Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy—its adherents prefer the term “Haredi”*—has an identifiable, branded color scheme: black hats, black suits, and white shirts. To watch Netflix, you would think its adherents were the only Jews on earth. The miniseries Unorthodox (2020) and reality show My Unorthodox Life (2021) were both about women who had left Haredi communities. The Israeli series Shtisel (2013–2021) is a more positive depiction: a soap opera–cum–allegory about a gentle, dreamy Israeli Haredi who is a gifted painter. The shows’ popularity reflects enduring, if cyclical, audience interest in Haredi Jews. Those Jews look (to the uninitiated) like throwbacks to the eastern European shtetl, and so are well suited to serve as canvases for modern impulses of revulsion and nostalgia.
The Haredi color scheme could hardly be more symbolically perfect. The black and white hark back to nineteenth-century Europe, a time before color photography. Poetically, they conjure up the Haredi vision of God: a God of right and wrong, of permitted and forbidden, a God whose Torah records and commands bright-line rules that are written in black ink on white parchment and that lay out a black-and-white morality without shades in between or room for updated modernization.
I can remember the appeal of that black and white when, as a child, I visited my Haredi cousins in Borough Park, Brooklyn. I could already make out that the way they dressed stood for Jewish authenticity: the idea that there was a right and a wrong way to be Jewish and that theirs was the right way. In particular, I envied the crisp black fedoras the boys were given to wear when they became bar mitzvah. My own family identified as Modern Orthodox, which meant that we followed the law fairly rigorously but didn’t wear the black-and-white uniform.
I lobbied my father, then as now a model of traditional Ivy style, to buy me a fedora. He didn’t want to, realizing, I am sure, that I would have no occasion to wear it back in Cambridge. But when he visited his Brooklyn family, he himself would break out a natty soft blue fur-felt number from Worth & Worth. So somehow he relented, buying thirteen-year-old me a child-sized fedora. It was manufactured by a company called Kova Hats, “Hat Hats,” since kova‘means hat in Hebrew. (I looked it up online: Hat Hats still exists, appropriately enough in Lakewood, New Jersey, the home of the largest yeshiva in the United States.)
The hat my father let me get wasn’t black, however. It was gray, as if to say to my relatives, and the world, that we weren’t fully with the program, but somewhere betwixt and between. Authenticity eluded me. I am pretty sure I didn’t wear the fedora in public more than a few times.
The God of black and white is the right starting place for making sense of the beliefs and lives of the Haredim. There are numerous subgroups of Haredim—so many, in fact, that almost no Haredi would ordinarily use the term to describe himself or herself, preferring a much more specific designation. What almost all Haredim share is a common and complete inner commitment to what they consider the unbroken tradition of Jewish belief and practice. This can be summarized neatly by the first teachings found in the Ethics of the Fathers, a compilation of wise aphorisms by rabbis who lived roughly from 200 BCE to 200 CE:
Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua; and Joshua to the elders; and the elders to the prophets; and the prophets transmitted it to the men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in doing justice; raise many students; and make a fence round the Torah.1
The main point of the passage is to establish the chain of custody of the Law from God to Moses on down to the sages and rabbis, who have authoritatively borne the tradition ever since. The secondary points are that the Law governs in the real world (it does “justice”); that it is to be studied by the many students of the rabbis; and that the rabbis must protect the observance of the Law by making new, more restrictive rules to assure no one comes close to violating the rules laid down by God.
To Jews whose beliefs belong to this pattern, God is the ultimate authority. His will can be known through the living tradition: the binding, definitive body of interpretation that tells them what God requires of His people. Jews who believe in this God may justly be named “Traditionalists.”2 They know God through His Torah. They know His Torah is true because the tradition teaches them that it is. And they are certain that the tradition to which they belong goes straight back to the revelation at Mount Sinai.3
Traditionalists believe that God requires a totalizing envelopment of purely Jewish spiritual and communal life. For them, the authority of the rabbis does not stop at the outer boundary of what the Torah requires nor even at the fence that extends around the Law. To be precise, they do not think the Torah’s requirements delineate a boundary at all: every aspect of human life is to be integrated into a single Torah worldview that is articulated by the rabbis and obeyed by everyone else.
To historians, whose job is to chart the development of human ideas and religious movements from outside rather than from within, ultra-Orthodox Traditionalism is not actually a seamless continuation of unbroken Jewish historical practice. To the historians, Haredi thought is a product of the modern age, a reaction to the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment.† The Traditionalist insistence on an absolutist Torah worldview is, to the historical eye, a cousin of the other totalizing worldviews that emerged in the modern era, including the totalizing commitment to reason or science. In other words, from the standpoint of academic history, what I am calling Traditionalism isn’t inherently traditional at all.‡
To the Traditionalists themselves, however, who conceive even their innovations as part of unbroken tradition, this set of external observations is basically irrelevant. Hasidim, one of the two major groups of Haredim, symbolically trace their old-Polish-style fur hats and long black coats back to ancient Israel and its priestly and royal garments. They revere their founder, Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (c. 1698–1760), not only as the creator of devekus, a radical mystical practice of cleaving to God, but as a lineal descendant of the royal House of David. The other major Haredi group, today often called Yeshivish after the yeshivas that form the heart of its community, understand themselves as the inheritors of a continuous chain of intellectual-spiritual-legal Torah study going back to the beginning, even though in the past only a small number of intellectually qualified young men studied in the great yeshivas.
In their daily lives, Traditionalist Jews seek to operationalize the Torah in every moment, waking or sleeping. They pray three times daily, the men always in conjunction with a quorum of at least ten, whether in synagogues or at work or at the study house. They marry young and have many, many children in fulfillment of the divine command to be fruitful and multiply. Everyone studies Torah full-time until around the age of eighteen in schools that teach either the bare minimum of legally required secular knowledge or, sometimes, less than that. After eighteen, almost all men continue to study Torah as a profession for roughly another decade, sometimes longer. Women may obtain college and professional degrees and might work in non-Haredi jobs, but men generally do neither. Traditionalists live in big, like-minded, highly supportive, and highly insular communities where they can be close to their extended families and participate in their own institutions of education, prayer, and even health care. They read newspapers and books aimed at their communities. They speak to each other either in Yiddish, a language they have lovingly preserved from pre-Holocaust Europe, or else in distinctive dialects of English or Hebrew that are shot through with Jewish words and ideas. Those dialects are pronounced and intoned a lot like Yiddish and can sound strikingly different from conventional English or Hebrew.
From these distinctive aspects of Traditional Judaism, it is possible to begin to glimpse the extremely attractive aspects of its lived reality for those who choose it, and perhaps for some others who appreciate it from a distance. Traditionalism offers that most elusive, rare phenomenon in our contemporary fragmented world: total, comprehensive belonging in an environment of total, comprehensive belief. Traditionalists, at their best, can experience lives of divinely driven purpose, enmeshed in the love and unwavering support of families and communities that share the same sense of meaning and the same ethical framework.
All this is, for Traditionalists, warmed by the comforting, nurturing flame of authenticity. For hundreds of years now, since the start of the modern age, self-questioning and self-doubt have informed or defined many people’s spiritual lives. The postmodern worldview is, if anything, more troubled by uncertainty than the modern. Traditionalists are living out a kind of solution to this doubt. They can take refuge in their confidence that they are doing what God wants, in the way God wants them to do it. They are, in short, living their spiritual and familial lives in perfect alignment with how they believe things ought to be. From their perspective, they are being authentic not merely to themselves but to the divine order of the universe.
The model of authenticity, collective commitment, and a high birth rate has translated into a communal flourishing and growth that was all but unimaginable after the devastating losses of the Holocaust. Today there are well over 1.5 million Haredi Jews in the world, with about two-thirds in Israel, one-third in the United States, and a smattering elsewhere. That accounts for perhaps 7 percent of American Jews4 and 12.5 percent of all Israelis.5
Measured in institutional terms, the Traditionalist resurgence is even more stunning. More people study in yeshivas today than at any time in Jewish history. Greater wealth and changing social norms have created enormous yeshivas of unprecedented size. In eastern Europe, a large yeshiva might have had a couple hundred students. Today the largest yeshiva in the United States, Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey, known colloquially as BMG or Lakewood, has roughly eight thousand students, ranging in age from eighteen into their thirties.6 The Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem has some nine thousand students.7
GOD’S COMMANDMENTS, GOD’S AUTHORITY
The success and sustainability of the Traditionalist way of life begins with God. He (gendered in the Hebrew language but genderless according to most Jewish theology, because God has no body) is not just any God. He is a God of law and of love whose ways can be known. His gracious commandments can be satisfyingly followed. His prescribed rituals of worship are meant to sustain human beings through joy and sorrow, all the while reminding us that the divine Presence is near. Awesome as this God is, Traditionalists often experience Him as caring and present. He even has an affectionate Yiddish nickname, der Aibishter (literally, “the Uppermost”), which conjures up a God who is aware of humans and the details of their lives.§
A life lived in accordance with God’s requirements and rituals can be a life infused with a near-constant connection to the spiritual plane. The family lies close to the heart of this Traditionalist life, and ideally, family life is constantly reinforced and elevated by the shared sense of holiness that comes with fulfilling God’s plan. The highest individual value is the nourishment of the soul, whether understood as the mind (in Yeshivish circles) or as the spirit (in mystical Hasidism). The service of God—the love of God—consists in connecting the individual soul to the collective soul. And what, really, could be more beautiful than that?
The challenges of creating and sustaining this kind of total spiritual community in the context of late consumer capitalism—a shorthand for the background social conditions of life in contemporary America, Israel, and Europe, where Traditionalists live—are as obvious as they are overwhelming. Our contemporary societies are, to a great degree, places of dissociation, disunity, and difference. Lots of people today experience connection, community, and even spiritual transcendence. But almost by definition, those parts of our lives are partial, not total. Sometimes we are in community; sometimes not. Sometimes we worship—or meditate, or do yoga, or drink in sports bars—with others; sometimes not. Almost never do we find ourselves in the setting of total community among people who share essentially all our deepest commitments and beliefs. You might even say that our societies are designed to accommodate our many different overlapping selves and identities and group attachments.
Traditionalists want to achieve a state of being that is almost the opposite of our background conditions of freedom and multiplicity. They might want to be free to choose the lives they lead, but that is where the freedom ends. In fact, Traditionalists are even ambivalent about whether we are free to choose to worship God or whether that choice is forced upon us.
Consider the pivotal moment depicted in the Bible in which the children of Israel enter into covenant with God at Mount Sinai. According to the book of Exodus, God offers the Israelites an if-then agreement: “Now if you will surely listen to my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be my treasure from among all the peoples, for all the earth is mine.”8 Faced with this opportunity, “All the people answered together, and said, ‘All that God has spoken we will do.’”9
The literal meaning of the text seems to be that the covenant with God is accepted freely by the Israelites. For most modern Jews, influenced by the structures of classical liberal political thought, the voluntary choice to enter into the covenant is central to what makes Jewish faith and practice appealing: to worship God is to make a free choice to do so. Seen this way, the good and just God of the Bible does not mandate obedience. He offers the Law to those who choose it.¶
The earliest rabbis sometimes embraced a version of this notion of free choice at Sinai. But the Talmud also records a very different viewpoint, which begins with the Bible’s innocuous-sounding statement that the Israelites at Sinai “stood at the bottom of the mountain.”10 One rabbi, Avdimi bar Hama, suggested taking this phrase literally: the children of Israel stood beneath the bottom of the mountain. “This teaches,” Avdimi said, “that the Holy One, Blessed be He, overturned the mountain above them like a cask, and said to them: ‘If you accept the Torah, excellent; and if not, there will be your burial place.’”11
In Avdimi’s version, God did not offer the Israelites a truly free choice to enter the covenant. Instead God made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: accept the Law or die right here, right now. The rabbis of the Talmud understood that Avdimi was contradicting the notion that the Israelites accepted the covenant voluntarily. Another rabbi, Aha bar Ya’akov, is recorded as noting that Avdimi’s story creates a “great caveat” to the Torah. By implication, based on Avdimi’s account, the Israelites would be able to say they were coerced into accepting the Law and therefore are not truly bound by it.
The Talmud offers a weak response to Rabbi Aha’s worry, suggesting that the Israelites later reaccepted the Law voluntarily in the time of Queen Esther.12 To my mind, the weakness of the response reflects and even acknowledges that Avdimi’s authoritarian version of the covenant has its own logic. Taking Avdimi seriously, the covenant is not a freely chosen pact. It is certainly not a contract among equals. God is transcendent and all-powerful; the Israelites are not. It follows that a divine covenant is inherently a structure shaped by pre-existing divine authority. On this view, it makes no sense to say you freely choose to worship the one true God. You have no alternative, not if you want to live and prosper.
As if to underscore this authoritarian perspective, the Talmud offers a statement by yet another, better known rabbi, Rabbi Shimon (Resh) Lakish, that ups the ante of the Israelites’ coerced consent. According to Avdimi, if the Israelites had declined the covenant, they would have been destroyed. According to Resh Lakish, if the Israelites had declined the covenant, the whole universe would have been destroyed: “The Holy One, Blessed be He, set a condition on Creation and said to [it]: ‘If Israel accepts the Law, you shall continue to exist; and if not, I shall return you to chaos and void.’”13
The point of Resh Lakish’s more extreme scenario is partly to suggest that the universe exists teleologically for the purpose of the Torah. At the same time, Resh Lakish’s view also emphasizes the authoritarian structure of the power differential between the parties to the covenant, the omnipotent Creator and the human children of Israel. God’s authority over the world inheres in His act of creating it. Within that created world, humans must play their role, or else the world would not exist. The universe would be cast back to the state the second verse of the Bible describes as existing before creation: “when the earth was chaos and void, and the spirit of God hovered over the waters.”14
To Traditionalists, then, God’s authority is primary, primordial, and absolute. The Traditionalist God is the Master of the Universe, the divine King. His realm is not a democracy.15 To believe in Him is to accept the yoke of His authority. You may plead with Him, pray to Him, reason with Him like Abraham, or even rage at Him in the manner of Job or a Hasidic master questioning divine justice. But you must accept His answer, or His situational silence, as final. That acceptance of God’s authority is the condition of believing, and that belief is the condition of belonging.
THE VIEW OF THE TORAH
In Traditionalism, God’s authority is not abstract but concrete. The core teaching of rabbinic tradition is that God assigned His authority to human beings: first to prophets and priests and judges, then to the rabbis who succeeded them. The God of the Hebrew Bible directs the children of Israel to act “according to the Torah which they shall instruct you.” The same verse concludes, “Do not deviate from the word which they shall tell you right or left.”16
To Traditionalists, this verse answers the basic theological problem of how Jews today can know what God wants. Their solution is straightforward: the rabbis will tell you. Consequently, God’s will can be known. It can be known by asking the rabbis what God wills. God may not be in direct communication with the Jews as He was with their biblical forefathers. But that distance does not matter, because the rabbis have the authority to say what God wants.
In this structure of authority, the rabbis in turn must ascertain God’s will. Their chief tool to do so is, unsurprisingly, the tradition itself. In the view of Traditionalist rabbis, the written and oral Torah comprise nothing less than a complete system of knowledge—all the knowledge necessary to know what God wants of us. What is required of the rabbis, in this picture, is interpretation and application. Fortunately, that is exactly the stuff the tradition is made of. The tradition is a record of other, previous rabbis interpreting and applying God’s laws.
The complicating factor in this structure of concretized divine authority is that rabbis are human beings, hence fallible. In theory, even the greatest rabbis might err in interpreting and applying God’s will. To complicate matters further, the rabbinic tradition is a tradition of argument and disagreement. The earliest rabbinic sources already record differing opinions from different rabbis on questions of Jewish law. The activity of Torah study has always consisted of arguing about the true meaning of the Torah.17
The way out favored by Traditionalist Jews is to locate final rabbinic authority in an ultimate, quasi-hierarchical institution: the rabbinic court recognized by the Jews of the time. A famous and important Talmudic story exemplifies and explains this solution.18 It involves a dispute over a matter that no longer troubles Jews, namely the operation of the Hebrew calendar, which was once set not by mathematical calculation but by direct observation of the new moon each month.
In the story, two witnesses came to Rabban Gamliel II, the prince of the rabbinic Jewish community in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. They testified they had seen the new moon at the expected time—the thirtieth day of the month—but had looked the following night and not seen it. Rabban Gamliel, untroubled by the inconsistency, accepted their testimony and, with his rabbinic court in the town of Yavneh, declared the new month, thus setting the dates of the holidays in it, which happened to include Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year.
Some other rabbis thought the contradiction between seeing the new moon and then not seeing it the next night rendered the witnesses’ testimony invalid. Fatefully, one of these was Rabbi Joshua, an important and widely respected rabbi. In his view, the calendar month did not begin until the next day.
Rabban Gamliel decided to enforce his princely authority. He ordered Rabbi Joshua to appear before him on the day that the latter considered Yom Kippur carrying “your staff and your coins.” If that day was actually Yom Kippur, then carrying those objects would be a violation of the strict ordinances that commanded rest on the holy day.19 The point was to show Rabbi Joshua—and the rest of the world—that Rabban Gamliel’s authority about the date of the holiday was final.
In the Talmud’s account, Rabbi Joshua was troubled by the order, but he nevertheless obeyed. When he came before Rabban Gamliel with his staff and coin purse on the day Rabbi Joshua had calculated as Yom Kippur, the prince stood up—a mark of respect—and kissed Rabbi Joshua on the head, saying, “Come in peace, my master and my student. My master—in wisdom. My student—in that you accepted my words.”20
Rabban Gamliel’s formulation was, it would seem, intended as a sort of compromise. His decree had been obeyed and his authority definitively established. He could then defer to Rabbi Joshua’s greater “wisdom”—provided the hierarchical structure was preserved. The underlying principle of rabbinic authority had been vindicated.
Something like this hierarchical idea, I would argue, undergirds the contemporary Traditionalist solution to the locus of rabbinic authority. To Traditionalists, divine delegated authority today rests with a small number of rabbis known as gedolim, great ones. The gedolim acquire their status through their reputations for Torah knowledge and personal piety. No single recognized institution has the authority to choose them, although yeshivas and Hasidic dynasties can play a role in shaping their reputations. Nevertheless, there is broad agreement among Traditionalists about who the gedolim are.21
The gedolim are human and so capable of disagreement among themselves. But when the gedolim do agree, Traditionalists call their collective opinion daas Toyre, a Yiddish phrase that means, literally, “the view of the Torah.”22 To Traditionalists, daas Toyre, the consensus of the gedolim, has the status of Torah, of Law, and is binding even on matters of policy rather than strict questions of Jewish law. The range of subjects covered can be extremely broad, ranging from a ban on the use of smartphones without software to protect users from worldly influences all the way to instructing adherents on how to vote in Israeli elections.
Because the gedolim are not prophets receiving direct revelation from God, daas Toyre isn’t divine prophecy. That’s why it is called “the view of the Torah,” not “the view of God.” Traditionalists typically believe, however, that daas Toyre is formed with a kind of divine guidance or inspiration. By a lifetime of pious worship and study, true gedolim gain access to the divine will. Daas Toyre is thus similar to Torah study in kind but not in degree. By studying the Torah, any person may ascertain some of God’s law. The most learned and most pious scholars are vouchsafed an even deeper understanding of God’s will, one appropriate to their station. They intuit God’s will out of their knowledge of God’s law as revealed to humans in the Torah.
CHALLENGES TO TRADITIONALIST BELIEF
The same structure of authority that organizes Traditionalist belief and maintains the community against the counterforces of the contemporary world is also the wellspring of the most powerful external criticisms of the Traditionalist worldview. Those criticisms may be heard everywhere from popular culture to more serious and sustained intrareligious conversation. They are not the criticisms of Traditionalism leveled by the thinkers of the nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment, which mainly had to do with its nonscientific worldview and alleged inability to engage the social and economic realities of modernity. Nor do they resemble the philosophical criticisms of traditional, premodern Jewish beliefs, which tended to focus on deep issues of theology, like whether the world is made of eternally existing matter as opposed to being created out of nothing.23 In the not-too-distant past, faith was lost and won over such abstractions. Today, while these problems are still of interest to some (especially to those wavering on the edges of belief), the most trenchant criticisms of Traditionalism lie in the realm of human equality, human freedom, and human potential.
Observing Traditionalists’ way of life—sometimes after leaving it themselves—contemporary critics level two main charges at Traditionalist Jewish communities. Traditionalism, they point out correctly, enforces rigid, sexist gender hierarchies. What is more, Traditionalism sometimes educates its children from birth, at home and in school, in such a way as to deny them access to the knowledge and skills that would give them the option of leaving the community as adults. Because the community also often cuts off those who leave, the human cost of exit is enormous, potentially resulting in isolation and depression. And the community offers no acceptance or recognition for gay and trans people. When those criticisms are combined, the upshot is that growing up in Traditionalism is especially terrible and cruel for people whose sex, sexuality, or gender identity leave them no way of flourishing within the community but for whom leaving is nevertheless extraordinarily difficult.
These criticisms are not ones that resonate with Traditionalist leaders and probably not with most ordinary Traditionalists either. That is because both criticisms derive from the belief world of contemporary liberal society. The critique of Traditionalism’s sexism and nonrecognition of difference is based on the contemporary liberal values of human equality and celebration of difference. The critique of the cost of exiting Traditionalism is based on the liberal belief in voluntary choice and consent with regard to how and where we wish to live.
Traditionalism largely rejects both sets of values. With respect to equality and difference, Traditionalism teaches that God has created all humans as equal in His eyes but has not conferred on them equal rights, responsibilities, or obligations. Jews incur 613 Torah obligations, including both dos and don’ts;24 non-Jews have seven.25 Jewish women, unlike Jewish men, are exempt from any dos that must be performed at specified times.26 The Bible expressly prohibits sex between men, according to the Traditionalist reading of the text,27 as well as cross-dressing.28 The canonical rabbinic compendiums of the Oral Law, the Mishnah and the Talmud, are aware of gender nonbinary people and frame them in recognizable legal categories, but do not afford them full and equal status for every legal purpose.29 And although some Traditionalist rabbinic authorities would offer some sorts of recognition to people who transition from one sex to another, the Traditionalist community does not, at present, offer a clear path to transition and recognition that would afford genuine equality.30
None of this much bothers Traditionalists, because they are not committed to liberal ideas of equality, difference, or free choice. Their ideology remains illiberal or even antiliberal, which is not surprising given that it emerged through confrontation with modernity and has sustained itself by continuing to resist developments within liberalism. Here and there, Traditionalists make political arguments that seem to invoke the equality or free choice rights of their own community. Ordered by the city of New York to teach a secular curriculum in the schools, for example, parts of the Hasidic community insist on the liberal right to religious exemption on the basis of the free exercise of religion.31 These arguments, however, are opportunistic, meant to protect the community against state coercion. They do not reflect internal beliefs about what rights humans ought to have as humans. For Traditionalists, any such beliefs would have to come from the Torah, not from the Constitution.
That is not to say that Traditionalists are completely insulated from the criticisms leveled at their communities, or that their practices are entirely static. The de facto status of women in Traditionalist communities has changed significantly in recent decades as more and more women attain higher education, work outside the home, and even become primary breadwinners. Yet they do so within a religious framework that continues to insist on their second-class legal status. Traditionalist rabbis have quietly grappled with the religious-legal questions around gender dysphoria and transition, and it is just possible that their formal Jewish legal analysis will develop further. Social acceptance for trans people, however, will certainly lag far behind even if that does occur. Recognition for gay people and their unions in the Traditionalist community remains and is likely to remain a bridge too far, precluded by biblical texts and a rigid, heteronormative view of marriage.
Behind these moral criticisms of Traditionalism lies a structural feature: the morality of liberalism requires us to accept and ultimately embrace social changes that are demanded by changing values. We recognize that sexism, homophobia, and transphobia were official features of our societies until very recently. They exist still. At the same time, however, we recognize that the values of equality and liberty require us to update our social practices and beliefs over time. In short, our liberalism is not traditionalist, let alone Traditionalist.
Similarly, our liberalism insists that individuals should be able to change their beliefs and communities. From this it follows, for some liberals, that society may justifiably demand that every child be educated so as to allow for the possibility of change. We’re not sure exactly how much children should be taught about how and why they might live differently from their parents and families. But most liberals do want to insist on a bare minimum.
These commitments are so fundamental to contemporary liberal thinking that they make it hard to accept the morality of communities that see things differently. Whatever benefits those communities glean from their illiberalism seem insufficient to justify the burdens that illiberalism imposes. We might look at Traditionalists with occasional nostalgic admiration. We might even admit that if they adapted to contemporary liberalism, they would lose something essential about their Traditionalism. Yet we think they should adapt anyway, because sexism and homophobia and transphobia are morally wrong.
No part of me wants to convince liberals to abandon their own moral beliefs, which as a liberal I share. But some part of me wants liberals to notice that the liberal critiques of Traditionalism, if implemented, would almost certainly lead to the end of Traditionalism itself. If Traditionalists self-consciously updated their practices and beliefs in the light of contemporary liberal morality, they would no longer be Traditionalists, but something else. Their belief patterns would be much closer to the creative-yet-struggling pattern I will discuss in chapter 3.
THE PERSISTENCE OF TRADITIONALISM
Would the loss of Traditionalism be a loss to the world? It would certainly be a gain for liberal values. Liberalism can tolerate a little authoritarianism and illiberalism at its margins. But if illiberal authoritarians become a majority or even a plurality in liberal society—a situation that could conceivably be happening in Israel32—liberalism itself will falter and fail. The hard question is whether liberals can, in good conscience, offer not just toleration but acceptance or recognition to illiberal communities that generate certain positive goods, goods like belonging and spiritual fulfillment, alongside their illiberality. In other words, if you are a liberal reading this, can you feel admiration or respect for the Traditionalists, or would that put you in an untenable moral position?
It’s so tempting to say to the Traditionalists, “Can’t you give just a little? Can’t you just be a little more welcoming of difference, a little more open to change? Wear what you want, live as you like, believe as you choose, but for Heaven’s sake, stop discriminating and excluding!” The trouble is that the structure of authority that underwrites and sustains Traditionalism is really, truly limited by the tradition, not absolutely but to a greater degree than external critics realize or want to admit. Traditionalism can change. But it can only change slowly, and, more important, it can only change while refusing to admit that it is changing. If Traditionalists could see themselves as one evolutionary strand within the history of Jewish life and experience, they would no longer possess their most valued and most definitional trait, namely their total commitment to the idea that they, and only they, are the true and legitimate carriers of the tradition. To maintain this self-conception, the Traditionalist rabbis must genuinely feel bound by the worldview of the rabbis who came before them. They must imagine themselves in an unbroken, continuous chain. A different form of self-awareness would break the chain as they understand it.
What I’m asking, then, is whether it is valuable that there exists a community of Jews that sincerely believes itself to be the only authentic bearer of Jewish tradition. And here my answer is a qualified yes. Of course Jews may live authentic and legitimate Jewish lives even when they have self-consciousness about the nature of tradition and their relation to it. Of course they may sincerely believe in God or sincerely disbelieve or something else entirely, with self-conscious recognition of how many different Jews have thought about these questions in the past. Indeed, the rest of this part of the book will be exactly about the different ways that can be done, each beautiful and admirable in its own way.
At the same time, it is true, I think, that at every moment in the history of Jewish tradition, there have been some Jews who unselfconsciously saw themselves as bearers of the unbroken tradition. If there were to be none left, that would constitute a fundamental change in Jewish life. It would be a loss to the diversity of Jewish beliefs and modes of living. The loss would be distinctive because, in a basic way, all strands of Jewishness relate in some important sense to the idea of tradition. Traditionalism is the most extreme form of connection to the tradition, and in that respect it stands in a special guardianship relationship to tradition itself. Its presence allows adherents of other forms of Jewish life and belief to see clearly what the tradition would look like if taken to extremes. It reveals what God would look like if God assigned His absolute authority in perpetuity to a group of self-defining rabbis committed to the idea of denying change.
The use value of Traditionalism to other Jews, not as an ideal, but as an instantiation of the authoritarian power of tradition, lies, I think, behind the nostalgia that many Jews experience in relation to Haredim. It’s a fair observation that, across the generations, for every Unorthodox there is a Shtisel. Each generation of Jews for well over a century has produced an influential work of popular culture that sharply criticized Traditionalism and distanced the viewer from it. And each generation, usually within the same narrow time frame, has produced an influential work of popular culture that depicts Traditionalism as beautiful and fulfilling. The Chosen (novel 1967, film 1981), subtly critical of Traditionalism, was contemporary with Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway 1964, film 1971).**
It would be easy to boil down the nostalgia for Traditionalism to a yearning for the warmth of one’s great-grandparents, real or imagined. Yet there is more to the nostalgia. Somewhere in every version of Jewish thought lies the notion that there is a tradition passed down across generations: Moses received the Torah at Sinai and gave it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and so onward. What to do with that tradition, and what to do about it, are questions that yield a wide range of answers, of which Traditionalism is only one. The nostalgia has the function of reminding those who feel it that the whole enterprise of being a Jew demands some engagement of some kind with the tradition—even if that engagement is to reshape the tradition radically or even, in important ways, to reject it.
This engagement also explains why, despite many predictions to the contrary over the last two hundred years, Traditionalism is not going to fade away: not now and not ever, so long as there are people who self-identify as Jews. The Holocaust failed to destroy it. Contemporary liberal criticism certainly will not.
THE SPIRIT IN THE LAW
Where is God experienced in this renewed and re-created Traditionalist Jewish experience? Here we come at last to a critique that the Traditionalists do take seriously, in no small part because this critique has been with Traditionalist Judaism since the start, and indeed forms part of the fabric of Jewish self-criticism back to the Middle Ages. The critique is that notwithstanding rigorous observance of the law and devotion to Jewish ritual and liturgy, Traditionalists run the risk of acting by rote, without deep spiritual connection to the God they all worship. The shorthand for this critique quotes the last phrase of Isaiah 29:13: “Inasmuch as these people draw near with their mouths / And honor Me with their lips, / But have removed their hearts far from Me, / And their fear toward Me is taught by the commandment of men.” In Hebrew, the italicized words are mitzvat anashim melummadah, interpreted by Maimonides to mean, roughly, unthinking and unintentional performance of the commandments without consciousness of their divine source. A life of rote performance may satisfy the technical requirements of Traditionalism, but, as Traditionalists acknowledge, it misses the whole point of their way of life, which is, at its core, to live in conjunction with God’s will, not merely in automatic obedience to it.
Hasidism was itself partly a response to this danger, coupled with deep concern about the inherent elitism of rabbinic culture that valued intellectual attainment and hence devalued the spiritual capacities of unlearned people. Its earliest masters offered a mystical interpretation of Jewish practice that infused ritual with transcendent meaning and simultaneously made the spiritual domain accessible on the basis of the primary and immediate emotion of worship. Hasidism still holds these aspirations, but over the generations, as charismatic leaders who attracted hundreds of followers by their personal qualities gave way to inherited family-based leadership, the difficulty of sustaining the spirituality recurred.
Today, there is a strand of Traditionalist neo-Hasidism that seeks to make mysticism, music, and dance relevant once again to Jewish spiritual life.33 Its practitioners are influenced by the thought of Rebbe Nahman of Breslov (1772–1810), a rare example of a Hasidic master who founded a movement but not a rabbinic dynasty. One highly visible group of Traditionalist neo-Hasidim—they’re called “Na-Nachs” for reasons I will leave to a footnote34—dress differently from other Hasidim. They wear white shirts and black pants but no coats. They look almost like hippies, except for extra-long curled sidelocks and roughly crocheted yarmulkes that cover most of the head in what my brother used to call “basketball warmer” style.
When they dance ecstatically in public, their choreography is totally different from old-school Hasidic circle dancing. It’s influenced by rave. You can see them driving through most Israeli cities on Fridays, blasting mystical Jewish lyrics set to their own EDM blend of trance, techno, and sometimes even reggae. Their numbers are small, but their visibility is great. They’ve made inroads into some of the experimental, vanguard settler communities who live both on and off the grid in the West Bank, communities to which I will return in part II. They need to be taken seriously in any attempt to explore the recurrent need for a renewed spiritual dimension in Jewish Traditionalism. Rebbe Nahman is buried in Uman, in Ukraine. Before the Russian invasion, as many as forty thousand Jews were making their way annually to Uman on a spiritual pilgrimage; in 2022, while the war was in full swing, a reported twenty-three thousand went anyway.35
As for Yeshivish Jews, the greatest risk for them is to lose the spiritual dimension of religious experience in the wealth of detail that is the Torah. To an outsider observing Traditionalist ways and words, the most surprising thing is usually how little God is discussed. God’s name is invoked thousands of times a day in prayers and even common expressions, but God is not often a direct topic of conversation, not even during Talmud study. Prayer is directed to God, of course. But praying a full liturgy three times a day can actually obscure the human capacity to imagine and experience direct connection to the divine. Rote praying is a bug for Traditionalists, not a feature of their practice. But it is the most common and recurrent bug that could be imagined.
The solutions offered by Traditionalists to the challenge of rote observance can be described as “meta-halakhah” as the term was used by my late teacher, Professor Isadore Twersky, who was both a professor at Harvard University and also, literally wearing a different outfit on the weekends, a Hasidic master of the Talner dynasty.36 Halakhah means, roughly, Jewish law, the set of obligations and laws that shape the life of Traditionalist Jews. Twersky’s version of meta-halakhah refers to the grand purposes that lie above and beyond the practice of the law. Halakhah asks: What is the law? Meta-halakhah asks: For what deeper purpose must we follow the law?
For many centuries, Jewish mysticism has offered one of the most influential meta-halakhic systems to explain what the law is for. Kabbalah, the catchall name for Jewish mysticism, has several subtypes. All of them, however, offer a cosmic perspective on how the observance of Jewish ritual and following of Jewish law shape the nature of the universe, including even the nature of God.†† Kabbalah is the meta-halakhah underwriting all forms of Hasidism.
Mysticism does not, however, underlie Yeshivish practice, which is so law-focused that it might be said that its meta-halakhah is halakhah itself, or that it rejects meta-halakhah as an idea. The Yeshivish are relentlessly untheological, even antitheological. The answer to why they study is to study. To the extent there is a meta-halakhic idea behind this approach, it is the value of the study of the Torah “for its own sake,” associated with the thinker Rav Hayyim of Volozhin (1749–1821), who in 1803 founded the Yeshiva of Volozhin near Minsk (now in Belarus) and became the progenitor of what would eventually become the Yeshivish movement.37 One might fruitfully compare Rav Hayyim’s theory to its rough contemporary, the Romantic, early nineteenth-century notion of l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake.38 The basic idea of both is that the undertaking is inevitably distorted if pursued for some larger instrumental purpose. Torah and art must be pursued in a disinterested fashion, hence for their own sakes.39
Rav Hayyim’s theory represented a continuation of an old teaching from the Ethics of the Fathers: “Be not like servants who minister to their master for the sake of receiving a reward. Rather, be like servants who serve their master not for the sake of receiving a reward.”40 But Rav Hayyim’s teaching went even further. Reacting against the Hasidic idea that the purpose of Torah study is to generate devekus, cleaving to God, he insisted that Torah must not even be studied “for the sake of Heaven.” Study of the law must be utterly and purely an end in itself.41 It is in this sense that Torah for its own sake comes close to rejecting the notion of meta-halakhah.
In yeshivas influenced by the Volozhin tradition—which includes many yeshivas still in existence—the students can be found reading and discussing and arguing in a characteristic singsong cadence that goes back to the European yeshivas.‡‡ Debate is the lifeblood of yeshiva study. The texts record disagreements, and disagreements about the disagreements, and disagreements about those. The students disagree about all of the above. Voices are raised. Decorum takes on its own inner logic: teachers are addressed with respect, but in the war for the truth of the Torah, no punches are pulled and no quarter is given. Outsiders often find the cultural style of the yeshiva to be strangely aggressive. It is. The intensity comes from love of the subject and recognition that studying the Talmud is the fulfillment of the divine guidance, “This book of the Torah shall not depart from thy mouth, and thou shalt meditate on it day and night.”42 But the intense debate normally concerns the technical, halakhic details of the Talmud, not the meta-halakhic question of what it all means at a deeper level. The debate would be about, for example, where one must search for leaven on the eve of Passover and where one may assume leaven has not been left, not about why God would want us to abstain from bread for a week and whether the best answer lies in mysticism, philosophy, or somewhere else.
The absence of a well-articulated meta-halakhah beyond halakhah offers some short-term benefit for contemporary Yeshivism. Unlike Evolutionist and Progressive Jews, who struggle with the moral justifiability of their beliefs and practices in the face of values like equality and freedom, Yeshivish Jews can just do it—where “it” is studying and following the law. This approach helps avoid crises of conscience. It frees energies for study and practice alike. It is probably one of the reasons that the Yeshivish movement is so fast-growing.§§
In the longer term, however, the lack of a clear meta-halakhah poses a real risk for Traditionalism. Not for its survival, which seems assured, but for its capacity to sustain itself on its own terms as a manifestation of God’s will. When you are a rearguard movement desperately fighting to preserve itself against the onslaught of modernity, as Traditionalism was from its founding in the late 1700s and early 1800s until World War II, you can survive without a grand theory, because your existential fight to preserve your tradition is an all-encompassing motive. When you’ve been decimated, as Traditionalism has been since the Holocaust, you do not need an explicit theology or philosophy, since your task is the desperate and then joyful one of creating anew a past that was very nearly destroyed in its entirety.
When you are a flourishing community, however, no longer embedded in a defensive war and no longer overwhelmed with the duty to survive and re-create, you eventually need a reason for being. The fulfillment of God’s will is as good a reason as it gets. But if you fall away from the immediate, charismatic connection to that will and into rote practice, all the warmth and community in the world will not sustain you. Jewish ritual and Torah study are tried and tested means to make and maintain Jewish life. History teaches that they must be infused with the deeper meaning of meta-halakhah.
In part II, I will explore the possibility that a new meta-halakhah is beginning to make its way into Traditionalist Jewish life, a meta-halakhah associated with the state of Israel. This process is by no means certain to succeed or even to continue. It would have complicated, transformative effects on Traditionalism. And it would not be welcome to many of the rabbis who hold the positions of authority in Traditionalism. Nevertheless, the stage may be set for it. Meta-halakhah abhors a vacuum.
AUTHORITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Earlier in the chapter, I used the story of Rabban Gamliel’s assertion of authority over Rabbi Joshua to illustrate the role of authority in today’s Traditionalism. But I left out the end of the story, which the Talmud tells in another place.43 The ending shows that the rabbis of the Talmud understood the complexities of asserted authority, even as they accepted its necessity. And it carries a potential lesson about the limits of authority for today’s Traditionalist community.
At the end of the dispute over the Day of Atonement, Rabbi Joshua submitted to Rabban Gamliel, despite his disagreement. His submission vindicated rabbinic authority. But the next year, according to the Talmud, another disagreement arose between the two. This time the topic was whether the evening prayer was optional or required. Rabbi Joshua held the former view; Rabban Gamliel held the latter.
In the story the Talmud tells, a student informed Rabban Gamliel that Rabbi Joshua disagreed with him about the evening prayer. Rabban Gamliel instructed the student to wait until all the rabbis were present and pose the question. (Again Rabban Gamliel’s concern for publicly enforcing authority was at work.) When the student asked if the evening prayer was optional or obligatory, Rabban Gamliel publicly answered that it was obligatory. Then he asked the rabbis present if anyone disagreed with him. Rabbi Joshua answered, “No.” It would appear from the context that he wanted to avoid a public disagreement with Rabban Gamliel.
But Rabban Gamliel would not leave it at that. He said to Rabbi Joshua, “But they told me in your name that it [the evening prayer] is optional!” Then he told Rabbi Joshua to stand up and be testified against, presumably to the effect that he was hiding his actual view. Rabbi Joshua admitted, using oblique language to avoid conflict, that he indeed had opined that the evening prayer was optional.
The Talmud’s story goes on to say that Rabban Gamliel continued to lecture without allowing Rabbi Joshua to sit down, emphasizing his power and his accusation of Rabbi Joshua. The Talmud states that those present were so offended by this humiliating treatment—on top of Rabban Gamliel’s similarly humiliating treatment of Rabbi Joshua the year before—that they forthwith removed Rabban Gamliel from his position as head of the rabbinic community.
In the story, Rabban Gamliel, the prince who insisted on authority, is deposed from power for overenforcing his own authority. The Talmud mitigates the disaster slightly by saying that Rabban Gamliel subsequently went and apologized to Rabbi Joshua, who at first refused to forgive him but ultimately did so. Then, at Rabbi Joshua’s impetus, Rabban Gamliel was restored to his former princely role. But now he was forced to share it with another rabbi, Elazar ben Azaryah, who had been appointed after his removal.44
It would be possible, of course, to interpret the ending of the Rabban Gamliel–Rabbi Joshua story merely as a warning to those in power that they exercise authority collegially, showing respect for other rabbis. It would even be plausible to say that the story shows that rabbinic authority is best exercised by small groups of leading rabbis, rather than by individuals, who might be tempted to overstep, as even the great Rabban Gamliel did.
Yet the story also suggests that the Talmud knows that the exercise of unified, centralized rabbinic authority over the application of the Law runs the risk of alienating the very community subject to rabbinic command. A tradition that is based fundamentally on interpretation and disagreement, as the Jewish tradition is, lends itself to a degree of pluralism, because everyone who engages it knows that multiple perspectives are and can be valid interpretations of God’s word and will.
Traditionalism therefore necessarily exists on the knife’s edge, between God’s authority carried by the rabbis and unending, divinely inspired debate that inherently resists totalizing control. Cleaving to God in Hasidic devekus or pursuing Torah for Torah’s sake in yeshiva study can yield beauty and meaning. But authority without suppleness will repetitively drive those who think and question out of the bounds of the authoritative system. No group of rabbis within Traditionalism plans to overthrow today’s gedolim as they did Rabban Gamliel. To maintain their authority, however, the gedolim must shape Traditionalism to fit the world of today, while maintaining fidelity to their belief in an unchanging divine Law.