The Unmaking of Israel (19 page)

While I stand on the street, a flock of teenage girls walks by, all with the pale complexions of indoor lives. The girls are dressed in blue blouses buttoned to the neck, pleated skirts, and high socks, so that no skin besides their faces and hands shows. Small boys—the age that Amos Oz was when his secular father chose an Orthodox Zionist school for his son because religion was dying anyway—are coming home, carrying book bags heavy with religious texts. A family passes, the husband in a circular, flat-topped black hat, his wife pushing a stroller, three more children younger than age six walking with them. The mother wears a wig, the common
haredi
method for married women to hide their hair in modesty. But that custom is now a matter of strident controversy, as one of the posters glued to a wall along the street testifies. It tells married women who wear wigs rather than scarves that they will be judged before the heavenly court for their licentious practice, which makes it look as if their own naked hair is exposed. On a cross street, I pass a
kollel—
a yeshivah where married men receive small salaries to study full-time. The building of the school that Oz attended still stands, but now it is an ultra-Orthodox boys’ school.

Kerem Avraham today is one neighborhood in the
haredi
belt of northern Jerusalem, a land of wall posters denouncing television, Internet, and rival religious factions; of lifelong Torah study for men and countless pregnancies for women; of schools that provide scant preparation for earning a living and no preparation at all for participating in a democratic society. The neighborhood began changing in the 1950s, after the rebellious young Oz moved to a kibbutz, which he left many years later. Socialism, not religion, is now a historical memory in Israel.

Less than a mile from Amos Oz’s childhood home is an apartment development put up several years ago for better-off
haredim
. The nine-story buildings surround a courtyard with a playground that is crowded with children in late afternoon. Underneath the buildings is a three-level parking garage, with small storerooms along the sides of the half-lit concrete caverns. The storerooms, a standard feature of Israeli apartments, belong to the residents who live above. But some of the small rooms have doorbells, names on the doors, water meters, and high windows looking into the dark garage. I hear the voices of a couple inside one, and an infant crying. Outside another is a metal rack on which laundry is drying. They’ve been rented out as apartments to young
haredi
families who can afford nothing else.

The picture aboveground is of a thriving community. Beneath the surface one can see one part of the price being paid by the
haredim
themselves, and by Israel as a whole, for the peculiar development of ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel.

Today’s
haredim
are known for marrying early and having many children, even as men spend much or all of their adult lives studying Talmud rather than working. When the state was established,
haredi
society “was entirely different,” says sociologist Menachem Friedman. “It was a normal working society,” similar to the rest of the Jewish population. The fertility rate was about the same. So was the average marriage age, though sometimes
haredi
men married relatively late if they wanted to extend their religious studies. To get married, a man had to leave yeshivah and find work.

Rather than being a diorama of traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, as many Israelis and visitors believe, Israel’s present-day version of ultra-Orthodoxy is a creation of the Jewish state. Policies with unexpected effects fostered this new form of Judaism, at once cloistered and militant. So did successful measures by
haredi
leaders to revive a community that was shrunk by modernity and then devastated by the Holocaust.

While a similar revival has taken place in
haredi
communities in the United States and other Western countries since World War II, their dependence on government funding is necessarily more limited. In turn, the extent to which adult men can engage in full-time religious study rather than working is also more restricted. The difference was illustrated in 2000, when the daily
Ha’aretz
published a series of pictures by photographer Alex Levac, showing ultra-Orthodox men at work in New York. For the Israeli audience, photos of gainfully employed
haredi
men—a private detective, a truck driver, a technician, a contractor, a welder—were news on the level of man bites elephant.

In economic terms, the
haredi
revival in Israel has been disastrous. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community is ever more dependent on the state and, through it, on other people’s labor. Exploiting political patronage, ultra-Orthodox clerics have largely taken over the state’s religious bureaucracy, imposing extreme interpretations of Jewish law on other Jews. By exempting the ultra-Orthodox from basic general educational requirements, the democratic state fosters a burgeoning sector of society that neither understands nor values democracy. And to protect their own growing settlements,
haredi
parties are now essential partners in the pro-settlement coalitions of the right.

This is a story full of ironies. Here’s the first: the critical, unnoticed catalyst of the transformation of ultra-Orthodox society in Israel was the 1949 law instituting free, compulsory education.

In the Palestine of the British Mandate, ultra-Orthodox schools were few, scattered, and short on cash. After independence, most joined a school system under the roof of the Agudat Yisrael party. In a Knesset Education Committee meeting in June 1949, a government official mentioned in passing that there used to be three party-linked school systems; now there were four, including the ultra-Orthodox one. The addition sounds like something inconsequential that happened almost accidentally. In Education Committee discussions of the compulsory education law, the fact that it would provide budgets to the ultra-Orthodox schools hardly merited mention. After all, ultra-Orthodoxy was vanishing.

Instead, the opposite happened. State funding made it possible to open new ultra-Orthodox schools and pay steady salaries. Young
haredi
women could finish teacher training at Agudat Yisrael’s Beit Ya’akov seminaries by age eighteen or nineteen and get elementary school jobs. Meanwhile, some of the Jews pouring into Israel from the Islamic world chose
haredi
schools for their children, creating more teaching positions. The absolute numbers were small, but the growth was astounding: in the state’s first four years, Agudat Yisrael’s elementary schools went from 7,000 to 24,000 pupils.

In 1953, when the Knesset voted to eliminate party-run schools and create a national educational system, it left loopholes in the State Education Law that allowed the Agudat Yisrael schools to keep operating and receive funding from the state. As the Israeli economy modernized, high school education became the norm. The state helped fund ultra-Orthodox secondary schools along with others, but the high schools for
haredi
boys were yeshivot devoted entirely to religious studies. Most were boarding schools, where students lived in a day-and-night realm of Torah study, with rabbis substituting for parents. From there, young men—not only the few brilliant scholars, as in European Europe before the Holocaust, but the mass—proceeded to advanced yeshivot.

The leading
haredi
religious figure in Israel, Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karlitz, used these changes to promote a transformation in the name of extreme conservatism:
haredi
men and women would marry young. Men would keep studying Torah in
kollel
after marriage, supported by their teacher-wives. Their working parents would help out. Funds to help give
kollel
students small salaries came from Jews in Western countries. The donors were not necessarily Orthodox. Rather, they regarded their contributions as honoring the destroyed Jewish world of Eastern Europe, seen through the distorting lens of loss and nostalgia. Young
haredim
rejected Israeli society, but accepted its demand for idealistic sacrifice. Through a lifestyle based on Torah study, they were outdoing their bourgeois parents and their secular rivals.

Ironically, the army’s centrality in Israeli life promoted the change, precisely because
haredi
society wanted young men to avoid what it saw as the IDF’s secular press gang. Remaining a full-time Torah student allowed a man to stay out of uniform. Gradually, the state allowed the quota of deferments for yeshivah students to rise, from 400 in 1948, to over 1,200 in 1953, to 4,700 in 1968.

The deferment helped lock young men into the
kollel
lifestyle. So did the education gap: though ultra-Orthodox men spent years engaged in study, their schooling did nothing to prepare them for jobs in a modern economy. From their teens on, their curriculum was devoid of mathematics, sciences, foreign languages, and other general studies.

Thus “the society of scholars”—as Friedman named it—took shape. Older
haredi
men, who’d come of age before the change, worked for a living. A growing number of young men stayed in
kollel
after marriage, often for a decade or more. The father was a carpenter, shopkeeper, or tailor; the son was a full-time student. In a universe of arranged marriages, Torah scholars were the most sought-after grooms. The marriage age for both men and women dropped: between 1952 and 1981, the average marriage age of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel fell from 27.5 to 21.5. At the beginning of that period, the typical
haredi
groom was slightly older than the average for Israeli Jewish society. By 1981, he was four years younger than the Israeli Jewish average. Among
haredi
women, marriage before age twenty became the standard. Ultra-Orthodox couples started having children early and continued to have them often. This, too, made leaving
haredi
society much more difficult, for women as well as men.

In the 1940s, it had seemed to ultra-Orthodox educators and parents that nothing could stop young people from giving up religion. Now the exodus stopped. The gulf between the society of scholars and the secular world grew too wide to cross. Rabbis noted with satisfaction that children were outdoing their parents at piety. “The sons are more complete than the fathers,” wrote Moshe Scheinfeld, a
haredi
ideologue, in an Agudat Yisrael journal in 1954. “This is the source of the ‘tragedies’ taking place in many homes, where the parents feel that their sons studying in yeshivot and their daughters training in . . . seminaries are rebelling against them in their hearts and demand of them, openly or secretly, greater completeness, greater sacrifice, greater consistency in [religious] practice and belief.”

Those words portray a revolution in a society that believed itself to be changeless. Young
haredi
Israelis saw the previous generation as insufficiently religious—a paradox in a community for which
religion
and
tradition
were synonyms. To show they made no compromise with modernity, young
haredim
sought to follow Jewish law in the strictest fashion. They thereby created a new interpretation of Jewish practice, a strict constructionism that was itself a product of modernity. This is the shared attribute of fundamentalist movements—they are creations of the present claiming to be old-time religion.

Karlitz—known as the Hazon Ish, after his major religious work—supplied the theology of strictness. In his view, precision in following religious law (
halakhah
) encouraged a person to overcome natural urges and purify his soul. The strain, the difficulty, was the fire that removed the dross. He also provided the specifics of strictness. An example: Jewish religious law includes various measures—the minimum amount of wine required for the blessing at the beginning of the Sabbath meal, the minimum amount of matzah to eat at the Passover Seder. The measurements are ancient and imprecise—the volume of an egg, or of an olive. These are requirements written in a book. In real life, for generations, Jewish children learned how to live their religion from parents, without using cup measures or rulers. The Hazon Ish famously interpreted the minimums in maximal terms, as if eggs and olives had been larger when the ancient rabbis set the measurements and had since degenerated, just as the wisdom of the ancients had faded through the ages. One had to make sure the wine cup was large enough to meet the new requirement masquerading as the traditional one; one had to make sure to eat a sufficient amount of matzah. “It follows,” as historian Lawrence Kaplan wrote, describing the sage’s impact, “that though the Hazon Ish was opposed to formal
halakhic
innovation, he was one of the great
halakhic
innovators of [his] century.”

The Hazon Ish applied the same innovative rejection of innovation to belief and science. The scientific knowledge of ancient and medieval Jewish sages, he asserted, exceeded that of modern scientists, and had to be accepted without question. Ironically, some of those medieval sages had regarded learning the science of their own time as a religious value. Most prominently, the towering twelfth-century rabbi, philosopher, and physician Moses Maimonides taught that knowledge of the natural world was the path to love of God. As a twentieth-century reactionary, the Hazon Ish honored the shell of medieval Jewish scholarship while negating its core. The very practical implication was that secular studies were at best a waste of time better spent studying Torah, and at worst an intellectual siren song, luring the young to the rocks where their faith would be shipwrecked.

By accepting his rulings and doctrines, yeshivah and
kollel
students were also accepting written tradition over lived tradition. Partly that was a consequence of the Holocaust and the mass migration of Jews to Israel and the West: the lived tradition was dead, buried in the rubble of Eastern Europe. Young
haredim
tried to re-create a lost world; tragically, they could only create a caricature.