Parting Shot

Dear Michael,

I’ll start with the least important point, to get it out of the way: Pas moi! Maybe check the last few pieces I posted before the one that gives you grief. You will see that I have certainly not been providing cover for positions and rhetoric coming from parts of the charedi world. To the contrary, I’ve voiced my consternation and frustration with positions that simply do not align with Torah as I know it. I’ve done this not in the hope of effecting any change, but to strengthen the many, many charedim out there who are wondering if they have lost their minds, since what they see and hear in the name of Torah runs so afoul of their chinuch as well.

What I was trying to do was inject a bit of honesty, which can’t be a bad thing. The letter from the secularist was a reminder that those of us who have been critical should not become naïve. It is easy for us to call for compromise; it is also far too easy to forget that there are forces on the left who still hate Torah, and wish to see it quickly or slowly stamped out. My piece was really self-reproach.

Now that we have that out of the way, we can turn to some of your points – maybe only because I refuse to be shown to be less of a contrarian than you!

You wrote: “I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at how effortlessly you wrote that, as if the disdain towards the Charedi perspective isn’t reciprocated with even more zest by some Charedi leaders.” As I said, I’ve been on record for quite some time as pained by those pronouncements. But are we keeping score here? Does it matter how many inflammatory statements, and by how many people? Surely the issue is whether the statements coming from my community – no matter what precipitated them – increase kevod Shomayim, or G-d forbid, unintentionally do the opposite. I know what many of us (a minority to be sure – although not among people who knew the Gedolim of a few decades ago) lamentably believe. Strange that you should have missed that.

You wrote: “Hatred of Judaism” is not how I would characterize any of the important founders of the state – lovers of Zion is a better term. Some detested halacha…” I’m flummoxed by this. If hatred of halacha is not hatred of Judaism, then what is?

And yes, they were lovers of Zion. They devoted their lives to the establishment of the State, even if they thought they were building a Soviet-style workers’ paradise in the Middle East. But they did that for the benefit of the Jewish people, and for that some of them deserve much credit. (I recall hearing from Rabbi Shurin, a son-in-law of Rav Yaakov Kamenetzky and a Hebrew prof at CUNY, that an adam gadol passed judgment on Ben-Yehuda. He said, “If Hashem wishes to give him olan habo for his resuscitating Hebrew as a spoken language, I for one will not object.”

Alas, there is a limit to this. Numerous sources make it clear that there is no eternal reward for those who completely rejected such a possibility. Or rejected the existence of G-d. To insist that those who spent their lives insisting that He doesn’t exist never really meant it is demeaning to their free will – and contrary to your very Litvish, non-chassidishe nature. Think of those “lovers of Zion” who successfully fought tooth and nail to see that there would be no mention of G-d in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Only in the end would they accept a compromise whereby a reference to the “Rock of Israel” was included, because they saw it as a literary figure that didn’t necessarily mean the G-d they rejected. Can one firmly reject the existence of HKBH, without being a “hater of Torah?”

Lastly, you wrote, “I am not sure who fired the first shot. Are you?” Yes, I am. Absolutely sure. It was the maskilim in Europe who denounced traditionalists to the authorities as anti-government agitators (think of the incarcerations of the Gra and the Alter Rebbe), pushed those authorities to close chadorim and replace them with secular schools, and subjected the world of tradition to a constant barrage of satire and mockery in the papers they controlled. All this is beyond cavil. That war never ended. It morphed into one between secular Zionists and traditionalists, and was transplanted fully to pre-State Palestine. (We Americans have a hard time understanding this, because we were raised in a non-Jewish country where Jews had to learn to live cooperatively with each other in order to establish our rights, and gradually forgot the old wars.) I write all this not to perpetuate that war, but simply to set the historical record straight. My own belief is that the secular Zionists lost the battle quite a while ago, and all of us – religious Zionists and charedim – should have simply declared victory and moved on. Zionism today does not mean what the State’s founders thought it means. Rather, it means that Jews have every right to live in their own country, in the Land to which they have been connected for 3000 years.

What we agree upon is that compromise is needed. I see that in a few courageous charedi leaders who have taken a different position this past year. I see it in the work of Rav Dovid Leibel. I see it in the elements of the IDF who really, truly have been working hard to create places within Tzahal in which charedim can thrive. (I hope and pray that their work will not be undone in an instant by a Supreme Court that, unlike no Western country, has no restraints, restrictions, or balance from another arm of the government.)

So we may not be so far apart. Perhaps we can compromise on some of the differences.

Es vahev basufa.

Yitzchok