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.
It's precisely because superficially charedim appear to be the height of religious seriousness that it is necessary for people like Rav Slifkin to point out why this nonsense. When so many dati Leumi leaders do not want to criticize them either because they think this will reflect badly on all religious Jews as this article says or because they sympathize with charedim in some aspects, it is even more important that voices like Rav Slifkin are heard to expose the realities of the charedi world.
What we need is a combination of his exposes to show that not only the practices but also the values of that community today are completely antithetical to Torah values in so many areas, but also some history lessons so people can understand what Torah life was really like in previous generations and how far from it the current charedi community has come.
Most yeshivish Americans I know have no idea that Torah true, DL roshei yeshiva exist. They don't know anything about the DL communities and yeshivot in Israel.