The Oyvey Office

Most who leave the Chassidic fold, fail miserably in their new lives. Aliens from a parallel universe, they are poorly equipped to deal with the harsh realities of western culture; the shallowness and the self-preservation. Coming from a world where a familiar face is a trusted friend, they confuse flirtation with sincere friendship and think ‘How do you do?’ is a question. Divided from their newfound family by a common language, they are not attuned to what is being clearly stated between the lines, even when it looks like they understand. While their companions happily watch their project tentatively taste his new freedom, they naively mistake their amiability for true concern. Sooner or later they end up, scared, lonely, let down and depressed, with no one left to turn to and nowhere to go.

Menachem Lang of Bne Beraq did not fall by the wayside completely. He was a budding cantor when he left at twenty and he is putting his experiences to good use in his new acting job in a theatre in Herzeliya, playing a part based on his own life. One part of him that does not come out in the show is the bit where he was sexually abused by some young adults in the community. Armed with the indignation that exposure to western culture accords such deeds, and a hidden camera crew from Israel’s Channel 10 he set out to confront his molesters. ( Text video -Hebrew)

Menachem comes across to me as a walking advert for staying put. He obviously does not realise how shallow he comes across, his outbursts sometimes seem rehearsed and when he adlibs, his positions become closer to his accused. He even seems a little unsure at times what is actually bothering him. All these are classic to victims of abuse and I am sure he needs help but my feeling is that he needs someone to advise him to return to a culture he knows and understands.

The three bearded men he identifies and interviews in the TV documentary were never charged although they all seem to admit the basic facts on camera. The reason, in a nutshell, is because "in the Charedi community such issues are dealt with internally" says the narrator.

I am aware that the situation in Israel is different than here. The Batei Din in Israel (rabbinical courts) are quasi legal bodies and in cities like Bne Beraq they represent a real force on the ground and enjoy widespread approval ratings despite the scepticism of those like me who prefer transparency and structure. Yet even there some prominent Rabbis have recently started advising people to report all forms of sexual abuse directly to the police.

It is laughable to expect our local Batei Din in London or Manchester to take on the function of society’s policemen. They simply lack the power or the influence, not to mention the expertise. Yet our Rabbis, in their infinite wisdom, insist on sticking to the rules and principles they were taught in a different age. Still dutifully fulfilling, to the letter, the orders they were given by their long dead generals in a battle that moved on decades ago. Still industriously firing their salvos at targets that have long ceased to exist, while the enemy has moved on and is busy pillaging the villages.

On the other side of the spectrum sit a group of Jews who also live somewhere in cloudcuckooland. The Neturei Karta movement has never been a savoury one although I have no argument with their founding principle, that the Zionists have no monopoly over the Jewish people. But my initial unease at posters on the lampposts on the Hill in the 80s stating “The Zionist state is a misfortune for the Jewish people”, has steadily developed into alarm and disgust as their disassociation turned to denouncement and blind hatred of all Jews but themselves. Indeed their actions illustrate better than any of their arguments the one undeniable truth; No one has the right to speak for a people without a clear mandate.

The pitiful morons’ latest escapade, strutting their stuff for all the world in Iran at a holocaust deniers conference was condemned by virtually all religious bodies in Israel, the US and the UK (except those deeper in bed with them than we all had suspected), albeit often in terms sometimes ambiguous at best. It is patently obvious that this rush of virtuous indignation and horror, that even a prayer vigil under the window of the dying Arch-terrorist Arafat in Paris and numerous highly publicised appearances in Shabbes clothes, black-silk-and-beaver-fur-fig-leaves for murderers and terrorists, failed to provoke, was not spontaneous. Rather, it was only the insistent prodding of secular Jewry, livid that their sacred cow, the holocaust, had been touched, that decided our seers that now it was important to make it known to the world that the NK do not speak for all Jews.

Our religious leadership has at last done the right thing, and expressed their disgust that a few individuals should try to hijack the garb we wear and the way we look to express views that are abhorrent, not only to practically all Jews but possibly almost everybody bar the Iranians and a few of their loony supporters. Still it is a scandal that even with an issue as clear to everybody as this, it is only when the wider world gets involved that suddenly (most of) our leadership springs valiantly into action. Our leaders are being led by circumstance, sometimes reacting, acting all the time but never taking a positive step to tackle problems from the core.

I believe that a good percentage of our leaders are good men. They are learned and pious and often well-meaning. They can not however, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as streetwise. They often do not know the distinction between opinion and fact, politics and law, wants and needs. They are out of touch with their communities and trying to apply rules and methods that might have been effective once but do not apply to the world I grew up in, far less the one my kids did. Worse, lacking any form of central leadership and hopelessly divided by personal interests, they and the orthodox media are forcing the mindset and rulings coming out from Bne Beraq and Jerusalem upon us, for lack of any original solutions to problems unique to us here in the UK and Europe.

There needs to be a central Orthodox Rabbinical Council for Europe, to deal with European problems from a European perspective. This council has to contain members from all orthodox groupings and must be professionally advised on law, health and politics, just as any governing body must. Until then in my opinion many of our learned Rabbis must be considered as sweet and wholesome but not much more. As innocent as smoothies and just as relevant.

Left, Right, Wrong

Comedian Jackie Mason once said he has no problem laughing at Jews to either a Jewish or a gentile audience . It is the mixed ones that are problematic because the Gentiles are uncomfortable sitting next to Jews while laughing at them. I feel a similar constraint in my colleagues at work when the Arab Israeli conflict comes up. An uncomfortable silence usually ensues when I drop in on such a discussion. I therefore tend to keep my opinions largely to myself on this issue, at work at least.

The recent demise of the Satmar Rebbe and a newspaper article about it in which the Satmar viewpoint was described as anti-Zionist caught the eye of a co-worker of mine who had the bright idea of producing the clipping during a lunch break. She unfolded it with a shy flourish and proceeded to explain that she wished to publicly apologise for supposing that all Jews were Zionists.

Caught unawares and unprepared I had no ready answer and explained simply that Satmar’s is just one of the myriad positions that Jews hold and reminded everyone of the age old saying ‘Two Jews, three opinions’. Everyone dutifully smiled and returned to their spam and sports pages. The episode got me thinking however. On the one hand I am an avid proponent of clearly making the distinction between being Israeli and being Jewish. In that respect I believe Satmar has got it right. On the other hand I am squeamish about getting into bed with a group that is happy to curry favour at the expense of their own brethren.

The Satmar viewpoint, developed by the first Rebbe and uncle to the one that just recently passed away, was uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. He was a pragmatist however and it has been suggested by many that his message was designed to temper the euphoria within the decimated religious community that the birth of the State and the emergence of a Nation of Jews created at the time. To him and his Eastern European colleagues it was obvious that Zionism and religious Judaism did not mix, this despite the fact that a few of them were personally saved from the Nazis by the Zionist organisations active at the time. His message that the Zionist State was no God given birthright was accepted by the mainstream in ultra-O-Jism until fairly recently. It is the media and their insistence that religious settlers and Chassidim are the same, that taught younger Chassidim to identify with the State. Made it for us more than a Jew- (but not always charedi) friendly place that has falafel balls on sale everywhere and Hebrew writing - for us previously reserved for school, synagogue or dreary kosher shops - on provocative billboards and vending machines too.

Still today the concept of the powerful vanquishing Jewish soldier is an image that many Charedim identify with uneasily. The twisted blend of religious fanaticism and right-wing extremism the media paints us with is in fact no more accurate than that which the rabidly anti-Israeli and pro-palestinian Neturei Karta, often misrepresented as Satmar, tries to portray. Indeed it is only the repulsiveness of NK’s uncle-tomesque parades of blind pro-Arabism that stops me agreeing with their posters proclaiming ‘Zionism is not Judaism’. It is the images like those on worldwide TV of their heroes in shining bekishes and shabby shtreimels wearing Kaffiyes like bastardised prayer-shawls while praying for the good health of the dying Yassir Arafat that prove to me they are no more honest to true Judaism than those that proclaim the greatness of Israel from behind the barbed wire of their fortified camps where once stood a proud Palestinian’s olive grove and livelihood.

The religious Zionist settler movement espoused the belief that the land was returned to the children of Israel by God. That was the justification in their eyes for the moral wrongs that were committed, for the hardships that the locals had to endure to make way for their rebuilding of the Land of Israel. Whenever a twinge of conscience did break through there was always the steadfast security argument to paper over the gaps. And to be fair the Palestinians have done their best throughout the last decades since the creation of the State to justify these arguments. Indeed I am probably not the only one who for whom it is more the need for us to stop occupying them that needles my conscience than their need for independence.

True Religious Zionism died the day the Israel disengaged from Gaza. On that day it became clear that what the Satmar and the thinking Haredim (ultra-orthodox) had been saying from the sound ‘go’ was true. The current State of Israel is not the historic redemption we have spent two thousand years praying for. “If Jesus was the Messiah we should be living in a messianic time.” we used to glibly point out to the Christians. It is by the same token that I refuse to accept that widespread poverty, strife and discrimination coupled with a dehumanizing occupation and perpetual bloodshed are our national destiny. God, when He allowed Sharon to return Gaza to the Palestinians, was officially informing His people that the State of Israel is not The Promised Land although it certainly is on it. It therefore becomes a political entity conceived by the League of Nations and one that needs the legitimacy of the family of nations to hope to survive. This brings the real Charedi viewpoint more in line with the extreme-left in Israel and firmly back towards Satmar.

Where I have to disagree with Satmar is with their insistence on delegitimising the State altogether by insisting it is a sin to vote or take active interest in the politics of the land. Jews living in a sovereign country should be entitled to participate in the running of it, just as Satmar so blatantly and shoddily tries to in New York. The sordid money-politics of the orthodox political parties in Israel and their blatant flirtation with the right-wing might be justifiable for them, as the legitimate struggle of a minority living in a country, to create a better life for themselves. The fact that it creates the illusion abroad that all religious Jews are right-wing fanatics is unfortunate but our fault not theirs.

Yet I am glad I did not say all this to my masticating colleagues. A friend of mine told his granddad that the goyim hate us because of what happens in Israel. The old man who had spent time in Bergen Belsen shook his head. “Forty years ago when I came to this country the yobs on the street used to shout out to me that I should go back to Palestine. Now they shout we should get out of Palestine. Nothing changes.”