In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
Orthodox Judaism is far from homogeneous, as can be seen not only in religious differences but also in the complex of institutions that organize social and political life within Orthodoxy. In the contemporary world, Orthodox Judaism is divided into two main subgroups, namely ‘Ultra-Orthodox,’ and ‘Modern Orthodox.’ In general, Orthodox Jews are defined by a more traditional and strict observance of Halakhah than Reform and Conservative Jews. ‘Ultra-Orthodox Jews,’ a group that comprises but is not limited to Hasidic Jews, tend to view their adherence to the commandments included in the Torah as largely incompatible with secular society. As a result, they are “self-segregated and relatively disconnected from the rest of the Jewish community,” as characterized by Steven Cohen, Jacob Ukeles, and Ron Miller (2012: 22). The Modern Orthodox movement, on the other hand, seeks to follow traditional Jewish law while simultaneously maintaining a relationship with modern society. As Modern Orthodox Rabbi Saul J. Berman explains, “[t];his approach does not deny that there are areas of powerful inconsistency and conflict between Torah and modern culture that need to be filtered out in order to preserve the integrity of Halakha” (2001). The three sections below are devoted to a more detailed discussion of the two subgroups within American Orthodox Judaism as well as the problematic position of Jewish women in this branch of Judaism.
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1.2.4.1 ‘Ultra-Orthodox’ Judaism 19
The ‘Ultra-Orthodox’ or ‘Haredim’ (‘Men of Awe,’ ‘the Fearful,’ ‘God-fearers,’ ‘Tremblers’) are those separatist, fervently observant Jews who oppose acculturation and who adhere to a restorative Eastern European Jewish ideology (Lange, 2002: 69–70). They hew to the strictest interpretations of Halakhah, in particular those that prohibit compromises with modern culture and secular studies. Ultra-Orthodox Jews minimize social contact and intellectual engagement with those outside their community, except in cases of economic necessity. Ultra-Orthodox Jews constitute only a minority of contemporary American Jewry. Jews represent about 2 percent of the total U.S. population; about 12 percent of American Jews are Orthodox; and of that group, about two thirds are Haredi (“A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 2013: 48).
Ultra-Orthodox Jews reject the values of modernity – they perceive the secular world as full of corrupting influences, and because of this worldview, they live in insular communities, often speaking only Yiddish, and do not allow their children to attend universities since “secular education represents the most dangerous of these outside influences” (Rubel, 2010: 12). They believe that all of life should ideally be dedicated solely to the Torah in daily life, practice, study, and prayer. Both American Orthodoxy in the United States and Haredi Orthodoxy in Israel established yeshivot, but unlike Israeli kollelim, American yeshivot attracted relatively few young men who decided to pursue full-time yeshiva-studies after marriage. This fact, as some American Jewish scholars claim, might be one of the reasons why American Ultra-Orthodox Judaism remained relatively open to the surrounding society (Brown, 2003: 320–322, Sarna, 2004: 300–304).
Ultra-Orthodoxy20 is a broad term that includes both Hasidic and non-Hasidic groups, that is Mitnagdim (the opponents of the Hasidim), who to outsiders, are often seen as a monolithic group of religious Jews, easily identifiable in the streets by the men’s black coats and hats (hence their colloquial nickname ‘black hats’) and always a beard (as prescribed in the Torah). The women, in turn, are distinguishable from other Jewish women by their modest dress and head coverings which are in accordance with the laws of tzniut (laws concerning modesty, both in dress and behavior for women as well as general conduct between the sexes) ←45 | 46→(Nadler, 2011: 344). Hasidism,21 which was started in south-eastern Poland in the middle of the eighteenth century by the charismatic teacher known as the Baal Shem Tov, is a populist Jewish religious movement that emphasizes mysticism and claims that “simple faith, inward passion and fervent prayer [are] as important as Talmudic scholarship” (Harris, 1985: 49). Hasidism challenged not only the authority of the rabbis, but their whole system of values, and it is therefore not surprising that its rapidly-growing popularity was met by resistance on the part of the established Jewish communities and their rabbis, that is the Mitnagdim (‘opponents’). As Nadler explains, the Mitnagdim believed that:
the Hasidim’s emphasis on […] the joyful worship of God through ecstatic prayer, song, dance, and feasting, all performed in the [presence] of the [Hasidic] rebbes, […] to whom are attributed great, even supernatural powers to intercede with God […], was a threat to traditional rabbinic Judaism, which placed Torah study at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of religious values, so they excommunicated the Hasidim and banned the rebbes’ courts. (2008: 97)
Despite this opposition, Hasidism spread very rapidly throughout Eastern Europe during the last half of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attracting the masses of the simple, uneducated Jews, largely because it popularized optimistic and joyful doctrines of Jewish mysticism and its festive approach to religious life. Hasidic courts with charismatic Hasidic masters (known as tzaddikim, or rebbes), were established all across Eastern Europe, serving as community centers where the Hasidim gathered during farbrengens (ritual gatherings), to worship and celebrate in the presence of their revered masters. Therefore, the success of Hasidism clearly showed that it was possible to question and even overthrow the traditional values and still celebrate the immanence of God and his closeness (cf. Lange, 2002: 68; Nadler, 2008: 97).
Before World War II, Hasidism was concentrated almost exclusively in Eastern Europe with only a few thousand Hasidim living in New York City and Jerusalem. Because of the fact that Hasidic culture was thriving in Eastern Europe, and most Hasidic rebbes strongly discouraged their followers from emigrating to “[…] the treyf medinah [unkosher land], America, where Jews might survive but Judaism would die, or to Israel, the Zionist heresy established by unbelievers who wanted to reinvent Jews and Judaism” (Heilman, 1995: xiii), the overwhelming majority of Hasidim did not join the waves of Jewish immigration to North America at ←46 | 47→the beginning of the twentieth century. For these reasons, World War II and the Holocaust almost entirely destroyed Hasidic communities, along with more than 90 percent of their members. In addition to the physical assault, the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe eradicated the great Orthodox centers, yeshivot, Hasidic rebbe-courts, which in turn led, with few exceptions, to the nearly irreversible destruction of Orthodoxy’s spiritual leadership.
A small fraction of Eastern Europe’s Hasidim who survived the Holocaust emigrated to the United States, where they managed to set up new roots and discover new strategies for their survival in the ‘treyf country.’ One of such crucial strategies was the reinvention of the Hasidic past, which used to be treated marginally in their culture. They believed that by rekindling the past, they would succeed in establishing even larger and stronger Hasidic communities than those that had existed before the Holocaust. Indeed, as Jonathan Sarna puts it, the goals of “[…] most of the reconstructed Hasidic enclave communities of the post-war period, were to resist acculturation, to distinguish themselves from the American mainstream, and to perpetuate their commitment to their own sacred path” (2004: 297) (cf. Heilman, 1995: xiii; Levine: 2011: 217–218).
In fact, after World War II, Ultra-Orthodoxy, surprisingly, managed to rebuild and reconstruct itself by establishing communities not only in the United States and Israel, but also in Belgium, Canada, Britain, and France. These Ultra-Orthodox communities have experienced tremendous population growth and have become a significant (though minority) force, particularly in post-war American Jewry, which was not anticipated by the large majority of Jewish historians and sociologists who had predicted its inevitable decline. Brooklyn, New York, with its neighborhoods such as Borough Park, Williamsburg, and Crown Heights, has become home to the major Hasidic communities in North America. Although it is difficult to ascertain precisely the population numbers of Hasidim as a whole and of specific sects – due to the fact that Hasidim are extremely suspicious of any surveys and censuses – it is generally estimated that there are today between 200,000 and 250,000 Hasidic Jews in the United States, the large majority residing in Brooklyn (Nadler, 2008: 106; Levine, 2011: 217). Moreover, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, they are the fastest growing sector of the Jewish community world-wide as