Cognitive Dissonance

Why American Frum Jews Cannot Accept Israeli Realities

In my previous post, Clueless People, I described how many well-meaning American religious Jews are simply unaware of the realities of Israel, and of how their values are actually better reflected by the Dati-Leumi community rather than by the charedi community. Subsequently, a few people reached out to me and correctly pointed out that I had left out another important part of the picture.

Being a religious Jew in the US or UK is the same as what being a religious Jew has been about for the past two thousand years. It’s primarily about learning Torah and keeping the halachos that are listed in the Shulchan Aruch/ Mishnah Berura. Consequently, those who learn the most Torah and adhere more carefully to halacha are the most respected Jews. Thus, it’s natural for people who grow up in this value system to see the charedi community in Israel, who seem to be the most dedicated to learning Torah and adhering to Mishnah Berurah, as being the best kind of Jews. And then naturally that also means that their leaders are wise and that their society is an outstanding moral society.

Of course, the reality is that when you have an entire state of millions of Jews, and religious Jews form a large portion of that, and especially when you’re faced with millions of hostile enemies who want to kill you all, then there’s lots of other things that become important - things that were very important in the times of Tanach but which became irrelevant after the Destruction. It’s important to have an army. It’s important to have a strong economy. It’s important for every community to be a part of all this. Achdus becomes not just speaking nicely about other people, but actually sharing national responsibility.

Most American Jews instinctively and naturally understand the importance of all that (as does pretty much every society in the entire world aside from charedim). But then they are faced with the evidence that the charedi community, including its rabbinic leadership, does not attach any importance to it and furthermore actively opposes it. The charedi leadership and much of the community don’t want any charedim to join the IDF, even those who are not learning; they don’t care about the crushing burden on the reservists and the IDF manpower shortage; and they also demand enormous financial subsidies for avoiding army service and for a lifestyle of not being economically productive. Israel is in a long and difficult war, yet charedim are simply not interested in helping the nation, only in harming the nation.

All this is absolutely crushing to the centrist American Jew’s entire worldview of what Torah and Judaism is. Accordingly, they try their best to deny it. They try to convince themselves, and others, that it’s only “extremist” unrepresentative charedim who are like that, and that the “real” charedim understand the need to participate in national defense and support the economy and are working towards it. (Or they massively inflate the tiny number of unrepresentative charedim who are in the IDF, or the significance of the few charedim who do valuable chessed work, which is trivial in comparison to the chessed of army service, or the chessed of economic productivity that builds hospitals and everything else).

One example of this was in the article by Rabbi Moshe Hauer of the OU, and its follow-up in the Letters section of Jewish Action. But I just saw another extraordinary example. Here’s an extract from a mailing that was forwarded to me:

I had the privilege of participating at a wedding this week near Kiryat Malachi. On a beautiful evening, we stood around the chuppah and listened as the chassan spoke, reading letters - nine different letters! - all from friends in his unit who’ve lost their lives over the last year and a half. At the moment of his greatest joy, he remembered them.

You’ll never believe who this mailing was from. It was from the Chairman of Agudas Yisrael of America.

Shlomo “Sol” Werdiger, Chairman of Agudas Yisrael, cares about soldiers and respects what they do (and is invited to weddings by people in such communities). Yet he chairs an organization whose rabbinic leadership is steadfastly opposed to such a thing. Rav Aharon Feldman expressed his discomfort with even davening for soldiers, as it risks “glorifying” them, and the Agudah Moetzes likewise opposed helping Israel by joining the political rally in Washington DC. And their counterparts in Israel lead an entire community who are solidly opposed to helping the nation in its time of need and don’t even care in the slightest about what the nation is going through.

For people who have been accustomed to thinking that Torah and halacha is the essence and epitome of Judaism, it’s very difficult to come to terms with the fact that those who appear to embody Torah and halacha do not care about the rest of the Jewish People and are actually harming them rather than helping them during a war.

One person wrote to me that the only reason he has been able to accept this painful truth is that he was primed for it by struggling with the ban on my books, twenty years ago. Because it’s all very similar to the cognitive dissonance that occurred with that episode. Having been taught their whole lives that Torah is wisdom and therefore that Gedolim are wise, many people just couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that the Gedolim were saying that it’s heretical to believe that there was an age of dinosaurs or that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation. Accordingly, people convinced themselves that the ban was about my “tone,” about my personality, about secret issues - anything except that which the Gedolim explicitly said that the ban was about!

Those who realized back then that the “Gedolim” are nothing more than isolated Talmudists reflecting a very narrow worldview, that they are not actually “Gedolim,” can readily accept today that the charedi community in Israel represents a poisonous form of Judaism that is ultimately an existential threat to the nation.