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.
Showing posts with label religous memes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religous memes. Show all posts
Monday, February 1, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
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.
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.
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