The hidden OTD crisis in the Orthodox world

You're surprised? Really?

I could write a book on this. But it’ll have to get in line. Right now, I don’t even have time to read the very large number of posts in this discussion.

I read Dean Maughvet’s Substack, and he wrote a piece called “Gawd is a Neurosis”, which led me to a piece called “My opinion on the "Orthopraxy" conversation”, which in turn has so many links to so many articles that I couldn’t read them all.

I’ve been fighting the “Open Orthodox” “Morethodox” “Social Orthodox” “Left-wing Orthodoxy” “Edah”, “YTC”, “Zev Farber”, “Asher Lopatin”, “Shlomo Riskin” axis of Jewish mediocrity for decades now. I haven’t written about them recently, because there’s just so much else going on in the world, and frankly, this issue makes me want to cry. And I hate wanting to cry.

But there are some points that I think are worth mentioning. It’s possible that one or more of the other pieces on this subject have already addressed them, but like I said, I haven’t read through all of them, and don’t really plan to (though I might subscribe to some of them).

Fear of Fighting the Dominant Culture

This, I believe, is the single biggest problem. When I was in high school (Ida Crown Jewish Academy), we had an obligatory Jewish History course. All junior year, and the first half of senior year. My junior year, the textbox was Solomon Grayzel’s History of the Jews. And the first day of class, the teacher told us we were going to start from the post-exilic period (Ezra and Nehemiah and the return from the Babylonian Exile), because the material prior to that was am-haartzus. Ignorance. Nonsense.

We used Grayzel for two reasons. One was that it was accepted by the high school accreditation people as a textbook, and the other was that, quite simply, no history book exists that’s written from a Jewish historical perspective. It’s all based on the “documentary hypothesis”, which starts from the unproven (and unprovable) premise that the Torah is a patchwork of primitive legends clumsily sewn together in the post-exilic period, and that Jewish history is not to be taken literally.

If you’re an intelligent Orthodox Jew, you’re going to want to read about our past. But you’re basically stuck between a body of work that says the Torah is a joke and our history is a fraud, or Artscroll.

And the Artscroll perspective on Jewish history is the one that pervades the frum world.

(Quick note: not everyone reading my blog understands “Jewishisms”, so I’m mostly trying not to use jargon that only insiders will get. But it’s tiring, so I’m going to use words like frum and halakha and whatnot, and maybe I’ll do a post that’s a glossary. In the meantime, “frum” means religious; i.e., Orthodox Jewish, “halakha” means Jewish law, and the rest should be understandable from context.)

Artscroll put out a history book back in the 1980s or thereabouts called The History of the Jews: The Second Temple Period. It didn’t even try to deal with the massive discrepency between the Jewish view of the chronology of that period and the Greek view, which is accepted universally in the Western world.

It was a valiant attempt to fill a gap, but it had negative value for anyone interested in serious history. Because it disagrees with everything else in print, and doesn’t even appear to be aware of it.

And that, in turn, is because of our fear of fighting the dominant culture.

You don’t often get religious Jews working in archaeology or the various ancient history disciplines like Assyriology and Egyptology. The reason is that everything taught in these programs runs counter to what we know about our history. It’s not even up for debate. People who think the historical narratives of the Bible and rabbinic literature might actually reflect what happened in reality are pitied and scorned. Definitely not debated.

And it’s a vicious cycle. We didn’t dispute their findings when they first came out, because we simply dismissed them as nonsense. Goyische kop. Naarischkeit. And now, there’s no way into those circles.

It’s embarrassing

So what happens when a Jew, raised Orthodox or newly Orthodox, tries to look into our past? He has to choose between “Everything Judaism says is ridiculously wrong” or “Everything the rest of the world says based on scientific findings is wrong, and it’s probably because they hate us.”

What would you choose?

Well, most Orthodox Jews who don’t want to lock themselves up in self-imposed ghettos like Meah Shearim or Kiryas Yoel choose… not to choose. They direct their efforts in other areas. Funding Jewish schools. Building shuls and mikvaot. Helping the hungry. All good things, but the idea of Jewish history stands behind them, just over their shoulders, like a monster that they don’t dare look at for fear of being eaten. They ignore it because they lack the tools to deal with it. They don’t want to go the ghetto route, because that’s not who they perceive themselves to be. And they know that those subjects are toxic for an Orthodox Jew, because there is seemingly no way to resolve secular scholarship and our history.

(Just as an aside, there is, but I haven’t found a way to convince large numbers of people of it. I may write about it here, but for now, you can have a look at an article that appeared in Jewish Action about 30 years ago that deals with it in a very popularized way.)

And the Jews who are unwilling to turn off their curiosity in this area? Of course they stop believing. Of course they go off the derekh. Internally, if not externally. Many of them know they’d lose friends and families if they were to come out as non-believers, so they do what’s necessary to “pass” as faithful Orthodox Jews. Some are rabbis.

It’s extremely unhealthy.

First of all, I think closets are unhealthy in and of themselves. If you live a lie, you’re only living a partial life. And none of your relationships are honest, because any friend… well, you don’t know if they’d still be your friend if they knew.

But beyond that, it’s created a time bomb within the frum community, particularly in the United States (though not exclusively), that is currently exploding, very slowly and gradually. And things will only get worse.

It spreads

We see books around like “Jews Confront Modernity” (or titles like that), but ultimately, none of them have answers.

And it’s making us retreat into a kind of emuna peshuta stance. For those interested, the concept of emuna (often mistranslated as faith, or belief) is often contrasted to that of yir’ah (fear/respect of God). We generally see yir’ah as being a lower level of relationship with God. “Don’t eat that cheeseburger, because God said no, and He’s super powerful and you’ll be punished for it, either in this world or the next.” We see emuna as a more peaceful and mature outlook. “Don’t eat that cheeseburger, because it’s contrary to God’s will and His plan for the world.”

But there’s emuna peshuta, or simple emuna, which is the lowest of the three. It’s the childlike acceptance of God said so and nothing else needs to be considered.

The three levels can be seen as parallels to how a child relates to his parents. As a small child, he listens to his parents because they’re his parents, period. There’s no intellectual element. As an older child, he listens to his parents (when he does) because he doesn’t want to be punished. Finally, as an adult, he listens to his parents because they have more wisdom and experience, and maybe actually know more about some things than he does.

I was riding the bus home one Friday many, many years ago, talking with a friend of mine. I was thinking about these things. About why we keep kosher, for example. Why God wants us to. And she was utterly baffled. God said to. Isn’t that the beginning and end of it? And while I’ve known fellow frummies who are… let’s say, intellectually challenged, she wasn’t one of them. Any other area, and she had tons to say. But when it came to this, she showed zero curiosity.

Fail

Our rabbis have failed us. Rabbis in centuries past confronted science and learned from it. Participated in it. Be it medicine or astronomy or mathematics or whatever, they went there with eyes wide open. In Eicha Rabba (2:13), we’re told:

“If a person tells you there is wisdom among the nations of the world, believe him. If a person tells you there is Torah among the nations of the world, do not believe him.”

We don’t have any leadership that will actually deal with the issues of Jewish history. So how can you be surprised that more and more frum Jews are leaving?