Purity of the Camp

Jonathan Rosenblum writes:

RECENTLY, AN ad appeared in the two largest haredi daily newspapers seeking men at least 35 years old with a broad knowledge of Talmud, Halacha and aggada, who also have experience giving classes to audiences from varying backgrounds. Applicants were informed that they must be prepared to live in completely nonreligious urban neighborhoods.

Within a day, over 200 had faxed resumes.

Now, anyone reading the local press over the past year might have concluded that the most important issue for the haredi community is sexually separate buses. But then how to explain all those haredim eager to make their homes in neighborhoods which no separate bus will ever reach, and where the women will not exactly be conforming to the dress codes of Mea She’arim, even if they seek to dress respectfully?

Maybe those who responded represent some modernizing trend within the haredi community. Not likely. First, that group would not be reading Yated Ne’eman or Hamodia. Second, the large majority of those who responded already had positions within the haredi community as heads of kollelim or teachers in yeshivot. Many of them had written religious books. In short, they were from the very elite of the community.

How, then, do we explain the apparent contradiction between the response to the ad and the publicity given the issue of separate buses? The answer, I think, is that there are two opposing trends within the haredi world. On the one hand, there are those whose entire focus is on protecting the “purity of the camp” and erecting as many barriers to the outside world as possible.

Then there are those whose primary concern is with sharing their own joy in Torah life and study with the broader Jewish society. The latter also feel the need to protect themselves and their children from alien influences. They do not believe religious observance is a lifestyle choice, or imagine that there is no tension between contemporary secular culture and Torah values.

I ASSUME that nearly all of those who responded to the ad have kosher cellphones, and that most do not have Internet access in their homes, or if they do, that the computer is always in a public place and guarded by the highest level of filters available from Internet Rimon.

But the latter group is not content to be purely defensive. Its members also want to do something positive with their lives, and for them that means primarily sharing Torah with their fellow Jews. (My own guess is the second approach is likely to be more successful, even in terms of protecting haredi youth. If one adopts a purely defensive posture, one is likely to eventually end up knocked out, like Floyd Patterson against Sonny Liston. But if one is filled with enthusiasm for sharing Torah, the operative principle is one borrowed from the laws of kashrut – that which gives off does not absorb.)

The two “camps” are, of course, archetypes. There may be many haredim who do not fit neatly into either – those who are neither exercised about separate buses nor eager to do kiruv work. And there are others who have one foot in both. But my sense is that those who are more concerned with outreach constitute the silent majority of the haredi community.

Ayelet Hashahar, the organization that published the ad, has placed individual couples on more than 50 secular kibbutzim and moshavim in recent years. The same organization currently sponsors 7,000 telephone study partnerships between haredi and secular Jews weekly, and is offering special partners before the Days of Awe for secular Jews who would like to familiarize themselves with the mahzor (www.B-2.co.il). Nearly 2,000 kollel students, under the banner of Lev L’Achim, go out weekly to learn with secular Israelis.

HOPEFULLY, I have succeeded in providing a more nuanced view of the haredi world for at least some readers. But I don’t want to suggest that misconceptions run only one way.

My family just returned from a short trip to the North. Along the way, due to a variety of car problems, we had to rely on the kindness of numerous strangers. As we searched for a garage in Beit She’an, something about my accent or facial expression must have aroused the pity of the young woman we stopped to ask for directions, and she told us to follow her for more than a mile. At the garage, the owner put our car up on a lift and spent 15 minutes rigging up the exhaust so it would not continue dragging along the ground. He refused to accept payment, despite all my entreaties, and even though he had saved us from a very costly repair.

On the way back, our car died at a nature reserve. When I asked the shirtless fellow with a small tattoo next to us if he had jumper cables, he replied affirmatively and gladly spent the next 20 minutes in a futile attempt to revive our car.

I cannot say that these encounters with non-haredim shocked me. Many of the nicest and most generous people I have known were not religious. But they did cheer me immensely and put me in the proper frame of mind for the work of Elul – rediscovering my connection to all my fellow Jews.