We try to keep the way we’ve been doing things for generations
When “education” consists of nothing but studying one book, then not much is learned.
For thousands of years the way that ultra-orthodox Jewish children are taught has changed little and is based almost entirely on study of the Torah – the Jewish Bible.
But now a group of leading secular Israelis wants to force the ultra-orthodox, or Haredi, education system to modernise and adopt standard subjects like maths, science and English.
The reason, they say, is that thousands of Haredi students are unable or unwilling to participate in wider Israeli society and are becoming an increasing economic burden.
“Participate in wider Israeli society” looks a lot like “get a paying job.” The BBC is apparently reluctant to spell that out (why?) but it seems pretty clear that if all you have ever “studied” is the Torah, then nobody is going to hire you except someone who wants Torah-knowledge and has the money to pay you to provide it, which once again implies a job or some other source of income in the background. In short if everyone in a given society learns nothing but the Torah or the Koran or Harry Potter, then no one will be doing anything that produces material wealth, and all the Torah scholars or Potter scholars will sooner or later starve to death. In short there is something just a tad self-indulgent about infinite Torah-frotting unless one is already, like Mr Bingley, in possession of a large fortune.
The rabbi acknowledges that most of the boys he teaches will never work or participate in “wider” Israeli society – dedicating themselves instead to a life of religious study.
“We try to keep the way we’ve been doing things for generations – for hundreds, even thousands of years,” he says. “It’s the same idea of studying the Talmud, an explanation of the Torah. We see the success, the great success and don’t want to change a thing.”
What success? At whose expense? Who provides the meals and the roof over the head? Who pays for all this success?
The Haredim make up about 10% of the Israeli population. One would think that other Israelis eventually would tire of supporting those folk by paying the men subsidies to do nothing but study Torah and shelling out additional public support for each new child delivered by their women — and there are lots of those: families with ten children aren’t uncommon among the Israeli Haredi. On top of that, the Haredim are exempt from the mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces that all other young Israeli men and women must perform.
The Haredi extract these privileges from Israeli society because their political parties all-too-often determine which of the major parties gets to form a coalition government. Their price for putting Likud, Kadema, or Labor in power is control over some government ministries particularly important to them and generous government legal, financial, logistical, and moral support of their “holy” lifestyle.
I wonder how long Israeli society will allow this gravy train to chug along?
Those ‘New Muggles’ who continue to mock the revealed truth of J K Rowling fail to understand that science and Harry Potter occupy seperate but complementary magisteria.
In the interest of fostering dialogue between these different but equal ways of knowing, those of us at the Hogwarts Foundation intend to offer a yearly Quidditch Prize of 10,000 syckles to the scientist who does most to promote accommodation.
Thank you.
it’s the “Torah Event Horizon”
:-)
My wife comes from a Jewish family (we’re both atheists now, praise God) and has visited Israel, and she has commented on this problem a number of times.
Indeed, secular Israelis are getting mighty sick of this BS. Unfortunately, in addition to the Haredim’s political clout, there are many moderately religious Israelis who view these fundamentalists as being quite holy, and as such are happy to perpetuate it. Many of these moderately religious people might be appalled at the reality of some Ultra-Orthodox practices, but since they’ve been taught that these people are holy, they have a selective blindness going on.
My wife was just saying the other day about the conflicted feelings she sees when she sees a decked-out Orthodox walking down the street to or from temple (the town we live in has a relatively large Jewish community). A part of her is proud — “that’s my people!”; but on the other hand, she can’t condone their primitive misogynistic beliefs. She talked about how when she was a child, she had been taught to view them with admiration.
I’m rambling a bit here, but the point I want to make is that this is a perfect demonstration of one of the dangers of moderate religion, namely, that it gives cover for fundamentalists. The vast majority of religious Israelis practice their faith in a way that is totally compatible with modern life, and which, while philosophically conflicting with a scientific worldview, does not often come into practical conflict with it. But they enable the Haredim. The Haredim could not exist without these moderates. The moderates’ faith may not be directly harmful, but it enables the subsidization of fundamentalism.
That sounds exactly like the way the Amish are viewed in the US – almost universally. Hence, perhaps (or probably) the Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin v Yoder – which I’m always grousing about.
Not rambling; informative.
I disagree with the premise. The Talmud itself mandates teaching children a trade, and minimal practical education is the way to teach a trade nowadays.
I also can’t help commenting that Harry Potter also discusses the tradeoff between schools maintaining time-honored traditions and making changes (book 5). It’s not a simple or uncommon issue in any society.
Which premise, Dov?
If it’s true that the Torah is all that they’re studying, then the fact that Talmud mandates teaching children a trade doesn’t really help.
And I’m actually not enormously interested in what Harry Potter discusses, because I don’t think Rowling is very thoughtful.
Ophelia, I share your views about Wisconsin v. Yoder — Dawkins’ comments about religious indoctrination as child abuse are particularly applicable to a culture that can survive only by isolating its children from the outside world and ending their education (such as it is) at the 8th grade. On the other hand, at least the Amish do some productive, useful work like farming, furniture making, and the like, and provide most of their own material support.
Darron,
Yes. I’m one of those who were lulled into thinking of the Amish as more picturesque than sinister…until I read an article about a little problem they have with abuse of children (sexual and plain).
Have to admit that the child abuse scandals in Amish and similar religious communities slipped my mind when I wrote my previous comment.
Funny how things like pederasty and other forms of child abuse seem to correlate so well with insular, ingrown religious groups that cut off contact with the outside world supposedly to avoid “contamination” by “worldly” people and their ideas! The Amish social structure (unlike, say, the Branch Davidians or the Jim Jones cult) probably wasn’t originally set up in order to shield abuse from outside scrutiny, but it certainly has had that effect. Too many abusers have knowingly perverted such cultural arrangement to their own vile purposes.