‘Talmudolatry’ – the root of today’s Haredi crisis?

Against the backdrop of an ongoing and increasingly violent war of terror being waged by the Haredi community against the State and the citizens of Israel, a critical question is not being asked.

Haredim argue that they are the avatars of Torah without which, and without whom, Israel – an Israel whose very legitimacy they reject – could not exist. In their latest effort to engrave into stone their exemption from military service and entitlement to endless funding at taxpayer expense, they are pushing for a constitutional law that would declare Torah study on a par with combat service in terms of importance to the State; once again, a state whose legitimacy they fundamentally reject in both word and deed.

So, the big, unasked question is, how come Israel’s other Torah community is being ignored? Why are the thousands of religious Zionist Torah scholars never mentioned in any discussion of the role of Torah in the sustainability of the State? How dare the Haredim show only contempt for Torah scholars in over 100 yeshivot across Israel who also serve in the IDF and give their lives for the country?

Worse yet, why is a cynical, self-serving heathen like Bibi Netanyahu so obeisant to Haredi society that he, with a straight face, can declare the centrality of their Torah studies to the national interest without ONCE mentioning the fact that there is a whole other Torah-centric society that is tragically overrepresented among the ranks of IDF war casualties?

I recall, very early in the war in Gaza, the death of an IDF reserve officer – a full-time Torah scholar in civilian life and the father of six children. Not only was he both learned and a fighter, but he was also exempted from service on account of the number of children he had. And yet, he insisted on showing up for active duty.

This hero was hardly unique. Over the course of the next three years there were many, too many, who followed him into Israel’s military cemeteries.

Yet, the Haredi world, and a Bibi in bed with rogues and ex-cons like Yitzchok Goldknopf and Aryeh Deri, act as if they don’t know of the existence of this other Torah society; the salt of the earth religious Zionists who combine religious fervor and combat, who support their families and support the State.

According to the Times of Israel, religious Zionists account for roughly 60% of Israeli soldiers killed in action, despite making up only 10% to 15% of the general population.

But their Torah is ridiculed by the howling Haredi mobs, and ignored by Bibi and his legislative henchmen like Bismuth, Smotrich and Ben Gvir.

I would like to suggest that part of the blame falls squarely on the unwitting shoulders of the least likely party – the very leaders of the religious Zionist Torah world themselves. And here’s how, and here’s why.

Some months ago, the Orthodox Union, America’s representative organization of modern Orthodox (i.e. religious Zionist) congregations, invited a delegation of Israel’s Religious Zionist rabbinic leaders to visit the United States. The OU had been concerned about an increasing alienation between America’s modern Orthodox communities and their Israeli counterparts.

This was certainly an excellent and worthy initiative. However, instead of bringing with them an unabashed message of chizzuk (encouragement) and an example of leadership, these Israeli ZIONIST rabbis made it their business to first visit and pay their respects to the most vicious Israel bashers in the American Jewish community – the roshei yeshiva of Lakewood and Baltimore, the two flagship Haredi yeshivas in the United States.

Anyone who is tuned in to these institutions, and the men who are at their helms, knows how deep their loathing for Israel is. In their Yiddish perorations (most of their talks are given in Yiddish despite their poor mastery of that language), they rail against everything that Israel does and stands for with a vicious vocabulary bordering on verbal pornography.

By paying their respects to these no-holds-barred haters of Israel, the Zionist roshei yeshiva were embarrassing themselves and, by extension, debasing their entire community and, indeed, every religious IDF casualty. Moreover, they were feeding into the Haredi frenzy of contempt for Zionist Torah scholarship.

Were these men ignorant? Were they stupid? The answer is neither. What they were, and what they had in common with the hosts who had never invited them, was an unhealthy, elitist obsession with Talmud that superseded any other concerns and priorities. For them, by definition, anyone who spends their days and nights obsessing over a Gemara (Talmud) is – in this key aspect – one of them.

And therein lies the problem. Because religiously observant Jewry – their rabbinic leaders at least – has been toxified by Talmud to the point of dependency and worship. They are not Torah Jews. They are Talmud Jews, addicted to the study of Talmud to the exclusion of, and indifference to, any other aspect of Torah … including the Torah itself. And they measure stature – both on a lay and leadership level – by the extent to which one’s Yiddishkeit is defined by their Talmudism.

Already in the mid-19th century, Rabbi Israel Salanter (born Zev Wolf Lipkin 1809-1883) recognized the arrogance, elitism, verbal violence and utter absence of spirituality that resulted from a monomaniacal emphasis on Talmud study. Accordingly, he introduced the Mussar movement, which attempted to mitigate the character flaws that were endemic among Talmud scholars.

Salanter’s Mussar movement garnered some initial success in prompting Lithuanian Talmudists toward self-reflection and more refined interpersonal behavior both toward each other and toward the world at large.

Clearly, this is no longer the case, and hasn’t been for a long time. The wholesale abandonment of true mussar and the resurfacing of Talmudic arrogance and thuggery has been fueled largely by the new, post Holocaust ethos of full-time, lifelong Talmud. A critical mass of such coddled and indulged men eventually snowballed into the arrogant, elitist, violent reality we are experiencing today.

Their violence is not directed only toward the outside world. Even amongst themselves, contempt and hatred are commonplace. The finest example is the flagship Haredi yeshiva Ponovezh in Bnei Brak. In Ponovezh today there are two antagonistic groups of students, each with their own preferred roshei yeshiva. These two groups refer to themselves as Sonim (haters) and Mehablim (terrorists). They behave toward each other accordingly. This barbarism manifests itself in everything from fisticuffs and the throwing of furniture to the attempt by one faction to thwart the interment of an opposing rosh yeshiva in the yeshiva’s cemetery plot. Hence, if they act this way among themselves, we can hardly expect anything better from them regarding the greater society.

It is interesting that the roots of Talmud were in the Babylonian exile. Even after the return to Zion from the first exile, a majority of Jews chose to remain in Babylonia. Then, like now, the “winners” in Jewish society preferred the luxuries of diaspora life and never returned to the Land.

Under such circumstances, a new Judaism had to be combobulated – one that would replace the cultic ritual in the Temple with an academic Judaism, a theoretical Judaism, a legalistic Judaism that would be sustainable in self-imposed exile.

Suddenly kohanim and leviim, priests and Levites, were an anachronism. They now served no useful purpose. What was called for was a new class of religious monitors called rabbis, self-selected men who were eager to step into roles that often combined religious leadership with an unabashed appetite for material acquisition and comfort.

Following the destruction of the Second Temple, some 500 years later, the Talmudic ethos rapidly overtook Jewish life even in the Land of Israel, turbocharging the halakhic juggernaut that would redefine Jewish life to conform with evolving exilic reality.

Although we should hardly sing the praises of those original, willfully exiled Babylonian masters, yet there is much to be said for the Talmudic takeover of Jewish life subsequent to the fall of Jerusalem. Rabbinic Judaism has clearly helped sustain our people in exile for 2,000 years. At the same time we can speculate regarding what would have happened otherwise. Perhaps rabbinic Judaism made life in the galut too sustainable. Without it, a much earlier return from exile, and a much earlier re-establishment of the Jewish homeland might well have occurred.

Interestingly, and significantly, the Talmudic-halakhic process was meant to be organic. “Halakhah” literally implies a legalistic ambulation that would perennially adjust to evolving and emerging diasporic challenges and situations. Talmud was orally transmitted, thereby allowing for, and enabling, constant evolution and fine-tuning. It was never meant to be a canon, and assuredly never meant to replace the Torah itself.

However, by 650 CE the Talmud had become a closed book. It was no longer an oral record of earlier exegetical discussions, debates and rulings. It was now not only a canon, but THE canon, thereby effectively ending seven centuries of creativity, invention, imagination, brilliance, foolishness, humor, praise, denigration, legend. It had become the holy of holies itself, each word as sacrosanct, and as subject to exegesis, as the Ten Commandments.

The rest is history. The Talmudic canon – except among certain dissenting and ultimately sidelined sects – came to define diaspora Judaism. And its study became the benchmark for who mattered and who did not.

It was Talmudic elitism, hauteur and self-segregation which, in the 18th Century, triggered the birth of Hassidism, which sought to value and embrace every Jew, and minimize the political brutality of the Talmudic class. This resulted in a malevolent schism between those European Jews who clung to the old Talmudic ruling class and those who aligned themselves with Hasidic masters.

By the mid-19th century, especially in Lithuania, Talmud had become the drug of choice for non-Hasidic religious young men, and subsequently among many Hasidim as well, and today – bafflingly – even among Mizrahi Jews. Indeed, this obsession snowballed into the mass, global Talmudolatry and halakhic overkill that effectively grips and defines contemporary observant Jewish life, and who is qualified to lead it.

And yet Talmud, as effective as it was in controlling that part of the Jewish community which retained an interest in being meaningfully Jewish, was ALWAYS a Diaspora tool. It was never intended, nor would it have been possible to use it, as the blueprint for sustainable life in a renewed Jewish commonwealth.

Hence, while it remains a treasure of the Jewish people, Talmud, like kabbalah, can hardly serve as a decisive factor in how life in modern Israel can be shaped. Slavish adherence to it is both a refusal to recognize reality and, by default, a nostalgia for a diaspora past that is antithetical to a vibrant, robust, hyper-achieving Jewish society.

It is no coincidence that so many of the Haredi yeshivas in Israel are named after long-gone yeshivas in Europe. Their eyes are trained on the fiction of a halcyon past, and their minions are obedient exclusively to purveyors of a script that is perforce oblivious, and downright hostile, to the existence and needs of a new Jewish reality. Yet they have zero compunctions about taking advantage of everything our decidedly non-Talmudic society has to offer.

It is ironic that the two most vitriolically outspoken Haredi sages, Dov Lando and Hillel Hirsch, are the heads of the Slabodka Yeshiva in Bnei Brak. The founder of the original Slabodka Yeshiva, Rabbi Noson Tzvi Finkel (1849-1927) was one of the outstanding leaders of the Mussar movement; a man who advocated civility, humility, refinement and courtesy, and who certainly tolerated, if not actually advocated for, both Zionism and for greater worldliness among his students. Rabbi Finkel is surely turning in his grave as his self-anointed academic heirs wreak havoc in Israel.

Perhaps it is understandable that Zionist roshei yeshiva visiting America would pay their respects to haters in Lakewood, Brooklyn and Baltimore. Because, despite their Zionism, they, too, remain mired in Talmudolatry and cannot see their way to recognizing that this elitist and arrogant subservience to an academic pursuit long in need of reconsideration is no longer the way.

Until such time as the spiritual leaders of religious Zionism come to terms with the harmful side effects of riding the Talmudic monorail, they will continue to suffer from an inferiority complex that has them constantly looking behind their right shoulders and hoping for an approval from the Haredi rabbis that will never come. Their obsession with Talmud blinds them to the core evil that radiates from the Haredi nerve centers in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem and, of course, Lakewood and Baltimore. Hence, both their community, and all of us who care about our country, are put at a disadvantage.