Those Hated Chareidim

by Yonoson Rosenblum

I. Of Headlines and Footlights

It’s now official: chareidi Jews are the most despised group in Israel. According to the latest poll by Dr. Mina Tzemach, 28% of Israelis identify chareidim as the most scorned group in society.1 (Israel is perhaps the only country in the world whose citizens are asked regularly to identify which of their fellow citizens they hate the most.)

The Tzemach poll was conducted during the final stages of preparation of the 2002 State budget, which was not approved in the Knesset until the first week in February, more than a month after expiration of the previous year’s budget. For a period of weeks, virtually every news broadcast seemed to begin with mention of Rabbi Yaakov Litzman, chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee, who repeatedly refused to allow any discussion of the budget until Finance Minister Silvan Shalom made good on his promises to the yeshivos.

Even when the budget was brought to the Finance Committee for final approval, Rabbi Litzman quickly adjourned the session after noticing that the Treasury had “forgotten” to include nearly 250 million shekels promised to yeshivos.

Headline writers and editorialists had a field day with this brinksmanship, and their efforts were uniformly hostile to the chareidi MKs. “More For Chareidim; Less for Everyone Else”; “Half a Billion for Chareidim in State Budget”; “The Chareidim Flex Their Muscles and the Treasury Submits,” read the banner headlines in Yediot Aharonot and Maariv. Editorial cartoons pictured chareidi MKs robbing the state treasury.

Though triggered by the budget approval process, the outpouring of animosity towards the chareidi community is neither a short-term phenomenon nor just the product of a hostile media, as we sometimes try to convince ourselves. I recently had lunch with a young American journalist, living in Tel Aviv, and he told me that the favorite topic of conversation among his contemporaries is their loathing of chareidim.

Nor is that attitude confined to the twenty-something crowd in Tel Aviv. One of the most successful kiruv workers in the Tel Aviv area relates that she is constantly stymied in her efforts by the “rabid hatred” of chareidim that she encounters everywhere. Before she can talk about Torah, she laments, she must first endure countless questions about the army or the budget. Even those who embark on the path of mitzva observance often find themselves blocked by their negative images of chareidi Jews.

Though the Israeli theater may not be a measure of popular opinion, it is a fair barometer of elite attitudes. In recent years, anti-chareidi plays have become one of Israel’s leading exports. Motti Lerner’s The Murder of Isaac, on the Rabin assassination, opened in Heilbronn, Germany, two years ago. It featured a chorus of Chevra Kadisha members chanting their support for continual bloodletting with the Palestinians: “The war dead will require the services of those who do ritual washing of the body, of the sellers of shrouds, and of the sayers of Kaddish. . . . If they have 20,000 casualties in the next war, it will be better for us, for we’ll get another 100,000 jobs out of it.”2

Atom, a play by Motti Golan3 currently on the boards at Israel’s prestigious Cameri Theater, surpasses even The Murder of Isaac in the vitriol directed at the chareidi community. Golan presents a futuristic scenario in which an extremist “chareidi” sect assassinates the prime minister and his wife, seizes control of the government, and then drops atomic bombs on various Arab capitals. By triggering a nuclear Holocaust, the sect hopes to rid Israel of infidels and bring about the coming of Moshiach.

Dan Margalit, a friend of Golan’s who walked out in the middle of the play, ranked Atom with the traditional Pesach blood libel or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for plausibility. He acknowledged, however, that, like its predecessors, Atom would no doubt find a large gentile audience eager to be told by an Israeli that religious Jews are the single greatest threat to the future of the world.

Golan clearly knows nothing about Torah Judaism or chareidim: When the villain realizes that his nefarious plot has succeeded, for instance, he takes out his tzitzis and kisses them in celebration. Defending his thesis that Chareidi fanatics might seek to destroy the world to hasten Moshiach’s coming, Golan could do no better that cite Seffi Rachlevsky’s book, The Messiah’s Donkey.4

Rachlevsky’s main “chiddush” was to incoherently lump together the chareidi and national-religious worlds under the rubric “ultra-Orthodox messianists.”5 To make that linkage, Rachlevsky ignored the fact that historically one of the crucial distinctions between the two worlds was the chareidi rejection of political activism as a means of bringing Moshiach.

Happily, Atom is now scheduled to move to a smaller, less prestigious theater after a relatively brief run of eight weeks. That is the half-filled part of the glass. But the half-empty part is that the play opened at all. As Margalit pointed out, the Cameri Theater would never portray a single Arab character as chareidim are portrayed in Atom. “Junk of this level would never have been staged,” wrote Chanoch Domb in Maariv, “unless it were anti-chareidi junk.” Only because past experience has demonstrated that there is a large audience for anti-chareidi works, did the Cameri Theater produce such a play.

II. Sources of the Hatred

Asked to explain their loathing of chareidim, secular Israelis invariably answer: They don’t serve in the army, and they refuse to work. A full treatment of these charges is far beyond the scope of this article, which focuses on perceptions and how they are created. Nevertheless, it is worth noting in passing that many of the claims about the lack of economic productivity of the chareidi community are grossly exaggerated. It is frequently said, for instance, “Chareidim don’t pay taxes,” which is blatant nonsense in a country with a highly regressive 17% value-added tax on all goods and service.

Similarly, the claim that chareidim do not work must be taken with a grain of salt. Researchers on the economics of the chareidi community typically come to their topic with an axe to grind. They tend to define “chareidi” in a manner that excludes those who work, and then come to the tautological conclusion that chareidim do not work.

It is true, however, that entry into the workforce in the chareidi community is generally delayed by a number of years of kollel study. Given that the chareidi community has a lower median age, this means that at any given point in time a high percentage of household heads have not yet entered the workforce. While the army issue and lack of economic productivity are two separate issues, they are typically coupled in a synergistic fashion: Even as they refuse to participate in the basic service required of most citizens, chareidim demand ever larger handouts from the state to support their large families.6

At a time of economic recession, such as Israel is currently experiencing, the chareidi community is particularly vulnerable to the hatemongers.7 More than a quarter million Israelis are currently unemployed; the tourism industry has been destroyed by the past 19 months of non-stop terrorism, with a 50% drop in the number of hotel employees; and 70% of those employed at the height of the hi-tech boom are now without jobs.

During the whole month and a half of the most intense budget negotiations, Israeli television viewers were treated nightly to heartrending images of disabled demonstrators, occupying government buildings to advance their demands for increased support. News producers were not bashful about juxtaposing wheel-chair-bound demonstrators with shots of Rabbi Litzman announcing that there would be no budget discussions until the yeshivos received the money promised to them.

The week the budget passed, Bagir textiles announced that it was laying off hundreds of workers in the development town of Kiryat Gat. A typical op-ed in Maariv pointed out the “irony” that the “Bagir plant was closed the same week that the government proved that the little money it still has (and even that which it does not have), it prefers to invest in those who prefer not to work.” After singling out the Large Family Law8 for special mention, the author concluded, “There is no gentle way to say this to the Bagir workers; your government prefers to give to the family in Bnei Brak that does not want to work . . . than to a family in Kiryat Gat that wants to work.”

As usual, the monies received by the chareidi community were juxtaposed to a wide variety of crying national needs. That card is played so frequently that Israelis can be forgiven for thinking that the amount of money going to the chareidi community is sufficient to pay for all Israel’s defense, education, and health needs combined. The same comparison is never made with any of the other expenditures in a budget of over 250 billion shekels. The Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport, for instance, distributes over 300 million shekels annually in subsidies to support sports clubs, theater, and Israeli filmmakers without any formal criterion. Yet one never hears the question asked: Why should Israel subsidize theatre and opera tickets for the rich by as much as $15 per ticket, while the disabled are still in the streets or Bagir workers in Kiryat Gat out of work?

With so much attention focused on the chareidim and their budgetary demands, it was a simple matter to convince a large part of the Israeli public that the chareidim are receiving a disproportionate share of the pie. No one, wrote Aryeh Caspi in Ha’aretz, seemed particularly interested in the facts. True, the budget for yeshivos was not subjected to the same 2% cut imposed on all ministry budgets, but the difference came to no more than 20 million shekels or less than .01% of the national budget. Moreover, the decision not to cut the budgets of the yeshivos was fully supported by a Treasury committee established three years ago, which found that the budgets for yeshivos had been frozen in comparison to other educational institutions and recommended appropriate adjustments. Those findings were never implemented.

All in all, Caspi found, chareidi institutions receive only 8% of the total education and cultural budget, even though chareidim constitute at least 12% of the school-age population. Caspi, a long-time critic of the chareidi community, concluded, “There is something shocking about how easily an entire segment of the population can be indicted without real cause. Equally shocking is the willingness of both politicians and journalists to be dragged into the fray, with little or no knowledge of the facts.”

The funding process for yeshivos seems to have been intentionally designed to create the impression that the chareidim are receiving a disproportionate share of the budget and to focus attention on the allocations to the chareidi sector out of all proportion to the actual significance of those allocations in the context of total governmental spending. The monies for the yeshivos have never been a standard line in the state budget, but have come in the form of special payments from the budget reserve. That system served first and foremost the interests of the Treasury, which every year fights a rearguard action against the payment of monies already promised to yeshivos at the beginning of the year. Typically, in the last four months of each fiscal year, the transfer payments to yeshivos stop, with the Treasury claiming a lack of additional funds. At that point, the chareidi MKs have to go to war to ensure the continuous flow of funds to yeshivos.

Every new transfer is accompanied by a fully choreographed performance. First, the Treasury Minister mounts the Knesset podium to announce a new transfer to the Religions Ministry on behalf of chareidi institutions. The transfer payment then becomes the subject of further discussions in the Knesset Finance Committee. Each of these separate stages is thoroughly reported by the media. As a result, the public receives the impression that the chareidi parties have succeeded in extracting millions of shekels in additional funding, when, in fact, they have done nothing but receive monies already promised.

This year, for the first time, the chareidi parties won from Prime Minister Sharon an agreement that yeshiva funding will henceforth be a regular budget item, not subject to funding from budget reserves. That change will hopefully do much to reduce the opportunities to portray the chareidi community as conducting continual raids on the Treasury.

Despite the potency of the draft issue and that of the economic dependence of the chareidi community on government support payments, those issues are ultimately inadequate to fully explain the hatred directed at the chareidi community. The frequent portrayal of chareidim as lacking even the most basic human feelings –as in the war-loving chorus of The Murder of Isaac — suggests deeper sources of the antipathy. So too does the dearth of news stories that reflect the unquestionably positive aspects of the community: e.g., the chessed both within the community and on behalf of fellow Jews, their self-sacrifice and commitment to ideals, and the relative absence of many of the social ills associated with modern Western society. Secular Israelis rarely see or hear anything that would humanize chareidi Jews or show the chareidi world as anything other than a menacing sea of undifferentiated black.

The chareidim occupy a position in Israeli society similar to that played by Jews in Christian Europe. They are the “other.” Just as Jews denied the central belief of Christian society, so do chareidim reject many of the “values” upon which modern Israeli society is predicated: the elevation of rights over duties; the view of man as essentially a more sophisticated animal largely governed by his instinctual drives; the glorification of the pursuit of pleasure and material plenty. 9

III. How Should We Respond?

Is there anything that the Torah community can do to lessen the hatred directed at it? Do we bear any of the responsibility?

Clearly there are significant constraints on our ability to change the situation in certain areas. The resentment of those who serve three years in the army – often in circumstances of great danger – towards those who do not serve, is understandable from their point of view. Yet the chareidi world will never agree to dismantle the hundreds of yeshivos built from the ashes over the last fifty years and send our 18-year-olds into the army. If the price of an improved public image is the destruction of the world of Torah, it is a price that cannot be paid. We also have our world view, and know that without the protection of Torah learning Israel cannot defend itself.

The chareidi rejection of army service for 18-year-olds (the traditional draft age) has both a positive and a negative dimension. The positive is the insistence on the incomparable value of Torah learning in Hashem’s eyes. The Yeshiva world rejects the assertion that yeshiva students do not contribute to the national defense. On the contrary, yeshiva students are told repeatedly that their learning is the greatest protection of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisroel. Though it is true that a radical division of labor exists in Israeli society, it is not just between those who serve in the army and those who don’t, but more fundamentally between the 10-15% who are shomer mitzvos and those who are not.

Even at Mercaz HaRav, long viewed as the flagship yeshiva of the National Religious world, boys are strongly encouraged to push off army service in favor of full-time learning during the crucial years prior to marriage, and for several years thereafter.

The negative objection to army service derives from the use of the Israeli army as an instrument of socialization. Chareidim have no desire to have their children socialized to norms antithetical to the Torah and in a spiritually threatening environment. Israel, for instance, has long been the only non-revolutionary society to draft women. The recent push to integrate women into combat units has caused many even in the national religious world to reconsider the propriety of army service.

Nor can we control the irrational aspects of the hatred. A certain antipathy to the Torah and those who learn it is built into the Creation. Where does the name Sinai come from? Chazal ask. They answer: From there sina (hatred) came into the world (Shabbos 89b).10

If irrational hatred of Torah and those who learn it is built into the Creation, then perhaps we should even take pride in being loathed and view it as a sort of perverse proof that we are truly upholding Torah in the world. Such an attitude is not unknown in our world, and even has its place in certain circumstances. Nevertheless, such complacency should not become our general attitude. The fact that there will always be some degree of hatred of those who uphold the Torah does not mean that we are helpless. “In pain you shall bear children” and “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread” are also part of the Creation. Yet we do everything we can to mitigate the Biblical curses.

So too are we required to mitigate the hatred of Torah to the maximum extent possible. Rabbi Shalom Yosef Elyashiv recently told a group of cheder principals that the focus of chinuch should be the command, “Let the Name of Heaven become beloved through your actions” (Yoma 86). If we are hated, we will obviously not be the instruments of making Hashem beloved.

The animosity towards us should spur some self-examination on our part. Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa taught, “Anyone who does not find favor in the eyes of his fellow men, does not find favor in the eyes of Heaven” (Pirkei Avos 3:13). “Fellow men” does not refer only to people of stature, as the Gemora in Sanhedrin makes clear (103b). There the Gemora teaches that a verse in Iyov (38, 15) is written in an unusual fashion to protect the honor of David Hamelech and Nechemia, both of whom had many enemies. It is unusual for tzaddikim to have many enemies, Rashi explains, because many enemies are an indication of Divine wrath.

Still, what can we do to improve the situation, without compromising our beliefs or sacrificing our most important interests?

One of the tragedies of life in Israel is how few secular Israelis first meet a chareidi Jew facing each other over a Jewish text. Rather, most secular Jews derive their knowledge of chareidi Jews from what they see in the political realm. But the realm of power politics is not ours,11 and the figure we cut in that realm is bound to be a distorted one.

A little over a year ago, Rabbi Osher Weiss noted in a far-ranging interview in the chareidi weekly magazine Mishpacha that the celebration of our political power brings with it the danger of putting inordinate faith in that political power and falling into the trap of kochi v’otzem yadi (by my might did I achieve what I did). He pointed out that Ehud Barak’s “secular revolution” came in the wake of the greatest chareidi electoral success ever.

Chareidi political power terrifies the secular public, and has triggered a backlash. For every additional new chareidi MK, there has been a commensurate and ever greater growth in the strength of the explicitly anti-religious parties: Shinui and Meretz.

Addressing this problem recently, Rabbi Moshe Gafni, a veteran MK from United Torah Judaism, called for more modesty and less muscle-flexing on our part. Proclaiming every political achievement or boasting that we will turn the Knesset into a beit Knesset is counterproductive. All it does is arouse secular fears of a chareidi takeover.

A second point made by Rabbi Gafni is that we have to be careful not to be seen as concerned only with our narrow sectorial interests.12 In that vein, the chareidi parties made a conscious decision in the recently concluded budget negotiations, not to exert all the pressure they could have in recognition of the national need to make dramatic budget cuts.

The media, of course, does not make it easy for chareidi MKs to shed their sectorial image. Rabbi Gafni, for instance, is one of the most active MKs on environmental issues, and has won plaudits across the political spectrum for his conduct as chairman of the Knesset Interior Committee. Yet he is almost never interviewed on environmental issues, but only on narrowly “chareidi issues,” usually in a confrontational context.

A recent Dahaf poll revealed that over two-thirds of the secular public feel that chareidi Jews view them with contempt (while less than 20% of chareidim admitted to feeling any such contempt). The sense on the part of secular Jews that they are scorned in the eyes of chareidim makes it almost impossible for them to listen to anything a chareidi Jew says with any kind of objectivity.

Unfortunately, secular Jews who wish to do so can find too many statements in the chareidi press that appear to confirm their suspicions. Careless statements that seem to exclude secular Jews from Klal Yisroel13 or to place them with the eruv rav only serve to confirm secular Israelis in their feelings that they are viewed with scorn. (Each of Israel’s mass circulation papers employs a reporter who combs the chareidi press for just such tidbits.)

Almost every chareidi Jew who has spent any amount of time in private conversation with a non-religious Jew has had the experience of being told, “You are not like all the rest.” As long as conversations between chareidim and non-religious Israelis are so sporadic, it remains easy for secular Israelis to dismiss their own pleasant experience with a chareidi Jew as nothing more than the exception that proves the rule, and to continue to believe that the media stereotype is generally accurate. At the same time, the disparity in the Dahaf poll between our perception of how we view non-religious Jews and how they think we view them, suggests that many of the impersonal encounters in the public space are far less successful.

In part, that is attributable to a failure to sufficiently develop a Klal Yisroel perspective. Too often we act in ways that grate on others’ feelings simply because we do not notice them at all. So intent are we on shutting out the messages of the secular society that we lose sight of our fellow Jews who comprise that society. If we took to heart Rabbi Elyashiv’s call to emphasize the mitzva of “making the Name of Heaven beloved,” however, we would of necessity remain aware of our fellow Jews and of the effect that our actions have on them. For in whose eyes are we to make the Torah beloved if not in the eyes of those who have never been exposed to its beauty?

We would do well to look to our gedolim for ongoing lessons in our responsibilities to Klal Yisroel. The pained reaction of all gedolei Yisroel to the recent decision of the Israeli Supreme Court recognizing non-Orthodox conversions performed in Israel – a decision of no practical consequence for any chareidi Jew – is a valuable lesson in the extent to which our gedolim are concerned with the fate of all Jews. It is a lesson that the rest of us would do well to incorporate into our lives. n

The funding process for yeshivos seems to have been intentionally designed to create the impression that the chareidim are receiving a disproportionate share of the budget and to focus attention on the allocations to the chareidi sector out of all proportion to the actual significance of those allocations in the context of total governmental spending

Typically, in the last four months of each fiscal year, the transfer payments to yeshivos stop, with the Treasury claiming a lack of additional funds. At that point, the chareidi MKs have to go to war to ensure the continuous flow of funds to yeshivos.

One of the tragedies of life in Israel is how few secular Israelis first meet a Chareidi Jew facing each other over a Jewish text. Rather, most secular Jews derive their knowledge of Chareidi Jews from what they see in the political realm. But the realm of power politics is not ours,14 and the figure we cut in that realm is bound to be a distorted one.

If we took to heart Rabbi Elyashiv’s call to emphasize the mitzva of “making the Name of Heaven beloved,” however, we would of necessity remain aware of our fellow Jews and of the effect that our actions have on them. For in whose eyes are we to make the Torah beloved if not in the eyes of those who have never been exposed to its beauty?

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