Hasidim in the 21st Century
“A letter from Mrs. Tzipora Ehrman, a shaitel macher (wig seller) in Lakewood: My gorgeous Instagram page is not the source of Parnasa (income), it's Hashem. I'm throwing away my Instagram page as a Korban (sacrifice) to Hashem.”
In 2022, a women’s asayfa or mass gathering convened at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, 10 years after a men’s asayfa at the same place as a part of a siyum hashas, or completion of the 8-year Talmud Daf Yomi study cycle. The focus at both of these rallies, for the lack of a better word, was the dire need to restrict the ultra-Orthodox world from the internet.
By 2022, the speakers were no longer in the position to tell people not to adapt smartphones — they were telling them to drop what they had, no matter how successful they were. Smartphones with connection to the internet are considered “not-kosher.” There are phone shops in Israel and New York that sell Kosher phones, which are essentially flipphones with limited internet usage.
Generally what happens is that people have both kosher and non-kosher phones: the kosher phone for when the rabbis are looking, and the non-kosher phone for everything else.
The yeshivish rabbinical giant Yosef Kanievsky z’’l wrote in 2012 that phones constituted a massive danger to Jews. Was he right? What justifies such massive efforts to get people to stop?
Smartphones, and the easy access to the internet that comes with them, are the keys to 21st century modernity, which is not easy define in terms of content, but easy to define in terms of parameters: the internet includes most of the world, and the internets that are socially or practically cordoned off due to laws (China) or language (Japan, Russia, Turkey, France, etc.) eventually do leak into the giant soup bowl.
This is the common culture, political arena and social networking that we are thrust into. Sometimes it is liberatory, and sometimes it is destructive.
When I see a new generation of Yiddish-speaking Hasidim on Joe Rogan style podcasts, watching Tucker Carlson, engaging in heavy consumer culture and swearing profusely, I don’t think to blame them for the rabbit holes they’ve gone down or why they’ve gone down them. I think everyone is going down the same rabbit holes. I bring this example only to demonstrate that not even a community that kept Yiddish, ultra-orthodoxy, and strict rules about media consumption can withstand the vortex.
Abraham Cahan’s Forward newspaper at the turn 20th century was designed to train fresh-off-the-boat Jews, in Yiddish, how to be Americans. This was a successful (perhaps too successful) effort in parallel with both push and pull forces. But there is no obvious guide for anybody about how to engage with identities that have no set boundary or formation.
Lately, I’ve had the unique opportunity to observe Hasidim who are unsettled in their senses of self, challenged by the freedom of the world, the chaos of the internet noise, and the familiarity and love for their own identities and worlds.
One thing that caught my attention is the fascination with finding the books in Rabbi Hollander’s inventory that the old Hasidic rabbis of their community would have been most troubled by. The aim of this exploration is not to adopt them wholesale, but rather to give voice to reconciliation that they cannot make between the “black and white” ultra-Orthodox outlook and total free-for-all of society, as they see it.
In the way modern media consumption works, you are plunged into other people’s worldviews — and they are presented in ways that seem universalist and true. One such Hasid presented a choice: can we abide with the acceptance of democracy, the LGBT (and he used that acronym correctly, first I had ever heard from anyone ultra-Orthodox) and other liberal aspects? Or do we accept the complete truth of Judaism, and as he put it, Jewish supremacy in our land? While this binary seemed to be heavily favoring the latter answer, it was the way he subtly denigrated totalitarian Judaism and was implicitly respectful to liberal social values that made me see that the problem, for him, was in the binary. (It wasn’t clear that he had a strongly preferred answer.)
He didn’t really know how to accept an in-between view, as he put it, coming from us. This is something I’m familiar with in many ex-Hasidim, and how they run the opposite direction. But many do find a certain reconciliation. The hard part is that between the rabbis suppressing alternative views, and the internet flooding us with, well, everything, bridges between the worlds are not yet built, and if they are, not yet found.
One thing that always impressed me about Rabbi Hollander’s books was that, by his word, the religious books were placed seamlessly side-by-side with secular ones. Should a customer come in with their head down, looking for a sefer, they might find their eyes wandering to a bukh. This is the natural state of affairs for us — even in the 19th and 20th century, Jewish thinkers, especially in Yiddish, dreamed up a larger world of Yiddish and for Yiddish that we could exist in. There were numerous translations of classical literature, and deep explorations of Talmud, which intersected in and out of shul chatter and political propaganda.
The limitations of the internet are in its inability to build worlds, and in doing so, bridges, between ourselves and what is around us. It forces us to pick up the call but never to do the talking.
In this day and age, we are all part of the cultural elite of the world, at least as it was once defined. We speak the international language and can travel freely. But there was a reason why the education of such an elite was so intense and careful — so that they may never be unmoored in the swirl of the distances they go by an inflexibility or lightness of the self.
