Sophistry at its best

When is a bum not a bum? When he has a beard, apparently. Oh, and tzitzit.

That seems to be R. Levi Brackman's argument in his latest column. Taking umbrage with some potentially antisemitic statistics that indicate, to no one's surprise, that 70% of Haredi men in Israel don't work, he feels the need to explain.

The question immediately arises: If they are unemployed what are they doing with their lives? The simple answer is that they are involved in advanced Jewish studies.

Indeed the study says that 60% of haredi men claimed Jewish scholarship to be their primary focus. Now, one can either say that haredi Israeli men are unemployed or that they spend their time in pursuit of a higher goal—religious study and spiritual excellence. I prefer the latter approach.

Of course you do.

R. Brackman points out that Jews have always valued education, and tries to connect this with the fact that a lot of Jews have won Nobel Prizes. Of course, this would be a lot more convincing (and help his unspoken argument that having hundreds of thousands of kollel students somehow benefits mankind) if there was a Nobel Prize in Talmud. The fact is, all those Jewish Prize Winners, down to the recent (and quite frum) recipient for Economics, Robert Aumann, made a decision at some point that they were going to engage with the world, and learn about the world, and not lock themselves in a self-imposed ghetto library for their entire lives. I'm not saying religious study is meaningless or useless- on a personal level, or even a communal level, text study can be deeply meaningful and moving. But it remains a closed circle; the act is ultimately self-directed and only extends as far as the next student (or rabbi).

Not to be crude about it, but what are all those kollel students contributing, either to Jewish life or the world at large?

Jewish religious scholars are encouraged not only to delve deeply into the texts but also to come up with novel ideas based on the sacred scriptures and the Talmud. Thus, innovation, within certain well defined boundaries, is encouraged in the hallowed walls of the Yeshiva.

Oh really? How many of them will go on to produce original work, research or commentary? Let's be generous and call it a thousand- does that justify keeping (or saving, depending on your POV) so many others from the world? Even then, there seems to be an unfortunate tendency among Haredi scholarship to remain cloistered. How many Christians in the world do you think have heard of Rabbis Shach, or Elyashiv? From what I've read, there is a sizable proportion of kollel learners who aren't even particularly good students!

Clearly the pursuit of further learning within the Haredi communities is something to be respected rather than derided. In fact, one of the great achievements of modern Israel is creating a renaissance of Jewish learning.

Clearly according to who? And it is not a willing achievement, it has only occurred through political blackmail and coercion from a religious minority that, had Israel had a republican instead of parliamentary system, would have never had the influence to start their legal no-man-zones in the first place. Yeah, let's all give the Haredi leadership a big hand for showing us the joys of loopholes.

Finally, R. Brackman admits that the picture isn't all gemara and roses.

The problem however is that in the secular world only the very promising and studious go on to pursue a lifetime of fulltime study and research. Most people are not suited to that type of intense study. Undoubtedly this is also true in the haredi communities—most are simply not cut out for a life time of study.

Unfortunately, however, within the haredi communities that follow the Lithuanian school of thought—which seems to dominate in those circles today—there is social pressure to follow that path even if the individual would be better suited to a different occupation.

Yes, in fact most haredi men are essentially forced to remain in kollel for life because it protects them from serving in the army or having to work. Those who attempt to find ways around this, be it through exemption, national service, or Nahal Haredi are attacked within the community, whose leadership acknowledges (as Jameel so damningly documented) that they keep their people in kollel-prison so they can continue to stay in power as the Haredi-on-the-street's protectors from the big, bad, secular state. The haredi leaders, rather than teach their people self-sufficiency, as their fathers and grandfathers in Poland and Russia did, and as their cousins in every other country on earth have done, instead have taught them to view religious study, and a life of sloth, as an entitlement owed to them by... who? God? Their fellow Jews? This is a travesty of Judaism and a true disgrace to God and the principles that the Torah and Talmud are supposed to espouse, not to mention the whole idea of religious study in the first place. It makes no more sense to declare that Haredi Judaism should be a whole "culture of learners" than that it should be a "culture of blacksmiths." Yes, blacksmithing is a useful vocation, and some elements of blacksmithing can indeed be taught. But there are people who are cut out to be blacksmiths, and people who aren't- and ultimately, you only need so many.

So too with kollel learning. If the Haredi leaders let their students go out into the workforce, within a generation they could be earning enough to subsidize their own programs, and create their own kollels, where, since there would be a limited number of spaces, there would be more of an incentive to only have the true geniuses there- conversely, people that didn't want or weren't cut out to be there would have plenty of other options. This would free Haredi society from being dependent on a largely secular government, and the government from wasting so much time and energy trying to deal with (and cater to) the Haredim. If the Haredim can make themselves self-sufficient, as they were generations ago, and still are around the world, they can create something to be truly proud of- instead of continuing to nurture a culture of laziness, complacency, and entitlement.