The Hareidim: A Defence. By AHARON ROSE (1)

[malenkiyscot]

From here (requires registration)

The Haredim will be the first to admit that their existence today is little short of miraculous. For centuries, the traditional Jewish way of life suffered one setback after another, each more perilous than the last. First came the Emancipation, which threw open the doors of modern culture to Eastern European Jews; after generations in the confines of ghetto and shtetl, where the Jewish religion was preserved in its traditional forms, many Jews began the journey toward secularism. So, too, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did the movement known as the Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment, encourage secular studies and scientific methods to approach the Jewish tradition, leading an even larger number of religious Jews to withdraw from the classical way of life.

Traditional Jewish society was still further challenged by successive waves of emigration to the United States and Western Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To survive economically in a Christian culture, many immigrants abandoned Jewish practice. But it was by far the Holocaust, which annihilated entire Jewish communities and a generation of sages, that brought traditional Judaism to its knees. Within a decade, the once-vibrant culture of Judaism centered on the Tora and its laws-a culture of great spiritual richness and intellectual brilliance-was almost entirely wiped out, and the millennia-old chain of Jewish wisdom and tradition nearly came to an end. When the State of Israel was established just a few years later, many survivors of the destruction saw it as the ultimate blow: An end to the Diaspora, they believed, should come not at the hands of secular Zionists, but only at those of the messiah. Here, then, was the greatest evidence to date of their leaders’ failure to foresee the future, and their own failure to understand Jewish history. To them, modern Zionism spelled the end of Jewish life as they knew it.

Yet, like so many times in the past, traditional Judaism’s death knells were premature. Six decades after the death camps and the ascendance of secular Zionism, the Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, community-the last vestige of prewar traditional Jewish society-is experiencing a revival of incomparable scope. With one of the highest birth rates in the Western world, Haredi communities both in Israel and abroad boast numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and enrollment in Haredi yeshivot, or centers of learning, is at higher levels than ever. Perhaps none are more surprised by this reversal of fortunes than the Haredim themselves: The late Rabbi Shalom Noah Brozofsky, the Slonimer Rebbe, explained in 1987 on the yahrtzeit of the previous Slonimer Rebbe, Rabbi Avraham Weinberg, who had perished in the Holocaust:

We are seeing with our own eyes the most amazing phenomenon of our generation: Suddenly, a generation has arisen and prospered, a generation of Tora and meticulous attention to the commandments. The houses of learning blossom again, and the halls of the Hasidim thrive in all their glory…. And does this not raise the question-who brought all this about? Who has the power to bring forth such a generation… and from what power did such a generation grow? It has no natural explanation, of course, other than God himself, the one and only God.¹

Whether or not we see in today’s Haredi renaissance the hand of God, it is nonetheless striking to consider the forces that have kept the various Haredi communities, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, alive. In light of its past of persecution and destruction, and of the pressures it faces today from an increasingly invasive secular culture, the evidence of the Haredi world’s vitality-growing numbers of hozrim bitshuva, or non-observant Jews who adopt the Orthodox way of life; the creation of Shas, an Israeli political party intended to further the interests of Sephardic Haredim; and the gradual movement of the modern-Orthodox and religious-Zionist communities towards greater religious stringency and an increasing similarity to Haredi norms-is genuinely remarkable.

For much of the Israeli public, however, these developments are greeted with a measure of anxiety. Rightly or wrongly, they are viewed as a threat to the authority of the secular Zionist culture that has dominated Israeli society since the founding of the state. And it is this anxiety-often swelling into hostility-that is reflected in the majority of academic works that purport to examine the Haredi community today. These works form the basis for much of the secular world’s understanding of the Haredim, yet they are distinctly at odds with Haredi society’s perception of itself.

As someone who was raised in the world of Hasidic yeshivot, yet now walks the halls of Israel’s universities, it is my hope that my acquaintance with both realms will enable me to shed light on the distorted portrayal of the Haredim in academic literature. And, while it is not necessarily my purpose, in the course of this essay I might just convince some of my readers of the value-indeed, even the beauty-of many aspects of one of Judaism’s most reviled, yet least understood, communities.

 

On one point, at least, there is agreement between those who study Haredi society and the Haredim themselves: That what primarily sets this Jewish movement apart from others is its total rejection of modern values, norms, and forms of inquiry. Haredi Judaism, regardless of its particular faction, objects to Jews entering the cultural fray of the modern West, studying in its institutions, revering its leaders, fighting in its wars, or partaking of its cultural bounty. This rejection must be understood in two ways. First, Haredi Jews aspire to be different from the surrounding culture, whose values, behaviors, and worldviews conflict with their own. Second, they seek to remain loyal to the traditional Jewish identity in Eastern Europe that preceded the Emancipation. It is only by means of this identity, the Haredim believe, and the lifestyle through which it finds expression, that the Jew can fulfill his obligation to live a life in accordance with God’s will.

Yet while the Haredim trace the roots of their contemporary identity to the traditional form of Judaism practiced by their forebears, academics have taken an altogether different view. Most scholars of the Haredim regard today’s Haredi Jew as an essentially new phenomenon, one that evolved over the last two centuries as a reaction against the Haskala and the integration of Jews into Western society. For proof, they point to a series of beliefs and practices adopted by today’s Haredim that developed, or became decidedly more pronounced, over the course of the past century. They then conclude that these principles and behaviors have had the unintended effect of changing the very way of life they sought to preserve, and leading inadvertently to the creation of an entirely new community.²

The first scholar to assert that today’s Haredim are in truth a new phenomenon was Jacob Katz, the foremost historian on the Orthodox communities of Eastern Europe.³ Katz distinguished between the “tradition-bound” society which received traditions and viewed them as self-evident, and the Haredi community, which consciously chooses the traditional way of life, and as such is merely “traditionalist.”⁴ In this way, claims Katz, the Haredim cannot claim to be defenders of the “pure Judaism of old.”⁵ In time, this view became the dominant one in the field. Thus, for example, the historian Michael K. Silber writes that Orthodoxy “is in fact not an unchanged and unchanging remnant of pre-modern traditional Jewish society, but as much a child of modernity and change as any of its ‘modern’ rivals.”⁶ Similarly, Israel Bartal of the Hebrew University explains that “The two major responses of the Ashkenazi Diaspora to the encounter with modernity were the Haskala movement and Orthodoxy. Both flourished in Central Europe, inexorably intertwined.”⁷

Having declared Orthodoxy a relatively new phenomenon, Katz and his students attempted to show that in the struggle with modernity, the overriding need to defend traditional values often forced the Orthodox, and especially the Haredim, to invent new doctrines and principles and then to portray their violation as heresy. Yet these principles, these scholars insist, were often of marginal value in the Jewish tradition. A prime example is the principle of daat tora, which grants great rabbis the authority to issue rulings on matters not directly concerned with Jewish law-such as, for instance, for whom to vote in an election.⁸ This claim-that certain doctrines are inventions whose aim is to augment rabbinic authority in response to modern attempts to curtail it-is the common thread running through the articles that appear in the anthology Between Authority and Autonomy in Jewish Tradition, published in 1997 and edited by Ze’ev Safrai and Avi Saguy.⁹ Indeed, the main disagreement among the contributors to this anthology concerns when and where the daat tora innovation appeared. Katz, for example, traces it to conflicts between Orthodox and Reform Jews in Hungary during the 1860s,¹⁰ whereas Judaic scholar Lawrence Kaplan argues that it first cropped up among Lithuanian groups in Israel after the Holocaust.¹¹

Yet this view, while widely accepted in academic circles, is highly problematic. Often allowing ideology to skew their reading of the data, some researchers are inclined to ignore the central status of the rabbi in traditional society, and instead paint a grossly misleading picture of his function. If these researchers are to be believed, the traditional rabbi was concerned mainly with checking cows’ lungs and other ritual matters; only occasionally did he involve himself in leading the community. Yet as scholars such as Haym Soloveitchik and Benjamin Brown have argued, this is far from the whole truth. Brown is particularly decisive in his rejection of the opinion current among his colleagues, insisting that the academic preoccupation with the halachic-practical aspect of daat tora completely ignores its theological dimension, which is far older and is bound up in the notion of dekula ba (“everything is in it”). This phrase, taken from the maxim of Ben Bag-Bag in the Mishna, “Turn its pages and turn them again, for everything is in it,”¹² was over time incorporated into the classic talmudic and midrashic literature, according to which God concealed in the Tora light (or ganuz) by which one can see “from one end of the universe to the other.”¹³ According to this tradition, the Tora encapsulates all knowledge, and therefore holds the answers to all questions. True, it may be the case that as a vehicle for the expansion of rabbinic authority, it is a new thing. Yet it is at the same time an effort to preserve and develop a classical belief in the infinite reach of the Tora’s wisdom, and as such, it cannot be seen as an invention out of whole cloth. As Brown explains:

Daat tora is one of the phenomena used to demonstrate the theory of ‘Orthodoxy as a reaction’ that originated with Professor Jacob Katz. This theory, in its various applications, frequently presents the gaping divide between traditionalist, pre-modern society and an Orthodox society ‘tradition-bound’ (as Katz describes it), which is a kind of ‘mutation of the former’ (in the words of Moshe Samet).… It does sometimes appear that the description of the gap is too deep and too dramatic. The new tiers that Orthodoxy is building frequently rest on sources that are deeply rooted in tradition and the addition of these tiers on top of the old floors only testifies to the dynamism and fertility of a society that is sometimes regarded as stagnant and lacking vitality.¹⁴

The doctrine of daat tora is but one example of an aspect of Haredi life cited in academic research as pure innovation in response to modernity.¹⁵ Similar arguments have also been made with regard to the Haredi community in Israel. Menachem Friedman, one of the leading researchers into Haredi life and a former student of Katz, attributes the makeup of today’s Israeli Haredim to their ability to exploit the resources of the welfare state toward the creation of a “community of learners” in which it is customary to engage in full-time yeshiva study before marriage, as well as for several years thereafter. He points to the figure of Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, known as the Hazon Ish, the leader of the Haredi community in Israel in the early years of the state, as the person most responsible for the development of the contemporary idea of Tora study as the fulfillment of religious perfection. This idea has served to alienate the Haredi community even further from Israel’s secular public. It is clear, for example, how the ethos of the community of learners would result in significant educational gaps between Haredi youth, who study only in yeshivot and lack any experience with secular education, and non-Haredi youth. So, too, is it clear how these gaps would then oblige the Haredim to spend their entire lives in the confines of a community of learners, as their chances of success outside this community are slim. When military exemptions on account of full-time yeshiva study are then added to the mix, the result is even less contact between the Haredi and non-Haredi worlds, and more opportunities for misunderstanding and misconceptions between the two groups.¹⁶

The historian Joseph Dan also sees in the practice of lifelong yeshiva study a phenomenon unlike anything else in Jewish history. He points to a number of additional characteristics that differentiate today’s Haredi society from traditional Judaism: Reliance on government transfer payments as opposed to charitable contributions; clannish discrimination; aggressive public behavior; and strict dress codes, among others. In light of these new characteristics, Dan argues, there are no grounds for “the belief of the Haredim that the community they established in Israel is one link in a continuous chain of the history of the Jewish community throughout the generations.” Today’s Israeli Haredi, he concludes, is “a unique Israeli phenomenon that has no equal in the entire history of the Jews in the scores of countries of their dispersal.”¹⁷

This bold statement, however, rests on shaky foundations. Like many historians, Dan does not seem aware that in many cases, the innovations of the Haredi world are the result of a kind of operational flexibility aimed at preserving the same rigid theological principles that continue to guide them as they did generations of Jews in the past. The Haredim would be the first to admit, for instance, that the universal duty to study in a yeshiva derives from the distinctly modern need to rebuild the world of Tora that perished in the Holocaust. Yet they will also insist that one cannot ascribe the same degree of importance to this duty as to the founding principles of Haredi belief: Strict adherence to halacha and the mitzvot; the acceptance of rabbinic authority; and the rejection of fashionable values out of loyalty to the belief in Tora as divine revelation. It is these principles that express the Haredim’s profound and uncompromising commitment to tradition, and not the fact of their full-time study in yeshiva. The latter, rather, is an effort to uphold the former under extreme historical conditions. Moreover, it is misleading to ascribe any profound meaning to displays of aggressive public behavior and clannish discrimination in the Haredi world today. These are not values or beliefs, and to the extent that they actually take place, they are circumstantial rather than a fixed or intrinsic component of the Haredi identity. (On Dan’s complaint concerning the central place that dress occupies in the Haredi community, it can only be remarked that in a culture in which nudity is used to a rapidly increasing degree to sell everything from cars to ice cream, it is perhaps understandable that a minority community, trying to defend itself with limited resources, overreacts to a degree in its notions of modest dress.)

Now, no one disputes that in the struggle to preserve tradition, the Haredi community has employed a variety of methods, some of which are clearly innovative. These include, for example, creating Haredi political parties and publishing Haredi newspapers. Yet those scholars inclined to consider almost every aspect of the Orthodox lifestyle a reaction to modernity, and not an authentic expression of loyalty to something that preceded it, frequently ignore the very real element of continuity-that is, the vast and profound common ground between today’s Haredi way of life and the tradition it seeks to preserve.¹⁸ This continuity is expressed primarily in the sphere of principles and values, and less so in praxis.¹⁹ This, as we will see, is a pivotal distinction.

 

It is easy to see how the academic understanding of today’s Haredi society as a mere “reaction” to the threat posed by modern society has led many scholars to conclude that the same processes that enabled the Haredi community to gain strength will eventually lead to its decline. But these predictions, like the assumptions on which they are based, are flawed.

Menachem Friedman, for instance, believes that the Haredi community of learners has an umbilical link with the State of Israel.²⁰ By forcing even the most untalented of its students to devote themselves to full-time study, he explains, Haredi society has created a situation of economic dependency on the secular public: The community relies on the willingness of the Israeli taxpayer to fund its full-time study, and on the ability of the Israeli economy to absorb yeshiva graduates with few or no practical skills  into the workforce. As a result, writes Friedman, “the large natural increase [in the size of the community of learners] calls into question its future.”²¹ Indeed, the economic needs of this group are growing, and will, it stands to reason, eventually outpace Israeli society’s ability to fund it. Furthermore, yeshiva graduates seeking to enter the workforce will eventually face a lack of available positions. Already in 1991, Friedman concluded:

Is it possible for a community of learners to survive in the long term when it forces all its adults to study in yeshivot and to complete their studies over many years in kollels [post-marriage seminaries] while avoiding a general and professional education? Will the Haredi community not have to make a choice in the near future between those who will be accepted into its yeshivot and those who will be forced to integrate in one way or another into the socialization process customary in the Western world? When this happens, will Haredi society be able to maintain the same degree of supervision over its adults in order to ensure its continuity? Will this society be a Haredi society?²²

There is undoubtedly much merit to Friedman’s arguments, but his position relies too heavily on an economic-materialistic analysis of Haredi society, without even venturing a spiritual-conceptual one. It was this methodological slant, in fact, that led him to describe Haredi participation in the Israeli government coalition in 1977 as a step aimed solely at securing funding for its community of learners-a cause for which the Haredim were willing to pay the ultimate ideological price: Abandoning the principle of separation between Haredi and modern society.²³ Yet any argument that assumes that Haredi society’s success in ensuring continuity is absolutely conditional on its existence as a community of learners ignores the flourishing of Hasidic life in communities throughout the world. There are, for example, Hasidic communities in New York, London, and Antwerp, in which Haredim figure prominently in a wide range of professions, from selling electrical products to trading in diamonds. The success of these communities in preserving their identity demonstrates that the economic integration of Haredim into modern Israeli society does not necessarily spell the end of Haredi society, or even presage its radical alteration in any way. Research on professional training institutes for Haredim that opened in Israel over the course of the last decade provide further evidence of the resilience of this way of life: The identity of young Haredim and yeshiva students who study at these institutes has not, according to these studies, weakened in accordance with researchers’ expectations.²⁴

Nonetheless, despite the shortcomings of Friedman’s approach, there are many who share his view that the Haredi community will eventually succumb in the battle against modern culture. An example is the book The New Religious Jews (2000) by Yair Sheleg.²⁵ Sheleg purports to give his readers an up-to-date look at the process of Haredi Jews’ integration into Israeli life, what he calls “the Israelification of the religious community.”²⁶ According to Sheleg, the tremendous growth in the Haredi community has resulted in an increased self-confidence among its members, along with a kind of internal diversity. This combination, Sheleg explains, has caused serious cracks to form in the community’s ideological backbone. In a chapter entitled “The New Haredi: Changes in Haredi Society,” Sheleg enumerates the various indicators of what he sees as a new “openness” among Haredim as a result of the influence of the modern-secular world: Haredi “yuppies” who adopt modern dress and recreational pursuits; the independent Haredi media, which show an increasing degree of ideological flexibility; institutes for professional training that make it possible for Haredi students to join the workforce; an increased sympathy for Zionism, even at times expressed as extreme nationalism; and a lowering of the status of rabbinic sages. Here Sheleg quotes Eliezer Schweid of the Hebrew University, who claims that “it is impossible to escape from modernity. If Haredi society insists on turning its back on the higher elements of the modern world, it will end up connecting with its lower elements.”²⁷

Similarly the anthropologist Tamar Elor, who researched trends in leisure and consumerism among the Haredim, concluded that the Haredi community is slowly succumbing to that very force-Western consumer culture-that it once considered a no-less-insidious threat than the Haskala, the Holocaust, and Zionism.²⁸ Watching Haredi families strolling in shopping malls, she writes: “This is it, this is the end, they have joined everyone else… a Hasidic couple drinking cappuccino? Haredim sitting on a platform for all to see, relishing fettucini Alfredo?”²⁹

Like Sheleg, Elor points to displays of “hedonism” among Haredim as evidence of an overall trend of disintegrating values. Yet what both Sheleg and Elor miss is the fundamental difference between the way ideals are perceived by a traditional-conservative society and the way they are understood by a modern-liberal one. Haredi values-from the requirement to contemplate the Tora day and night to the prohibition on gossip-cannot, by their very nature, be upheld fully, at least by most people. Nonetheless, Haredim choose to try to adhere to these strict demands (believing, as they do, that they emanate from heaven) rather than content themselves with the more lenient human norms that are insufficient to urge a man towards perfection. The traditional society, as a result, has room for those human weaknesses that lead to inconsistency and hypocrisy-so long as these do not become in themselves an ideal toward which one aspires. The Hazon Ish explained this approach in what became known as “the extremist epistle”:

In the same way as simplicity and greatness are different, so too are extremism and greatness. Extremism is the perfecting of the subject. Whoever countenances mediocrity and despises extremism belongs with the fabricators, with the dimwitted. If there is no extremism-there is no perfection, and if there is no perfection-there is no beginning…. The mediocrity that has a right to exist is the mediocrity of those who love extremism and aspire to it as their heart’s desire, and educate their offspring to the heights of extremism. But how pitiful is noisy mediocrity’s scorn of extremism.³⁰

This striving for the absolute is perhaps the key factor that distinguishes Haredi Jews from modern secular society, which adapts its principles to man’s capabilities. Thus Sheleg is mistaken in seeing the penetration of modern forms of leisure into Haredi society as evidence of the diminishing status of the rabbis, who vehemently oppose these trends.³¹ Rather, the strength of daat tora lies in the fact that from the outset it is nearly impossible to achieve.

For the same reason, the analysis offered by Sheleg and Elor fails to recognize the crucial distinction in Haredi society between center and periphery, between what is understood by the Haredim to be the core of their community and the numerous outer or fringe elements that have attached themselves to it in the last generation. Indeed, most of the evidence Sheleg evinces to show the “profound changes” in Haredi society, from the shababnikim (Haredi youth who remain officially enrolled in a yeshiva to maintain their army deferments, but are in truth wandering the streets) to purely recreational jaunts at shopping malls, in fact occurs primarily on the periphery of Haredi society. For this reason, Elor does not tell us what percentage of the Haredi population the mall-goers represent (in fact, a very small one), or their status in the Haredi community.³² It is this failure to distinguish between center and periphery that accounts for endless newspaper coverage of the new “openness” among the Haredi community, such as education for democracy and Haredi artists who paint nudes. A closer look will reveal, in most cases, that a connection to the mainstream Haredi community is ephemeral at best. The mere fact of someone identifying as Haredi does not make him in any way reflective of the Haredi community. Thus the fanfare that accompanied the purported success of Nahal Haredi, a special unit of the Israel Defense Forces designed for ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the eagerness to see it as an indicator of social change in the Haredi community, is a perfect case study in jumping to conclusions. Although I personally served in Nahal Haredi and would not dream of disparaging it, it is a fact that of the more than 1,000 men who have served in Nahal Haredi since its inception just over six years ago, no more than about 50 came from the core of the Haredi community. The majority, rather, came from a wide range of peripheral groups-semi-Haredi Zionists, followers of the Lubavitcher and Breslaver Hasidic groups, and hozrim bitshuva.

There is little value, therefore, in predicting the decline of Haredi society if such forecasts are based on the behavior of those who have never been central to that society’s vitality. On the contrary, the fact that such exceptional cases are nonetheless so eager to identify themselves as Haredim may itself be proof of the movement’s growing appeal. Indeed, researchers have repeatedly had to revise their doomsday prophecies in view of the Haredi community’s uncanny ability to survive and prosper. Friedman, for instance, postulated in 1988 that the exposure of the Haredi woman to modern culture, along with the pressure she faces to provide sole financial support for her family, would eventually force her to break from the old ways. She would, he wrote, inevitably internalize the values of modernization and import them into Haredi society.³³ This prediction is logical: Why, indeed, should the Haredi woman, who receives an education with more secular content than that of her husband (including English, mathematics, history, and geography) continue to sacrifice her own ambitions so that the men in her life may study Tora? Time, however, has proven Friedman wrong. Today, the insistence among Haredi women on marrying a ben tora, or full-time yeshiva student, is one of the primary factors motivating men to remain in yeshiva-otherwise, they fear, their prospects of marrying well are significantly diminished. Friedman revised his position eleven years later, admitting that “it is a fact that the women who graduate from the Beit Ya’akov [Haredi women’s] seminary have become the center of gravity of the community of learners.”³⁴ This time, Friedman took into account the spiritual elements driving the Haredi community:

Whereas in the past, the secular-modern world offered hope not only for a solution to the problem of poverty, but also for the construction of a better and more just society, now it no longer offers a meaningful life, warmth, and social involvement. Secular society does not help in times of need. On the other hand, Haredi society excels in its charitable enterprises, in the spirit of volunteering that pervades it, and the feeling of belonging of those who identify with its goals.³⁵

This is a crucial development in Friedman’s thought, and it reflects a possible awakening to the profound errors in the academic research: Friedman now acknowledges the importance of the “spirit of volunteering” and the “feeling of belonging” to understanding the ability of the Haredi community to resist the lure of modern culture. Indeed, when the spiritual elements of Haredi society are placed in their proper context, predictions of its wane seem entirely off the mark. We can only hope that both academic research and popular writing about the Haredim will, in the future, pay closer attention to those elements that simply cannot be understood with the limited tools of economics and demography. For it is those elements which contain the secret of the Haredi renaissance.

 

If we truly wish to understand the vitality of contemporary Haredi society, we must look at the way that society views itself and its specific role within Jewish history. Where the academic scholars have insisted on presenting Haredi society as a modern contrivance, the Haredim see themselves as indentured to a specific heritage, one that has a divine source. This, according to the Haredim, is the core value of their existence, and the reason they resist so fiercely the siren call of modernity.

Modern thinking, built on a belief in the inexorable progress of human civilization, insists on the superiority of the present over the past, and pins its hopes on a better future.³⁶ Haredim, because of their total devotion to tradition, cannot accept this notion of progress. As Eliezer Schweid writes, Haredi society is a “blatant and bold demonstration of the preference for the past over the present.”³⁷ The “past” that the Haredim prefer, however, is a very specific one: It is the time of the revelation on Mount Sinai, and the days of the biblical prophets and the Temple. As opposed to the idea of progress, the Haredim put forth an opposite idea, that of the yeridat hadorot (“descent of the generations”), in which every successive generation is further away from the original revelation, and thus the spiritual stature of the Jewish people only diminishes with time.³⁸ It follows that the lowly present must subject itself to the only remnants of that glorious past that remain with us today: The sacred texts, legal rulings, and traditions passed down by previous generations. Indeed, if the modern concept of progress has the effect of eroding the authority of parents and teachers, the “descent of the generations” has the opposite effect: It confirms and enhances the authority of both, and in turn strengthens traditional societal frameworks.

The principle of yeridat hadorot fills such an important role in Haredi society that it is worth taking time to understand the intensity of the experience that accompanies it. The Holocaust that destroyed the great yeshivot and Hasidic courts illuminated this principle in a tragic light: The few who survived the destruction saw themselves as far less worthy of survival than those who perished. Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, one of the greatest thinkers of the Lithuanian community, described this feeling in his famous sermon, “And It Came to Pass After the Destruction”:

Our generation is not like other generations. It is a generation of destruction-for our sins. Do we understand what a generation of destruction means? No, we can neither understand nor grasp it; we cannot even believe that it is possible; but… it is the truth. The riches we once had are destroyed and gone. The picture of that rich past is still vivid before our eyes-but it is nothing but a past which is ever receding from us. In the present it does not exist…. The present is a void! That spiritual wealth, that unique yeshiva atmosphere, that yearning for truth, that intellectual brilliance, that fear of God, that warmth-all these are no longer with us…. Divine Presence has gone from amongst us…. Our children will not see it with us. ³⁹

Part 2

Notes