Some Thoughts on Charedi Moral Authority and Technology...

A friend forwarded me this commercial a few months ago. After viewing it for the first time, I sat dumbfounded and open-mouthed for about 90 seconds. Was I supposed to be offended? Was I supposed to laugh? Should I write a letter to someone protesting this, a commercial whose entire gimmick revolves around people who look like me protesting?

For the next several days this advertisement haunted me. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Now to shift gears. When I was learning in Israel I was an outsider with a party line. I was an American Yeshiva bochur supporting the charedi camp, yet not fully integrated into the complex web of politics/religion/power that is yiddishkeit in the medina. After a few months, I recognized that the clashes between religious and non-religious were not isolated events, but rather symptoms of a constant psychological tension churning just beneath the surface of “Israeli” society.

Because I was firmly in one of the categories (“charedi”) my objectivity was severely limited. Nevertheless, I wanted to understand the pathology of the conflict. If I understood the tensions, the fears of both sides, then perhaps I could use this understanding as a tool for kiruv. However, it was almost impossible to have an open discussion with anyone about the conflict. Both sides have deep issues with each other, yet they deal with the problems via a veil of intractable silence. It is like two brothers with long unsettled grudges who must now share a flat. They avoid the tough issues, dancing around them as a matter of practicality, until they can keep silent no longer. Then temperatures rise and things boil over. A few days later, they are back to status quo without having resolved anything.

In 2003 Noah Efron, a professor at Bar Ilan, published his book Real Jews. Secular academics are not usually the authors to whom I gravitate, but this book caught my interest. Real Jews is a pretty even-handed and frank (if not wholly unnerving) exploration of chareidi/chilloni tensions in Eretz Yisroel. What emerges from his account is much like my experience: the religious and secular worlds are separate universes wholly out of touch. However, each group believes that its understanding of the other is correct and resents the other based upon that belief.

Efron traces the current dynamic to some terrific political miscalculations in the early days of the medina. Assuming that the orthodox Jewish population would eventually dwindle and disappear, the early Zionist leaders granted charedim powers and concessions to garner their support in the creation of an essentially secular state. However, we haven’t disappeared. Over the past 6 decades, as we have grown, our relationship with secular Israeli society has become exceptionally convoluted. The result is a pathology of constant identity crisis/paranoia for both secular and religious Jews. This crisis is smeared across questions of national identity, religion, diet (kashrus), businesses (closed on Shabbos), and public transportation (Shabbos, separate seating on buses for men and women, etc).

Efron also addresses the secular perception of the charedi world as medieval, backward, and sinister. Although he touches upon it, I would have liked to have seen more about how the non-religious perceive charedi attitudes toward technology and scientific progress. Internally, we know that we are not technophobes. Nobody in the frum velt would assign himself such a label. We merely advocate responsible use of technology. Unfortunately, the rhetoric we employ is often misleading. I remember a shmuz from Yeshiva when one of my rebbeim spent 45 minutes blasting the microchip as a tool of the yetzer hora. All of the evils of today’s youth, he said, can be traced to electronics which have “distracted and drawn them away from the derech ho-emes.” What do all of these inventions have in common? The “maykro-tzip” which was “invented by atheists, by baboons in the shape of men who are devoid of wisdom and G-dliness.” He concluded that people should avoid their evil handiwork at all costs. As I left the shiur, I made a point of asking this Rabbi how he had been feeling since his bypass operation and pace-maker installation. He responded “it is k’mo nes [like a miracle].”

This point now takes us back to the commercial. As I said, I couldn’t get it out of my head and finally realized why: it is simply brilliant advertising. Whoever created this ad has put their finger right on the nerve of… well… something.

For the past several years we have seen a “banning trend.” Banned cell phones, banned internet, banned computers, banned PDA’s, etc. Recently, a colleague in my community announced in his shabbos drosha that blogs were assur and banned. What emerges from these bans is an aura of technophobia. Regardless of whether or not we, the religious, are technophobes, such is the perception. And, as such, we are reinforcing one of the stereotypes which alienate us from the non-religious: that of the medieval, superstitious, backward shtetl dweller. In many ways, publicly banning new technologies does as much for our image in the eyes of the chillonim as would us explaining away electricity as magic or sorcery.

Now, for those of you who like to post comments without reading carefully or investing much critical thought, note this: I don’t disagree with most of these bans. My concern is that we have publicly over-invested our moral authority in issues that only alienate and contort our mission and ideals in the eyes of the non-religious. As a consequence, we are suffering from a sort of “moral inflation” to the point where proclamations of right and wrong from the religious Jewish world carry zero value amongst the non-religious. Perhaps we need to place our public zeal behind issues which carry more universal Jewish relevance: caring for our children, combating domestic violence, drug abuse issues, etc. In these areas we can be mekarev the non-religious. In these areas we can agree with them and show them the positive value that our hashkofos and way of life have to offer. Perhaps we should move away from negatively asserting our identity and instead focus on creating a positive identity. Jews are compared to letters in the sefer Torah. Yet, by defining our identity via negation it is as if we have poured ink onto klaf and are now scratching away the surrounding ink to create our letters. However, a sefer Torah written in this manner is posul on account of chok tochos. The letters must be written in a positive fashion to be kosher.

The commercial successfully taps into and provides a release for secular frustration with many of the issues describe by Efron. It also fires an arrow into perceived charedi technophobia. To the non-religious, our perceived opposition to technological innovation (or innovation as a whole) has become a routine, a song-and-dance. Hafganos have become choreographed, costumed displays of righteous fervor and histrionic sobbing (see the commercial at 35 seconds in) over issues which the secular public perceives as trivial. In deconstructing this video, we also see that there is a suspicion of insincerity. The zeal of the charedim is viewed as a front which may hide or compensate for something else in a sexually repressed culture (hence the use of the Village People’s YMCA as the soundtrack). All of these perceptions and paranoias are part and parcel of the non-religious fear of the charedi world.

And here, someone has tapped into these demons which lie beneath the surface and channeled that energy into selling HD-TV. Brilliant advertising.

The real punchline of all of this was the charedi reaction: protest. In fact, so much protest that the commercial was eventually pulled. So, we protested a commercial criticizing our protesting. What is more, as an Israeli non-religious neighbor pointed out, secular Jews will ask: “How do charedim know about this commercial?” They will assume that someone in our world saw it on television. This assumption will only strengthen the suspicion of insincerity and hypocrisy. Perhaps righteous indignation was not the best instant response.

Just to reiterate: I don’t disagree with most of the bans or protests. Should TV in the home be opposed? Yes! Should we make people aware of the dangers of the internet? Yes! Should these issues be those in which we invest the bulk of our hislahavus and zeal? Should we define our Judaism in terms of protest and negation rather than positive assertions? Perhaps not.