Tag Archives: haredim

So, Rabbi Baruch Haba from the Holy Land of Israel, how are you doing and where are you?

1:08 – AM:

I’m in Jerusalem, sitting in Rechavia, sitting in my in-law’s apartment in Rechavia, and it’s really nice to be able to share with everybody some of the highlights of my trip and to talk about Parshat Behar. We bring everybody together. Last week you were in L.A., this week I’m here, and we’re looking forward to a great discussion.

1:30 – GS:

Fantastic. We were discussing what was going to be the subject matter today, and you had suggested that since you had visited a Hesder Haredi yeshiva, and we’re going to parse that and explain what Hesder is, and we’ve discussed Haredi, but we can refresh our memory, and you’re going to tell us about your visit, but I thought that we would put it into context. Because all of the different movements that we’ve seen and that we’ve surveyed and that we hear about in the news with regard to this kind of quasi-conflict between studying Torah and serving in the military, studying Torah and being in the job market, all comes down to the Torah’s really high regard for study for study’s sake. On the one hand, and on the other hand, the integration of study into what is a textbook, and I’m referring to the Torah now, of a full life, a full life for an individual, a full life for a society. So, I thought we would just quickly glance at the beginning of the parashah. I said it was Bahar and that’s because it says that God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, that’s the mountain, And it’s an important speech, obviously. He says, speak to the Israelite people and say to them, when you enter the land that I assigned to you, the land shall observe a Sabbath, a Sabbath of God. Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyards and gather in the field, but in the seventh year the land shall have a Shabbat of complete rest, a Shabbat of Hashem.” And most of us probably know this concept from modern-day academia. I mean, I think probably it is something that has retained value within other professions as well. This idea of taking off time from that which you do on a regular basis, every seven years is what the sabbatical has given us, and doing something different. In academia, it means maybe not teaching and just doing pure research or traveling. So forth and so on. So, this is a Torah concept that has had legs, but it also has had legs with regard to actual study of texts and traditions. And that’s kind of interesting because in the text itself, Rabbi, there’s really no reference, number one, to what you do in the sabbatical year. It tells you what you can’t do. All it says is it’s to Hashem. What do you feel were some of the traditions of what you were supposed to do during that seventh year?

4:37 – AM:

Yeah, so that’s a really interesting point. In Judaism, in the cycle of Judaism, it seems to be that the cycle is around days in which you’re not supposed to do. Shabbat, you’re not supposed to do work. Shemitah, you’re not supposed to work the field. Yovel, the Jubilee year in this week’s parasha, is a time when you’re supposed to free the slaves. It seems almost as if holiness is a time that we let go, that we don’t do, which is kind of the opposite of what you might think. We kind of think that you have to be very active. To be holy, you have to be very active. But it seems to be that holiness is when you pull back and you kind of realize that it’s God’s world. We don’t need to be doing all the time to make things valuable. So, I think that that point is a really interesting point. And what do you do? What were they supposed to do? So, whenever you are not allowed to do certain things like on Shabbat, like on the sabbatical year, like on the Jubilee year, there’s the idea that you’re supposed to take care of those who are less fortunate, right? So Shemitah, the rule, one of the things about Shemitah, it’s not here, but one of the things about Shemitah is that all loans are canceled. Now, all loans are canceled, means if someone borrows money from you, so they don’t have to pay you back in the Shemitah year. That’s an amazing thing. That’s a form of charity. Because today we talk about loans, we talk about loans for business, like an investment. But in the Torah, they didn’t know about that. In the Torah, all loans are forms of charity. So that’s great that all loans are canceled. So, what are you supposed to do during the sabbatical year? You’re supposed to give charity. And that charity is forced upon you because all loans are cancelled.

6:51 – GS:

But you’re right, it doesn’t tell you what you have to do. The Bible doesn’t say you need to go to synagogue, it doesn’t say you need to study and read Chumash and Rashi. It leaves that to our imagination. And as I did a quick look at all of the commentaries and traditions, what you said is clearly one of them. I found also something, because it says it’s to Hashem, to God, it compared it a little bit to the manna, where the manna didn’t fall on the Sabbath day and you had to have faith in God that he would provide. And so, if you’re an agricultural society, and this gets back even a little bit to Joseph, the seven good years and the seven bad years. You have to have faith that the produce that God will grant you during the prior years will be enough to serve you during the year of fallow. So that was another one that I found. Clearly it does connect it to coming into the land. And so, from a national religious point of view, if you look at many Zionist thinkers up until today, the idea is it teaches us to respect the value of Eretz Yisrael, of the land that God gave to us. If you look at it in terms of environmentalism, there are environmentalists who talk about the Shemitah as recognizing that the earth belongs to the Lord, that we are only guardians of it. So, a lot of people take a lot of different things from it, which is maybe the whole point. We don’t always have to be told what to do. But I was trying to connect the dots and find a connection to the way I started, the academic sabbatical. And the closest that I could come was a Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Kalischer. I believe you’ve quoted him in the past with regard—

AM: Yes, we have. He was an early Zionist

GS:  and what he writes is, the liberation from the yoke of work would give them the opportunity for studying Torah and wisdom. Those who are not students will be occupied with crafts and building and supplying these needs in Eretz Yisrael. Those endowed with special skills will invent new methods in this free time for the benefit of the world.” I was just blown away by that, because he kind of says it all in the sense, when I read the text through that lens, I realized that what he takes from it is, you get stuck in the day to day, the planting, the harvesting, the cutting, the mowing, and you can’t think big. You can’t think about the big questions of how do we step back and do a process analysis. I love this idea that he says those people who are capable, he’s almost talking about tech, that you can come up with a way to give us more leisure time. If the industrial revolution is anything, it was that. It was to free man by using technology to have more free time. Which of course, begs the question, what do you do in the free time? But he clearly starts by saying, studying Torah and wisdom. And I’ve put the quote in the source sheet. I’ve also, as you say, he was an early Zionist. He was before Herzl. He was before many of them, and he was a really very vocal and very thoughtful Zionist, and I put a little bit of an article in the notes that I think makes for fascinating reading. But I think ultimately, and this is also the way I started, is, you know, we talk about the division of labor is the source of modern economic systems. I think it is pretty clear that what the law of the Shemitah does is it divides labor from something else. There’s a time to work and there’s a time not to work. And I think this concept of studying Torah in a designated time is probably at the source of all of the different methods that we’re going to describe today, the different philosophies of integrating Torah learning into the modern state of Israel. And what the modern state of Israel and our parasha have in common is that these laws could not apply in the desert. They are not theoretical laws. These laws only apply when you’re in the land, whether that land is the land of Israel or you’re part of civil society, you’re engaged. So, there’s a famous Talmud in Shabbat 31a, and it says, with regard to the world to come, Rava said, after departing from this world, when a person is brought to judgment for the life he lived in this world, they say to him in the order of that verse, he’s referring back to a particular verse, first question that they ask you at the pearly gates, Did you conduct business faithfully? Wow, that is the first question. And of course, that presupposes that most people have been engaged in business, somehow providing livelihood, somehow providing a way to live. Next question at the pearly gate. Did you designate times for Torah study? Kevata itim l’torah. Again, getting back to what I said a second ago, it’s not did you study your whole life, did you study every minute, yomam velaylah, it says kovea itim l’torah. And then it says, did you engage in procreation? Did you await salvation? Did you engage in pilpalta b’chachma, in dialectics of wisdom? And did you have fear of God? But korvea etim l’torah, Rabbi, that is a biggie. That is, it’s not biblical. It’s rabbinic. It comes from this innocuous piece of Talmud. But clearly, that is the marching order of every traditional Jew, which is you put on tefillin, you eat kosher, but at the end of the day, did you study Torah today? Did your week go by, and do you have a regular (fixed) time that you study Torah? It’s a biggie, isn’t it?

13:20 – AM:

I mean, it has become a biggie, and you know, you make a very interesting point. It’s not really biblical. I mean, there is a law in the Torah to study the laws and to teach, but the idea of kavat ha-itim la-Torah, to study every day, like the daf yomi, to study every day, is clearly a rabbinic idea, that the rabbis thought it was important to continue to study. And of course, as you’re getting to, that became a tradition of yeshiva. And that tradition probably goes back about 1,500 years, that they had yeshivas where people would study all day long. Now, in the old traditions, you would study as a young man, and then you would go to work at a certain time. But what happened after the Holocaust, there was a feeling that so many Torah scholars had been killed that we needed to put an extra emphasis on Torah study. And therefore, and especially in Israel, there developed an idea that people should study all the time to the exclusion of working, to the exclusion of getting an education, to the exclusion of working. And that, you know, in Israel, in America, that’s not a viable option. Because in America, education costs money, you have to send your kids to school, medical insurance costs money, means you need a job, you need to function. But in Israel, all those things are provided by the state. So, you really can manage not making all that much money. So, what happened was that their wives went to work and they continued to study. And literally there were people in their 50s and 60s who were just studying Torah all day long. And as we’ve talked about before, now, after October 7th, this has become extremely controversial because one of the issues in the state of Israel today is that it doesn’t seem as if there are enough soldiers. Meaning, that unfortunately, you know, there’s a war in the south in Gaza, and there’s a threat in the north, and we just literally don’t have enough soldiers to protect us up north and down south. I just was speaking to my nephew, who just finished his reserve duty. He said it’s a real issue. We don’t have enough soldiers. So, there’s been a big political push to force the Haredim the ultra-Orthodox who were not serving in the army to serve in the army. And many of the leaders of that community have said that, you know, you’re not allowed to serve in the army, you have to study Torah all day long.

16:08 – GS:

So, I want to call on Yochanan who raised his hand, but before I do, I just want to pick up on one item that you mentioned. You said after the Holocaust. I don’t think I and maybe many of our listeners are sensitized to this, but maybe two weeks ago when we had Menachem Brumbach, and he talked about two major movements of the 20th century. He talked about Zionism and he talked about Haredi Judaism. And I think that most of us have kind of drunk the Kool-Aid served by the Haredi community, that they are the carriers of a thousand-year-old tradition, which is kind of strange if you look at them because they’re dressed in the garb of a certain era in Eastern Europe. But what he was saying, and he is Haredi, is actually this is post-Holocaust. It might have started with the beginning of the Enlightenment, but clearly some of these reflexes and defensive mechanisms, such as for the first time in Jewish history, I’ll say it, dedicating a time to study all day and having people supported by others to study all day. He called it a new movement. Yochanan, I’d love to hear your insight into the discussion.

17:26 – Yochanan Lowen (rav dude on Clubhouse)

Oh, thanks for having me, Rabbi and Geoffrey. I know Menachem Bombach, he was writing to me, he was messaging me a few months ago. Yeah, he’s definitely correct. It’s a new movement. It never existed before in Jewish history. Obviously, there were the idea of a Kollel or a yeshiva, existed already, Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, they say, and Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan founded the first Kollel in Kovno, they say. But this system today that everyone in the Haredi system has to go to yeshiva until marriage and being in Kollel for the first two years after marriage, this type of system never existed before in Jewish history. And many other elements in the Haredi system never existed before. So, it’s obviously a new movement. And to be honest, it’s a cult. Maybe some people will be triggered by me saying that, but that’s the truth. Me, my wife and children are considered the first family to leave this fold. There’s a documentary about us called I Want to Know. It’s available on Vimeo, 58 minutes. I have a lot to talk about it, but I will stop now.

18:52 – GS:

But I think that it is amazing that it was a new movement, and where we want to go today is I want to hear first from the rabbi about his experience with Haredim and Hesder. Rabbi, maybe you can give us the background of what the Hesder movement was, how it started, and give us a sense of how revolutionary this is, and then give us your impressions would be really welcome.

19:22 – AM:

So after the founding of the state of Israel, you know, there were the after the war of independence. There was a mandatory draft in the state of Israel, meaning that every young man and woman who was 18 years old had to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. And they needed to have that because, you know, they were defending the different borders and they needed to have a draft. There was, starting probably in the 1960s, There were a group of religious Zionist rabbis who went to the government with the following proposal. They said, we want our young men to serve in the army, but we don’t want them to leave the world of Torah study. So, we’d like to create a program, which is called Hesder, and the word Hesder means a program. Hesder, like the Seder, it’s a program. We’d like to create a program which would have them spend, instead of three years, five years. And in those five years, they will serve in the military for half the time, and they will study in yeshiva. So, they go to yeshiva for nine months, then they go to the army for a year, then they go back to yeshiva, then they go back to the army. And this program started, I think probably Kerem B’Yavnah was the first Hesder yeshiva. But now there are  several thousand young men from Israel studying in these yeshivot and serving in the army. And you know that because, you know, there were unfortunately some of the people, what is it, 275 soldiers have been killed in the past seven months in Gaza. A number of them are studying in these yeshivot, in these hesder yeshivot. And they were serving in the army. Now, the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, never participated in this Hesder program because they believed that you have to learn all the time, you have to study Torah all the time. There was no time for army service. About six or seven years ago, there’s a rabbi, an American-born rabbi. His father was actually a principal of the Yeshiva Day School in Miami, Florida. His father’s name was Rabbi Alexander Gross. He was one of the pioneers of Jewish education in America in the 1940s and the 1950s. His son is a man in his 60s. His name is Rabbi Carmi Gross. He’s American, Yeshiva University educated. But now he’s kind of more part of the Haredi community. He proposed and then he started a Hesder yeshiva for Haredim, which means the following. He takes young men, 18 years old, who have gone through the Haredi system. Now, there are two ways to go through the Haredi system. You can go through the Haredi system and study secular studies and take these compulsory tests at the end of your high school called Bagrut, and that gives you a high school degree. And there were some of these Haredim who just studied all the time. They didn’t study secular studies at all. And it was open to any one of these. And he started a school seven years ago. And in this school, they study Torah, Talmud basically, from 9 a.m. To 3 p.m. At 3 p.m., they join a program and they study math and computers. And they do this for two years. They have this program, almost like Yeshiva University, study Torah from nine to three, then from three to eight, they study computers and math. After two years, they get some kind of degree. It’s not a BA, but they get some kind of degree. And they enlist in the Israel Defense Forces. And they serve in the Israel Defense Forces. They don’t serve as infantry, they don’t serve as soldiers on the battlefield, but they serve as people in communications, in computers, in all those desk jobs that are so important for the military. And of course, that’s critical for us, because every Haredi who would sit at a computer frees up the person who’s now sitting on the computer and would allow them to serve in the army. So therefore, this is really what they need. If they could have a few thousand of these people, it’d make a huge difference in the army. And this rabbi, Rabbi Carmi Gross, he actually, he began this program. There, I went there on Monday. There are 80 students in this program. There were about 50 who were there because the other 30 are serving in the army now. It’s the wartime. And you know, all the things that they’re doing, all the desk, you know, all the computer things they’re doing means that there were additional people who were able to serve in the military. And the best part of this is, you know, in the Haredi community, The young men are not educated, so they go to yeshiva, they study, they study, they study, they get married, they have children, but they’re not educated, they’re not ready to serve in the workforce. This is what Rabbi Menachem Bombach talked about. How do they serve in the workforce? So Rabbi Bombach has this amazing online program where they can actually get a degree, they can study online, and they can get a degree and they can go into the workforce. This is another model where they can get a degree, they can work in the army. When they finish the army, they then can get a job in high tech, in computers, in all these things. These are jobs that were not open to the Haredim because they weren’t educated up to now. So, this, this Hesder Yeshiva is actually changing really the eco center of the Haredi approach to the army and to, you know, and to entering the workforce. Now, obviously, you know, there are however many hundreds of thousands of Haredim in Israel, and this is 80 people. So, it happens very slowly. But just like Rabbi Bambach, you know, each one of these things is just moving the dial a little bit to allow for Haredim to be part of Israeli society, the army and the workforce.

26:06 – GS:

That’s absolutely amazing. You know, it reminded me the fact that we’re now talking about a Rabbi Bombach approach and this approach. Again, getting back to what this Rabbi Zvi Hersh Kalischer said, where he gave different variations on what you could do in the sabbatical year. There are different variations of how you can be kovea etim l’torah. There’s not just one silver bullet. And I think that that is totally amazing, and I think you said to me a little bit in the pre-discussion that Bombach has a lot of PR, we need to know more about some of these other alternatives. And so, I think it’s fascinating that you went there and that you saw it in action. It’s obviously been operating for seven years, and it’s important, and as you say, every one of these students who comes home with a military uniform on and now is given honor rather than spat on is a change maker and is changing perceptions and changing the future. The other thing that you talked about which again gets back to the Shemitah is this has to do with making a living. If you’re in agriculture, it means plowing, but if you’re not, it gives them the ability to then go into the workforce from a legal point of view because they’ve served in the army, but also from a skill-set point of view. So, it’s really important. So, for the remaining time of our discussion, what I would like to do is to discuss some of the other alternatives or innovations that have been made since the founding of the state, since we returned to our land. That have been used to integrate whether it’s Torah study or more theological study and theoretical study into civil society and into the army. The other great innovation is something called the Mechina program. And what happened was, at a certain point, and I think the Mechina program that now encompasses all sorts of Israelis, both religious and secular and others, initially started, came from the religious movement where there’s this kind of ongoing concern, Rabbi, with coming from a closed society, a closed belief society, and then going into the army. And one of the solutions was Hesder, where you, number one, were segregated into your own divisions, And number two, you weren’t in the army for three straight years. There was this constant  integration with learning. The Mechina program said as follows. These kids that are coming out of high school, they’re really not prepared for the army. They’re not prepared for integration into the larger Israeli population, which is the army. And so, it was a year where they could be prepared. Machina is from the word to prepare. And they were therefore given the skills. It’s kind of like a gap year, that they were given the skills so that they could get more out of the army and they could contribute more out to the army. And one of the things that you haven’t said, Rabbi, about the Hesder movement is both the Hesder movement and the Machina movement revolutionized the army in terms of representation of dati lu’umi, of religious Zionists, who were very unrepresented during the Six-Day War, for instance, where it was the kibbutznikim who were considered the ideological leaders that one looked to. I think because of the Hesder movement and of the Mechina movement, the number of religious Jews wearing that knitted kippah, the kippah seruga, in the officer corps, in positions of leadership, has drastically been changed, and it was over time, and it was changed because of setting up these programs. It was thoughtful, it was strategic, and I’ll just finish by saying, and as a result, Secular Jews also opened up Mechina programs. Now there are three types. There’s religious, there’s secular, and there’s mixed. But what they are doing is preparing secular Jews for love of country, for understanding of idealism, and so it created a very positive impact on all of Israel. In a sense, the people who graduate these machina programs are the leaders of the army, and as you know, that means the leaders also of industry and everything. So, I’m involved with the Rashi Foundation, which works in the periphery. They are saying that many of these mechina programs are like a Choate or a private school here. You get into it and your career track is set. So, they are opening up mechinot for people in the periphery. But this is a revolution and it comes from this concept of taking off a year, of dedicating a year, or taking off time. So, it really does kind of fit into k’vayah itim l’torah and to the shmita. What are your thoughts?

31:43 – AM:

I mean, I think that that’s so great that you connect them and that we’re really continuing in a tradition of Shemitah, of how we take off and how we reestablish or reassess our values. I think that’s really what you’re saying, right? That you take the year off and we reassess what is important to us. And whether it’s the Haredi Hesder Yeshiva or whether it’s the Mechinot, it’s the same point. And that is, what are our values? How can we rethink the way that things have been going and how can we make them better? We know that that’s our biggest problem, right, that you kind of get stuck in a mode, and you continue doing the same things. And we need to reassess, and that’s what Shabbos is about, and that’s what the sabbatical year is about, and that’s what the jubilee year is about.

32:40 – GS:

So, I want to end by talking—there is also something that has become popular, which is study after the army. There’s an organization called Ein Prat, where they take you and they give you the bigger picture. But I want to talk about a personal encounter that I had. Rabbi, you talked about your visit this week.

I want to describe a visit that happened to me about 46 years ago. I was a yeshiva student in Be’er Yaakov, which was a black hat. You could call it Haredi in those years. We had a Agudat Yisrael. We had a generator at that yeshiva for Shabbat, so we wouldn’t have to use the electricity of the state on Shabbat, to give you a sense. And we had what was called a bein hazmanim, a time off between the end of the one quarter and the beginning of Elul. And I had three weeks And I went to visit Rabbi Riskin, who at that point had not yet made aliyah. He was in a kibbutz called Ein Tzurim. And Ein Tzurim was formed by people who had been living on a part of the West Bank that is currently Efrat, which was actually part of the State of Israel in the UN Partition, was taken by the Jordanians. About 50 or 60 of the kibbutznikim were killed and captured. And they re-established themselves in a place called Ein Tzurim and I’m working in the Lul with the chickens and I’m there and there was a Hesdernik, someone who was from a Hesder yeshiva and there was a kibbutznik. And we’re all wearing kippot, maybe mine was velvet and black and theirs were kippah seruga, and I oversaw an argument that I just had to keep my mouth shut. Because the kibbutznik, …. and I did some research preparing for today, the kibbutz Ein Tzurim was part of something called shiluv, and they look down upon the people who went to Hesder Yeshiva because they weren’t fully integrated into the army. They served in their own divisions. And Shiluv was started where you would be prepared to literally be integrated fully into Israeli society. It happened to be a part of the religious Zionist movement that leaned left They also had rabbinic studies with postmodern approaches. I met a guy named Yehuda Neumann. It was amazing, and guess what? They closed the yeshiva about 10 years ago. Experiments in how to do this integration. Some of them have worked and some of them have not worked, but maybe are still out there for the future. The idea is we still have to keep experimenting. The idea that secular Jews will go a year before the army and maybe be exposed to Jewish texts. There are so many opportunities here to be kovei etim le-Torah, to provide our citizenry with this shared language of Torah. And I think that ultimately is what a part of Shemitah is about, and a part of what you experienced in Israel recently, and is a part of the equation of change, but also unification of the people of Israel. It’s really amazing. Thank you so much for that story. It’s amazing that your story from then and my story from now really come together. It’s the same, it’s the same movement and we can just hope that more people are experimenting and doing things like that.

AM: Shabbat shalom from Jerusalem. I look forward to being back in New York for Shabbat and we look forward next week. Bechukotai, chazak, chazak, v’nitzchazeh.

GS: Shabbat shalom. See you all next week.