We have outdone the Shulchan Aruch. No longer are there merely four volumes of Shulchan Aruch,or a fifth, including common sense, plus poskim and achronim and Mishnah Berurah and the latest Kol Halachos of everything. We have done better than that.

Now everything, everything, is prescribed.

Everything from the style of your kippah, the style of your payos, the way you walk, even the accent you have, everybody has some sort of weird Newark (?) accent, is standardized.

And it doesn’t stop with how you look or what you do. Even our responses to everything, and our ways of thinking, are prescribed. Everything is almost scripted.

It’s so conformist, down to the nitty-gritty: what you’re doing, where you’re going, how you’re doing it, how you’re supposed to fulfill something, what’s the best way to fulfill it, what you have to do to fulfill it.

There’s really no end.

It’s as if Jewish life is no longer the four volumes of Shulchan Aruch, with all the poskim and achronim and everything that came after. Rather, it’slike there are hundreds or thousands of volumes of everything that doesn’t matter.

Things like the tightness of your pants, the type of makeup to wear and how to apply it,the style of your kippah, payos style. And even on what you think (like never even thinking how base people are base “chas veshalom”)

And then you come to the volume called Parnassah. You open it up and there is only one line. “Make a Parnassah,” it says…

And the rest is blank.

How is this the cause? What could start to trace this trend? I’m going draw a tread line on the banning of comments on most internet articles.

Once upon a time on the internet, many, maybe most, news articles and opinion pieces had comment sections. As, let’s say, the cracks in the post-2001 consensus started to emerge, one would often see feedback, in its most proper sense, in the comments.

In other words, a news story or an opinion page would have a story, say something as fact, or quote an interview that said something. People in the comments, usually by sourcing the original materials or truly authoritative sources, such as basic texts on the subject or whatnot, would show that what the article was saying was nonsense and sometimes completely made up hogwash.

Suddenly we started seeing the claim that these comments were toxic. They were full of bullying, bad words, etc., and had to be controlled. You now needed to sign up. Or you had to use your real name. And comment sections were removed entirely from many, many things.

I would say this was about 2010. I think part of this was a reaction to the age of Obama, where so much was promised, and usually the opposite was delivered. We were promised healthcare that works. We were given incredibly expensive non-healthcare healthcare.

And, of course, this whole thing was disingenuous. Yes some people bullied (although not as bad as on social media) as even in those days, the technology was good enough to stop people from commenting if their comment used a bad word, a nasty word, whatever.

I think this tension, this dissonance between what, let’s say, some people, more educated and often more privileged, wanted the world to be like and the way others perceived or experienced the world, grew. That connected to the growth of populism, the election of Donald Trump, and whatnot.

Which led to, around the time of the first Trump campaign, Big Tech saying, “We can never let this happen again.” There was even a quote like that from one of the tech executives.

I think this was the final nail in the coffin of the future of tech. Big Tech had decided they knew best about everything, and the user, the user who supported Donald Trump or something equally as scandalous was to be ignored. Actually, if the user said something, it was probably wrong.

No more the Steve Jobs or Don Norman focus on solving problems for the user before they knew they existed.

We saw Google Search being changed. They were already, I would say, manipulating the results even before that, nudging towards their interests. Now we say this intensive effort to refashion Google Search to THINK CORRECTLY.

Once upon a time, you could type almost any question into Google Search. It would find you the answer by finding the best answer given on the internet, often on some random website or user forum where somebody who really knew what they were talking about had answered it. It had all these built-in things, like conversions and whatnot, that always worked.

We saw all that fade away. Instead, Google promoted “authoritative sources” and other useful jargon terms. Usually tenth rate academic research or “shoe leather” reporting by likes of NPR and other places that employ trust fund kids and the people they went to school with. No more forums or interesting sites that promote wrongthink.

Instead we had Quora, the site where PhD in Swimming Literature answer questions in history and office dynamics. Then we got Reddit and its subterranean dwelling base.

But what you actually needed or wanted was gone. The user was WRONG!!

Google Search “evolved.” No longer this incredible resource. Once upon a time you could Google a name of a barely known historic person and find out all about them. Google anything and get all these wonderful ideas, all this interesting information, old interviews, fascinating stuff. But it’s all gone. I think 50% of what I use AI for is just finding the answers to solving problems that, once upon a time, Google would just tell me much more cheaply.

We saw the same thing in other places too. Amazon, once upon a time, was very user-centric, with amazing customer service, trying to get you to become a member and keep coming back.

Today, they try to squeeze a few extra bucks with their overpriced Prime accounts and are still showing ads. Worse the first page of Amazon is just all the same junk you can buy for a third or a tenth of the price on AliExpress, as opposed to giving you what you want, what you need. What the user wants is no longer a concern.

In general, every website and every app is now full of what you do not want. Things like pop-ups; the same thing that Google helped destroy on the internet. Those annoying ads are now being used by Google and all these other websites, except they’re their own pop-ups, telling you all sorts of useless guide information and about new features you don’t want to know about.

You see this in all areas, like Google Analytics. The Google Merchandise Store was once a common teaching tool to teach people how to use Google Analytics. But they now update the data constantly in real time, which means it can no longer be used for setting an exercise because the instructor doesn’t know what answer the student will find. The whole point of sharing the info on Google Merchandise Store publicly was to allow for teaching. So what is the point if you cannot teach based on it.

In short, they’re basically chasing people away from their own software. Not to mention that they constantly change the interface, the reporting, move things around, so people who’ve trained on it and spent hours and hours becoming experts can no longer use it. Not good for people with complicated jobs that suddenly opened Google Analytics and discovered they needed to retrain for no reason at all.

Google Ads seems to have given up the fight against spam and fake accounts. I think every single ad I see on YouTube now is a scam. Literally.

Let’s not start about eBay, where I was just looking at books to buy and the used copies were more expensive than the new ones on Amazon. which, by the way, are not easy to find on Amazon, like I said before.

We all know about Twitter and the Twitter Files, though many people are still in denial about them. Of course, denial doesn’t make something any less true.

Facebook? It almost never shows you anything from your friends anymore. Many of the features don’t seem to work at all. I’ve tried multiple times joining a group recently; it didn’t show me the group questions. It doesn’t tell me what my friends post. It just shows me lots of useless AI slop and stolen content.

And let’s not even start with LinkedIn.

And the kicker making copy and paste “app” specific.

I suspect that in 10 years, or much less, Meta, by refusing to care what its users want-even though it’s completely a user-based company-will be gone.

Google will probably be two companies: Gemini AI and YouTube. Everything else will disappear.

Amazon? I don’t know what’s going to happen. I mean, I’m assuming AWS is actually an important resource, but what’s going to happen with Amazon’s shopping business? Right now, I don’t know an alternative, but you can’t find things anymore. You need to know what you wanted originally. Will it just become an app?

We’re back to the old internet, where you needed the URL. Otherwise, you’d had to dig through Yahoo’s hierarchy. That’s where we are.

And let’s not start with Netflix, which seems to be a company in free fall out of deep desire to make slop movies. They seem to think their subscribers are as dumb as the “writers” who write their season two’s etc.

The only question is, who’s going to crash first?

-Author’s Introduction to Chovos Halevavos by Rabbeinu Bahya ibn Paquda

Somehow today in the “frummer” world, even as people become less serious about religion, that change is not accompanied by greater concern for the world, for behavior, for education, for knowledge, or anything like that.

For generations, Jews understood that modernity often came with religious costs, but also with gains in education, manners, intellectual depth, and refinement. As people became more modern, they became more sophisticated, more educated, deeper, and more concerned with their behavior while, of course, sadly often becoming less religious or less serious about their religion. It now seems that the costs remain while the refinement is disappearing.

I was sitting in a chasidish shul last week next to an chasid who didn’t daven at all,

Suddenly something that had bothered me crystallized. For years I have been struggling with the oddness of people acting harshly and inappropriately, even though they are religious and even though they seem to be thoroughly familiar with the crasser parts of this world.

I had also wondered why people like him still identify as chasidish. And, spending lots of time with the frummer community, speaking to people in it, and observing from afar, I see this as a question for the whole “frummer” community.

I just did not understand. How come it seems that more and more yeshivish and chasidish people retain the outward markers of the community while becoming less serious about religious life, but still don’t embrace what Rabbeinu Bahya described as the wisdom of other nations, “the words of philosophers, the ethical teachings of the ascetics, and their praiseworthy customs”? And how about the ideals of honest business, manners, and mores?

Where is the aspiration toward refinement, whether in character or in intellectual and cultural matters? By refinement I mean good middos. I mean treating people like you believe in the God who created them. I mean interest in God’s world in a healthy and Torah-approved way. I mean respect for yourself and your behavior as one made in God’s image. I mean trying to respect God’s commandments about behavior with other people, even if they do not look exactly like you.

Indeed, one wonders whether a lack of self-respect lies at the heart of the problem, and whether we should be asking why that exists.

Why does there seem to be so little aspiration toward high or even middlebrow culture. Plato, Shakespeare, or even Dickens and Twain, or even Greene and Waugh are not of interest to them. Rather, cultural interests run from gross to grosser. From TikTok to even worse things.

It seems that perhaps what’s happened among the frumer velt is that there are people who are not really religious, people who are somewhat religious, people who are very religious but have very poor middot, and people who are very religious and are careful about middot, and they’re all part of the frum community. They all wear black and white, or whatever.

So one pole is barbarism; the other pole is careful middot. That’s how the spectrum runs. And as people head out, they don’t leave the faith; they just leave the good parts.

Sometimes it seems that we have fallen into the trap Rabbeinu Bahya warned us about: “their good ways you have not copied; their evil ones you have followed.”

I hope this isn’t true. Then the barbarians are within the gate.

When did culture start mattering to a yeshiva boy? I was always looking for culture; I just didn’t know the terms. I think one of my first art experiences came from buying a package of used art playing cards. It was very cheap, 25 cents or something, at the thrift shop, which was a very important place in my life as a child and teenager. But that’s another story.

These decks of cards had Van Gogh paintings on the back. One was Sunflowers, obviously. The other was the self-portrait after he cut off his ear, the one with the blue background, Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat.

I was haunted by this image. I looked at it constantly. I don’t know what it was. There was something about the blue, the face, the eyes, something both haunting and fascinating.

Of course, my mother said something about him being a crazy person who cut off his ear and mailed it to his girlfriend. I don’t remember exactly how she put it. I think that was the extent of my early exposure to art. But the blue stayed with me.

The life of the mind was not something ever discussed at home. While Torah mattered, and of course behavior, we were always reading, but we never dissected why we were always reading.

Like a good Jewish family, we carefully critiqued and examined almost everything. But we never asked why we were always picking things apart for being “too” this or that.

It’s hard to drift back into the past and see what matters when. Maybe my culture sense started to wake up when trying to make sense of Maupassant and other writers’ work in old “school readers” I found in the semi-forgotten school library. Puzzling over the worlds these writers described, trying to understand their points, and being disturbed by some of their stories. Maybe here I started to realize one could appreciate what one does not want in one’s own life.

In W. N. P. Barbellion’s famous memoir, Journal of a Disappointed Man, he talks about how he strove to become a scientist, even though he came from a disadvantaged background. He succeeded, but then, unfortunately, had a terminal illness. Towards the end of his life, he thought about how he should have devoted his mind, his self, to matters of art and culture.

I read his book and felt joy for him in getting where he wanted to. I thought that I would like to get that too. And then, at the end, where he is dying so young and thinking how he would have wanted to devote his time to arts and culture, I was confused. “Will I feel like that one day?” I asked myself. Today I think I understand his point. What do you want to do in this world, and why, is an important question to ask.

It is a scary thought: to have actually made it to where you wanted to be, like Barbellion (whose real name was Cummings), and then regretted it.

I remember being a kid, walking on the curb, thinking how I’d like to be a critic. Not sure I knew what it meant. A critic of what? But I knew I had a point of view. And an adult said I would be a great critic. That felt wow. I would be something. I didn’t know what she meant exactly, except that she said you get to share your views, which to my mind was and is the greatest thing ever. Critic! Even the word rolled nicely on my tongue.

Music was not that different. Yes, there was Jewish music and old Broadway records from “the old days.” But classical music, fine music, fine art, opera, jazz—just not present. Though I wanted something more complex and real to listen to besides Jewish music tapes, so many of which were maddening and limited.

I got myself a little Walkman radio and then later a radio so small it fit in my pocket (!) and I found the classical station and spent a lot of time listening to it. At least now I knew what Bach sounded like.

I always found the idea of art fascinating, but I was so removed from it. Once, I remember taking a book on drawing out of the library. I was fascinated by the whole idea of drawing real objects. I obviously didn’t even try the exercises because it felt like too much, but the idea of creating representations fascinated me. It was not something that was ever really part of our experience. It also had life portraits, which scared and fascinated me as well.

When I was in yeshiva in Israel, desperate for something to read, I once found, in the three-books-for-one-shekel section of a bookstore run by a man grumpy even by the standards of booksellers, a copy of Irving Stone’s fictionalized biography of Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy. That book really affected me. It explained something about the artist’s need to create. I didn’t identify with that yet, but it stayed warm within.

Looking back, yes, it was decidedly middlebrow, but coming from a white-shirt, black-hat background, middlebrow art was as cultured as could be.

Real literature wasn’t really present either in our home. Luckily I went to schools that were in their last years using the older curriculum that took Western civilization more seriously, or perhaps realized what happens when you forget it. We read Julius Caesar, Henry V, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. I feel like we read one more Shakespeare play, but I can’t remember for sure. We definitely did not read Romeo and Juliet because it was considered inappropriate, and we did not read Othello either. Clearly everything had to be curated instead of just felt.

Obviously, Hamlet really spoke to me. Not so much the others.

I vaguely knew people from wealthier families who constantly traveled to see every museum, every exhibition, every cultural event.

The trouble was, you know, this vaguely appealing idea of just trying out different things. In my mind, my background, my education—or at least maybe the implicit messages, and I guess some explicit messages I got—framed this as following the yetzer hara, following the evil inclination. It was ביטול תורה, a waste of time. Indeed, a kind of knocking out that little Torah learning often didn’t stop ביטול תורה; it just stopped me from everything else. So ביטול תורה often didn’t mean wasting time from Torah, but rather being מבטל everything else in the name of Torah.

Which just made things worse.

If Artscroll were starting their Ramban project today, they would only translate the mystical sections.

Somewhere in the last few decades, Kabbalah has gone mainstream. No longer the preserve of cloistered scholars with philologists’ beards, it is now taught to explain the fundamentals of Judaism in place of Rambam, Ramban, Saadia Gaon, or even the classic mussar seforim.

Our Chumash shiurim are all about mystical terms and their connection to Chumash. Our Gemara shiurim weave in and out from Kabbalistic preoccupations to Talmudic ones.

And this all hurts Kabbalah.

Everywhere we see Kabbalah to no end, everywhere we see Kabbalah employed in place of classic Torah, we also see shallowness and lack of depth. Instead of learning about the fundamental pillars of Judaism, we are studying coded language that might mean something to the one using it.

I think that Kabbalah is real, that it is preoccupied with the essential metaphysical and philosophical issues as the Rama tells us it is; that we may struggle to understand it as (among other reasons) it uses a terminology and a cosmology that is foreign to our day and time. I don’t know about lots of the other things about it its practitioners.

I also don’t want to be forced to wonder about them. However, the proliferation of Kabbalah everywhere, and the clearly strong correlation between large amounts of speaking about Kabbalah and not such exemplary Torah behavior, give the cynics more credence.

I think the solution to make Kabbalah great again is to make Kabbalah secret again. No more Kabbalah classes by guest lecturers or lomdim or deep-breathing experts. Kabbalah belongs in the cloistered, protected worlds of dedicated probably elderly scholars, to be read in the flickering light inside hidden garrets where thoughts are only of Hashem.

No more pop-Sod. Or Pop-Kabbalah. No more pseudo-Chassidus. No more internet Kabbalah. And let’s learn the non-mystical Rambans, please.

For example, saying, “I cannot succeed at anything because I am fat or whatever,” is an excuse not to try.

So the Parked Sloped brains embracing the media/academic/ NGO Park Slope Co-dubious  pretense that Israel is so much worse than the hundred or more countries that act the same as, or worse than Israel, is maybe the same type of Adlerian belief designed to allow rude behavior and worse.

Now these formerly opened minded people can feel liberal and civilized and kind and like a good person.

While at the same time they are being full of prejudice and nastiness and embracing the darkest areas of their nature. They can call people nasty things and fill their hearts with prejudice and anger while playing Mr and Ms Virtuous.

These deeply immoral park slope folks can now abandon the hard work that it takes to act and think like a civil person in a difficult world but can still feel like  moral people .

So no wonder if they embrace this odd Israel obsession.

It allows them to have their hateful co-op and to feel liberal too! 

I think, following Isaiah Berlin’s dictum of positive liberty and negative liberty, we can understand part of the charedi identity.

From Wikipedia:

“Berlin initially defined negative liberty as “freedom from”, that is, the absence of constraints on the agent imposed by other people. He defined positive liberty both as “freedom to”, that is, the ability (not just the opportunity) to pursue and achieve willed goals; and also as autonomy or self-rule, as opposed to dependence on others.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty

To paraphrase, Berlin defined negative liberty as “freedom from”, meaning the absence of constraints imposed by other people. He defined positive liberty as “freedom to”: the ability, not just the opportunity, but the real ability to pursue and achieve the goals that you want and will. Positive liberty is also the idea of self-rule, that you govern yourself and make your own decisions, as opposed to relying on others.

So here we have something that can help us understand the problem of the modern Haredi community. In the past, Charedi identity was defined both negatively and positively. Negatively, in terms of not having to go to the army and not having to be part of the secular state or ציבור. And positively, by very specific actions and behaviors.

In other words, positively: a man is supposed to learn Torah most of the day, and a woman is supposed to work in a supportive profession that is, let’s say, what they would call tzniut-appropriate. Both men and women stayed within devout circles, and when women worked, it was often framed as part of a devout, spiritually oriented role, not with many secular men, etc. They ate a very restricted diet, they only went to places that are modest, and they avoided engaging in all sorts of activities that are not tzniut or not befitting a ben Torah or bat Torah.

And this framework, positive versus negative, seems especially useful here.

When the community was like this, it was more successful, more frum, more self-contained, more holistic, whatever you want to call it.

However, the reality is that, probably as a function of multiple generations, now you have a third generation of people in the State who are also officially Haredi. And of course, being Charedi is, in at least some ways, defined in the French sense of a mot d’ordre as being anti-Zionist, or at least not accepting of many Zionist premises and values.

This third generation is more about negative liberty. It is more about “freedom from” vis-à-vis the State. The idea that being Charedi means freedom from external obligation. As part of this negative liberty, the community wholly embraces the idea that it does not have to be constrained by what everyone else is constrained by. The community does not have to necessarily go to work, go to the army, pay taxes, follow the mores of society, or be connected to the social contract at all. Hence arguments that Charedim should volunteer for service organizations instead of the army. Why should they slip the bounds of the social contract? Because of this concept of negative liberty.

And while there is often talk of autonomy, which is part of positive liberty, this talk always omits discussion of the other half of autonomy, namely eliminating dependence on others. Dependence on others is a core plank in current Charedi society, whether these others be American philanthropists or the Israeli taxpayer paying much of the cost of new neighborhoods and institutions.

Gone is true positive liberty. A man cannot choose not to learn in kollel. Even if he does choose not to, there is not much a man without a middle school education, in a society that does not respect him, can do. At least honestly. Also gone is the idea of sacrificing to live this life. No, now we need a nice home in a neighborhood built with state money secured through coalition politics, with new medical offices and schools and shuls paid for through similar mechanisms, perhaps on the municipal level as well.

And it’s inevitable that this will anger many people.

Now, by radical indifference, I don’t mean losing your sense of morality. Don’t give in to saying that Israel is not on the right side or that it is not moral, or that Israel should stop. I’m not saying any of that. Personally, regardless of what you read here, I assume that much of the problem with this war is that Israel is not doing enough to its enemies. But let’s leave that to greater minds to argue about and debate.

Let’s accept a simple canard. There’s almost nothing I can do. There’s almost nothing you can do. There’s almost nothing one can do in their daily life about this war. Yes, whether you agree or disagree, you can vote one way or another, sign something, do something. That is true. But in 99% of your life, there isn’t anything to do that will have any effect. You can’t affect what’s going on outside that 1%. And if it consumes you, than what use is it?

The only effect that comes from obsessing about this war is getting upset, angry, and increasingly frustrated. That’s why I think the only real solution is to embrace something like Richard Feynman’s radical indifference. Realize that having an opinion is not meaningful enough to let it take over your life.

I don’t mean don’t take a stand. Or have no opinion. Take a stand. But that is it. Don’t spend all day talking about your stand. Don’t give your opinions about the war. Don’t read about it. There’s nothing you can do about any of this anyhow.

Let it go. Try to continue to live your life as much as you can. Try not to let the toxic pressure color your impressions of your loved ones and your relationships with them. Go places or take it easy. Make sure to go out every day. Now that it is a calm period, push yourself to enjoy.

Just live your life, like the birds and the beasts. And run to the shelter.

And sadly, every failure becomes another confirmation that you’re useless. And anything out of the ordinary is forbidden. When you mix fear with religiosity, you end up claiming that every hard thing you’re actually afraid to try is “not religious.”

So many of us learned growing up that “secular” things like life planning, things like college, learning great ideas, careers, internships, non-camp summer jobs were impossible to consider for us or our parents. Everything was off-limits. It wasn’t frum to make it actionable. And in the end, nothing was supposed to happen.

I remember an older very nice secular Jew that I knew who had all sorts of ideas and contacts for me. He was always suggesting I study this or speak to this person or that person he knew. But I was afraid. I was so afraid I kept on canceling a meeting he set up for me with someone because “I did not want to do that.” Not to mention I was afraid of talking with him because he wasn’t religious. As if talking to someone was a life sentence.

Perhaps the story of Orthodox Jewish religion in the modern world is, at its core, a story of fear. The religion struggles to survive modernity for many reasons, and frankly the first reason is fun.

Without religion, people can do whatever they want. It’s hard to argue for staying faithful to one partner when there’s an entire ethic saying you don’t have to. It is hard to say that one should follow a code of law and ethics when the primary societal ethic says that you can live wherever you want, lower your cost of living, and enjoy yourself all weekend. Why would anyone choose hardship and especially the economic hardships of early marriage and children?

Religions can only address this challenge by creating resistance or meaning. I once read something by someone from the Christian Weston College who said that the greatest enemy of Christianity in America over the last 30 or 40 years wasn’t secularism. No, it was coed dormitories. They’re irresistible, especially for men, but also for some women.

So what resistance does the Orthodox Jewish community deploy? How does the Orthodox Jewish religion resist the siren call of modern freedom? Of modern fun? Mostly through fear. The fence of fear.

Traditional religions often built entire worlds that are hermetically sealed. You cannot be in the world of the religion while also living freely in the world outside it. You can leave the community, theoretically, but only by leaving everything, family, friends, identity, and rebuilding yourself from scratch. It’s made very, very difficult.

This is hard to do when your community is in the middle of liberal Western America. So exposure in the community is limited. But even that is not enough. So fear of the outside is employed.

Instead of just walls, there is fear of the outside world. And this fear creates an additional fence. It’s not restricted to just a physical fence of community. There is also a fear of everything. A fear of being “off,” fear of going OTD, fear of not being accepted or acceptable to people in the community. A fear of being too friendly with that nasty “modern” or “secular” Jew who just wanted to help you with your life goals or just wanted to show he felt akin to you as a fellow Jew.

I suspect many, many people in frum communities want secular freedom. Whether they want to eat whatever they want or sleep with whom they want or do what they want. Or maybe they just want to wear a different colored shirt and have children who grow as happy frum Jews working in the career of their choice. So what keeps these people in the community? What keeps them from staying in but still experimenting?

It is fear. Fear of being found out. Fear of making fools of themselves. Fear of crossing lines. Fear of rejection and exile. Without that fear, there’s very little holding them in place. It’s a fence of fear, not a fence of reality.

This fence of community pressure and fear is still a fence. It isn’t a wall. There is no way to keep the world fully out anymore. Especially if you go looking for it. So there is no walling it off. Instead we have a fence. There are holes in a fence. Some communities have wider holes than others. But holes are there. The world can get in. And you can see out. So how to keep people in the fold? Fence them off. So the fence has to be electrified with fear.

Teach that everything not frum is suspicious and should cause fear. So even if they are exposed to great books, good writers, and the universal ethics of learning and wisdom, they are fearful of it. Even if they have interests in the modern world, in the secular world, or just enjoy a book or movie, or just love God’s world, they should be fearful of these feelings or interests and certainly fearful of talking about them. Instead of the normal tension from having one foot in each world, there is a fear about it.

This fear is not fear of God. It is an internal fear and a fear of other frum people. The fear often fixated on a specific insulation or person, “what will he think of me.” But not always.

Making the fence of fear the barrier crushes souls. Instead of living out dreams and spreading wings, while still remaining in the community, too many are just frozen by fear. By the time a young man or woman has any idea of who they are, what their potential is or may be, they are too old and encumbered by family responsibilities to have any chance to make their way there except if they are graced with extraordinary family resources. And instead they continue to live in poverty.

And the fear continues to paralyze. And swallows the next generation. Unless of course they catch the sleazy hustler bug. But that is another story.

In the midst of all these ills, it seems odd that the charedim keep arguing two contradictory claims. One is that “your problems, the State’s problems, are only your problems,” while the other is that “our problems, the Charedim’s problems, are also your problems.”

There has been a tremendous outcry against the Charedim for not serving in the army, especially as in recent years more and more people identify as Charedi and then do not serve. As well, to many, many in the Charedi community behavior toward the war has seemed callous or gross.

Meanwhile the Charedi world keeps saying they cannot go to the army, and their argument seems based on a contradictory claim that the State’s problems are the State’s problems since how they, the charedim, will survive spiritually in the army is also the State’s problem and since there isn’t a “good” enough resolution to this problem therefore they do not have to serve.

But what kind of argument is this really? Why is it only the State’s problem to solve? Why isn’t it also the charedi community’s problem to solve?

Let’s consider for a moment Ruth the Moabite words to Naomi, “Your people are my people, and your God is my God.” Ruth’s words were both a statement of shared fate as well as shared responsibility. But here there seems to be a different mantra at work: your problems are your problems, while my problems are also your problems.

That seems to be the general mantra of this whole Charedi situation. Consider children who never leave home, who continue to live with their parents into their 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. Whatever you think, it isn’t the child’s right to demand the parents solve their situation.

At some point, like a mother bird pushing her children out of the nest, children have to move on and make their own problems their own. This does not mean cutting them off, but it does mean they cannot remain children forever reliant on daddy and mommy to do the worrying. . And part of moving on is no longer looking to one’s parents to solve one’s problems!

What do we have here instead? The idea that there is no moving on, no moving out. That while on one hand the Charedim think that the State of Israel’s problems are only the State’s problems and not the Charedi community’s problems on the other hand, the child’s problem, the charedi community’s problems with joining the army are also the State’s problem!

This is why the contradiction matters. You cannot say that the State’s problems are not your responsibility, while at the same time insisting that your internal challenges become the State’s responsibility.

It is also becoming more obvious that an enormous number of people are not learning at all, and then many are barely learning. That makes the argument of a patur from the draft even harder to claim.

Sadly, it is not as if this pattern is unique. In many places in the world where there is a large Charedi community, we see welfare dependence and the social problems that go with it. There is no excuse.

The words of Ruth describe a shared destiny: your people are my people. But here the message seems reversed. Your problems are yours, and my problems are also yours. That is not a shared destiny. That is indeed not healthy at all.

Indeed, the Haredi population is growing immensely. Of course, perhaps much of the growth has to do with many people, specifically many datim from the edot hamizrach, making the very rational decision of not wanting their kids to get shot at and perhaps not wanting to risk their children’s religiosity. And perhaps many mesorati from the edot hamizrach want a higher-quality, God-centered family life. All of that makes sense.

Especially since becoming Haredi often seems to be relatively low stakes today. It often seems to be more about not doing certain things than about doing other hard things (8–12 hours of hard learning, living a simple life, maintaining a restricted diet and lifestyle). Often it appears that you simply avoid certain behaviors and dress a certain way. It doesn’t seem to demand very much anymore. One of the families across the street are “charedi,” and among other odd things, I once saw them move their car off the sidewalk shortly after Shabbos began because the parking enforcement officer threatened a ticket.

If the Charedi population were to take over the State, how would they run a religious state? How would electricity and the systems that must function to prevent collapse operate on Shabbos? How will a population whose skepticism toward the institutions of the country is so strong, that people claim it is lashon hara to warn others about a child molester, govern responsibly?

In a friend’s neighborhood a year or two ago, a convicted charedi child molester and children’s entertainer was invited to perform locally. The local “normal” rabbi said it was lashon hara to inform people that he had been convicted of these crimes, and of violating parole by being near children, because it “might not be true.”

I would suggest that things like this mean that the question of how the Charedim would run a state does not have to wait until they are a majority. We can ask it now.

How do religious people, people who see themselves as children of God, a nation of priests and a holy nation, function in a democracy, and more specifically in a spoils democracy like Israel? Do they realize the vision of God in a democracy, in a welfare state, as a minority? Do they cause people to praise the Name of God by distinguishing themselves through elevated behavior?

If not, what will happen if and when they become a majority?

Locally, one of the health funds has a small center for child development. Predictably, there are never appointments. You can literally wait years. Recently, I discovered there is a second one. It is not publicly acknowledged. When you ask about appointments, they do not mention it. Even the national call center does not present it as an option.

It turns out that the second office is located within a complex run and controlled by the most powerful Charedi group in the area. It appears that access is effectively limited to them.

Perhaps this group needs many services. It is understandable that any community would want as many resources as possible. For some people in this country, such behavior is considered normal, though it remains troubling and harmful to the health of society. Still, it is shocking. This is organized monopolization of resources by people who see themselves as representing God. God’s ambassadors walking off with public resources?

A frum fencing-in the commons? Imagine a public water fountain being privatized. The word is chutzpah. In a relative’s neighborhood, as it became increasingly Haredi, more and more public land was fenced off. The local public library closed and the space was taken for a private institution. In Jerusalem, part of the sidewalk near the entrance to the city has been taken over by an institution that installed doors blocking the way, forcing parents with small children to walk on a narrow strip of concrete near the street.

This phenomenon exists elsewhere in Israeli society as well. But how can it persist among those who claim a higher calling? Who claim to be more mehadrin and to “tremble at the word of God?”

What is the excuse? One sometimes hears, “Everyone does it.” But do the children of God give such excuses? If religion does not mean striving to be better, being called by God, if it is merely the same behavior in different clothing, then instead of elevating man to God’s level, it brings religion down to man’s.

Some deny it. Some olim who want to believe in the Haredi world close their eyes. They pretend it does not happen. Or they subdivide the community repeatedly, insisting that those responsible are not “real” charedim. Or they say, “I judge everyone favorably.” But such responses do not make the problem disappear.

So how could you run a state as a majority on the basis of religion, while ignoring those very principles when functioning as a minority in a democracy? Many people have pointed out how extreme groups, like Islamists, fascists, and most famously communists, work within democracy when they are a minority or when they are not in control, and once they take over, they eliminate democracy. I would say this also about radical progressives today.

However, here we have a group that already does not signal that they are reasonable stewards or that they believe in the principles of democracy. Now, of course, they are not engaged in street warfare, although one could argue that sending these boys into the street and what happened in Bnei Brak recently does not inspire confidence.

To use Midrashic-type language: imagine a king who has a son who spends his time with bad companions (like Prince Hal and Falstaff) and when confronted, the son just replies, “They are bad, so I am bad too.” What kind of defense is that?

Great political power should produce a greater kiddush Hashem, not a greater disconnect.

Instead of protests that frighten, imagine public acts of generosity that inspire. Instead of inflammatory rhetoric, imagine speech so refined that even critics feel respected. Instead of nasty signs and wild displays, imagine positive interactions between frum and frei that demand nothing at all.

People should look at charedi Knesset members and say, “How fine and thoughtful they speak.” They should appear on television not because they inflame, but because they produce viral positivity.

Instead of protests in the street, imagine charedim bringing kugel to motorists. Instead of rallies where Roshi Yeshiva try to outdo Rav Shach in sharpness, imagine gatherings where they lead their talmidim in chesed for the zechus of people of this country to do teshuva. Let me see the Beis Yaakov girls giving out a Tehillim to every reporter, soldier, and police officer. Instead of chasing female soldiers, let me see older charedi women covering them in brachas.

Make people praise the Name of Hashem. Let them and God know that if the Charedim take over the State, the world will look to Zion to hear the Name of God.

Oy, the yom ha-din; oy, yom ha-tokhacha.

One case involves long-life whole milk produced in Belgium by Solarec and imported by Euro Dairies Europe (Gold Frost) Ltd. of Yavne. The cartons claimed supervision by Badatz Beit Yosef and approval from the Chief Rabbinate, presenting the product as chalav Yisrael.

However, inspectors from the Rabbinate’s Import Department found that the milk was never authorized. As a result, officials ordered the product to be removed from shelves and returned to the importer.”

I found this hard to believe, and knowing that there are people who constantly seek to undermine a kashrus agency like Badatz Beit Yosef, I called Badatz Beit Yosef and asked them if they certify this milk. I also sent them photos and the story (in Hebrew) from Arutz Sheva (which also has it).

They told me that they certify the milk. So I went back and read the story again. Both in Hebrew and in English, if you parse the details, you realize it is not as precise as it seems (or it is very precise). It says, “However, inspectors from the Rabbinate’s Import Department found that the milk was never authorized.”

What I think this really means (or claims) is that the Chief Rabbinate’s Import Department did not authorize it. Not that the Badatz Beit Yosef did not cover it. However, what people (like in my neighborhood and in the comments to this article) are understanding this to mean is that the label was forged. However, it seems as if that is not correct!

These days, Israeli supermarkets are awash with Chalav Stam cheeses from a not well regarded agency that say approved by the Chief Rabbinate’s Import Department. Now I would say that there are questions as to how those meet the Chief Rabbinate’s standards?

Let alone this milk.

And then one wonders: Where did this story come from? Who wrote it and spread it? Why was it written in such a terse fashion that it causes a misunderstanding of what it says?

And then how can one trust kashrus in a country where stories like this are seemingly being spread by who knows whom to seemingly undermine? How can you trust those who benefit from such stories? And why do we seldom see stories about the problems and mistakes some of the others have? :)

Very sad.

https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/israel-news/2516670/kosher-shock-israels-chief-rabbinate-exposes-major-labeling-scandal-in-imported-foods.html

Trust in the media is at an all-time low. It’s supposedly as low as something like 10% of Americans, maybe 10% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans, numbers that sound almost unbelievable. Trust in institutions as a whole is also very low: Congress, academia, and experts in general. “Trust the experts” has basically become a joke meme. Nobody believes it anymore. I think much of this loss was earned, but that may not be such a great thing, because what is poking out instead isn’t too pretty.

We’ve seen a growing rise in conspiracy theories, not just more harmless ones, but what could really be called dangerous conspiracy theories. In the past, people often talked about conspiracies as a kind of pastime, not in a serious way. For example, for people growing up in the ’90s, “Oh, they killed Kennedy” was more of an academic exercise or a game. The same was true with UFO discussions. They were interesting and speculative for some people, but no one took them too seriously.

When Joe Rogan used to talk about conspiracy theories involving things like the pyramids and UFO’s then speak to “experts” who seemed to have arrived from a scientific fiction convention it did not seem too disturbing, It was obvious he was speaking with kooks and cranks, and it felt relatively harmless. Yes, these people would find small openings or incongruities in the historical record and build entire intellectual pyramids in them. But it seemed to be more of a joke or hobby than anything else.

But today conspiracy theories keep getting more and more extreme. We hear wild things like all vaccines do not work at all, Israel is the most evil country in the world, and more. And we have witnessed the growing popularity of these ideas among people who should arguably behave more responsibly: popular podcasters, academics, and the media.

Le-havdil, I think this lack of belief in traditional systems for understanding the world can also be seen in another phenomenon. Namely, the obsessive rise over the last few years of pop-Kabbalah and sod-based shiurim among certain religious communities, including very right-wing or formerly more rationalist groups like some Litvish or Misnagdic circles.

The Winter 2014 issue of Jewish Action famously covered the rise of Neo-Chasidim among the modern Orthodox. And now this fun and fancy-free philosophy has conquered much of the rest of Orthodoxy.

Many yeshivish rabbis now give shiurim that they label as machshava or philosophy but are really focused on sod/Kabbalah material. Of course, there is no text being learned, or if there is, it is one written recently or else a very peculiar or extreme one.

One gets a sense of mystical language being thrown around like a Jackson Pollock splatter painting, Ein Sof here, yesod there, keter, tzimtzum a bit, in ways that frankly make a mockery of Kabbalah itself, regardless of what one thinks about Kabbalah more broadly.

At the same time, we see the rise of yoga-and-Kabbalah shiurim, breathing-and-Kabbalah retreats for men, and other practices taken from outside our religious tradition but marketed using Kabbalistic terminology and claiming to be rooted in sod.

To me, this is exactly analogous to the rise of conspiracy theories. People now want totalizing explanations for everything. Now we need to believe we can understand the inner meaning of breathing and of gartels, something that all those learned Litvaks and modernish types can’t understand. Like the conspiracy theorists, we understand statistics and public health history and World War II history better than anyone. Not only better than the so-called experts, but even better than those scholars who lean in our direction, but don’t have the guts to drop it all as they are still have “real” degrees.

I think what this confusion points to is a deep loss of belief in shared order and a growing need to find hidden systems, what psychologists call agency, that supposedly explain everything.

Similarly, le-havdil, we see enormous popularity in Kabbalah-like terminology and the insistence that it must always take precedence over any other argument. In classical literature, a posek or acharon might mention a Kabbalistic idea cautiously, sometimes without even naming it explicitly, and it certainly was not always decisive. Today, however, once someone says, “But the Kabbalah says,” that often ends the discussion. There is no falsifiability anymore. The claim becomes impossible to challenge.

This is not to deny the existence or even the truth of Kabbalah. Believe what you will. That is fine. But the idea today seems to be that one Kabbalistic reason trumps hundreds of years of halacha. And a person who knows a lot of Kabbalah, or claims to, is at the pinnacle of human achievement, without peer. Or that people who can’t read a line of Gemara, or who can but struggle to give a shiur on Ramban, can now be experts if they deploy sod-based patterns of explanation is ridiculous.

In this pop-sod approach, mystical language automatically takes precedence over any rational or textual argument. It becomes the ultimate trump card. Just as someone who says Lee Harvey Oswald probably acted alone or argues that man did land on the moon, is accused of denying a deeper hidden agency, so too someone who questions whether a particular Kabbalistic reference is relevant or correct is accused of rejecting deeper knowledge, and that becomes the worst possible offense. Lo Aleinu.

There’s a basic lack of seriousness in this world that is analogous to camp. It’s an unreal situation where you wander around certain neighborhoods in the afternoon (in winter) and the streets are full of people who don’t seem to have much to do, yet seem to be going about life just fine, with benefits for not working, stipends, kollel money, gift cards paid for by who knows what, and basically free schooling. There are shuls and institutions that don’t have to pay electric and water bills. And more.

And while these people are talking and wasting their time with all this nonsense about the “war on the Torah,” their lives, and especially the men’s lives, are basically being run like they are in summer camp.

Or perhaps like the “learning programs” or “masmidim programs” in summer camp. We all know these programs. They’re lots of fun. They often heavily subsidized, so instead of paying the thousands of dollars that a regular camper pays, you pay almost nothing. You get to eat all the meals, go on trips, or at least some of them, and hang out in the facilities.

The boys are supposed to be sitting in the beit midrash and learning. Some people are; some people aren’t. What they’re doing is called learning, so that’s what it is. It can be whatever you want. And anyhow someone else is paying for it.

And obviously, the highlight of camp is Color War.

Here too, while the State of Israel has gone into a real war with real casualties, charedim are having Color War. That’s a fake war, where they get to have generals too, pretend to be fighting too, and have songs and excitement.

Here too, we put on a whole act. We have Rav Dov Landau. They hand him things to read, and he reads them, whether he knows what they mean or even what he’s saying. Just like a color war general. Frankly, it seems more like elder abuse than anything else.

Be that as it may, the Color War has broken out. The problem is that it’s a Color War about a very, very serious matter, a real war.

And, and, and…
The only problem is that real life is real. And people are getting hurt.

(Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, interview by William Helmreich, Interviews with Various Roshei Yeshiva, January 17, 1978)

We have come a long way from these words. Perhaps the people who do the worst in the Haredi world today are the nonconformists. These may often tend to be those who are high on what psychologists call openness. The problem with people high in openness is that they can’t fit easily into a structure. For them, it doesn’t necessarily work to leave the Haredi world to go to the dati world, or to go to the secular world. Often, they don’t do well there either.

Note, I do not mean open orthodoxy or open-minded. I mean to describe a general tendency.

From Wikipedia, “Openness to experience is one of the domains which are used to describe human personality in the Five Factor Model.[1][2] Openness involves six facets, or dimensions: active imagination (fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety (adventurousness), intellectual curiosity, and challenging authority (psychological liberalism).”

Openness can be a wonderful thing. People who are high in openness are a source of creativity, of making changes for the better. It is so deeply needed and is therefore something that should be nurtured and helped. However, there are fundamental problems that make it difficult for them to work in a system, and the tighter the system, the harder it is for them to function.

And the tighter the Haredi system has become, the harder it is for them to function there. The only problem is that, because of financial and social pressures, the other Jewish systems have also become very tight and very difficult to function in. Both the dati system in Israel and the modern Orthodox system in the United States are systems where people have sacrificed.

Both the dati system in Israel and the modern Orthodox system in the United States require people to sacrifice much of their personality in order to find those high-paying jobs to afford life in these communities.So the nonconformists don’t fit there either.

It seems as if most Orthodox Jewish communities offer little space for these individuals. Yes, there are some communities that are okay with nonconformists as long as they conform to Breslov, Neo-Hasidic, Chabad, or Open Orthodoxy. But that price is too high.

Do Jewish Orthodox Jews in general have space for these people? They have been marginalized. As there is a demand for those who are smart, intellectual, and creative within, we have ended up with some suboptimal solutions.

There are what you might call intellectual resellers. These are people who find (or buy or “borrow”) creative stuff that other people have created and pass them on as their own work, in order to position themselves as if they were creative. But because they’re not, because it’s just a pose, we gain little.

Then we have the charisma merchants. Selling inspirational religion as if it will solve our problems. The “I am ok, you are ok, as long as we love each other and God.” In other words, mega church style religion.

And then Modern Orthodoxy has its own approach. It looks to the soul-crunching, heavy-handed scholasticism of academia for creativity. Their reward is progressive ideas from university campuses that have been cooled off slightly in a tepid bath of lukewarm religion.

And there is so much more to say and unpack…

It is sad. We are missing out on so much. On great moral leadership. On the great chiddushim in Torah, life and behavior. On a newly vibrant intellectual life in the Orthodox community.

And we all lose out.

I don’t mean “wild” in a charming or adventurous sense. I mean impulsive, reckless, sometimes physically aggressive. Jumping off things. Jumping on people. Testing boundaries constantly. They were often nice kids, but they were not well-contained kids.

And the explanation that circulated, and that many adults genuinely believed, was that these kids were protected. That they were insulated. That because they didn’t watch television, because they didn’t read newspapers, because they didn’t engage with the outside world, they were somehow purer, more kosher, more spiritual.
That simply didn’t match reality. This matters, because it connects directly to the larger conversation about secular studies.

Over the past few decades, a new model has been celebrated in parts of the yeshivish world: the idea that you can eliminate secular studies entirely and still succeed.
Why waste time on math, science, history, or language skills when people are “successful anyway”? Amazon sales. Real estate. Business. Micro “lending.” Hustling.

But let’s be honest. That story applies to a small minority. Most people are living paycheck to paycheck, if not on parental support and/or some other form of financial scaffolding. The success narrative is massively overstated. Even if we take it seriously, what we actually see on the ground is more problematic.

Talk to older teenagers or young adults from very insular communities. Yes, some are bright. Some are articulate, especially in a mobile-first generation that’s learned how to sound fluent without being deep.
But scratch the surface and the gaps are glaring. Many can’t write a coherent paragraph. Basic arithmetic is shaky. Independent thinking is rare. The ability to handle a thought based on premises they are not used to is scarce, if it exists at all. Sustained concentration is almost nonexistent.

And this isn’t about college. College may well be a scam in many ways. That’s not the issue. The issue is education, the ability to understand the world, process information, reason carefully, and distinguish substance from nonsense.Academics and secular studies are not the same thing as credentialism. Rejecting college does not require rejecting literacy, numeracy, or intellectual discipline.

But when everything “secular” is framed as fake, corrupt, or a con, something poisonous happens. Kids internalize the idea that most thinking itself is suspect. That learning outside a narrow framework is illegitimate. That effort can be replaced with hustle.

So what fills the vacuum when secular studies disappear? Is it all Torah? For a small, genuinely gifted and committed minority, maybe. For the average person? No.

What fills the space is noise. Emptiness. Low-grade distractions. Shallow content. Gossip. Stupid books. Shorter, dumber articles. Magazines stripped of real Torah ideas and intellectual seriousness. A persistent need to negate the humanity and value of those outside the community. The irony is rich but painful; communities that claim to value depth are producing less of it.

And let’s not pretend moral insulation has improved either. Anyone who grew up inside knows what actually went on, at least in their own hearts, and it’s not getting better. A small minority is up to who knows what. A larger group seems to pretend not to be fascinated by kol davar assur while constantly keeping their eyes open.

We didn’t eliminate exposure. We just eliminated tools, useful ones, like the ability to think critically, to contextualize, to process, to grapple. We built a fence around the Torah, not a wall. A fence keeps people in well, but a fence has large holes that let the world in.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the kids who had some real secular education and later became more religious often do better, intellectually, emotionally, and professionally. Even with guilt. Even with gaps in formal Torah learning. They often outperform those who were “protected” from everything.

American Jews who grew up with solid general education tend to do reasonably well. Those raised with almost none often struggle far more than we’re willing to admit. This isn’t an argument for college worship. It’s an argument against anti-intellectualism masquerading as piety.

Without education, real education, you don’t get holiness. You don’t get wisdom. You get people who are brilliant at doing nothing except the least beneficial forms of thinking. And that should worry anyone who actually cares about the future.

Over the past month or so, we’ve seen a series of tragedies in the Haredi world, most painfully the babies dying in the playcare and the teenagers being run over in the street. Running people over is obviously wrong, but reckless behavior in public spaces (standing in the street?) points to something deeper: a collapse of basic civic and moral sensibility.

I think the explanation is uncomfortable but unavoidable: cultural Yiddishkeit has won. The Jewish ethical-culturalists won their battle, decades after seemingly going extinct.

Whether you date it to 150 years ago, 75 years ago, the late 19th century, or the first half of the 20th Century doesn’t really matter. There was a long-running struggle between what we might call the Torah world and the Jewish culture camp. Maybe it even goes back to Mendelssohn, or at least to the generations after him. The classic question was always the same: Is Judaism a religion, or is it a culture?

The traditional Torah world insisted that Judaism is all-encompassing. It’s not something you “do” on the side. It’s not just an ethnic marker, a costume, or a lifestyle aesthetic. It’s a total identity, rooted in a living relationship with God.

And yet, ironically, the Haredi world today seems to proudly espouse the opposite assumption. Despite seeing itself as the defender of the old European Torah world, it has come to function like an urban ethnic minority engaged in a cultural struggle. In practice, it has internalized the idea that Judaism is a culture, Haredi culture.

You see this most clearly in debates about the army. The question is almost never framed seriously around Torah learning itself. Nobody really asks who is actually learning, under what conditions, and why.

I once had an American yeshiva student studying here tell me that week after week, over Friday night meals, the question kept coming up with different visiting Rebbeim: under what circumstances would you ever allow anyone to go to the army? Not whether it might be a mitzvah, not whether some should learn and some should serve, just whether there is any condition under which it can ever be okay.

And the answer, of course, was never. Always no. Or it was evasions and appeals to alleged broken promises, with a flat refusal to imagine any situation at all.

Why is that? Because once Judaism is understood primarily as identity and practice, rather than truth and obligation before God, there is no room to negotiate. The religion becomes the externals: the dress code, the behavioral markers, the group boundaries. Backing down feels like existential surrender.

This is exactly what the Yiddishist vision wanted: Judaism as something you do because you’re Jewish. Belief doesn’t matter. God doesn’t really matter. Personal moral or spiritual transformation isn’t required. You keep some things like speaking Yiddish or Hebrew or names etc. because that’s what Jews do. It’s heritage, legacy, continuity, but nothing deeper than that.

And that model has now taken over large parts of the Haredi world in Israel (and perhaps elsewhere, though that’s a separate discussion). Yiddishkeit, for them, has become minhag avoteinu be’yadeinu, not as a living covenant, but as inherited behavior.

Once that happens, a second transformation follows almost automatically. The community begins to resemble the familiar pattern of an angry, disenfranchised minority: young men without meaningful work, without responsibility, expressing frustration through aggression. We’ve seen this model again and again across countries and cultures over the last few decades.

And now we’re seeing it in Israel.

That’s why so many people, rightly or wrongly, complain about Haredi behavior: cruelty, selfishness, lack of basic courtesy, pushing, shouting, callousness, blaming others for their mistakes (like with the babysitter tragedy). Yes, some of this is exaggerated. Yes, there’s hypocrisy and projection. But for anyone who actually knows that world, there’s also some undeniable truth here, Painful truth.

And that is the real tragedy.

A community that sees itself as children of God, that presents itself as more spiritual, more elevated than everyone else, ends up behaving as badly as others, ends up following at least some of the worst mores of the society it is part of. But even worse than that, it violates its own standards most of all.

That isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s a spiritual collapse.

And the human cost of it is now being paid in the street. But the greater cost is in our souls and in our future.

“Et tu,” I knew from Asterix, the wonderful Belgian comic books that we were privileged to grow up with instead of regular comic books, which my mother would not allow in the house, and for that I’m forever grateful.

And then, of course, “Friends, Romans…” and “Et tu” were also familiar from the old TV show Wayne & Shuster, great Jewish comedians made famous by Ed Sullivan. They were clever types whose best sketches stack up well today, as well as any decent, intelligent humor. Their absolutely brilliant sketch based on Julius Caesar taught me many famous lines from the play and takes place in an “American tough-guy detective” Philip Marlowe type world.

I watched it many times with my sibling on our VHS player because TV was banned and forbidden in the house. When we watched it, Wayne & Shuster was already gone from the air by then, and their broadcaster had already started their auto-da-fé to destroy anything worthwhile in their product.

Thinking of Wayne & Shuster makes me wonder why there is so little intelligent humor today. Clever humor, yes; intelligent, not so much. Yes, I understand there’s clean humor, dirty humor, non-clean humor, slapstick, non-slapstick, clever humor, not-so-clever humor. Yes, divisions like that exist. But what about humor that also appeals to the intellect and not just cleverness and off-color? What happened to that?

Shakespeare knew how to appeal to more intelligent things. Yes, his plays are full of bawdiness; luckily, most of it goes over the heads of kids, and even adults don’t always get it. And truth be told, maybe he would chuckle that people today actually look so hard for it that they find bawdiness that may not even be there.

But there is more than just clever bawdy humor. The language, the characters, wonderful turns of phrase, the references to Plutarch, the Bible, Montaigne, and the classics, and the ribald humor is all there.

The brilliance of Shakespeare’s work was already recognized by his contemporaries. That’s why he was beloved then and why he is beloved to this day. And, by the way, the fact that his brilliance was already recognized by his contemporaries is the clearest argument against the Baconian conspirators and the other “theorists” who claim that someone else wrote Shakespeare’s work.

Namely, it was not a surprise to everyone who knew him that he wrote them. It made sense to them that he did, which is because he did.

It’s not hard to understand why clever comedians like Dave Chappelle or Joe Rogan or whatnot are at the top of the comedy heap, but why is there no place for intelligent comedy, for comedy that’s intellectual too, not just clever? Like Shakespeare’s, spanning the gamut from clever to ribald to intelligent.

In high school, when I read Shakespeare, I was confused. What was so great? Lear was just depressing and more depressing. Henry V was interesting, but didn’t really stick. Macbeth pulled me in a little bit, but it seemed mostly depressing and about a bad marriage.

Now Hamlet’s indecision haunted me for years. On and off, it would just appear in my head. And a couple of times over the years, I bought a Shakespeare play, but I didn’t read it.

Then one day, someone told me that he reads Shakespeare on a cycle, and he was already on his second or third time around. My mind was blown. I couldn’t believe it, all of Shakespeare. I had to try too.

So on long subway rides from South Ferry to Upper Manhattan, I sat and read. And now I was in awe. The words were put together like music, like a hip-hop artist. The usage was brilliant.

And the characters. In a few dozen or hundred lines of text, Shakespeare sketched out personas as complex as the ones built layer by layer in season after season of award-winning TV shows.

And the ideas. The idea underlying Romeo and Juliet, that a relationship based on desire is something OK, that marriage is not, should not be, made for you by family or clan, as still was the norm at that time, is astonishing.

Rereading Hamlet, Hamlet’s very personality, his defining characteristic, his indecision, is us, is our lives in this postmodern, social-media, smartphone era where everything seems about regret and indecision.

Henry V, his inspiration of his troops, his weird, not-really-explained development from being a bum to growing up and turning his back on it all, is an amazing argument for embracing responsibility and abandoning the debauchery in our own lives. While Henry’s Churchillian propelling of his troops by sheer will is the greatest argument for a life full of meaning and purpose.

Julius Caesar tells of how republican principles are always threatened by strong executives, by needless infighting, and how the democratic consensus is built on a certain prisoner’s dilemma, where one side, like Caesar, may fear giving up power out of fear of what persecution and abuse they may suffer.

And then, of course, how even men of the best intentions, like Brutus, whose goal is to save their republic, can bring it down. Assassinating Caesar results in the complete end of the Roman Republic and the creation of Imperial Rome.

In Lear, the story that everyone forced to read hates, is found the clearest testament about how people in power always behave. Like Lear, always demanding to be told what the person telling them really thinks, as long as it is what they want to hear. Cordelia’s fate is what is in store for those who believe the powerful when they say they want to be told the truth. Lear’s later neglect in the play too closely parallels the neglect of so many aging parents, especially in our youth-obsessed society with its unhealthy obsession for warehousing older people.

I never really understood much about power and how it is obtained until I read Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, but Shakespeare was there a long time before Caro. Shakespeare recognized how power works. In Macbeth, the quest for control, and being willing to climb on top of anybody and everybody, is already present there, and the guilt.

Maybe I didn’t give Shakespeare his due because of our contemporary distrust of genius. The word “genius,” makes people get hot under the collar. We fear the idea of anyone being superior, as such ideas have led to so much blood in the past 100+ years. Easier to think of a genius as a very bright person who does things on computers and might be on the spectrum.

Shakespeare is different; he is a creative genius, someone who, when putting together things that already exist, creates something new.

Shakespeare is like Maimonides, like the Rambam. He takes what already exists and just puts it together a little differently, conceptualizes it a little differently, and then suddenly he haunts us. In a few words, they sketch out ideas that fascinate for hundreds of years. Words that they may have put little thought into open windows into minds of inventive originality.

Shakespeare is no different. People say, “Oh, Shakespeare’s just writing the popular entertainment of the day,” and they think they’re diminishing Shakespeare, but really that’s the greatness of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was writing the low, popular comedy of the day, but it was also more than that. It wasn’t just for the rabble; it was for the high, for the nobility. He played command performances as part of the King’s Men, performing in front of the king and the literate people in his court.

But it’s more than that. In the medium of popular entertainment, Shakespeare was able to create characters that sit with those who take the time to learn the language to this day, and to create turns of phrase that, again, those who have taken the time to learn the language are shocked and impressed by today.

As if someone were making Star Wars movies or Marvel movies, but incorporating the art and genius of a Stanley Kubrick or a Martin Scorsese, while hiring Nabokov and Borges as the writers. Popular entertainment, even soap-opera like, but that appeals also to the most highbrow audience while continuing to astonish audiences and readers (like the members of my reading group) for hundreds of years.

Not bad. Not bad at all. I’m glad I’ve rediscovered Shakespeare.