New York State vs. the (Hasidic) Yeshivas
Those who defend ḥasidic yeshivas against
increasing state regulation have conjured up an unrecognizable
fairy-tale world.
But the arguments of the state’s defenders are even
worse.
In recent years, New York State
has become the scene of an increasingly fierce battle over the provision
of secular education in ḥasidic boys’ schools (yeshivas), a battle that
brings to the surface many of the latent contradictions in liberal
society. These contradictions, because of the ḥasidic community’s
relentless growth, will soon enough have to be arbitrated one way or
another both in New York and wherever else ḥasidic Jews can be found.
While there had been rumblings for decades about the quality of the
secular education that ḥasidic yeshivas offer their students, the issue
became one of state-wide political concern in New York after the
founding of an advocacy group, Young Advocates for Fair Education
(YAFFED), in 2011. The leaders of this organization—young Jewish men and
women who had grown up in the ḥasidic community and made the decision
to leave—alleged that they had been personally failed by an education
that left them ill-equipped to pursue careers of their choice, and that
many yeshivas were in flagrant breach of New York State laws requiring
education provided by private schools to be “substantially equivalent”
to that offered in the public-education system.
YAFFED successfully lobbied the New York State Education Department (NYSED) to change its laissez-faire
policy and enforce rules that would require yeshivas to teach the full
secular curriculum—which includes social studies and computer skills as
well as English, math, and science—or face legal sanctions. The ḥasidic
community has responded in two ways: by challenging the sanctions in the
state senate, and by filing legal challenges alleging that the state’s
behavior infringes on its First- and Fourteenth- Amendment rights. In so
doing it has successfully leveraged a coalition of Jewish and
non-Jewish religious schools for whom the proposed regulations pose no
direct threat but who are concerned about potential long-term
ramifications for the independence of religious schools. Most legal
experts concur that these constitutional challenges to state regulation
of ḥasidic education will ultimately prove unsuccessful, but the wheels
of justice grind slowly and the community is counting on a mayoral or
gubernatorial candidate looking for the support of the ḥasidic bloc to
save the day before that happens.
Legal arguments that turn on the precise significance of a comma in
the Bill of Rights will, of course, not be of much relevance when the
same issues rear their head in other countries where the ḥasidic
community is growing—especially since few countries define religious
liberty so broadly as does the U.S. More importantly, both parties have
framed their cases in legal language that obscures and distorts the
genuine ethical and philosophical issues involved. Much of what has been
said on both sides to date is spurious, and even where it isn’t, it
fails to cut to the heart of the issue. Since that issue turns out to be
a crucial matter of religion and state, it behooves us to try to see
clearly what’s going on.
Let us start with arguments made by
those who defend the yeshivas—advocates who have conjured up a
fairy-tale world that I, as a graduate of the ḥasidic school system,
barely recognize. These defenders argue that ḥasidic schools are so
dedicated to talmudic and biblical learning that they simply have no
time available to teach secular subjects. The reality at elementary and
middle school is much different: many hours are spent singing songs,
listening to stories, and repeating material that has already been
learned. In high school, meanwhile, most of the day is devoted to
unstructured learning. This, for many students, consists primarily of
socializing while absorbing a tiny amount of material. The system, which
eschews academic selection and testing, is the polar opposite of one
designed to churn out elite talmudic scholars, and, unsurprisingly, it
doesn’t. (Precisely what it is for will become clear in due
course.) Indeed, it is well known, within the ḥaredi world at least,
that graduates of non-ḥasidic ḥaredi yeshivas—those in New York make up
something like a third of the total and have a strong secular-studies
program—typically emerge with greater proficiency in Talmud than their
ḥasidic counterparts.
Even more strained than the fantasies of impossibly busy students are
claims that the yeshivas’ religious curriculum is so sophisticated that
it achieves the goal of “substantial equivalency” by accomplishing
everything the public system is designed to deliver. Plainly, yeshiva
education does something that public-school education doesn’t: namely,
providing students with the vocabulary, concepts, and background
knowledge they need to study a page of Talmud. Claiming that on top of this it also fulfills the learning goals of the New York State curriculum really amounts to a claim that yeshiva education is superior
to the mainstream version and has discovered an almost magical ability
to level up the human brain. It’s an extraordinary claim, and
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, none of which is
forthcoming. Yeshiva advocates point to the many ḥasidic Jews who are
successful in business, or those who received a ḥasidic education and
subsequently went on to distinguished academic achievements. The first
only demonstrates that which is already widely known, namely that formal
education is not necessary in many spheres of business. The second is
not evidence of the power of ḥasidic education, but, rather, that
overcoming educational deficits is easier and more common than often
assumed. A Jew who grows up secular and chooses to become Orthodox will,
if he is sufficiently intelligent and diligent, learn to read Hebrew
and understand Talmud in one to two years. However, no one would take
that as evidence that the public-school system is “substantially
equivalent” to an Orthodox Jewish education.
Finally, yeshiva advocates argue that secular education in ḥasidic
schools is not really that bad. Making this argument invariably involves
blurring the boundaries of the discussion by including a wide range of
non-ḥasidic ḥaredi schools that offer relatively good secular education,
thus taking advantage of the fact that most outside observers find it
hard to distinguish between one variety of black hat and another. The
reality is that, with a few exceptions, most ḥasidic schools offer
something like 90 minutes a day of secular studies to students ages six
to twelve, the quality of which varies widely, but is mostly well below
average; and these pupils then go on to high schools that provide no
secular studies at all. I can tell you, as someone who attended
mainstream ḥasidic schools, that by the age of fifteen I had forgotten
almost entirely the smatterings of English and mathematics I had learned
in elementary school and had to start again from scratch.
All this makes yeshiva advocates look
pretty bad, but it turns out that the leading advocates for improved
secular education offer up even poorer arguments. I have dedicated my
career to ensuring that ḥasidic boys get better secular educations than I
did, and was initially sympathetic to YAFFED’s arguments. In time,
however, I realized that, as a result of relying on a shallow
understanding of ḥasidic education and culture, the would-be reformers
have maneuvered themselves into a foolhardy insistence on untenable
claims.
First, YAFFED consistently tries to link the high rates of welfare
dependency among Ḥasidim to poor education. But the relationship between
educational deficits and reliance on the welfare system is much less
direct than YAFFED asserts. Welfare dependency within the community is
primarily the product of an expensive lifestyle caused by large family
sizes, high property prices, private-school fees, wedding after wedding,
and the cost of more than 60 Shabbat and Yom Tov meals a year (the
equivalent of having Thanksgiving at least once a week)—all of which
make welfare a rational economic choice for many people. I am personally
concerned about the reliance of the ḥasidic community on welfare, and
the kind of attitudes it fosters. But comparisons with non-ḥasidic
ḥaredi communities, where welfare dependency is also common despite
standards of secular education being better, do not indicate that
education is the chief source of the problem or its solution.
Second, YAFFED has argued that the meager secular studies on offer in
ḥasidic schools prevent young adults from pursuing college degrees, as
if this were an unintended consequence of educational neglect in
childhood. In reality, preventing college is the point. Ḥasidic parents
are absolutely opposed to their eighteen-year-old sons or daughters
attending college for the entirely rational reason that college consists
of a complete immersion in a culture antithetical to Ḥasidism at the
most formative stage of a person’s life. Other conservative subcultures
within the United States have been doomed, more than anything else, by
sending off their best and brightest to institutions that teach them to
reject their upbringing as a condition of attaining the piece of paper
that provides access to the socioeconomic elite. It is certainly true
that having shaky English and math makes it an easier decision for young
Shloime to continue with his talmudic education rather than majoring in
gender studies at Yale. However, even if standards of secular studies
in ḥasidic schools soared, ḥasidic parents would remain implacably
opposed to their children pursuing degrees, at least until they are
firmly anchored in the community through marriage and having children.
The most fundamental flaw, however, in YAFFED’s argument, is its
failure—or inability—to acknowledge what ḥasidic education is and what
it is for. Ultimately, the organization denies the existence of any kind
of education at all outside the normative liberal form it advocates.
Amid the frequent references in its reports to “educational neglect” and
“denial of a basic education,” YAFFED ignores the matter of what
ḥasidic children are doing for the nine or more hours a day
they spend in school. Its flagship 2017 report limply claims that “boys .
. . are expected to aspire to become rabbis” as an explanation of the
curriculum. To understand the issue properly, we must move beyond such
trite and specious answers and turn to a more essential question: what
education—ḥasidic education and any education—actually is.
The purpose of the ḥasidic education system, beginning at age three and ending with marriage, is, quite simply, cultivating Ḥasidim.
Lessons in the Pentateuch or Talmud are not primarily, often not at
all, about developing academic skills—they are about molding a
particular type of religious personality, one that will be comfortable
in, satisfied by, and loyal to the ḥasidic community and way of life.
The American sociologist Samuel Heilman, no friend to Ḥasidim but one of
their most acute observers, describes lessons in ḥasidic schools as
“far more than a literary foray into a text; . . . they were pretexts
for passing along values, tools for deflecting heresies, and . . . means
for helping give substance to what it means to be a Jew in the world
they inhabited.”
This is the kind of definition that is calculated to offend liberal
sensibilities: how can education, which is all about expanding
boundaries, be about directing children towards a particular way of
life? But this is what education has always been. The first known
advocate of compulsory schooling, Plato, certainly did not think it was
about imparting career skills. To him it was about developing the raw
material of the human mind so that it became fit for citizenship in the
perfected Greek polis. The spread of education in the Western
world following the collapse of the Roman empire was everywhere
connected with spreading and promoting Christianity. It took off
following the Reformation, when reading the Bible, and hence literacy,
was elevated to a basic religious duty of the ordinary believer. In the
age of nationalism, education systems were designed to inculcate
national identity and culture in what had previously been loosely bound,
linguistically and culturally diverse areas.
Superficially, it looks like the liberal ideal of education as a way
of promoting choice and individual autonomy is an exception to this
principle. But this is only because choice and individual autonomy are
the core cultural features of modern liberal society. No less than any
other, the American public-school system has as its purpose the
absorption of young human beings into a particular, historically
contingent cultural and socioeconomic system. The endless controversies
about American education are really controversies about what it means to
be a good American. And so, the generic purpose of the tens of
thousands of hours spent learning things that not one person in a
hundred will ever use in pursuit of gainful employment is the same:
cultivating the right type of American.
The extent to which academic education in the 21st-century liberal
state can deliver on its own objective of social mobility is dubious. As
the political philosopher Rita Koganzon powerfully puts it, liberalism
“has valorized a kind of education that only a small elite can well
afford—not simply financially but more important, psychically—because it
is designed to weaken, in the name of autonomy, the sorts of
commitments—to family, religion, and place—that anchor life for the vast
majority of citizens.” Every single American can and should, under the
liberal theory of education, grow up to be a highly skilled
professional, untethered from parochial commitments and loyalties, while
imported helots do all the grunt work. But it doesn’t quite work out
that way in practice. The ḥasidic education system, by contrast, is
markedly successful in achieving its goal of cultivating and retaining
Ḥasidim. Ḥasidic Judaism today is a postmodern movement that has
selected and adapted elements of East European Judaism to create a model
that can withstand the forces that have—generally without direct
coercion—ravaged every pre-modern form of social organization, the Amish
excluded. And the lynchpin of that ḥasidic success is its school
system.
What the dispute about ḥasidic
yeshivas is really about, then, is something much more critical than
instruction in secular studies. It’s about whether the liberal state is
willing to let a countercultural social movement that bends the rules of
the liberal order grow up in its midst. From the perspective of the
state, and those loyal to it, there are reasonable grounds to prevent
that. What is not reasonable, however, is the sort of liberal
triumphalism that imagines that, under the pretext of implementing minor
or neutral reforms, Ḥasidim will simply be intimidated into dismantling
their own social order. Those among YAFFED’s supporters who understand
what is at stake and want to disable the ḥasidic community’s ability to
ensure generational continuity should do them the credit of not
imagining it will be so easy.
In the meantime, those who have the more modest goal of promoting
better secular studies in the ḥasidic education system would be well
advised to return to first principles and remember the distinction
between education—the molding of an individual—and instruction—the
imparting of specific skills. If they wish to get the majority of
ḥasidic parents on board, then their most urgent priority is to
demonstrate how specific forms of instruction can be introduced into ḥasidic schools without imperiling its overall educational purpose.
In my own experience as a headmaster trying to do exactly this, I have
found the task both easier and harder than you might think. Many
seemingly impossible obstacles can be overcome when your goals are clear
and defined, and many seemingly innocuous reforms actually have a
destabilizing effect that ripples throughout the whole system.
Many features of a ḥasidic school seem pointless or bizarre to those
who have not thought deeply about how they fit together, but it is
precisely for that reason that reformers—assuming they want to
succeed—must tread carefully. As G.K. Chesterton warned in his famous
fence parable, you cannot fix what you do not first understand.
The
instinctive attitude of ordinary ḥasidic parents who would like better,
more engaging, and successful secular studies for their sons, but who
fear any tampering with the existing system, is wholly reasonable.
Improving standards of secular education can be done only by those who
have demonstrated their ability to tinker with the edifice of hasidic
education without bringing the walls tumbling down. As for those who want
those walls to fall so that poor, oppressed ḥasidic children can taste
the pleasure of liberal autonomy—well, as we say in Yiddish, zol zayn mit mazel.
https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/politics-current-affairs/2021/10/new-york-state-vs-the-yeshivas/?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=campaign&_kx=ayiklDSRLg4Hn-hHeSePGvfrcdXwGgISugwuAr3enVacORpjmVuv3tYH_4O1edfO.L87CGh
