The Haredi threat

Growing ultra-Orthodox power could jeopardize the Zionist enterprise

By MORDECHAI NISAN
Haredim (photo credit: REUTERS/BAZ RATNER)
Haredim
(photo credit: REUTERS/BAZ RATNER)
Atlit, south of Haifa, December 9, 2013: ...Here they are, protesting the military draft, fanatically declaring martyr-like readiness to die on the altar of enlistment refusal, throwing eggs at policemen outside of the prison where a 19-year-old yeshiva boy is being held for ignoring his draft call-up ...a surrealistic scene of an 18th century Polish-garbed crowd of idlers in a campaign bad-mouthing the State of Israel and its laws in the 21st century .
Since Israel’s founding in 1948, the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community has been engaged in a quiet war of conquest against the Jewish State.
Defaming Israel as morally polluted and devoid of any positive cultural element, Haredim fantasize about transforming it from a liberal open society to a monolithically self-styled “ halakhic ” state, governed by Jewish religious law.
The Haredi community has been encased in a fossilized mind-set of ultra-conservatism, exclusivity and segregation, bound to the narrow round of personal interests and communal solidarity, closed to and fearful of the wider environment. For them there is only Torah, narrowly interpreted, whose scope does not encompass worldliness and the brotherhood of man. Scorning Israeli society as the embodiment of secularism and permissiveness, Haredim justify their position by subsuming their campaign under the banner of their restrictive version of “Torah.”
The problem for Zionist Israel is demographic. The ultra-Orthodox population in Israel is approaching one million of slightly more than six million Jews, nearing 15 percent of the Jewish population in the country.
Yet among first-grade Jewish school children, Haredim constitute approximately 30 percent.
At this rate, in a few decades the Haredim could approach 50 percent of all Jews in Israel. This could well mark the end of Israel as a modern, free, pluralistic and Jewish society. The country will become a place, which demeans all social expressions that differ from the ultra-Orthodox model.
Worse, as Haredi youth refuse the universal draft and consider the army enemy territory, the military ethos for all of Israeli society will wither. Secular and religious Zionist Israelis will no longer tolerate being the Shabbos goy and cannon-fodder for their unpatriotic brothers. The IDF, the army whose name the Haredim religiously refuse to enunciate, is stigmatized as sullied by rampant sexual promiscuity and indifference to rabbinic supervision. Living in denial and mendacity is how they justify their hostility toward the IDF they don’t know and without which their own communities could not survive.
In the early years of Israeli statehood, 400 Haredim received exemption from army service by declaring their total devotion to Torah study. The present-day figure is estimated at 60,000. What was a worthy recognition of the Jewish people’s appreciation of Torah has been exploited to promote mass insubordination that undermines the laws, honor and very survival of the state.
Changes in demography and geography reflect a militant vibrancy as Haredi families move into and change the tenor of secular and religious neighborhoods, especially in Jerusalem. Haredi penetration is also deep and growing in Ashdod, Bat Yam, Arad, Netivot, Tiberias, Safed, Bet Shemesh, and Beersheba. As real estate is about location, location, location, so power and presence in Israel is about babies, babies, babies – seven on the average in Haredi families.
From the very outset, the ultra-Orthodox deliberately alienated themselves from the Zionist project in all its aspects. They feared that modern Israel, a daring adventure transforming the unpredictability of Jewish life in the Diaspora into a redemptive sovereign enterprise in a national homeland, could provide an exciting alternative to their archaic and vulnerable way of life.
Bereft of a national spirit, they do not fly the blue and white Israeli flag over their schools, Independence Day is ignored and the Hatikva national anthem is not sung.
Haredi children grow up in a Zionist sanitized universe. Thriving and vital Israel, with its extraordinary technological, medical, agricultural and military achievements, no less its very struggle for national survival, is not their concern. They live in but are not of Israel.
THE ULTRA-ORTHODOX choose a segregated existence in virtually every aspect of their lives – residence, schooling, dress code, foods, vacations, media outlets, rabbinic authorities and modes of transportation. The overwhelming majority of Haredim shun general Israeli newspapers, radio stations, movie houses, television channels, theaters and Internet sites.
Norms of exclusion operate within the Haredi sector in an ever-expanding fashion.
The community’s politicos have successfully negotiated gender-segregated buses, beaches and higher-education programs, while the non-negotiable dogma steadfastly dictates that ultra-Orthodox youth ignore IDF draft notices, preempting possible mingling with their non-Haredi counterparts.
Early Zionist and Israeli leaders, dedicated to building a Jewish state and offering the Torah a safe haven after the Holocaust, are defamed and denigrated. The Haredim spit into the well from which they drink.
Aspects of Haredi religion highlight the ideological clash between modern Israel and the ultra-Orthodox world, and provide a cultural backdrop to their rejectionist attitude toward Zionism with its egalitarian and rationalist core. Following are some examples of the unbridgeable chasm between Haredi belief and practice, and modern Israeli sensibilities:
• The Democracy of Mediocrity: The bland regimented Haredi sectarian appearance, as boys and men all don white shirts and black hats, like the sweeping recognition of their rabbis as geniuses ( gaonim ), is equality reduced to a vice and not a virtue.
• The Ritualization of Nonsense: The Haredi world is full of inane customs like the variety of hats worn by Hasidic courts, based upon Polish and Hungarian hagiography, reducing Jewish spirituality to haughty masquerade and vain spectacle.
• The Feigning of Modesty: The ultra- Orthodox have stretched the gap between appearance and reality. The young Haredi woman praying on a bus is oblivious to the old woman leaning on her cane and in need of a seat; and the male Haredi’s dissemblance of piety is enhanced the more his wife is subjected to a rigid code of segregation and discrimination.
• The Sanctification of Illusion: Haredi man differs from normal man, when in his folk-metaphysics he obsessively visits graves as sacred precincts and dubious mystical seers as sources of heavenly illumination.
Detached from the national enterprise and its inner spirit, the ultra-Orthodox refuse to adhere to the ‘social contract’ and ‘general will’ on behalf of a modern Jewish State. The Torah demands Jewish unity as a sacred, central and necessary condition for national success and survival.
In their stiff-necked resistance to military service and standing in defense of the Jewish State, the ultra-Orthodox trample on Torah behavioral models and legal codes.
Moses in the Bible, presaging the equitable moral imperative that stretches from the sage Hillel to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, reproached the tribes of Gad and Reuven, saying, ‘Your brothers [from other tribes] will come to war and you will sit here [east of the Jordan River]’?! (Numbers 32:6) Maimonides, some 2,500 years later, obligated all Jewish men to fight the war [ milhemet mitzva ] for the land and the people. (Laws of Kings and Wars 7:4) In Israel today, Haredim in Sabbath synagogue services do not recite the prayer for the Peace of the State of Israel or the Welfare of IDF Soldiers. The state is not a value for the ultra-Orthodox.
How ungrateful they are in not appreciating the great blessings that Israel has given the Jewish people, how numbed in not understanding that history should be in the service of life; because it is thanks to Zionism that Judaism thrives – and thanks to Judaism that Zionism was born.
For now Zionism has the upper hand; but growing Haredi power by numbers could threaten the entire enterprise.
Dr. Mordechai Nisan, a retired lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of several books focusing on Israel and the Middle East