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Jewish Orthodoxy: Coping With Secularism
by SIMON ROCKER
In 1941 a group of rabbis and their students arrived in Japanese-controlled Shanghai.
They were refugees from one of eastern Europe's most renowned yeshivas (Talmudic academies) from Mir, now in Belarus. At the outbreak of the second world war they had fled to Lithuania, but as the threat of the Nazis loomed they moved once again, settling briefly in Kobe, Japan, before seeing out the rest of the war in China.
Now based in Jerusalem, the Mir Yeshiva is a thriving institution with thousands of students, including some from Britain; there is also a branch in New York.
But its survival and success tell a larger story.
The Holocaust wiped out almost all the seats of traditional Orthodox learning in Europe, so much so that it must have seemed that the devout forms of Judaism they inculcated would vanish before long. Instead, the old yeshivas were revived in Israel and America, and there are more advanced Talmudic students now than probably at any time in Jewish history.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=24176
The recovery of the strictly Orthodox, or Haredim - meaning "God-fearing" - is one of the most remarkable features of Judaism over the past half-century.
The Haredim are the most rapidly expanding part of the Jewish world. It is estimated that nearly a third of all elementary schoolchildren in Israel will be in Haredi institutions within three years.
In the United Kingdom, the Haredim have moved from being a small minority once considered on the margins of Anglo-Jewish society to an increasingly visible presence. With large families of often six or more children, they are growing at around 4% annually, concentrated largely in Stamford Hill and Golders Green in north London, Prestwich, Manchester and Gateshead, location of an internationally respected yeshiva.
One in three Jewish children under 18 in Britain is strictly Orthodox, according to the most recent survey.
Overall, the British Jewish population has dropped from over 400,000 in the 1950s to under 300,000 now. If the Haredim maintain their growth - while other Jewish streams continue to decline through assimiliation, low birth rates or emigration - they are likely to form a majority here within a couple of generations.
The Haredim do not comprise a single sect; they are made up of various Hassidic and non-Hassidic groups, some with a more mystical bent, some more worldly than others.
But they share a belief that only the most stringent religious lifestyle can guarantee Jewish survival. Whereas the Chief Rabbi's more modern style of Orthodoxy can allow him to make YouTube videos or liberally quote western thinkers in his writings, the Haredim are far warier of secular culture, frowning on such distractions as television or the free-thinking openness of the university.
While most British Jews would struggle to read a page of the Bible without the aid of a translation, the Haredim are characterised by the intensity with which they cleave to the study of the Torah and the vast corpus of rabbinic law and commentary built upon it.
The Haredim today suffer little defection from their ranks, while a survey in the mid-90s showed that more than half the children of Reform and Liberal Jews in the UK did not belong to a synagogue.
A century ago, one of the founders of British Liberal Judaism, Claude Montefiore, could declare: "The traditional conception of Judaism, both in theory and in practice, is, we think, doomed."
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=24176
No one could be quite so confident now.
Reform Judaism arose in the 19th century in an attempt to adapt Judaism in the wake of the Enlightenment. But the Haredim stood firm, following the motto of the influential central European rabbi Moses Sofer (1762-1839) that "The new is forbidden".
In their rising numbers they must see a vindication of their way of life.
The renaissance of the strictly Orthodox poses a wider question: could it be that only the most traditionalist forms of religion possess the inner resolve to withstand the challenge of secularism?
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