The Haredi menace

I think of two Rosas—Luxemburg and Parks, and of the Grimké sisters—Angelina and Sarah. I think of Emily Pankhurst and of Susan B. Anthony. I think of Emilia Shrayer standing up to the Communist authorities in the old Soviet Union. I think of Nofrat Frenkel in Israel. All were women who knew something was wrong and risked everything to correct it. Some were killed, others were imprisoned, each was the object of ridicule. What do these women know about how things are or should be? Things are as they are because of divine ordinance. Read the bible. Slavery is divinely sanctioned; women must know their place because they are a pernicious, though necessary gender. “Now, I find woman more bitter than death; she is all traps, her hands are fetters and her heart is snares.” (Ecclesiastes 7:26) Enough said, right? Wrong. We also find “She is clothed with strength and splendor; she looks to the future cheerfully. Her mouth is full of wisdom, her tongue with kindly teaching.” (Proverbs 31: 25-26)

I think of the Women of the Wall and the arrogance of the authorities who arrested a woman for wearing a tallit at the Western Wall, still rankles. Granted, Nofrat Frenkel wasn’t stoned to death—for all their puritanical fussbudgetness the Haredim of Israel are not the Taliban. But they insist that they know the truth and that the truth shall deny others freedom. Just like the Taliban, just like the Puritans from whom Roger Williams fled. And we who are not ultra-Orthodox are asked to bend our wills to theirs, since they are the authentic Jews. Women must sit in the back of the bus, they insist; a 13 year old child converted by a Conservative rabbi has to be buried in a non-Jewish section of a cemetery in Spain by decree of rabbi Shlomo Amar, not a Spanish rabbi, but the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel. So, not only do the Ayatollahs of the extreme right in Israel try to dominate in that country, they seek to extend their purview to the world. Recently mixed-group singing at the Wall was declared Vorboten so singing Hatikvah there to celebrate the return of the Old City to Israel is now a criminal offense. If I were a conspiracy theorist I’d suspect that the ultra-Orthodox who opposed the creation of the State of Israel have found a new way to destroy it—by alienating the vast majority of us who have entered the current century. It’s like supporting Hamid Karzai. Americans look at his corrupt regime and ask, for this we have to pledge our soldiers and our cash? For the Haredi we have to fight in Congress and the White House?

Avi Shafran, spokesman for the Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, has a strange argument. On the one hand “Israel is a country that has functioned with a certain understanding among its religious and not religious Jews. If the activists don’t want to alienate Jews, they shouldn’t thumb their noses at the traditional Jews in Israel.” The fault is all on the side of the progressives. On the other hand, it’s only a handful of the Haredi who protest the women and others who violate traditional standards. Most are in favor of a reasonable compromise, but there are always holdouts, he says. So, which is it—the fault is with the activists, or the fault is with the Haredi hot heads? Pick one. Oh, he also argues that the problem is with foreign Jews who are trying to impose their views on the traditional ways of Israel. Rather like Ross Barnett or George Wallace complaining about outside agitators coming to their states. The defenders of the benighted old ways always blame outsiders.

Modern Orthodox in America also feel the sting of their Haredi brethren who, not content to deny Reform and Conservative conversions, now challange the validity even of theirs.

Oh, lest it be thought that my ire is directed against the Haredi, it’s not. They are what they are. It’s Israel’s government which kowtows to them, allowing a minority within a minority to dictate public policy. That’s the shanda.