On Covid and Haredim....

 

Guest post by Professor Shaul Magid
 
On COVID and haredim:This has become a national issue but is one that has persisted from the beginning of the crisis. Of late there has been much written by Modern Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews about the haredim, how they are behaving and why they are behaving that way. While well-placed, I found a lot did not have a real foundational and experiential understanding of the haredi world. I lived in Boro for almost three years in the late 1970s. It was a long time ago but I think I came to understand and absorb that world and something of that remains.

This is NOT an apologia for the haredim; what is happening is horrible and will damage that community for years. They erred seriously and now are paying the price, as well as bearing responsibility for others. What I am trying to do, however, is understand what evoked this response in this way.

Yssocher Katz posted what I found to be the most thoughtful post on the haredim I have seen. Without apologies he tried to situated a value system in the orbit of behavior and  suggest that while this is a mistake, it comes from a place that is not unreasonable. He dealt mostly with religious practice and in a religious register.

I will offer a more societal, maybe sociological rendering that squares with to Yssocher's remarks.

The haredi community is a much more social community than most of us live in. By social I mean that the collective life is driven by social events, from as small as daily minyan, night seder, to as big as a hasidishe wedding or the rebbe’s table on Sukkos. These events don’t have the same values in our world as in theirs. For them, this is the crux of their “leisure” time, it is largely where people meet outside business or study. I recall being surprised when I entered the haredi world that children were always a part of that social world. The notion of children not being invited to weddings is unheard of. One often finds a family with small children in Boro Park walking home from some simcha at midnight. I recall being back in America and invited to a secular wedding where we were told we could not bring children. It was arresting.

As a result, having all that taken away is different for them than for us. It is wrong not to have done it, but viewing it from our frame of reference misses something crucial: you are taking away their whole social world. Now of course they use Whattapp etc. but more fundamentally, it demanded more of them then us. We were more equipped in part because we are less social.

One can also include that living in close quarters with many children (other high risk communities also share this problem), makes social distancing very challenging. Many of us have spacious and/or comfortable places to live, Netflix, plugged into all manner of technology to keep us connected to the world and our kids out of our hair. Generally, the haredi world doesn’t have that kind of man-made internal entertainment. Many have computers and are increasingly connected to the outside world but the community has an ethos to minimize that as much as possible, especially among the young. Television or Fortnight is not their babysitter.

Of course, one can see, for boys, that yeshiva education is a highly social thing. One doesn’t study regularly alone, or if he does, he does so in a room with 100 other young men. That creates an expectation of sociality that is almost unconscious. Girls, of course, are deprived of that educational experience but their lives are founded on social circles in very close ways.

In any event, even as many leading rabbis came out strongly for masks etc (they did so late, but that is another story) it never was able to filter down to the people perhaps in part because the sacrifices were quite difficult and they did not have the will to recognize they were going to have radically revise their social structure. That may be true for us as well, but not in the same way. Haredim have zoom but many of them never used it before COVID and it is a steep learning curve. This is just to say that the social structure of haredim, at least in American centers, presents certain challenges to them that it doesn’t quite present to us.

They failed. But one can also ask why. Science? Maybe a bit but not really. Most of us don’t know much science either. Its really about authority not science. We trust that authority. For them there are competing authorities that also play a role. They are paying a high price.

There is also remnants of mistrust of the “state” (even though the state protects their right to exist), and the way the community for complicated and fascinating reasons for another time, have become big fans of the state of Israel and in most cases, lean pretty right because their religious beliefs serve as the foundation of their views on the Jewish state. A hasid who will vote for Trump because he is good for Israel could be the grandson and a hasid in Poland who was vehemently anti-Zionist. The grandson could live the same lifestyle, in the same Hasidic court. The one big difference is that the grandson will be pro-Israel (albeit not a Zionist).

In this way they fell for Trump, saw in him someone they could lean on, they are people who can be taken by a certain kind of strength. Hasidism often liked strong leaders. Hillel Zeitlin writes about the admiration of Czar Nicholas and Rasputin. In any case, they were convinced that liberal was bad for them. This has its own history in Europe when it was communism.

The haredim will have to comes to terms with this. And they will do it. And yes, tragically more people will likely die first. That community has been devastated from this disease much more than upper-class Jews in the suburbs or “uptown.” Theirs more resembles poorer neighbors with diverse populations. So they don’t need to hear from us how many people died. They know. I think we can help, perhaps, by understanding their challenges in context; a world that seems very much like ours, and in some ways is, but is also very different is ways that have made this moment history difficult, and tragic.

Hag sukkos samaech

Shaul Magid is the Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. From 2004-2018 he was a professor of religious studies and the Jay and Jeannie Schottenstein Chair of Jewish Studies in Modern Judaism at Indiana University