The Fear of Charedi Flaws

Why it's hard for people to acknowledge them

I received the following insightful letter from a rabbinic colleague:

“I think one reason people feel uncomfortable with your critiques of the Charedi community is that, by many traditional or commonly used metrics of religious commitment, the Charedi world appears deeply “frum.” It’s a community that excels in Torah learning, dresses in a way that visibly signals religiosity, davens with what seems to be sincere kavana, and is often very scrupulous about certain mitzvot, particularly those focused on bein adam laMakom, and often also certain areas of bein adam la’chavero.

“Precisely because the Charedi world is so identifiable as frum, through dress, language, time devoted to learning, public davening, and tightly enforced communal norms, it becomes a stand-in, symbolically, for religious seriousness itself. When a group is recognized as the maximal expression of Torah commitment, criticism of that group does not stay local. It generalizes. People don’t hear, “This community has serious moral failures.” They hear, “This is where Torah intensity leads.”

“Because of that, and because of the percentage they represent of the total observant community, when someone points out very serious moral failures - dishonesty, disingenuousness, or systemic ethical breakdowns - it doesn’t feel like a critique of a small subgroup. It feels like an indictment of frumkeit itself. Acknowledging that the group of Jews often regarded as “the best of us” is profoundly flawed, perhaps even beyond excuse, risks casting Judaism itself as morally compromised. And that is something many people simply do not want to confront.”

Indeed. And I suspect that this may be particularly difficult for Americans who are not familiar with the large and religiously rich dati-leumi community, and have no other models for rabbinic leaders, yeshivos and religious communities.