In the last lecture we identified the modern Orthordox as enacting the principles contained in Mishanh Peah, doing a Rabbinic Judaism of prayer, study, and religious deeds that produced an interdependent community, indeed an extended family. This Judaism, we argued along with Heilman, promotes the kind of group "belonging" that Durkheim attributes to religion in general and which Heilman's ethnography so persuasively reveals.

The ways in which religious sentiment and especially religious practice establish community and collective consciousness can be seen in the New York Times ad on "How to be Orthodox in 5758" which I distributed in class. The ad by the leaders of modern orthodoxy (who here are actually polemicizing against the ultra-orthodox) stresses the strong social elements of Judaism and the halachic life: "As a Jew," the ad reads, "you have a covenant with God and every person on earth. Jewish law therefore directs behavior for all relationships….At home and on the job." The ad encourages the reader to "attend shirurim [study circles], and to "get close to God and reach out to others" through "family relationships" loving other Jews and strengthening "the entire Jewish people and express its wholeness by connecting with Jews of all movements…"

The ad reads like a modern translation of the injunctions of Mishnah Peah in which, as the ad begins, one might "let Halacha lead your life." You recall how in The People of the Book the rabbi understood the four walls of the sukkah as established less by a contractor and more by the regulations of halacha. A Jew, he insisted dwells within these walls of the halacha,within the very principles enunciated in Mishnah Peah. It is these halchic walls, part of a portable rabbinic home that is as moveable as a sukkah that provide sanctuary and comfort and belongingness. Neo-Orthodoxy enacts a Judaism that encourages full participation within modern society while at the same time establises a community of inter-connection among Jews by applying the halacha to modern life.

How different are the walls established by another contemporary community of rabbinic Jews, the ultra-orthodox haredim described in Defenders of the Faith. They can be said to dwell within Mishnah Avodah Zarah, enacting with a vengeance a Judaism that the ancient composers of that text never acted out and likely never intended anyone to enact. That Mishnah, as you recall, is one that creates boundaries in its almost paranoid anxiety about being contaminated by the Other beyond, the Gentile, or polluted by the Other within, women. One Mishnah you read captures the heightening of anxiety that is so dominant in this text: "Cattle may not be left in inns of idolaters because they are suspected [of using beasts] for sexual purposes; and a [Jewish] woman may not remain alone with them for they are suspected of lechery." And you recall Eisen's sense that this is a text produced by persons who feared "that they too would be tainted in and by a world gone mad," and found ways of producing a holiness of separation that would assure them some protection from a dangerous world.

Whereas the modern Orthodox direct their religious energy to ties that bind, these Jews are pre-occupied with separation from the dangers of all things alien: the Gentile, "America, " all things modern and anything new; secular Jews, Zionists and Israelis, Conservative and Reform Jews, the neo-Orthodox--all of them threats to haredi purity.

The wall of halakha here is not the more open one of the sukkah into which even a thief could enter. This is the wall of the mechizah, a physical separation in a traditional synagogue which keeps them men from being able to see the women perchance they might get aroused by their "impure thoughts." Heilman's quotes an early Haredi source: "Agudat Israel was founded to help construct a thousand-foot mechitzah between us and them. There must be absolutely no connection between authentic Judaism and diluted Judaism. Absolutely none" (Defenders, p. 27). Here the "them" includes any Jew who is contaminated withg the virus of modernity.

For the haredim the "fences around the Torah" are never high enough (see p. 28) nor are the walls of the yeshivah ever thick enough to provide "isolation and protection from the evils outside. The traditional Jewish concern with ritual learning [had to be] reconstructed as a defense mechanism, and inoculation against the dangers inherent in the encounter with the virus of modernity" (p. 35).

The walls of the community are indeed, as one of their own observed, held together by posters that name the enemy, the "Na-zionists," whose "name should be blotted out,. The community acquires its supervised cohesion by these signs that ban contact with those who support any cause with which they disagree, warn of sexual dangers, advise how to avoid being on a street or in a business where someone from the opposite sex might be. These signs might reveal the splits and antagonisms so rife within the community, but their main purpose is to reinforce the walls of separations between the ultra-orthodox and other Jews.

Now the juxtaposition of these two contemporary Rabbinic Judaisms is a fruitful one for us. We have been able to see already two forms of the rabbinic teaching, a first one that was more textual than actual, that is, the ancient form between the second and the sixth centuries, a utopian Judaism we called it. A second rabbinic Judaism--modern Orthodoxy--is the full enactment of the first, a case where the model for becomes a model of. Here Judaism flourishes textually as well as in a fully embodied form of life. In ritual life, in the host of cultural performances Heilman records, we see Jews practicing the interpretive gestures of traditioning and contemporizing the text. And now in Defenders of the Faith we see in a third rabbinic Judaism much at odds with the neo-orthodox, indeed standing in opposition to their attempts to balance the world of Judaim with the world of modernity.

We have been talking about how Judaism is always contested, how different are each of the Judaisms in these different case studies. Here we can see three quite different forms of rabbinic Judaism, the last two being contemporary rivals, contemporary enactments of the ancient texts.

Now some might say that the actual numbers of the ultra-orthodox is so small that they are but an extremist fringe that doesn't really merit study. The haredim themselves would of course acknowledge such extremism. Says one of the founders of this movement, the Hazon Ish: " He who champions a middle course [like the neo-orthodox] and scorns extremism, has a place among counterfeiters….If there is no extremism, there is no completeness. Those who testify that they have not tasted the sweetness of extremism testify that they are bereft of faith in the essentials of religion…"(p. 38)

But they cannot be regarded as fringe. Their numbers keep growing, and increasing number of the children of the modern orthodox are moving toward the right and becoming ultra-orthodox. Their influence on Judaism as a whole is great, since they have persuaded even their opponents that indeed they are the "true Jews." Their religious and political power in Israel is so enormous that Prime Minister Netanyahu will likely abdicate to them and forsake the millions of Jews who are affiliated with Reform and Conservative Judaism rather than risk a crisis in hisGovernment.

They are also worthy of our study because they are a splendid example of how religion can sometimes be innovative, indeed revolutionary as this haredi Judaism is, and persuade themselves and others that they are traditional. The past that is conjured up by these communities is much more recent than they imagine. In many ways their Judaism--including their dress, customs, the origins of the law codes they use, the vernacular of Yiddish they use--derives form the late pre-modern period, that is the 16th-18th centuries. The platform on which this set of novelties is introduced is the Judaism that immediately preceded the dramatic changes in the West that we refer to in short hand as the Enlightenment. Soon we will be reading about the general climate in the West which allowed Jews for the first time a much wider range of decisions about their Jewishness. Haredi Judaism presents a highly romanticized, nostalgic and of course distorted memory of that former world, elevating everything that we in our studies would regard as one more case of Judaism into the one and only Judaism.

Such nostalgia and a variety of forms of religious traditionalism are of course part and parcel of our modern world, responses to modernization, secularization, the elevation of a national identity over all other social identities. Heilman makes clear how embedded the movement of ultra-orthodoxy is within a world of rapid change, a movement that itself reflects an ever changing ideology in response to the rapid changes going on all round it. He notes that "Haredim are inextricably linked to the ways of life they oppose. And those are always changing. To succeed in being haredi, their opposition must be dynamic and flexible, ready to shape itself to the ever changing realities against which it has set itself. Before all else, they must always know what they are not"(p. 38).

The movement itself has introduced into rabbinic Judaism much that is new. Heilman deals with some of these far-reaching novelties: relocating the center of decision making from the home and the local rabbi to the yeshivot and the rosh yeshiva; introducing the notion that, "The new is prohibited by the Torah"; developing a Judaism "by the book," one that takes all of its cues for correct behavior from the law codes, where before the law codes themselves were anthologies of diverse customs in various localities; introducing a "stringency and inflexibility" a doing of "all" and "everything" a preoccupation with detail and punctiliousness that was unheard of in the past.

Our study of Haredi Judaism therefore allows us to continue observing some of the things we have been tracking in this course: Judaism as contested, traditioning and other interpretive gestures, cultural performances that "naturalize" the constructed, the relationships of texts to practice, the attempt to discover affinities and discontinuities among the Judaisms. We will also raise in our study of the ultra-orthodox something new. We pause to raise the important matter of how one goes about assessing a Judaism. More precisely, we want to reflect on the question of whether and to what degree the outside scholar can pass judgment on someone else's religion.

This is an opportune moment to raise this issue because I think that no other community of Jews appears more alien to our own modern sensibilities than this Judaism with such a stake in rejecting all things modern. Though not assigned, you might want to read the chapter called "The Triumph of Sex" in which you will encounter a newly married couple whose marriage is not consummated for six weeks because neither of them have been informed that the act requires penetration. In this chapter both Heilman and the reader have a chance to test out the limits of understanding things that are indeed strange. Heilman concludes this rather voyeuristic chapter by observing: "Intuitively, Breindel [his informant about sexual conduct in the community]…understood that it was what went on in the bedroom or more precisely the attitudes toward sexuality, that had made me, and people like me, think that she and her husband and other haredim lived so different a life that they were of another time and another order" (p. 350)

Despite all the lip service we might give to cultural relativism, to being objective, to not making judgement but attempting rather to negotiate an understanding, there is something about these folks that sticks in our craw. And it is just at this point where one Other encounter the other Other that judging--poor judging, the kind that leads to distorting, demonizing, and even violence--begins. So since such judging cannot be avoided, it strikes me that this is the opportunity to see if we can train ourselves to do it in a thoughtful, reflexive, and informed manner.

Now judging is one of the things we are warned against doing in the academy, and for good reason. For there are dangers in judging.

a. Judgements are often ethnocentric, that is, they are culture bound and specific-culture driven. We are not some neutral observers, objective flies on the wall recording intimate conversations of the persons we are studying. We have our stakes, our interests, and most of them are usually invisible to us. We might be able to expose the taken-for-granted of the Other (because we are outsiders) but we dwell within our own cultural assumptions, and even when they get challenged by just such cross-cultural encounters, it is not unusual for us to cling to them. We might expose the relativity of our own cultural values, but visit some traditional society in which social hierarchy, asymmetrical relations between the sexes, and vast inequalities of wealth are institutionalized and you will see the degree to which our own values are deeply embedded and hard to give up even temporarily.

b. We speak the language of tolerance toward worldviews entirely different from our own, but often this tolerance is but a disguised form of condescension. We might say "Everybody's entitled to their viewpoint," when we really mean, "If this fool wants to believe that I'm not going to even try to show him how benighted he is."

c. Another related problem is that when we try to make discerning judgments we often end up moralizing. We slip all too easily into harsh judgmental ways and this subverts the kinds of knowing the insiders' viewpoint in their own terms. When it comes to what people think we might be tolerant; when it comes to what they do, we are easily appalled. For example, monitor in the regulat newspaper accounts how very open-minded persons who accept all sorts of deviant ways of thinking can get very upset about religious practices involving female circumcision.

d. Such moralizing, which has a tinge of hostility to it, strikes me as emerging out of a defensiveness that is a quite normal response to that which is different from us. The naturalization process of the constructed gets undermined by encounters with things different. Such encounters expose to us that perhaps our own values are artificial and not natural. This might be the origin of the defensiveness that produces easy moralizing, a way of warding off our own self-doubts.

e. Finally, we have been trained to be skeptical about the notion of absolute truths and claims to some absolute standards of conduct. Yet despite this, we do often have some inkling that there are certain behaviors that are reprehensible, even evil, such as the gratuitous production of suffering in another human being, the violating of the helpless out of the sheer delight in the exercise of power, the joy in humiliating another person, and so forth. There are other behaviors that we often esteem as normative, not just for us but for all other cultures. These positive norms are often more difficult to discern, but the willingness to sacrifice something of ourselves for the ones we love, is probably one of them. There is often confusion here about the normitive on two levels: 1) confusion arises out of our own contradictory philosophic position that we take that there are no absolute standards while at the same time we are [possessed by an inklingthat there are some values that are normative, if it is only that each culture establishes a normative set of rules the regulate conduct. 2) The easy confusion of what we hold to be normative as that which is the normative and universal standard for conduct

Now with all this in mind, I am going to suggest that we can-- indeed we should-- make a judgment in this case study of the Haredim for in so doing we train ourselves to bring together our critical intelligence and our deep inclinations to judge. Let me make a stab at this in the lecture/ When we have our next lecture class (October 29) we will convene a panel of TAs and anyone in the class to discuss whether this assessment is persuasive as well as the larger issue of whether we should be doing such judging in the first place.

What I am proposing in making judgments here is a stage of thought that that goes beyond the critical understanding of a culture through the kinds of negotiating we have been developing in this course. I am suggesting that once one has, as far as possible, come to an understanding of a culture's orientation and values, then one might want to ask the question: Is the culture enacting its own values? And if not, what is being performed and exactly what is culturally being produced inits cultural performances.

To signal where I am going with all of this, let me announce here my conclusions: Haredi Judaism is in the business of producing anxiety in its community, an anxiety that I will suggests narrows a person's humanity and diminishes the (rabbinic) Judaism that is being practiced. In addition, the teachings and the practices of ultra-orthodoxy engender fear and paranoia within their own community and they arouse feelings of hostility toward other Jews. Haredi Judaism encourages dangerous splits within Judaism and produces violent actions toward other Jews. Two last points will be raised in this assessment: A group that cultivates a sense of being attacked, promotes feelings of vulnerability yet at the same time has enormous power can be very dangerous to themselves and others. The Haredi often produce situations in which they use techniques of confrontation and violence which display their real power even as they reinforce the community's sense that they are threatened and under attack. A frightened grizzly bear protecting her cubs is one of the most fearsome creatures in nature. Finally, the Haredi attempt at establishing the one true Judaism through an authoritarian kind of totalizing has ended up producing a Judaism that has been robbed of some of its central features for self-renewal.

The claim of the Haredi is that their community is the most complete expression of Rabbinic Judaism. They are, as you can see in reading the chapter on education, punctilious in fulfilling one of the codes of Judaism that requires that "every father must educate his young children in all the obligations…each and every obligation…" Now were we to provide an epitome of the social values and obligations of Rabbinic Judaism it would include such things as

--love of other Jews (ahavat yisrael) --establishing peaceful relations --humility and self-effacement about one's piety --gratuitous kindness: gemilut hasadim tovim

--righteous actions that establish social justice --a sense of honor and respect for the full humanity of other persons

So one would imagine that the increased stringency of the ultra-orthodox and the multiplication of obligations that Heilman describes would extend the range of opportunities for such social bonding. In terms of the Rabbinic dictum that "the mitzvoth (the commandments) were given for no other reason than to refine human beings," one would imagine that the Haredi community is the place to find refined Jews, erlicher Yidn, virtuous Jews as they call themselves.

All the evidence points in another direction. I would argue that this stringency, this totalizing of Judaism, involves a compulsiveness that has its origins in anxiety and a need for total control. This over intensification of Judaism doesn't increase social binding but has subverted the very social principles summarized above. Compulsive behavior is often an attempt to alleviate anxiety. More often than not it only intensifies it. Anxiety is the engine that drives an exponential multiplication of laws to be scrupulously observed, and anxiety is also the result.

Heilman reminds us that some of this anxiety-driven totalizing has its the origins in the writings of the 19th century founders of Hasidism. "To remain beyond challenge," he argues, "these leading rabbis and others like them held to the most demanding requirements of Judaism. To do less so would have opened them to the accusation that they were making compromises and following the nefarious path of reform" (p. 28). And each year one or another of the haredi communities ups the stakes on what it means to be observant, and others follow this path of (self) righteousness, each community trying to out do the others as the most haredi.

You recall the epigraph from Geertz in Heilman's chapter on "Cultural Performances": "We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture--and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it…." The "particular form" of Haredi culture is, as Heilman keeps noting throughout the book, an "on guard, anxious, worried " Judaism. The term haredi itself, he reminds us, comes from the biblical passage praisng those "who tremble at His word," and Heilman translates this modern "trembling" as the result of those who "share an existential angst" (p. 13). The goal of so much of the ritual activity is to promote Jews who are "continually anxious" (p. 38).

Heilman attributes some of this anxiety to the Haredi post-Holocaust fears for Jewish survival. I would suggest that the sense of fear, vulnerability, suspicion, resentment, danger, and alienation (terms that keep coming up again and again in the words of Heilman's informants) has its origins in the cultural performances themselves. That is, the enacting of the Judaism here is one that has its driving sources and motivations in anxiety, is often permeated with anxiety in its execution, and that the very goal is to produce even more anxiety. Thus can one create "continually anxious," haredi/trembling Jews worried about about all sorts of things. And as one would expect, the anxiety gets especially located on those two favorite objects , the Gentileas Other and the Woman as Other.

Now one of the innovations in this form of Judaism is that the Gentile is not some external source of pollution. In Mishnah Avodah Zarah we described the Gentile asthe Outside Other. In contemporary Haredi Judaism this Other is located within, a source of contamination that is the proximate stranger, the fellow-Jew, "Jews who livedlike goyim [who] were also goyim" (p. 19). It is from such Jews that the stringent practices provide protection from any contact. For the Haredim it is "America," the very icon of assimilated (see 99 and 202), modernized Jews, and the Zionists, the Jews who have modernized themselves into Israelis (see 37), the modern orthodox, the Jews who attempt to contemporize their Judaism so that they can be traditional and modern at the same time who are the sources of infection.

It is from those who have already contracted the disease of modernity that one must establish a one-thousand foot wall that provides complete separation. It is the Jew that carries the virus from which the community requires inoculation and protection (and see pp. 35, 107, 170 for the language of disease and the notion that ritual life and the community itself are prophylactic devices). In a world of "us" and "them" it is other Jews who are the demonized "them", the impure ones who are diluting Judaism, the Nazis as they are increasingly being portrayed these days, the Jews whose "name and memory [should] be blotted out" (see p. 301 and the sign on p. 302).

These Jews are not only to be exposed, condemned and split off from being included within Judaism; they must be actively confronted. Modernized Jews who live according to the "chukos ha goyim," the ways of the Gentiles, especially the secular Zionists in Israel, require "the abiding presence of a counter-culture that confronted them in all things." Thus do the Haredi see themselves as "defenders of the faith, cultural warriors in the battle against secularity" (p. 37). This language of battle is not only a metaphor for continual vigilance within the community, but is an accurate descriptive term of the Haredi who regularly enact ritualized violence against other Jews, as we shall be noting below.

The (disguised) alien within of course is much more dangerous than the Other who "is a being of another order" (p. 210). Science fiction movies of the 1950s, read as coded message about alien communists disguised as a fellow-Americans, and more contemporary TV programs like the X-Files which in another way link the aliens with disguised Americans--this time, government agents in a conspiracy plot--are splendid ways to intensify anxiety and cultural paranoia. The alien within engenders extreme suspicion and vigilance, for one knows clearly the enemy without, but one never knows who might be the infected enemy within. In many ways, the disguised Jew--that is, the modernizing Jew who claims to be traditional-- can pollute in the same way that physical contact with a menstruating women can contaminate the one who does not know she is bleeding. And just as one must therefore create religious ways of separating men from women to assure the men's purity, so too extreme measures of separation are taken to establish boundaries between "true Jews" and all other Jews.

And when the external enemy has become the "enemy within" one expects that the internal Other, the Woman (and all things sexual, which are associated with women) becomes an even greater threat to religious purity. The body itself gets regarded as a proximate alien object, a source of "impure thoughts," and temptation. The purity of children requires "extra watchfulness, care and energy," especially concerning matters of the body associated with sexuality. The Rebbe of Sziget instructs: "Warn your little boys of five or six (or even younger) that they should not touch their holy bris [penis] even at the time that they make water, nor should they touch that of their fellows, nor even look there" (p. 175). The chapter on the "Triumph of Sex" is filled with more examples of how even "normal" sexuality, including the conjugal relations between husband and wife are regulated with extreme measures so as to diminish sexual arousal.

Indeed, the regulations around the marital sexual act are ones that are prime examples of rituals that successfully produce anxiety. "With trembling [with 'haredi-ness'] wrote Rabbi Liezer Papo…must a person approach food and the rest of his pleasures" (p. 316). When one of the young married men is informed just before the marriage what is involved in the sexual act he will be asked to perform on his wedding night, he reports "I was in shock," and another is so appalled and afraid that he runs out of the room. Women likewise report that when they heard the details of sexual intercourse, "some of them go into shock," (p. 326), and that many who were not adequately prepared "were staggered by the experience" (p. 325).

Women, who are in the Talmud already considered a source of danger for men, are seen within the Haredi community as a source of heightened concern. The signs on the walls constantly warn women to be modest, and they also attempt to establish separation of men and women on the streets and in the shops (see pp. 309, 310). In a community that is proud of the ways that it guards against all ways of being "normal"--at least what is considered normal by others--haredi Judaism goes out of its way to increase anxiety about just those areas in which contamination can occur within the sphere of normal relations.

Vigilance about contact with women, the prime bearers of uncleanness and impurity, becomes a central preoccupation. Such heightened anxiety increases the need for separation from this source of contamination and produces an intensification of the asymmetrical relationships of power. Women are not merely subordinated--and I am not saying such hierarchies of power and status are necessarily bad. What is to be judged critically is that such subordination limits women from opportunities of fully completing themselves humanly, even within the terms of rabbinic Jewish culture. I am not arguing for equality here, for such egalitarian values are clearly local, clearly our own, and they are a relative, not an absolute value. What I am suggesting is that this "anxious Judaism" is one that narrows ones humanity, and does not, as classical Rabbinic Judaism clearly intends, expand and complete the human, not just the women in the community but the men also.

But it is the women most of all whose full humanity gets eclipsed. Religion, often a tool for liberation and revolution, can likewise be a tool for political and social subordination. And nothing is more effective in regulating persons as these codes of purity, especially when they are laced with the anxiety of men who fear that they might, through contact with women, themselves get contaminated and become temporarily religiously unfit. Thus women are, in this community, not only restricted within the public spheres; they are also limited from those spheres of study and prayer in which one has access to religious power.

My critique is actually not so much on the limitations on women however. It more broadly suggests that cultural performances by men and women which succeed in producing an anxious, trembling Judaism turn a rabbinic Judaism that aims at human completion on its head. Instead of extending Judaism into the normal spheres of life, it produces a very narrow, constricted Judaism, a religion that diminishes ones humanity and ones sociality by increasing anxiety, hostility and violence.

Anxiety relates to Latin words for anger, for anguish, for discomfort and dis-ease. The somatic markers for acute anxiety, the trembling and shaking, the narrowing of throat that makes it hard to swallow and the tightening of the belly, suggest well the forms of contraction--physical, psychological, emotional, and social--that I would suggest are the hallmarks of this Judaism. This is a Judaism of narrowness and constriction, one that robs persons of experiencing their own and Judaism's fullness.In place of some of the rather noble and admirable features of Rabbinic Judaism--love of others, peaceful relations, social justice, and so forth-- it substitutes and normalizes just those mental states, emotions, and ways of relating-- fear and suspicion, generalized hostility and anger, confrontation and violence--that are deserving of the negative moral judgment they almost universally receive.

A religion that promotes "continual anxiety," this worried" Judaism which in Israel has so much power, can prove quite dangerous when it chooses "fight" instead of "flight," that is, when it actively confront its enemies. Haredi Judaism has multiplied the occasions for violent confrontation on the streets of Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israe. Indeed, ritualized violence, acts that are considered fulfillments of the teachings that go on in the yeshivot from, have become prominent forrms of community vitalization and cohesion.

In America the battles are mainly verbal, but in the Jewish State the words are being realized in numerous activities in which ultra-orthodox Jews violently confront other Jews. These become occasions for the haredim to overcome some of the rather vicious splits within their own ranks and achieve solidarity against their common enemies. These events of aggregation and community cohesion sharpen the boundaries between haredi and all other communities. They are violent actions that generate even more hostility and violence on both sides of the boundary of separation. When police are brought in, the actions succeed also in confirming for the haredi their sense that they are a beleaguered and vulnerable community, exposed to attack from a Zionist government which they portray as a Nazi regime. (For some interesting and illustrative Web links, go to Unit III in the on-line syllabus and click on haredim and see the description of the protest at an archeological site at #6 as well as the other sources on the top of the page; click also on Satmar and then on Religious 'Freedom' in Zionist Israel [in the main frame] and note the iconography in the photography.)

These actions by the Haredim include some of the following

--stonethowing on the Sabbath at cars that pass through neighborhoods that they want to make car-free.

--throwing of garbage at the Western Wall at mixed men and women prayer groups.

--harrassing women who gather to pray at the wall who are wearing a prayer shawl or chanting from the Torah

--attacks at archaeological sites where ancient Jewish graves are thought to be

--protests at construction sites of highways that might come near their neighborhood.

--putting swastika's on reform synagogues

The most shocking events were the massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron on Purim a couple of years ago, and then the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. Both events were done by persons (Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein) who were raised with this ideology of violence, and both considered their acts to be religiously sanctioned. In both cases many of the haredi refused to disown this violence.

Among the modern orthodox there were some strong voices of criticism, none more courageous then a memorial address by Norman Lamb, the President of Yeshiva University. At this Orthodox institution of higher learning in which there is waging a battle between the moderate Orthodox and the haredi for control, Rabbi Lamb used the occasion of a memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin to criticize the religious culture that has produced such violence. He quoted a rabbinic source to commend the notion of copious Torah and many commandments: "The Holy One desired to grant merit (le'zakkot) to Israel, therefore He gave them a copious Torah and many mitzvoth" And he added: "Note that the word le'zakkot means not only to give merit or privilege but also purification. Moral purity and probity in Judaism are incompatible with thoughtlessness, insensitivity, and careless language--let alone murder." He went on to say: "Let us speak the truth: the Amirs and Goldsteins did not invent their depraved [religious] justifications for murder out of thin air. It is true that they are weeds in our own garden…The atmosphere in certain quarters was heavy with viciousness and intolerance. There were rabbis who took it upon themselves to speculate aloud and carelessly on life-and-death issues…" Lamb concluded his remarks by calling for collective tshuvah, repentance, among the Orthodox who had, in their refusal to criticize such distortions of Judaism, allowed such weeds to grow as flowers in the garden of rabbinic Judaism

As scholars of Judaism we can see Lamb's indictment as a contesting within Judaism. We can also see it as support for an outside scholar's position that argues that in so many ways haredi Judaism is a subversion of the most basic principles of the classical Judaism it claims to be expressing. Haredi attempts to promote anxiety as the highest religious state, along with its inclinations towards splitting Jews and demonizing its Jewish opponents, its engendering of hostility among Jews for other Jews is profoundly anti-Jewish. This single-minded ultra-orthodoxy, so absolutist in making itself the one and only purified and true Judaism is a Judaism that has lost one of the tradition's most important of cultural tools, that is, flexibility and intertextuality. Judaism's capacity to re-invent itself through a form of interpretation that allows for the contesting of many voices is, perhaps, one of its most celebrated cultural achievement. One can say that Haredi Judaism is not only anti-Jews and anti-Jewishness, it is in some ways an "unJudaism."

Judaism's repertoire of instruments for change--intertextual conversation, traditioning along with contemoprization, a tolerance for diversity of belief and of action, a capacity to sustain argumentation among different positions--these are a set of qualities that has produced its "continuing vitality" (a term you will soon encounter in the writings of Riv-Ellen Prell). It is precisely renewal and reinvigoration which characterize the Jewish tradition, and the most prominent feature of the classical texts of Biblical and rabbinic Judaism--their very intertextuality--is what makes possible such renewal. A Judaism that claims that "the new is prohibited by the Torah" has read the Torah against itself. The stringent traditionalism of the ultra-orthodox that claims to have produced the only authentic Judaism ironically has produced what is actually one of the most irregular Judaisms, that is, a Judaism without the resources for culturally adaptive change. Its forms of control and and its need to dominate, its authoritarian creation of a totalizing Judaism have produced not a whole and complete Judaism as it might claim, but instead a totalitarian and constricted Judaism, one that in its trying to be more, has ended up becoming less.