Zionism was perhaps worth religious flexibility to meet half way, secular post-Zionism and anti-Zionism less obviously so. Nonetheless, the value of empathizing with the mainstream has never been abandoned, indeed it is difficult to see how it could be, and it is still cited as a justification.
That is where we are today. At something less than a million of Israel’s something less than six million Jews, Religious Zionists constitute most new combat officers and only a bit less than half of all new army officers. Their organizing principle of establishing holds on strategically important locations is now theirs alone now, but was once a universal Zionist ideal.
However, Religious Zionism is not merely the continuation of Zionist ideology under religious aegis. Orphaned by time, it faces a shocking hostility from a public that increasingly blames them for conflict with the Arabs rather than lauds them for bearing the brunt of it, and as always the secular state disregards their religious desires. As an established religion, it faces its own splintering into factions emphasizing aspects of its creed differently, exacerbated by the fact that a reason for its existence was pegged to an unstable variable—the secular public.
Though it was born from centrism, I expect Religious Zionism to become more diverse over time regarding how extreme its components are.
Likewise, if I give you a grocery list with both categories of things and specific things, the more specific things I put under a category, the less likely it is I want something not listed that is in that category. If I wrote on the list “Many kinds of bread, white bread, hot dog buns, hamburger buns, bagels, whole wheat bread, and pumpernickel,” it sounds more plausible that I want a bialy than if I only wrote “Many kinds of bread,” which only has four bread related words. Someone with the latter list will have to take some initiative, while with the former it is possible to simply buy the breads on the list and pretend inaction is not a type of action, and that one has not made an independent decision.
It is at least true that given the first list it’s highly unlikely the bread product I want most is a bialy. We might still expect that someone who wrote the first list might like bialys more than someone who wrote the second list, simply because the author of the first list has indicated enthusiasm for bread products by writing so much about them. This is because we are used to normal human authors who emphasize by repetition, but if we know the author to be strictly logical, we will understand that the request on the second list is broader and more open-ended than that on the first.
The barbarity and tedium of the Old Testament are both partially caused by enumerations of who to kill, and how, and when, in great detail (doubly so for bringing sacrifices and matters of purity [which includes lineages]). A normal human author, like those who actually wrote the texts, expressed their shortcomings thereby.
Pretending the texts were written by a logical, autistic, single person turns this on its head. The more detail appended to when to kill, the less its a reinforcing admonishment against our innate humanity and the more it is restrictive detail circumscribing the conditions where violence is permitted.
What’s that, God? Kill the Amalekites, you say? Every man woman and child? Um...and ox sheep, camel and donkey? Reminds me of the Order of the Stick from the exact day in the future when lessdazed will write about this online, but OK. And the Midianites? Kill the males, but keep the female virgins for ourselves? Got it! Who else do we kill? The Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites? OK. A man gathering wood on the Sabbath day? Kill. And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore? Why, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire. And if a man take a wife and her mother? It is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire! Tax evasion regarding rebuilding the temple? A beam is to be pulled from his house and he is to be lifted up and impaled on it. And for this crime his house is to be made a pile of rubble. The Philistines and Kerethites? “I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I take vengeance on them.” Glad you got that one covered, LORD. (It goes on like this.)
What we have today is an Orthodoxy that sees killing and genocide as things God is more than happy to command for circumstances in which he wants them done. Atheists often view the bible as reflecting upon the character of a fictional god, and worry believers will do the same (minus the recognition that it is fiction) and ask themselves what it seems plausible that god would want them to do. People are fundamentalist to the extent that they instead ask what they are ordered to do, under the belief that everything worthwhile is commanded. Not only the Chareidim, but also the Religious Zionists, are fundamentalist enough that there is no danger of a mainstream religious perspective conflating Arabs with Canaanites. Even for Religious Zionists, the conflict with Arabs is secular.
Belief in a less interactive god, even an omniscient omnipotent omnipresent one, is logically possible and what many imagine to be the case. Under such a theology, the gap in biblical instruction regarding what to do about Arabs would be filled in with the most plausible analogous case, and killing Arabs would have them same ersatz biblical sanction that settling and possessing the land actually does for the Religious Zionists. Instead, it is pretended that there is no instructional gap, so resorting to analogy has nothing like the force of divine command at all.
I’m having a bit of trouble with my point here, which may indicate a flaw in my thinking rather than articulation. But the tl;dr is that the Religious Zionists see themselves as commanded to reoccupy the land and kill the Canaanites again, under such circumstances that the presence of Arabs in the stead of Canaanites is perplexing rather than soluble, as it is also unsolvable for a dumb enough AI, (which includes otherwise smart ones). The “obvious” solution is correctly seen as not obvious at all, and only seems obvious because of human intelligence. In this sense there is not a religious war.
In general, taking seriously a text that reinforces evil by repetitious emphasis and instead reading it as if its writer were logical and had realized that “detail is burdensome” emasculates the evil. Non-fundamentalists who correctly find the original meaning of the text as author intended, namely that which seems plausible upon reading it, are directly dangerous.
Even Religious Zionists are sufficiently fundamentalist Orthodox Jews that such a reading is not at all common. (Chareidim are solidly so, which doesn’t matter much as they don’t see the state as legally a continuation of ancient Israel anyway.)
Lessdazed gave what seems to me to be a good answer to most of these questions so I’ll just address the remaining one (which unfortunately is one of the one’s I don’t know as much about.)
In particular, in many countries there is the institution of “Chief Rabbi” that enjoys some government recognition, but which Jewish groups stand behind those?
The Chief Rabbi as a separate institution evolved when in the late Middle Ages the various European states wanted official representatives of the Jewish population to talk to the government. Since for many purposes Jews were often autonomous groups this was the primary method of interaction. Somewhat similarly, in some places such as England, all recognized religions had to have a recognized chief clergy member who was actually considered to serve the monarch. For essentially historical reasons, this job has been generally taken up by a prominent Orthodox Rabbi in most countries where the title exists. In some countries with small Jewish populations (such as Norway and New Zealand) there’s very rarely more than one Orthodox Rabbi and so this individual becomes the Chief Rabbi more or less by default. In countries with larger Jewish communities this position can be surrounded by heavy politics and other considerations. Also in some countries the Chief Rabbi is not actually a government recognized position but is the term used to refer to a certain position overseeing some large organization of shulls.
Thanks for all the info. For whatever reason, even though I usually have no problem finding and sorting out information about complicated and controversial topics, I find this one (i.e. the general topic of Jewish religious and ethnic divisions) very difficult to systematize, and your comments have clarified a lot. Of course, even I was much more knowledgeable about the topic, I’d still consider it a valuable opportunity to hear the perspective of someone who has some insider knowledge but nevertheless strives for objectivity.
Well, yes, I don’t think that their rabbis have studied The Encyclopedia of Public Choice and gleefully deduced an ingenious plan for hacking the American political system. However, even though their MO has had a complex and curious cultural evolution and draws on prior art from Israel, it works in both countries because the relevant aspects of their political systems are similar. It really is a workable plan for rent-seeking in any system that values disciplined voting blocks.
Also, do you think these ultra-Orthodox groups would not be able to adapt to participation in the regular economy if their sources of government support dried up? I have the impression that they would be able to adapt very well, and are presently just taking advantage of their exceptionally favorable position to take advantage of government support. However, I’m sure you know more about them than I do, so I’d be curious to hear what you think.
Obviously, they don’t live in a utopia; some pathologies are the inevitable lot of every human society. However, when it comes to those measures of social pathology that do vary a lot among different communities, most notably violent crime and breakdown of public order, it seems like they are doing exceptionally well.
Also, I should note that when it comes to some kinds of inevitable social pathologies, I have a very unfavorable view of the ways they are handled by modern institutions, so this could make me biased in favor of more traditional communities. But these are complex and difficult issues.
The short answer to this is I don’t know. Over the last hundred years the ultra-orthodox have adopted a set of attitudes that has little in the way of historical precursors. Those attitudes include 1) a much more negative attitude towards secular schooling than existed previously and 2) an attitude that any line of work other than constant study of religious texts is bad 3) a strong aversion to interacting with people outside their own groups, even for business purposes. This makes it very difficult for them to do much other than this sort of rent-seeking behavior. However, in the other direction the more moderate end of the charedim have had some success getting jobs. A fair number are now doing work in IT or some actuarial jobs that minimize interaction with other people, and there are some lawyers as well. They actually have some advantages in that regard, in that the constant study of classical Jewish legal texts has trained their minds to think precisely given specific sets of constraints. But that’s the moderate end of the ultra-Orthodox and you won’t find almost any of them in a place like Kiryas Joel. Many people in places like Kiryas Joel consider such people to be borderline heretics.
Note that I’m glossing over here some complicating issues. The Kiryas Joel community is chassidic which is a proper subset, not a synomym, for ultra-orthodox. The specific group that controls Kiryas Joel and makes up the majority of the population are the Satmar chassidim, which are seen by many as more reactionary and conservative than most of the other chassidic sects or any non-chassidic charedi group. Moreover, the Satmars have had a complicated schism in the last few years which I don’t understand in detail but my impression is that the less moderate faction is the one which ended up with control over Kiryas Joel, while the more moderate Satmars are in Williamsburg and Borough Park (which while largely Orthodox are both much more diverse areas among the Orthodox population than Kiryat Joel, and have some non-Orthodox population).
Thanks for the answer! Looking at your comment and googling around a bit, it seems like I may have some significant misconceptions about various groups within the contemporary Judaism and their relations between each other and the wider world, especially on the Orthodox end of the spectrum. (For example, I just realized that my imagined Venn diagram of several of the groups you’ve mentioned was flawed.) Do you maybe know of some good book that has a comprehensive explanation of these divisions, preferably with reference to the historical context of their development, and also their ancestral geographic origins?
Not really. As far as I’m aware most of the history books on this sort of thing are either books which focus on a specific group, or are books about the history of Jews from a very long time, and thus don’t have as much focus on the last few hundred years when the modern divisions have arose. I’ve been told that Hayim Ben-Sasson’s “A History of the Jewish People” is in general a good book written from a modern, scholarly perspective. It has a section on the modern era which should be good. I haven’t read it myself though. I’m not aware of any book that focuses specifically on the chassidim which is what one would probably want. I suspect such books exist, but you can do a Google search as easily as I can, and I’m not going to be able to evaluate the books in any useful way.
However, the main divisions aren’t that complicated to summarize, and one doesn’t need much detail to have the context to follow things like New York Times articles about them. Data dump follows:
In the late 1700s, the Ba’al Shem Tov started the chassidic movement. The movement initially emphasized song, dance and prayer over religious study. This was a big deal because it gave the regular Jews, not just the bright scholars, something to do. The movement also had a strong mystical element and a focus on charismatic leaders. The movement quickly split into groups based on separate charismatic leaders whom the members would refer to as “Rebbe” (which literally means “my Rabbi”). The different groups were divided up by essentially geographic lines, and became named after the various cities where they were centered. Lubavitch had the Lubavitchers, Satu Mare had the Satmars, etc. A humorous aside is to note that the very late formed Boston chassidim are stuck with a very American sounding name; that is sometimes made up for by calling them “Bostoners” with a heavy Yiddish accent.
There was a strong reaction against chassidic movement which disrupted the pre-existing social norms, and power struggles. Moreover, there was perception (of some but not much justification) that the chassidim were ideological descendants of Sabbatai Zevi, an extremely disruptive individual who claimed to be the messiah about a hundred and fifty years before. The people against the chassidim were often called “misnagdim” from the Hebrew word for “against”, and a complicating factor arose that some people used misnagid to mean non-chassic (and chassidim still use it that way sometimes with very negative connotations).
This all took place during the general emancipation of Jews in Europe. Restrictions on their businesses and where they could live were dropped. The rise of the chassidic movement was thus one of a number of factors which severely disrupted the pre-existing social structure. In that chaos, other groups arose also, including Reform Judaism (around 1900 the Conservative movement would break off from the Reform, trying to return to more strict beliefs and practices but not nearly as strict as the Orthodox). At around this era, the notion of Orthodox started to arise as a separate term (prior to that no one needed a separate notion).
At the same time, in reaction to the Reform movement, the so called “ultra-Orthodox” or “charedi” arose becoming more religious and increasing how strict their observances were. At the same time, this group sort of pulled the chassidim along in some ways, making the chassidim more focused on learning and studying of classical texts, and at the same time, the chassidic movement started producing its own texts which became very important for each of the corresponding chassidic groups. Thus the chassidic groups as they exist today are more intellectual than classical chassidim. At the same time, some of the ideas that the chassidim had (especially about singing and dancing being fun things that are good in religious settings) became more common among the general Orthodox population. In that sense, the original chassidim in many ways won, in a similar way to how over time the Catholic church has adopted many ideas that the early Protestants were calling for.
The modern Orthodox also arose, which believed in keeping the classical laws while interacting with the secular world. In principle, this meant also accepting scientific knowledge about things like the age of the earth, however, studies (especially those by Alexander Nussbaum) show that among Orthodox students at secular universities, the acceptance of evolution, or the age of the Earth and similar issues is surprisingly low. The so-called “Modern Orthodox” have been more or less pulled in the last few years to the right in many ways, and attitudes about science is only one aspect. To complicate matters further, many Orthodox people don’t like the large set of connotations that either “modern Orthodox” or “charedi/ultra-Orthodox” brings (the issues are similar to those of what constitutes a blegg) and so self-identify as only Orthodox or observant. Some sometimes use the Yiddish word “frum” or occasionally “shomer mitzvot” which is Hebrew for “guards the commandments”. Also, some people when they hear the word “charedi” think one means non-chassidic ultra-Orthodox, this is especially true in Israel. And this can lead to some confusion if one isn’t careful.
And now that I’ve typed all this I’ve realized that I haven’t dealt with any of the different groups’ attitudes towards the State of Israel, which is actually really important to understanding them in any modern context. So, um yeah, I guess this is a lot more complicated than I realized and I’ve just internalized it. If there’s a real need I can explain that (there are a lot of misconceptions about this among both non-Orthodox Jews and non-Jews. In particular, the ultra-Orthodox are not generally the people who are pushing for right-wing policies in Israel regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
Thanks for the informative reply! As you note, however, the topic really is too complex to address in a single comment. For one, if I understand correctly, you’re writing only about various Ashkenazi groups—and one of the issues I find most puzzling is how they relate to the other geographic/linguistic/ethnic Jewish groups and their subdivisions. Another question where I can’t find a clear answer is the relationship of various local Jewish groups with national governments, both in Israel and in other countries. In particular, in many countries there is the institution of “Chief Rabbi” that enjoys some government recognition, but which Jewish groups stand behind those?
As for the attitude towards the State of Israel, my understanding is that religious Jews generally support it, except for an ultra-Orthodox fringe who believe that Zionism is an irreverent mockery, since it lacks explicit (Messianic?) signs of support from God, and it has created a secular state, which they dislike for obvious reasons. However, I have no idea where exactly on the Orthodox spectrum these ideas become prevalent, and I also don’t know whether there is a significant opposition between more moderate anti-Zionist Orthodox groups and Neturei Karta (and perhaps other such groups that I don’t know about?).
Of course, I’m sure all these questions are further complicated by the contrast between the official leadership proclamations and the situation on the ground, just like it is for various conflicts between Christian denominations.
This is a good (even the best) first step in the process of going from confusion to knowledge, but it’s mostly wrong, somewhat less enlightening than replacing the concept of a banana with the concept of molecules, while ignoring atoms and quarks.
“Support [Israel]” doesn’t mean only one thing without more context, even in most people’s minds, any more than “like people” would if I asked if you “like people”. About half the self-identifying Orthodox Jews in Israel and far fewer than that in America do not find any religious justification or basis for the modern state of Israel and are the Chareidim. This includes almost all Chasidim. Worse than not finding warrant for it, there is Talmudic justification for opposing its creation, while reactions to finding it created predictably differ.
The most noticeable members of this group are the dozen or hundred or so portion of the Neturei Karta who spend a lot of time and effort seeking to replace the state with another state, any other state, even an Arab one, at any cost. They are better known in the West than influential or representative people for the same reason an Afghan might be more likely to know about the Westboro Baptist Church than the Anglicans.
The reaction of most Chareidi Jews to the state is more similar to their reaction to most things without scriptural warrant, such as glasses or air conditioning, i.e. little concern. At least, it would likely be so, if not for a few other important factors.
Sticking with religious issues for now, it is a largely secular state. It is not obvious how religious or coercive any religious person should want their government, but it’s easy to see why autocratically minded theocrats could reach a (deceptively unanimous) consensus that the current state isn’t religious enough, details aside. This widespread opinion is a theoretically defeasible concern, unlike the narrowly-held pure religious opposition to any non-Messianic state.
The next issue is a social reaction to the rest of the Jewish world, particularly the Religious Zionists but more broadly the Modern Orthodox in general. Religious Zionists find that the current state meets their religious criteria to deserve their full backing. This position is more popular among the less religiously extreme. Reaching it requires a more expedient and flexible reading of religious texts and understanding of what the tradition entails. The conclusion that Israel is A-OK is what the judge should feel in his heart before inquiring into the religious texts. To quote Barack Obama, “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.” It is no coincidence that the “living constitution” branch of Judaism that decided to go along with what the other Jews were doing had previously decided that it wasn’t necessary to wear fur hats in the summer.
The identification of the secular state of Israel as religiously significant is regarded by Chareidim as akin to idol worship, a reductio ad absurdum of deciding what the tradition says before examining it, and it is to Religious Zionism that the Chareidim are opposed, along with their opposition to the domestic policies of the state.
It is these less extreme religious Jews who are the “settlers”, attempting to graft biblical injunctions of foreign policy to Israel. Interpretations of these vary widely, perhaps the most widespread interpretation absolutely forbids surrendering territory but is very lenient and practical regarding how hard one must try to conquer all of the designated land. Relatively fewer of these live in America, as they see it as necessary to dwell in the state, particularly where it advances Israel’s strategic interests.
Less literal and more liberal Jews who are still Orthodox are more likely to have a standard set of liberal positions, including regarding Israel and church-state separation.
It is in one sense very unfair to call extremists more religious than non-extremists. Many self-identifying Orthodox Jews might even assert and/or believe that the greatest rabbis of the other camps are more religious than they are, even for less extreme camps. In another sense, it is of course quite fair.
So we see the flexibility of interpretation has led to the centrists being the most irredentist, a position one expects to find religious extremists occupying. It is generally false that the extremists compensate by having logically irreconcilable differences with the state, though this notion can be forgiven since the most visible do and the rest have practically irreconcilable differences with the state as it is.
Demographically, Chareidim in America are less extreme than those in Israel, particularly among the non-Chassidim. Religious Zionists are far fewer, and the Modern Orthodox form a solid continuum from Religious Zionists to the secular American left. The mainstream Israeli left is probably to the right of the American left’s statements, though perhaps not to its actions, if you consider Obama representative or if you think important the left’s non-response to Guantanamo staying open, drone strikes in Pakistan continuing, undeclared action in Libya, etc. American non-Chassidic Chareidim are somewhat more pro-Israel than one would expect from the extent to which they are less extreme than Israeli non-Chassidic Chareidim, and are probably less cheated by conflation with Chrisitian fundamentalists than any other Jewish group regarding their beliefs and degree of nationalism.
Sephardim never collectively went through the shock of the enlightenment and have more traditional social forces, such as social cohesion around place of origin rather than level of observance and extended families with all levels of observance represented. Even the less religious are generally unlikely to see Reform or Conservative as at all valid and consider Judaism as degrees of Orthodoxy, and Israeli Ashkenazim are similar in this respect. Sephardim generally have little sympathy for active anti—Zionism and behave more like liberal somewhat nationalistic Modern Orthodox Jews with mildly Religious Zionist Rabbis, the top leaders of whom are actually mildly anti-Zionist and confederate with Chareidim.
This is all intended to be an enlightenment for those who know only of bananas as fruit, in which I explain bananas are made of little bricks called molecules. If anyone wants to correct or add anything, or take this as a starting point for explaining how bananas are really made of quarks (but first we really must teach you atoms as if they were billiard balls...) feel free. This isn’t the type of thing I have done any formal study of but it’s the type of thing one develops a perspective on, however biased, and I find that regarding this topic there is so much confusion that I think reading this will help many.
Thanks for the details. It’s unnerving to think that there’s drastically more detail behind the details, but I’m interested in whatever you want to write about them.
This just came to mind, in honor of the Passover holiday. As the Paschal sacrifice was/is an individual rather than communal sacrifice, it doesn’t rely on having an intact temple or valid religious authority and certainly not a Messiah. Three types of issues prevent it from being done today.
First are the religious ones as the exact nature of things now is not what they were then, but they are of a kind that are well within the limits of what precedent would call solved. The analogy between the past and present does not break down in a meaningful way as it does for other sacrifices and rituals.
Second are the tradition-based ones. Just as the Religious Zionists go to the sources with the bottom line of “go along with what the non-Orthodox Jews are doing” already written in pencil (not ink), Chareidim have the bottom line of “change nothing”. For example, weather and calendar century are not considered good enough reasons to change one’s manner of dress from one’s parent.
As the Chareidim consider Religious Zionists blasphemous idol worshipers for writing their bottom line before reflecting on the will of the LORD, so too may Religious Zionists consider Chareidim derelict for deciding not to change their bottom line of continuing to not bring the Paschal offering.
(Look for this type of issue to come up again [in snide remarks over kiddush] in the fall between Chabad and the rest of the Orthodox world as Chabad has developed the tradition of not sleeping in Succot booths, since the law clearly exempts one from doing so when it is cold and it was cold that time of year all the time in Russia. Now their custom is to never sleep there, and they do not, regardless of local weather.)
It would be a change for Chareidim to conclude it was important to fulfill this commandment, and they do not so conclude, or lobby for the right to do so.
That brings us around to the third reason, that Israel forbids it. The secular state annually blocks Religious Zionists from offering the sacrifice with legal action, physical police presence, and arrests.
This is actually more or less how I imagined it (though of course I’m nowhere as familiar with all the details). Thanks for the very informative comments.
A certain historical factor is important here, I will try to expand on it.
World religions are similar in that many have more liberal branches, more mystical branches, more conservative branches, more textualist branches, etc. For example, Sufiism and modern Breslov (Breslev/Bratslov) Chassidism or original Chassidism are similar mystical responses to institutional monotheism (however, the similarity here might be partially caused by direct Sufi influence on Judaism rather than convergent development). Similarly, different religions have produced people believing variously that: modern dating methods are fatally flawed, the Earth was created as if billions of years old, scripture was meant allegorically, scripture was not divinely given, or that the whole tradition is invalid. It is a matter of playing whack-a-mole in which one must admit to some unpleasant conclusions, but not all, and interpretation determines which.
Religious Zionism was the centrist movement in religious Judaism around the founding of the state, the median and mode Orthodoxy, and probably the mean as well, to the extent that means anything. It was the result of biased interpretation of tradition and text to be in accord with the majority of Jews. This happened due to historical exigency and under circumstances that may well have been extreme enough to invoke such a reading under the tradition’s own principles. What’s important is that a secular twentieth-century movement was justified in a religious community.
For a while Religious Zionists were heroes of the state and people, the secular majority’s link to traditional Judaism, traditional justifications for Israel, and its evidence its conflict with the Chareidim wasn’t simply the result of secular anti-Orthodox prejudice. This is what one would expect, considering that creating this unity was the justification for non-traditionalism. Yet, like all religions, Religious Zionism got stuck. Once the social milieu changed, it could not alter its ideology to match, at least not at great speed. In any case, it did not want to and would never have wanted to—secular Zionism was perhaps worth religious flexibility to meet half way, secular post-Zionism and anti-Zionism less obviously so. Nonetheless, the value of empathizing with the mainstream has never been abandoned, indeed it is difficult to see how it could be, and it is still cited as a justification.
That is where we are today. At something less than a million of Israel’s something less than six million Jews, Religious Zionists constitute most new combat officers and only a bit less than half of all new army officers. Their organizing principle of establishing holds on strategically important locations is now theirs alone now, but was once a universal Zionist ideal.
However, Religious Zionism is not merely the continuation of Zionist ideology under religious aegis. Orphaned by time, it faces a shocking hostility from a public that increasingly blames them for conflict with the Arabs rather than lauds them for bearing the brunt of it, and as always the secular state disregards their religious desires. As an established religion, it faces its own splintering into factions emphasizing aspects of its creed differently, exacerbated by the fact that a reason for its existence was pegged to an unstable variable—the secular public.
Though it was born from centrism, I expect Religious Zionism to become more diverse over time regarding how extreme its components are.
Fundamentalism is less prone to certain pitfalls than centrism.
The more details one adds to an account, the more plausible it sounds but the less probable it is.
Likewise, if I give you a grocery list with both categories of things and specific things, the more specific things I put under a category, the less likely it is I want something not listed that is in that category. If I wrote on the list “Many kinds of bread, white bread, hot dog buns, hamburger buns, bagels, whole wheat bread, and pumpernickel,” it sounds more plausible that I want a bialy than if I only wrote “Many kinds of bread,” which only has four bread related words. Someone with the latter list will have to take some initiative, while with the former it is possible to simply buy the breads on the list and pretend inaction is not a type of action, and that one has not made an independent decision.
It is at least true that given the first list it’s highly unlikely the bread product I want most is a bialy. We might still expect that someone who wrote the first list might like bialys more than someone who wrote the second list, simply because the author of the first list has indicated enthusiasm for bread products by writing so much about them. This is because we are used to normal human authors who emphasize by repetition, but if we know the author to be strictly logical, we will understand that the request on the second list is broader and more open-ended than that on the first.
The barbarity and tedium of the Old Testament are both partially caused by enumerations of who to kill, and how, and when, in great detail (doubly so for bringing sacrifices and matters of purity [which includes lineages]). A normal human author, like those who actually wrote the texts, expressed their shortcomings thereby.
Pretending the texts were written by a logical, autistic, single person turns this on its head. The more detail appended to when to kill, the less its a reinforcing admonishment against our innate humanity and the more it is restrictive detail circumscribing the conditions where violence is permitted.
What’s that, God? Kill the Amalekites, you say? Every man woman and child? Um...and ox sheep, camel and donkey? Reminds me of the Order of the Stick from the exact day in the future when lessdazed will write about this online, but OK. And the Midianites? Kill the males, but keep the female virgins for ourselves? Got it! Who else do we kill? The Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites? OK. A man gathering wood on the Sabbath day? Kill. And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore? Why, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire. And if a man take a wife and her mother? It is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire! Tax evasion regarding rebuilding the temple? A beam is to be pulled from his house and he is to be lifted up and impaled on it. And for this crime his house is to be made a pile of rubble. The Philistines and Kerethites? “I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I take vengeance on them.” Glad you got that one covered, LORD. (It goes on like this.)
What we have today is an Orthodoxy that sees killing and genocide as things God is more than happy to command for circumstances in which he wants them done. Atheists often view the bible as reflecting upon the character of a fictional god, and worry believers will do the same (minus the recognition that it is fiction) and ask themselves what it seems plausible that god would want them to do. People are fundamentalist to the extent that they instead ask what they are ordered to do, under the belief that everything worthwhile is commanded. Not only the Chareidim, but also the Religious Zionists, are fundamentalist enough that there is no danger of a mainstream religious perspective conflating Arabs with Canaanites. Even for Religious Zionists, the conflict with Arabs is secular.
Belief in a less interactive god, even an omniscient omnipotent omnipresent one, is logically possible and what many imagine to be the case. Under such a theology, the gap in biblical instruction regarding what to do about Arabs would be filled in with the most plausible analogous case, and killing Arabs would have them same ersatz biblical sanction that settling and possessing the land actually does for the Religious Zionists. Instead, it is pretended that there is no instructional gap, so resorting to analogy has nothing like the force of divine command at all.
I’m having a bit of trouble with my point here, which may indicate a flaw in my thinking rather than articulation. But the tl;dr is that the Religious Zionists see themselves as commanded to reoccupy the land and kill the Canaanites again, under such circumstances that the presence of Arabs in the stead of Canaanites is perplexing rather than soluble, as it is also unsolvable for a dumb enough AI, (which includes otherwise smart ones). The “obvious” solution is correctly seen as not obvious at all, and only seems obvious because of human intelligence. In this sense there is not a religious war.
In general, taking seriously a text that reinforces evil by repetitious emphasis and instead reading it as if its writer were logical and had realized that “detail is burdensome” emasculates the evil. Non-fundamentalists who correctly find the original meaning of the text as author intended, namely that which seems plausible upon reading it, are directly dangerous.
Even Religious Zionists are sufficiently fundamentalist Orthodox Jews that such a reading is not at all common. (Chareidim are solidly so, which doesn’t matter much as they don’t see the state as legally a continuation of ancient Israel anyway.)
Lessdazed gave what seems to me to be a good answer to most of these questions so I’ll just address the remaining one (which unfortunately is one of the one’s I don’t know as much about.)
The Chief Rabbi as a separate institution evolved when in the late Middle Ages the various European states wanted official representatives of the Jewish population to talk to the government. Since for many purposes Jews were often autonomous groups this was the primary method of interaction. Somewhat similarly, in some places such as England, all recognized religions had to have a recognized chief clergy member who was actually considered to serve the monarch. For essentially historical reasons, this job has been generally taken up by a prominent Orthodox Rabbi in most countries where the title exists. In some countries with small Jewish populations (such as Norway and New Zealand) there’s very rarely more than one Orthodox Rabbi and so this individual becomes the Chief Rabbi more or less by default. In countries with larger Jewish communities this position can be surrounded by heavy politics and other considerations. Also in some countries the Chief Rabbi is not actually a government recognized position but is the term used to refer to a certain position overseeing some large organization of shulls.
Thanks for all the info. For whatever reason, even though I usually have no problem finding and sorting out information about complicated and controversial topics, I find this one (i.e. the general topic of Jewish religious and ethnic divisions) very difficult to systematize, and your comments have clarified a lot. Of course, even I was much more knowledgeable about the topic, I’d still consider it a valuable opportunity to hear the perspective of someone who has some insider knowledge but nevertheless strives for objectivity.