Ultra-Orthodox culture wars
HAVIV RETTIG GUR
TWO weeks ago, Israel was shocked by the brutal shooting at a community centre housing a support group for gay teenagers in the centre of Tel Aviv.
A masked gunman entered the basement of the Tel Aviv Gay and Lesbian Association building and fired at teenagers gathered to talk about their struggles as young gays.
Two were killed on the spot: 16-year-old Liz Trubeshi and 26-year-old Nir Katz. Fifteen more were wounded, some of them forever deformed and crippled. The gunman escaped, and as of this writing, has not yet been apprehended.
It is no secret that Israeli society is bitterly divided along religious lines, so perhaps it isn’t¬† strange that Israelis jumped to the conclusion that a Charedi (or Ultra-Orthodox) vigilante must have carried out the killing.
Soon after the shooting, police arrested “a young Charedi soldier who threatened to kill gays in an internet forum”.
But that very sentence encapsulates the evolution of Israel’s culture wars. That the Charedi man was a soldier is remarkable, because until recently, Charedim did not serve in the military.
Today, the Israel Defence Forces fields a full infantry brigade that offers a military service in keeping with Charedi religious obligations.
Also remarkable is the notion that a Charedi man would use the internet to express his views on homosexuality. The community’s rabbis have outlawed not only the internet, but televisions and SMS texting, not to mention discussion of homosexuality, and these bans are largely upheld in Charedi neighbourhoods.
But the streets are rebelling. The average Charedi person knows that the rabbinic leadership has led their society into extreme poverty created by poor education and a staggering 80 per cent unemployment among men.
They are tired of living as an impoverished underclass while mainstream Israeli society grows prosperous as a fully fledged member of the developed world.
These popular pressures have led to some surprising phenomena. In recent years, even the most senior leadership has begun to advocate a different approach.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, greatest of the Israeli Sephardi authorities, charged his own daughter with running a Charedi women’s technical college to train women to hold modern jobs in the broader economy.
Jerusalem’s Belzer Rebbe, one of the most influential rabbis in the city’s Charedi landscape, used recent keynote Simchat Torah addresses to his followers to order all those who are not exceptional full-time Torah scholars to get jobs and support their families.
Both religious leaders were not acting out of a sudden epiphany, but as a reaction to the realities in the street. Women are leaving the Charedi world to find intellectual stimulation through Israel’s universities, while Torah students have started flocking to the job market because they are tired of being poor.
In ordering them to do so, the rabbis were jumping to the head of the camp and walking where it is already headed.
Yet, for all the promise contained in the Charedi street’s call for modernisation, it is important to understand what this call does not contain.
It is not an adoption of the modern world’s liberal values. Indeed, the encounter with the modern world has led to increased friction within Charedi society, which occasionally explodes outward in ugly ways.
The recent violent Charedi demonstrations in Jerusalem are excellent examples. The violence was not a response to an isolated act, whether a parking lot opening on Shabbat or the arrest of a Charedi mother accused of abusing her children due to a psychological disorder.
Rather, it was a reaction to the inevitable and growing intrusion into their insulated world of modern institutions and mores.
Israeli Charedi society is struggling to come to terms with painful issues, from child abuse and homosexuality, to western education and the unfilterable internet.
To turn the inner culture war of Charedi society into a healthy process, rather than a traumatic and violent one, Israeli Charedi leadership must begin to discuss the challenges of modernity.
It is not okay, as happens now, for Charedi children to stop learning English and mathematics in the fourth grade, or to not know to whom they can turn in the case of abuse or emotional distress.
We do not yet know the story of the man who shot at those teenagers two weeks ago. But even if it were not the act of a Charedi zealot, the very fact that the killing could not be reported in Jerusalem’s Charedi newspapers -— so as not to mention the gay nature of the club -— shows that it is time for Charedi society to start talking about its identity and values in a modern world.
Haviv Rettig Gur is the Jewish world reporter for The Jerusalem Post.
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