We at Wesleyan and other colleges are likely used to seeing religious communities as Student Groups. In many cases, these religious groups get along with each other, such as the numerous collaborations brokered between the Wesleyan Jewish Community and the Muslim Student Assembly. After all, this is secular America at its finest.
But in many places, even in secular America, there are religious communities that do not want to have any exchange with the outside world at all, yet alone with collectives of other faiths. These conclaves are noted for a deliberate fear of anything outside of the archetype they make for themselves.
A lot of my friends, regardless of their faiths, freely associate this description with “Hasidic communities”, or “Haredim”, a name applied to ultra-Orthodox sects, meaning “Tremblers”. (I am certain that many other communities like these exist in other religions, but as I would either not be welcome or would not have the opportunity to visit them, I cannot comment.)
If you visit collectives like these like I have done, such as Boro Park in New York, or Me’a Shearim in Jerusalem, they can be a frightening experience, even traumatizing.
In preparation for a visit to some of these neighborhoods in Israel, you may hear stories in advance about immodestly clad women getting rocks thrown at them, or cars getting vandalized beyond repair if they drive in these neighborhoods on Saturday. It is also common for people to class Haredim as “assholes”.
Boro Park in New York is definitely tamer, but the media is recreated entirely from the ground up, with seemingly no outside influences. No classic board games, only Jewish renditions of them. Secular Jewish culture, past and present, from Klezmer music to Philip Roth, is completely scrapped and ignored.
But do we need these communities? Do they give religion a bad name? Are they really that different from the rest of us?
To answer the first question, it is not really an issue of “needing” them, but there always will be the purists that will pursue their religion or hobby to endless devotion. Any collective has to exist in terms of a spectrum. Just as every religion has heretics and liberal communities—and always have—the same holds for extremists and strict communities.
The Haredim see themselves as “the true defenders of Judaism”, which they very well might be—because the rest of us, outside of their realm, see them as those that follow every aspect of their religion to the letter. If all other Jewish communities in America would vanish, they would still be there, strengthened by their isolation.
Communities like these may censure ones like Wesleyan’s community for being lazy and not knowing what the actual religion is, but it works both ways. I saw people in Boro Park, with a tour guide, doing the morning service in the afternoon. Breaking cars that drive through Mea Shearim on the Sabbath is a violation of the laws of Sabbath, oddly enough. What’s the point? All communities have room for liberalism and ignore some laws, regardless of how religious they claim they are.
But then one also has to account for the variance within many Hasidic communities themselves. I once spent a weekend in New Square when I was fourteen. Remember earlier that I said that you could not find classic board games in Boro Park? Here, in a predominantly Yiddish-speaking, genuine Hasidic community, they were playing Monopoly—Classic Monopoly—on the Sabbath, no less.
Professor Khachig Toloyan taught me that all communities have a collective lie that they share and believe. For many of these ultra-Orthodox spheres, it is that they believe that they observe everything according to the letter of the law. But it just can’t happen!
I wouldn’t wish away the Haredim’s existence by any measure. At their best, they are a culture for many to engage and to learn from. At their worst, they abuse custom as a pretense for malevolence.
When people realize that communities like these are in many respects similar to the ones they are used to, perhaps more peacemaking and understanding can occur, as well as far less name-calling.