The Generation Gap

Aliyas HaDoros or Yeridas HaDoros?

Today is the eighteenth yahrzeit of my father, Professor Michael Slifkin, of blessed memory, pictured above with me at my wedding, nearly 25 years ago. He was a wonderfully patient and good-natured father, a brilliant scientist, a very down-to-earth and sensible person, and a man of outstanding integrity. In a career spanning biochemistry, physics, electronics, membrane biology, and nanoparticles (among other things), he published 197 papers, including 11 in the prestigious journal Nature. He never missed a minyan and walked to Daf Yomi every day.

My father strongly believed in doing the right thing, even if it made him unpopular. He voted according to his conscience and not according to what was "the done thing" in the Manchester frum community. When he moved to Israel and took a professorship at a certain university, he noticed that they lacked a safety officer (which is standard in British universities), so he took on that role and actually enforced safety regulations - much to the horror of his Israeli colleagues! He also had a terrific sense of humor; I remember a very aggressive missionary in England shouting at him, “Jesus died for you!” to which my father responded, “But he didn’t even know me!”

My father did not grow up in a religious home and only became religious in his late teens. While he eventually spent some time in Yeshivas Dvar Yerushalayim and learned with Rav Boruch Horowitz, he did not spend years learning full-time in yeshiva. But, like so many in his generation, he had a powerful grasp of civic values and morality. He did many things for the community - shul registrar (that’s a British thing), chairman of Hillel House, helping Russian Jewry, and so on.

Looking around my home town of Ramat Beit Shemesh, where there are so many Anglo immigrants who came in their twenties and moved into charedi circles, I am often struck by the generational divide. These are people whose parents, like mine, understood and practiced civic values. They grew up with these values. And yet they are raising their children in a “religious” framework which denies any such values, and is often even opposed to them.

Their children don’t believe in working for a living and contributing to the economy and to society; instead, they believe that others should support them in permanent study and for their own personal “spiritual growth.” And they certainly don’t believe in sharing the responsibility of national defense; instead, they believe that everyone else should increase their own sacrifice on their behalf. They won’t even davven for the wellbeing of the country and those who serve it, even though their grandparents all did. And, bizarrely, they see all this as an aliyas hadoros, whereas it is actually the opposite!

Some of the parents of these Anglo-charedi immigrants write to me, horrified at how their grandchildren lack basic civic values (and some of the parents of these children, regretting having joined charedi society, feel the same way). While my own children’s army service gives me much fear and anxiety - my daughter’s base was attacked twice, once by Hezbollah and once by a mob of violent charedim, and my son starts combat training after Pesach - I’m proud that they have strong civic values.

But I can’t take the credit. These are the values that I received from my parents, even if I tried hard to abandon them when I spent years in charedi yeshivos. I’m just grateful that the Gedolim unwittingly helped me see the light and return to the mesorah from the previous generation.