Country Music

I’ve started listening to music on the radio recently (over the last few months), and it’s been a new experience for me. As I wrote here, growing up I only listened to Jewish Music. Even when I started listening to non-Jewish music in my early twenties, it was mostly older songs. Recognizing the music I hear from too-loud car stereos, in stores, or even what was played during the 4th of July fireworks show is a strange new experience.

I mostly listen to country music, which I discovered that I liked way back when I was dating my wife and would put the radio on during the long drive from my house to hers. While there are a fair number of songs about pickup trucks (which I don’t own) and beer (which I don’t like), many songs are about family and living life. I identify with a lot of these songs in a way I never did with pasukim put to music.

For instance, there’s this song about a guy who takes his daughter fishing and talks about how he’s building memories with her. I often think about how my kids will remember their childhoods, and me, when they’re adults. Songs like this speak to me.



There’s this one, about a guy who works hard to support his family.



And this one, about a guy who’s applying for a job so he can take care of his kids.



There are songs about being a parent, like this one about a woman dealing with her daughters being typical teenagers, and which makes me think about what my two daughters will be like in a few years.



And songs about missing family who have passed away, like this one about a guy who misses his grandfather and wishes he could take his family on a day trip to Heaven so his kids could meet their great-grandfather.



There are also the raunchy songs my high-school rabbeim polemicized against, like this one, which is actually rather clever.



And this one, which of all songs is the one that my four-year-old daughter leant most of the lyrics to.



There are songs about small-town American culture, or at least the idealized version of it, which are remarkably similar to aspects of idealized frum culture. Like this song about a guy who goes out of his way to buy American to support ”his” people, just as many frum people will shop at frum businesses to help support their owners.



There are songs about 9/11 which are far better than the single sappy song I can think of that came out of the frum music industry.

There’s this one, which has a triumphant ring.



And then there’s this one, which can break your heart. My oldest is four, about the same age the girl in the song would have been in 2001. I heard it on the radio once, and I can’t bring myself to listen to it again. I’m not an overly sentimental guy, but anything to do with kids always gets to me. Especially now, when I have kids of my own. This song made me cry, something that no repetitive Hebrew song has ever done, however beautiful its melody may have been.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

I came across the following passage in 1812: War With America. It’s an excerpt from an eyewitness account written by a man who lived in Halifax, Canada at the time.

“The upper streets were full of brothels; grog-shops and dancing houses were to be seen in almost every part of town.” In the area around Brunswick Street, “nearly all the buildings were occupied as brothels for the soldiers and sailors. The streets of this part of town presented continually the disgusting sight of abandoned females of the lowest class in a state of drunkenness, bare-headed, without shoes, and in the most filthy and abominable condition.”

Firstly, this account flies in the face of the modern-society-is-becoming-increasingly-degenerate myth. Not that that particular myth is at all difficult to debunk, but the above passage is a concise description of an entire town sunken in debauchery. Not even Las Vegas fits the above description today.

Secondly, and far more interesting, is that the writer notes the bare-headedness of the prostitutes. This could be understood in one of two ways. The first, and the way I think he meant it, is as a description of how disheveled these women were. In a society where it was customary for everyone to wear hats or bonnets outside, the lack of a head-covering is a sign of slovenliness almost as serious as being filthy.

The second way it can be understood is as a moral failing. He is describing women “of the lowest class,” prostitutes who are habitually drunk and so brazen as to go about bare-headed and barefoot.

Suppose, instead of merely being part of a memoir, this passage made its way into a text believed to be an eternal guide to the proper way to live. Would it be more likely to be interpreted the first way, or in the second way? If the latter, it would likely lead to a religious requirement for head-coverings. Say, you wouldn’t happen to know of a real-life instance of a similar scenario…


On another note, for a few years now I’ve been doing handyman work to supplement my income from my near-nonexistent career as a psychologist. Since I moved six months ago I haven’t bothered to get licensed in this state, figuring that the extremely slim chance of getting a job in my field doesn’t justify the expense and trouble, and have been focusing on the handyman business instead. Incidentally, I make more money per hour patching drywall and hanging blinds than I would as a school psychologist. Go figure.

Anyway, I was working last night in a young kollel family’s home. When I arrived, Mrs. X requested that I leave the door open because her husband wasn’t home yet. I was once that yeshivish too, and I understand how seriously yichud is taken in the yeshivish world, but:

1. She was expecting her husband to come home from night seder any minute, and told me so. Given that he could have walked in at any time, halachically, there was no reason the leave the door open. Even locking it wouldn’t be a problem, because her husband has a key.

2. The implication that I might jump her if the door were closed is mildly insulting. Now she’d never met me before, so perhaps it can be argued she has no reason to trust me, but that is itself the problem. Intentionally or not, halachos like yichud breed distrust between the sexes and help perpetuate the women = succubae/ men = satyrs stereotypes.

Frummer Than God

I recently received an invitation to a family wedding. The invitation was unremarkable, except for one interesting coincidence: both of the bride’s grandfathers had married women named “rayuso.”

The recent practice of omitting women’s names is ostensibly because printing a woman’s name is untznius. Yet even if we take it as a given that tznius is a legitimate concern, this practice makes no sense.

1) In regards to this particular case, it seems that it would be far more tznius to write “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” than it is to write “Mr. Smith and his beloved.”

2) The stated rationale of tznius rules is to avoid anything erotic. It follows that anything avoided due to tznius concerns is (at least somewhat) erotic. I find it hard to believe that even the most sex-crazed guy would find the name of a grandmother printed on a wedding invitation arousing. Yet it seems there are people in the Chareidi world who believe that even mentioning a woman by name is erotic. (Either that, or they never thought through the implications.) Which brings us to:

3) There are women’s names all through tanach. Here is a community that sincerely believes that God wrote every word in the Torah. God clearly thought there was no problem with referring to women by name. And yet, they have the chutzpah to try to be FRUMMER THAN GOD!

Go figure.

The Celestial Bank

It’s been a while since I last posted. I recently moved to a different state, and I’ve been busy packing, then unpacking.


DovBear had a post today about an email he received asking women to light candles five minutes early on Friday as a z’chus that a sick woman should get better. He asks, “the creator of heaven and earth be swayed if a lot of women light candles a few minutes earlier?” and waxes philosophical about how people can relate to God. I commented,

“This woman is from the group of people who, when they think about it at all,see s'char as currency. There’s a celestial banking system, where mitzvos and miracles have prices. So, say the recovery from disease costs $1000, and lighting candles early is worth $1 a minute, all you need to do is get 200 women to light candles five minutes early and donate their celestial money to pay for the miraculous healing.”

It’s interesting that learning Torah is contrasted in the mishnah with a carpenter’s work. The analogy to money goes way back. Of course, as my rabbeim were fond of pointing out, we don’t know what any given mitzvah is worth, which means we have no way of knowing if we have enough money to pay for miracles, or for a good seat in Olam Haboh. And we have to constantly worry about using up our money on mundane stuff here on Earth, like having a good parnassah, or having a near-miss with a car.

Midrashim describe many characters in tanach as worring about using up their z’chusim in Olam Hazeh. I wonder why, though. A dollars a dollar, right? Whether I spend it in this world or the next, I should get a dollar’s worth of benefit from it. So why the concern about using z’chusim in olam hazeh? It must be that to spend in this world the celestial z’chusim we earn by doing mitzvos, we first have to exchange them from olam habo z’chusim to olam hazeh z’chusim, and there’s a lousy exchange rate. :-)

More seriously, perhaps it’s the difference between buying something consumable vs. something permanent: a loaf of bread in this world vs. real estate in the next.


Then there are the Chassidishe stories about the horrible person who is wealthy because he is being paid off in this world for the single mitzvah he once did. So maybe the exchange rate isn’t so bad after all.

I think in the popular imagination, the celestial banking system works something like this:
* S’char/z'chusim = $
* Mitzvos pay s'char
* Extra mitzvos/chumros earn more s'char over the mitzva’s usual payout
* Kulos earn less schar than the mitzva’s usual payout
* Basic necessities cost some schar, but most goes into an account for Olam Haboh
* “Miraculous” events, like avoiding a car crash or recovering from a serious illness, cost extra s'char
** Sometimes one doesn’t have enough schar in his account, or Hashem decides to save the s’char for Olam Haboh instead of spending it on avoiding the car crash/healing the person.
** One can donate s’char to someone else to buy a refuah, usually by doing something extra specifically to earn s’char for that purpose. This can be used to buy someone’s health if the sick person’s account is inadequate or if Hashem doesn’t want to draw on the sick person’s account.
** If the sick person dies, it’s because either not enough s’char was collecte for him or Hashem decided that it was time for him to go, and the refuah simply wasn’t for sale. The s’char donated on the sick person’s behalf goes into a communal account that can then be drawn on the benefit other sick or needy people.
* Aveiros don’t really figure into the s’char balance, but doing a lot of aveiros may raise the cost of a miracle and/or make Hashem less inclined to sell you one.

Tiferes Yisroel Update

I objected strongly when Tiferes Yisroel implemented their policy of mandatory monitoring of student’s families’ internet usage, so it seems only fair that I should note that they seem to have thought better of it. I’ve been told by people with kids in the yeshiva that the policy hasn’t been enforced. Many of the parents never signed up for Web Chaver, and many of those who did are now letting their accounts lapse. It’s outrageous that the policy was ever implemented, but at least in practice sanity has won out.

Big Brother is Watching You…

I first heard about Yeshiva Tiferes Yisroel’s new policy a little over a week ago from a friend who has a kid in the school. I wanted to write a post about it, but didn’t get around to it and let the idea go (as I do too often with ideas for posts). Yesterday DovBear posted about it, and I’ve become fixated on the outrageousness of it. I tried today to get supporting documentation from my friend for this post, but he said he’d have to look for the letters I want, and I figured I should write a post before this becomes old news in the blogosphere.

For those who may not have heard, Yeshiva Tiferes Yisroel (the Brooklyn branch of the Chofetz Chaim yeshiva system) sent a letter to their students’ parents about a week and a half ago explaining their new internet policy. (Scans of the letter can be seen at DovBear’s post.) As of at least last year, the yeshiva’s policy has been that students are not allowed to access the internet for any reason, or even to look at the computer screen when someone else is online. (citation pending) Their new policy demands, on pains of expulsion, that parents install filtering and tracking software. The letter is careful to point out that the yeshiva doesn’t have access to the logs of your web browsing: these are instead to be sent to a “chaver” of the parent’s choosing. The yeshiva does, however, receive a list of families that have purchased the tracking service, and demands that parents buy and maintain a monthly subscription if they wish their sons to remain in the school.

Given the yeshiva’s already-standing draconian internet ban for its students, this new policy can only be predicated on the premise that parents are hopeless at maintaining good relationships with their children and at monitoring their children’s activities. Only the yeshiva is able to ensure that their students don’t stray, by enforcing a policy that imposes parenting practices on their parent body. This is a gross overstepping of bounds.

A school's job is to educate children, not to raise them. We send our kids to school to learn their ABCs and Aleph Bais, math and chumash, literature and hashkafa. We do not abdicate our responsibilities or rights as parents when we enroll our children. What happens in our homes is none of the school's business.

That said, yeshivas have been intruding into their student’s home lives for years. The schools dictate where our kids can hang out on motzei Shabbos, forbid them to go to theatres or video stores, and forbid us to have TVs in our homes. I remember a story a few years back of a couple of girls who were expelled from a Bais Yaakov because someone reported to the school administration that they had been swimming at a Florida beach during their vacation in non-tznius (that is, typical) bathing suits.

As outrageous as all of the above restrictions are, Tiferes Yisroel’s policy forges into new territory.

This goes beyond dictating what students may do. This is the yeshiva reaching into the homes of their students and setting a system in place to monitor the family’s activities. This is reducing the parents of their students to children who need a watchful paternal eye and a firm hand to guide them. This is only a step or two removed from the yeshiva inspecting student’s homes the same way they inspect the dorms. This is nothing short of an invasion of privacy dressed up as the yeshiva virtuously saving us from ourselves.

The whole thing reeks of Big Brother, from the monitoring of the family’s internet activity to the problem the monitoring is meant to prevent: that students may see porn. And why is porn evil? Because in the yeshivish world, any semi-erotic thought is a thoughtcrime. Perhaps more ominous is the thought that blogs like this one represent exactly the sort of subversive ideas that the Thought Police guarded against in Nineteen Eighty Four.

This is just the latest of the outrageous policies that routinely come from the right wing of Orthodoxy. Normally when I read or hear about what some rov said or some yeshiva did, I may find it distasteful or ridiculous, but I don’t identify with it. It’s something THEY do: the fanatical Chareidim is Israel, the chassidim in Williamsburg or New Square, the ultra-yeshivish in Lakewood. This hits much closer to home. I know people who went to Tiferes Yisroel, I know people who have kids in Tiferes Yisroel, and had things gone a little differently fifteen years ago, I might have gone there myself for high school. The insanity is knocking at my door, and I find myself wishing I had better locks.

Jewish Music

Recently a friend of mine was telling me about a new (for him, anyway) song from Ohad. In his words, the tune is, “Mamish beautiful. It’s so moving…” He played the song for me, and after a few bars I started singing along – with the original words. The song he thought was such a beautiful niggun was this:




If you don’t recognize it, this is the original:




Now my friend is right, it is a beautiful tune. But it’s not exactly the holy yiddeshe niggun he thought it was.

As a kid, I never listened to “goyishe” music. Both my parents listened to all kinds of music as kids, and my mother has a collection of records from the ‘60s and ‘70s of groups like the Bee Gees and the Mammas and Pappas. For some reason, though, once they were married they stopped listening to music on the radio and never played anything except “Jewish” music. (That is, music produced by Orthodox groups.) As a teenager, I was told by my rabbeim that goyishe music consisted of lyrics about sex and tunes that aroused unholy feelings in one’s body. Not having any firsthand knowledge of non-Jewish music, I believed them.

In my early twenties I started listening to music online, and I discovered that what my rabbeim had told me just wasn’t true. Most songs aren’t about sex, and many of the tunes were beautiful, moving, stirring, and/or happy. It wasn’t all sex and jerky dance tunes.

Then I discovered that many songs passed off as “Jewish” are actually covers of pop songs. In itself, there’s nothing wrong with that. What makes it odd is that many of the people who like the Jewish versions of these songs would never dream of listening to “goyishe” music. And it’s not just the lyrics. Many of these same people won’t listen to Jewish groups that explicitly create parodies of pop songs, like Shlock Rock and Variations. According to my rabbeim, groups like Shlock Rock were only for kiruv or kids who nebech listened to goyish music. It wasn’t good, but it was marginally better than listening to the songs with their original lyrics. Clearly, they believed there was something unholy about the music itself.

Later yet I discovered that what I had heard from malcontents in yeshiva was true, that many traditional songs were adaptations of folk songs and that there really is no such thing as “Jewish” music as wholly distinct from “goyishe” music.

All pretense of there being a clear separation between Jewish and non-Jewish music vanished when I davened in a Lubavitcher shul one Rosh Hashanah and heard them sing one of the tefillos to the tune of the Marseilles. I asked someone I knew there why they were singing the French national anthem, and he told me that one of the Rebbes had taken the tune and stripped it of its tumah so it could be used for the elevated purpose of Rosh Hashana davening. My reaction was, “Riiiiight.” It remains one the most ridiculous and unnecessary justifications I’ve ever heard.

Just for fun, I put together a side-by-side comparison of some of the songs circulating in the Yeshivish community that are widely accepted as authentically Jewish next to the original versions. I know that there’s a lot of original music produced by Orthodox groups, and I’m not trying to suggest that it’s all or even mostly co-opted pop tunes. It’s just that I find these really funny. It’s probably the unexpectedness of hearing a completely different version of a song I grew up with and knowing that version is the original.


Yidden / Dschinghis Khan

Asher Bara / Land Down Under

Kol Hamesameach / Simarik

Translated into English

Baruch Hagever / I Will Follow Him

As a bonus, this version of Barush Hagever uses the theme song from the Heathcliff cartoon as an interlude. I guess whoever put this version together was also a kid in the late '80s / early '90s.

Dip the Apple / Darling Clementine










Mishenichnas Adar / Pick a Bale of Cotton









Im Lavan Garti / Cinderella









Deaf Man in the Shteeble / A Blind Man In The Bleachers

Mama Rochel / I Can Go The Distance (low part) / Schindler's List theme (high part, slightly sped up)












Umacha / Snows Of New York








Rabbi Nachman / Numa Numa

D'ror Yikra / Sloop John B

Russian folk songs in contemporary Jewish music:
http://onegshabbat.blogspot.com/2011/09/blog-post_05.html



Hashem Melech /C'est la vie

Lichtiger Shabbos /Close Every Door To Me

Shir Hashalom /My Melody of Love

Daddy Dear /Little One

Od Yishoma /Drunken Sailor

B'tzeis Yisroel /Rivers of Babylon

Let Us Grow / It's a Sin

Halellu / Holiday Road

Wedding intro
0:22-0:57 of this song is played at lots of frum weddings as the intro music for the chosson and kallah

Anyone who went to frum schools will recognize these from davening

The Village Stompers were an American dixieland jazz group during the 1950s and '60s.

And this one is a folk song called "Let Us Sing Together," as sung in 1989 on the kids' show "Wee Sing In Sillyville." Which is probably descended from this:

Hupp Cossak / Hopak Cossack 

This one doesn't try to hide it, but it's still something to see the different contexts of the performances.

Ad Dlo Yada / dama dupa iurii

(0:52 and 1:40)

Hinay Lo Yanum / Mamy Blue

Hey Dum Diddly Dum

Ki Eshmera Shabbat / The Anthem of Sevastopol

Der Kedushah Lebt / Via Dolorosa

(As the post that brought this one to my attention pointed out, the frum version has "the exact same content and theme, just switching the person getting brutally martyred from Jesus to R Chanina ben Tradyon.")

If anyone knows of more, put them in the comments and I’ll try to find videos to embed in the post.

I Have Met the Other, and He is Me

I’ve been having a case of writer’s block lately. Or more accurately, a lack of inspiration. I used to have an idea for a post pretty regularly, every week or two. Lately, nothing.

I suppose part of the problem is that I want my posts to be original and unique, and most of what there is to write about has been written. I can write about my own experiences, but unless my anecdotes tie in to some bigger point, posting autobiographical accounts just seems narcissistic.

That said, I finally had an idea. It occurred to me that I instinctively feel uncomfortable around people who dress the way I do now.

The yeshivish world is obsessed with how people dress. For girls there’s tznius; for boys, there’s the uniform of black hat, pants, shoes, socks, and yarmulke and the white shirt. Even little kids starting in in 4th or 5th grade have to wear an approximation of the uniform, though their dress shirts are usually allowed to have patterns and they can wear all-black sneakers instead of shoes. I remember going shoe-shopping as a kid and having trouble finding sneakers without a trace of other color. Even a white Nike swoosh on an otherwise all-black shoe was a problem.

While it might be permissible to wear a polo shirt on vacation or while playing ball, dressing “like the goyim” was completely unacceptable. To this day, when I shop for clothing I inevitably imagine the clothes for sale on the stereotypical boorish "goy" caricature and have to quiet the voice in the back of my head that asks how I could wear the same things as one of them.

The ultimate goyish clothing is the jeans-and-t-shirt outfit that has become ubiquitous in the US and around the world. T-shirts might be tolerated in camp during the summer, but jeans, especially blue jeans, are evil. I still instinctively react to a frum guy in jeans by assuming he must be a bit of a bum. Which is odd, because a guy in jeans and a t-shirt is what I see most of the time when I look in the mirror.

I was sixteen when I realized that judging people based on the way they dress is silly. My epiphany came one afternoon when I was passing by a shul and was asked to help make a minyan for mincha. As I stood in the back looking around at my fellow congregants, I noticed one who was dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and sandals with a leather yarmulke on his head. I instinctively judged him to be less-than: less frum, less of a decent person, not as worthy as a refined yeshiva bochur like myself.

Then I realized how absurd that was. This guy had voluntarily come to shul in the middle of the day to daven mincha with a minyan. On the other hand, I, had I not been dragooned into helping make the minyan, would have happily not davened mincha at all.

And I was thinking that I was frummer than him? Because I wore a white shirt and he wore jeans?

We judge people based on how they dress because it’s convenient. We can tell at a glance what a person is wearing; it takes hours of conversation to learn about someone’s personality and beliefs. Because we judge people based on what they wear, clothing can be a strong group identifier. In the yeshivish world, wearing the yeshivish uniform declares that you’re One Of Us – and not One Of Them. Unfortunately Them is seen as the evil Other.

I have no problem with clothing as a group identifier. The indoctrinated belief that someone who dresses like One Of Them is the evil Other… that still affects me. Even when those who dress like the Other dress just like me.

The Kollel Meme

I had one of my younger brothers as a guest last Shabbos. He recently started dating, and the conversation soon came around to his plans for the future. To my surprise, he said that he’s planning on learning in kollel for a year or two before getting a job. This is a guy who just finished college, is in yeshiva right now mainly because all of his friends are, and who had no problem skipping Friday night davening. He could be eligible to work in his chosen field in few months. Yet he expects to stay in yeshiva until at least a year after he’s married, whenever that may be. Why?

Orthonomics had a post yesterday about the entitlement felt by some members of the kollel community. (Some commenters pointed out that the post she linked to may be a parody. After re-reading it, I’m undecided. I hope it is.) While commenting on her blog, it hit me that the kollel lifestyle is a meme. In retrospect this is rather obvious, but I was struck by how this realization made so many things suddenly made sense.

Back in June I had a post about the condescending attitude the yeshivish world has towards those that don’t sit and learn. Those who work are considered less-then, nebachs who couldn’t make it in yeshiva or were unfortunately forced by their circumstances to earn a living. “Baalei baatim” is only a hair above “am haaratzim.” Even among the less extreme in the yeshivish world, among those who are willing to grant that ballei baatim can be as righteous as yungerleit, those who sit and learn are seen as the ikker. Their learning sustains the world, and the wage-earning baal habayis should consider it his honor to support those who learn full time.

Never mind that the lifestyle is unsustainable. Never mind that many people in their mid-thirties, with too many kids and no marketable skills, suddenly find themselves struggling to make ends meet. Never mind that the society encourages a myopic, insular, xenophobic, narrowly-defined world view. Yeshivas are full of very smart, kind, warm-hearted people who firmly believe that the best policy is cutting themselves off from the world as much as possible and demeaning everything except talmud torah and everyone (to varying degrees) who doesn’t share their full-time obsession.

Viewed as personal opinions, the attitudes of the yeshivish world are insulting to anyone not in yeshiva. The attempt to brand all “secular” knowledge as pointless at best and trief at worst seems short-sighted, even foolish. The attempts to isolate themselves from the rest of the world and to brand new technologies as a sakana seem misguided, even counter-productive to maintaining their society.

When the kollel lifestyle is viewed as a meme, all of these things suddenly make sense. The veneration of the full-time learner and the pity for the nebach who has to work keeps people learning. The lack of opportunities keep people from finding jobs that might take them away from the yeshiva. Banning the internet and related technologies keeps people away from opinions that might cause them to leave the lifestyle.

Even when people do leave kollel under financial pressures and get jobs, they teach their kids that learning is the ikkar, and the kollel life is the ideal. They work because, nebach, they are no longer able to sit and learn. The meme passes on to another generation.

My brother, despite the ability to start his career in the near future, despite reading the yeshivish Yated only so that he can complain about the ridiculous things they write about, despite having no great love of learning, is planning on living the kollel lifestyle, if only for a year or two. Viewed as an independent decision, this is irrational. Viewed as the perpetuation of a meme, it makes perfect sense.

Shabbos Reading

I came across a few interesting things in my reading over Shabbos, and I figured I’d write them down before I forget them.

There were two interesting articles in this month’s National Geographic. The first was about the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, a group that broke with the Mormon mainstream over the issue of polygamous marriage. According to the article, members of the FLDS believe that their purpose in life is to have as large a family as possible, as this family will be with them through eternity.

What struck me were the similarities between the FLDS society and Orthodox Jews. Not the polygamy, obviously, for all that polygamy is technically muttar. Nor are the societies really similar overall. It was more the small things, like the notion of proper women’s roles as homemakers, the tznius dresses the women wore (though it seems their wardrobe is far more restricted than even the most machmer OJs), and the pictures of FLDS “gedolim” in a picture of a family’s living room, complete with a large portrait of the FLDS prophet that would compare favorably with the pictures many Chassidim keep of their Rebbe.

The article raises some interesting questions, such as whether society at large has a right to object to the FLDS lifestyle when its members seem to be happy and leading fulfilling lives. The same question could be asked of any religious group. It’s just that polygamy is further outside our society’s accepted norms than other differences between religions.

The second article was about nomadic blacksmiths in India who keep five-hundred-year-old social restrictions like not using lamps after dark in remembrance of their ancestor’s defeat at the hands of the Mongols. While many of the people said they would settle down if given the opportunity (despite another restriction against living in villages) there is no outside force compelling them to keep these traditions. Nor are these traditions religious. There is no fear of divine retribution for lighting a lamp. Yet they maintain these traditions, bound to them by a centuries-old sense of honor and internal social pressure. It occurred to me that this was a pure example of a meme, a tradition that is self-sustaining, which has no utilitarian purpose and is in fact restrictive, and which continues to exist only because it is passed down as a norm.

I’ve also been reading “Breaking the Spell” by Daniel Dennett. While he gets a little preachy at times, on the whole I’ve found the book to be well-written and impeccably rational. There are many interesting points that the book discusses, but as I read a few jumped out at me.

Dennett puts forward a theory that the group worship found in many religions is a means for ensuring the accurate transmission of the religion. If many people are worshiping together, no one has to remember the whole thing perfectly because it is very unlikely that everyone will forget exactly the same bits, and parts that any one person forgets will be filled in by the majority of people who remember them. He describes this transmission as a mesh rather than a chain. It occurred to me that this would be a much better argument for mesorah than the lists of those who held Torah knowledge in succession from Moshe to the present. (Of course, this wouldn’t act as a proof of Torah miSinai, merely as a better argument for mostly accurate transmission once the Divine origin of the Torah is assumed.)

A few pages later he writes about how the inclusion of incomprehensible elements in religious worship enhances the fidelity of their transmission. If we understand something, we are likely to try and modify it or to paraphrase. Instead, he writes, we are told to, “Say the formula exactly! Your life depends on it! (If you don’t say the magic word just right, the door won’t open…)” It’s striking how similar this is in form to the shiur I wrote about last week where the speaker admonished us to stick as closely as we possibly could to the nusach hatifilos handed down to us by our parents and grandparents.

Lastly, he writes about a distinguishing feature of “folk religions,” the religious beliefs of aboriginal populations as opposed to those of organized religions. Members of folk religions aren’t aware of being religious and don’t spend time thinking about their faith. The deities and demons that populate their world are taken for granted, known to exist in the same way as trees do. When asked, they are unable to describe any tenets of their faith, often coming up with flimsy and vague explanations clearly concocted on the spur of the moment in order to answer the strange question put to them by anthropologists. Their metaphysics is just the way the world is, and it never occurs to them to think about it. I think this may be true not just of philosophically unsophisticated folk religions, but of religions in general. While many yeshivas and Bais Yaakovs have rudimentary hashkafa classes, in my experience only a small number of people really think about their faith. The majority just assume that the world, metaphysics and all, is as their parents and teachers describe it.

Growing Up Different

Growing up in the Yeshivish world, it seemed that Europe, the alte heim remembered warmly in stories, the land where the pious Judaism of our forefathers once flourished, was an area that extended from Russia in the East to Lithuania in the North, Hungary in the South, and Poland to the West. (Not that I had a great grasp of geography as kid. Far from it.) The stories that were told, from those about the great tzadikim we were to emulate to those about the simple folk we were to identify with, all took place in small patch of Central and Eastern Europe. The names of the towns, the Yiddish the characters spoke, the social structure, all had their roots in the shtetl.

I identified with none of it. I heard no stories at home about Poland or Russia. No family tales of the poretz, the czar, the bitter winters and rapacious peasants. Nor was there any reason I should. My family was from farther west, from a place that, when it came up at all, was the source of the smart-aleky Maskil in older stories and of unspeakable horror in those from the mid-20th century.

All four of my grandparents grew up in Germany, in places like Berlin and Frankfurt-am-Main. I have photographs of my great-grandfathers in their uniforms, circa 1914. I know very little about their service, and it’s likely they were drafted rather than volunteers, but they fought for Germany. More than one of my great-great-uncles died in France in the Kaiser’s service, fighting for a country he thought of as his own. One, a doctor living in California, voluntarily returned to Germany to serve his country.

When WWI ended and Germany was forced to cede its eastern lands to the newly reconstituted Poland, one of my great grandfathers, who had been living just across the new Polish border, moved west to Berlin rather than trade his German citizenship for a Polish one. Unlike the oppressed Jews of Eastern Europe (and Poland, Hungary, etc. which I’ll throw in with Eastern countries for simplicities sake), German Jews saw themselves as full members of the German nation.

The Jews of Eastern Europe were, for the most part, poor, oppressed, and not very patriotic – often because they weren’t allowed the privileges of citizens. Western Europe was a very different place.

These differences expressed themselves in ways other than just patriotism. Jews in the West tended to be wealthier and better-educated than their Eastern brethren, a difference which accounts for the popularity of cholent in Eastern Europe and its absence from the West. This dish, which many frum people today consider their Shabbos incomplete without, was unknown in Germany. While cholent today may be expensive, it was originally a relatively cheap stew made with potatoes, beans, and a bit of meat and bones for flavor. Tasty and filling, it was the perfect Shabbos dish for people without a lot to spend. The richer Jews of the West had chickens and meat for Shabbos. My father first tasted cholent when he went away to yeshiva for bais medrash.

There are also differences in hashkafa and minhagim. In general, most of the kaballah-inspired minhagim prevalent among Eastern European Jews are not part of the German experience. My family doesn’t make upsherins, we don’t wave a chicken over our heads before Yom Kippur, and we don’t wear a kittel at the seder. At my wedding (and my parents’ and my siblings’) I didn’t wear a kittel, I didn’t wear a torn coat, and I didn’t untie my shoes or take off my gold cufflinks. My wife and I stood under the chuppah wearing a tallis over our heads and facing away from the audience.

Most of my classmates were descendants of the Eastern Europeans who have come to dominate American Orthodoxy. (So much so, that one is either a chassid or a litvak. In common usage in the yeshivish and chassidsh worlds, there are no other categories.) I was different from them. Not very different – we were all from middle-to-right-wing Orthodox homes. But I was different in that I didn’t personally identify with stories of Eastern European figures. To my classmates, these characters were their alter zaides. I didn’t even have a zaidy. I called my grandfather “Opa,” German for Grandpa. Underscoring the difference even more, my family did things differently than my friends did, differently than I was taught in school.

Like all yeshivish kids, I learned the Yiddish sing-song about the Seder. “Tatty comes home from shul and puts on his kittel…” Mine didn’t.

I learned to say the Ma Nishtana in Yiddish. My mother’s parents, at whose home we spent Pesach when I was little, spoke fluent German and could understand Yiddish, but no one in my family spoke Yiddish.

Before Yom Kippur I learned in school how we shlug kaporos. At home, I heard how we didn’t shlug kaporos, and could you imagine actually taking a chicken and swinging it over your head?!

Then there’s the best one of all. You must wait six hours between milchig and fleishig (always said that way, even though no one waits between milk and meat, only between meat and milk). This minhag is taught as part of hilchos kashrus. Except my family only waits three.

For me, the illusion of a monolithic mesorah promulgated by the Yeshivish world never had a chance to take hold. Sure, everyone knows that there are people out there who only wait three hours, or who wear taleisim before they’re married. But for most it’s not something they notice. It’s one thing if one or two of your friends do things a little differently than you do. It’s another when nearly everyone does things differently than you do.

I think this may be another small ingredient in my path to religious skepticism. Seeing what I was taught as normative in school disregarded by my family in practice – disregarded because no one in the family had ever done these things - taught me that not everything I learned was a tradition stretching back to God at Har Sinai.

People Like Me in Entertainment Media

There aren’t any.

All of the characters on TV, in movies, in the books I read, are all different than me. There were never any characters that I could truly identify with, someone that looked and sounded like I did. I suppose that is what it means to be part of a minority.

Except that there are Jewish characters all over the place. It seems like every third TV character is Jewish. Whether this is a result of the American tendency to erroneously hold up Judaism as one of the great (demographically) world religions, or Jewish writers creating characters that are coreligionists, I don’t know. But even these characters weren’t people I could identify with. They are mostly “informed Jews” – they look and act just like everyone else, and only reveal that they’re Jewish in December each year so that Chanukah can be shoehorned into the Christmas episode. If they have any Jewish characteristics, they’ll be highly stereotypical ones, like eating bagels. If they are at all religious, they’ll be on the extreme left wing of the Reform movement – a rabbi will officiate at their wedding, but that’s about it. The few depictions of Orthodox Jews are always of Chassidim. After all, a character in a long black coat, a fur hat, and long curly payos is much more interesting than a guy in a business suit with a fedora or a yarmulke on his head. (The only exception I can remember ever seeing was in “It Could Happen To You” in which a yeshivish-looking guy in a white shirt and yarmulke is seen mailing a letter.)

I identified with none of these characters. As much as TV and movies are a fantasy, for me there was an added layer of distance from reality. None of the people depicted were even close to “real” because none of them resembled anyone I knew.

I think this underlines the cultural isolation of the Orthodox world. While some liberal Chareidim and the Modern Orthodox partake of what the general culture has to offer, we aren’t really a part of it. There is nothing in it with which we can identify. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your point of view.

Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll

[I wrote this back in March and never got around to posting it.]

This morning on the news I saw a profile piece of a woman who was apparently a famous singer in the 60’s. The piece covered her life from her rise to stardom in her late teens; through an early marriage which she abandoned a few years later, rocky relationships with male singers, and drug addictions; and ended triumphantly with her rebuilt career and latest album release.

What struck me was that her biography matched so well with the yeshivish caricature of non-frum life as ruled by passions and inevitably hedonistic.

I wonder if modern celebrity culture could be reinforcing those stereotypes. In many science fiction stories characters worry about aliens judging humanity based on what we broadcast. Obviously, the aliens would get an extremely distorted view of human culture if their only exposure was radio and TV broadcasts. Yeshivish society, which goes out of its way to isolate itself from the rest of the world, knows of the world only through cultural osmosis. Big stories usually manage to leak through, perhaps from someone who listens to the news on the radio. The stories get passed around, and the result is a distorted version of the news show’s 10-second blurb caricaturing the latest celebrity scandal. These stories are repeated as proof that the outside world is morally corrupt.

I don’t have any evidence that this actually happens aside from some limited personal experience, but its an interesting thought.

Don’t Be A Baal HaBayis

It was a special occasion. The Rosh Yeshiva’s father, the original founder of the yeshiva, was visiting from Eretz Yisroel and was going to address the bochurim. I and my fellow students at the small yeshiva where I went to bais medrish sat at the tables waiting respectfully as the elderly rabbi made his way to the shtender at the front of the room.

For the next half hour he regaled us with anecdotes, witticisms, and quotes from Torah sources on the importance of learning. Drawing up to his conclusion, he leaned forward on the shtender.

“Rabosai, what you are doing here, sitting and learning, sustains the world. There may come a time when you are no longer able to sit and learn, when you have other responsibilities. Make sure that you always have a seder, and that learning remains your focus. Don’t become ballei baatim. Make sure that learning remains the ikkar.”*

I was disturbed. Not by the assertion that learning sustained the world and was of utmost importance: that was standard yeshiva rhetoric and while I didn’t like learning I still implicitly accepted that this was true. What bothered me was the characterization of baalie baatim, the members of the community who juggled jobs, families, and mitzvos, as “less than.”

This was an attitude I had encountered numerous times in the yeshivish world. Baalie baatim were the nebachs who couldn’t sit and learn. They were less intelligent than those who sat and learned - simple seforim and shiurim were called “ballei baatish.” It is a term that seems to be the modern equivalent of the gemara’s am haaretz.

The gemara portrays the am haaretz, the simple farmers who were the average Jews of the period, as unintelligent ignoramuses. While insulting to these people, this probably at least had some basis in truth. Most people of that period were uneducated. The baalei baatim of today, however, are by and large former yeshiva bochurim. Many of them continue to learn when they have the time. They are also the ones who financially support the yeshiva world.

I found the sneering condescension directed towards those who didn’t spend their lives sitting and learning reprehensible. A decade later I can add elitist and psychologically scarring for those who do not spend their lives learning. Even now, when I am around a yeshivish person, there’s a little voice in the back of my head telling me that I need to convince them that I too am a talmid chochem.**




*This happened a long time ago, and I don’t remember most of what he said, let alone word-for-word. This is an approximation which relays his main points.
**A voice I try to ignore, and which has gotten quieter and quieter over the years.

An Exercise in Self-Righteousness

There was recently a post here where the commenters, ostensibly members of the yeshivish community, displayed a complete certainty that the right-wing yeshivish way of life was the One True Way and that they were morally superior to anyone who is more “modern” than they are.

The comments on every site that linked to this post expressed the polar opposite reaction – a certainty that the hard-line yeshivish posters were nuts.

Is one group any more justified in their sentiments than the other?

(I’m talking about large groups of people here, and so I’m going to be making gross generalizations.)

The first group (yeshivish people) takes it as a given that their interpretation of the Torah is the only correct one, and anyone who interprets it less strictly than they are is only doing so because they are looking for excuses to do as they please. As such they regard other interpretations as excuses and those who are less stringent than them as weak willed at best and more probably morally degenerate.

The second group takes it as given that those who adhere to (and seemingly go out of their way to find) the strictest possible interpretation of the Torah are ignorant, indoctrinated, self-righteous xenophobes who know nothing of science, philosophy, or history; do what they do blindly because someone with “Rabbi” before his name told them to; and look down on anyone who is different than them.

I think that the second group is the more justified of the two. (Surprise!) Not so much because their characterization of chareidim is unbiased and objective truth (which it probably isn’t) but because this characterization, by and large, was arrived at based on experiences. The first groups’ characterization of those who are less stringent than themselves, on the other hand, is like nearly everything they ascribe to derived from seforim, which in turn derive their conclusions from scripture and maamrie chazal. What is physically real is unimportant: if it says it in a sefer, it must be true.

More than anything, it is this difference in epistemology that separates the two groups. The chareidim are certain they are right because they have it on the authority of scripture, revealed wisdom. Even if it were demonstrated that most modern and secular people are not morally degenerate and have legitimate reasons for their beliefs (or lack thereof), a fundamentalist cannot accept anything that contradicts revealed wisdom, and so cannot change his mind.

The “moderns” and skeptics, who base their opinions on their own and others experiences, are at least in theory open to changing their views. If experiences with right-wingers were to change, if it became common to find most chareidim were well-educated, accepting of those different than themselves, and open to the possibility that they were mistaken about some of their beliefs, then opinions among the second group would change accordingly.

The Girl in the Blue Uniform

Reading this post on DovBear brought me back to high school and the rumors that circulated about this guy or that yeshiva. It also made me remember the Yeshiva’s attitude toward sex and the opposite sex. Their opinion of contact between guys and girls can be summed up in one word: EVIL. [Since then Frum Satire has also had a post related to the subject.]

Girls were presented (intentionally or not) as evil succubae that would lead a yeshiva bochur away from all that is good and holy. They weren’t human – they were GIRLS.

A few anecdotes to illustrate what I mean.

The yeshiva I was in had a lot of guys (like myself) from other cities who stayed in the dorms. The yeshiva would usually arrange for us to eat one of the Shabbos meals with families from the local community. If the family had any daughters over the age of eight or so, these girls had to leave the house in order for the family to invite us. Not so bad, right? The girls went to friends’ houses, and we got a good meal. Why, though, couldn’t the families’ daughters and the bochurim sit at the Shabbos table together? Because we might talk to each other. Which brings me to my second anecdote.

One Shabbos afternoon in the spring one of the guys in yeshiva decided to go for a walk and ended up at a local park. The park was full of frum families enjoying a pleasant Shabbos afternoon. While there he struck up a conversation with a girl about his own age. After chatting for a while they each went their own way. Someone in the park recognized him and told the Rosh Yeshiva that he had been talking to a girl. The result was a week’s suspension.

Now we come to my personal high-school experience with a girl. Ready?

I used to bike the six or seven blocks from the dorm to the yeshiva every morning. Over the back wheel I had a rack with a spring-loaded clip that I would use to hold stuff I was transporting: books, snacks, etc. On my way to yeshiva I would often pass groups of girls on the way to one of the local bais yaakovs. One day as I was passing a group of girls the clip gave way and spilled my books into the street. One of the girls helped me pick up my books and handed me the ones she had collected. I said, “Thank you.”

That’s it. My entire high-school experience with girls. Yet it was such an anomaly that even now, eleven years later, I can remember the blue uniform skirt she was wearing and the shy smile on her face as she handed me the books.

Why is there this insistence on the strict separation of the sexes? Why is the worst thing a teenager (and in some circles, even an adult) do is talk to a member of the opposite sex?

I think answer is in the yeshivah world’s opinion that people can’t control themselves and in the stereotypes promoted by yeshivas and bais yaakovs.

The idea that humans have no natural self-control is illustrated by the often-repeated argument that we must be slaves either to our desires or to God. While this argument contains a number of logical fallacies, I’m not going to address those now. The point I’m making here is that the underlying assumption of this argument is that without God’s rules to restrain us we would follow every whim with no possibility of self-restraint.

If that is true, then men and women should be separated, since they won’t be able to control themselves. Yet we see that, aside from a small number of criminals, men and women do not assault each other when they are allowed to interact.

The yeshiva world largely ignores this obvious fact, and instead points to teen pregnancy rates in society at large as evidence that guys and girls shouldn’t socialize. Apparently interaction inevitably leads to sex. And why is that? Because guys, especially teenage guys, can’t control themselves around girls. This has a grain of truth – teenagers (guys and girls) do tend to be obsessed with sex. And yes, teenagers, due to a lack of experience and a tendency not to think of consequences, do a lot of stupid things. Letting guys and girls socialize does carry some risk that they may make unwise decisions. But parents and schools should teach them how to act responsibly and how to make the right decisions. Instead they are denied the opportunity to learn how to interact appropriately. This leads to a mythologization of the opposite sex.

Girls, according to yeshivas, come in two varieties. The first is the aishes chayil – our mothers and sisters, the wives of tzaddikim, the kind of girl every guy should want to marry. This version of women came up infrequently. Far more common was the girl as the temptress who would lead the good yeshiva bochur astray. Of course, the poor yeshiva bochur, being a guy and therefore unable to control himself around women, had no defense against these girls. Not that these girls meant to be evil. It was simply the nature of things that girls tempt guys, guys have no defense, and the results were always catastrophic.

As I understand the girl’s point of view, they are taught that guys have no self control, and that dressing untzniusly will cause him to sin. In other words, they are being taught that men see them as sex objects, and that they must make every effort to minimize their unholy influence.

So we have guys characterized as animals who can’t control their desires and girls as sex objects who stir those desires. These stereotypes represent the worst extremes in relations between the sexes and present those extremes as normative.

How insulting.