A Meeting of Natans

I got to host my hero

Last week I had the great honor of hosting a truly great man: Natan Sharansky. It was truly exciting for me to meet one of my lifelong heroes.

I told him that we have a lot in common: we're both called Natan, both of our wives are called Avital, and we were both persecuted by an authoritarian regime which tried to silence us!

Of course, the differences end there. Sharansky faced the Gulag, I faced the Gedolim. Sharansky did dozens of hunger strikes; deprive me of my morning cup of tea, and I’d do whatever the KGB wants. And if I played chess against myself in my head, I’d lose every time.

Sharansky’s books Fear No Evil, The Case For Democracy, and Never Alone are all outstanding. In the second, he describes how there are two types of society, a free society and a fear society. Sharansky writes that crucial to the power of a fear society is "a regime's ability to control what is read, said, heard, and above all, thought. This is how a regime based on fear attempts to maintain a constant pool of true believers.... All fear societies are based on a certain degree of brainwashing." Of course, he was talking primarily about government regimes, but when I first read this several years ago, I was instantly struck by the parallels with charedi society and its ban on my books.

Sharansky writes that most people would prefer to live in a free society - the exhilaration of freedom is vastly preferable to living in fear. I mentioned to him that I think that this is not always necessarily the case. While people enjoy freedom, they also enjoy emotional security, tribal identity, and purpose. Charedi society has many secret dissidents. But there are also others who prefer to be in a situation where other people do the thinking for them, and in which they are part of a close-knit homogeneous group which valiantly struggles against the rest of the world. Sharansky agreed that this is sometimes the case, but he said that in situations where there are great restrictions on personal freedoms, most people would prefer to be free.

After his visit, I looked up his Wikipedia page, and found that it had a section about “Yeshiva students' conscription.” To my horror, it linked to an article titled “Natan Sharansky: Historical echo of Haredi draft refusers,” which claims that “Like Sharansky, the Haredim face a society that views them as problematic to the aims of the state. They are signs of contradiction refusing to yield to majority opinion. The forced solitude of the prison cell (if they are to be incarcerated) judging from Sharansky’s own experiences, offers the modern refusers a profound opportunity to meditate on the validity of their decisions, not as defiance but as expressions of absolute moral conviction. The Haredi draft refusers stand as outcasts not merely from a society but as custodians of a conscience, carrying on their shoulders the heavy mantle of truth and conviction, echoing Sharansky’s own struggle.”

What an utterly appalling comparison. The society that viewed Sharansky as problematic was communist Russia, which sought to oppress its people. The society that views charedim as problematic is one that seeks to survive against those who try to destroy us all, and merely wants charedim to do their share. And while Sharansky’s dissidence was based on a truly heroic and moral conviction in a free society, as a true custodian of conscience, the charedi refusers are simply demanding that others do a difficult job that they themselves agree is absolutely necessary but don’t want to have to sacrifice anything for. That article is an absolute disgrace, as well as an insult to a great man.

Meanwhile, I’ve never seen a museum visitor be so fearless around our animals. When I carefully took out our monstrous and dangerous snapping turtle, from which most people recoil in fear, Sharansky reached out to pet it. I guess after facing down the KGB, animals are not particularly scary.

It was only after his visit that I realized that I should have taken a photo of him with a weevil beetle. We could have titled the picture “Fear No Weevil.”