The Unmaking of Israel (20 page)

But more than the historical fracture was at work. Ultra-Orthodox men growing up in Israel spent many years in yeshivot—cloistered and hierarchical religious communities. They learned from books. They learned to value obedience to rabbis in every aspect of life, to believe that effacing one’s own judgment and accepting that of the great scholars of the age was the foundation of piety. The rabbis themselves, unlike their forefathers, did not need to interpret Jewish law pragmatically, moderately, for the sake of a working laity. The working laity was shrinking. Every strict ruling could eventually become the norm, in turn calling for an even stricter interpretation, so that the process of radicalization rolled onward. Rather than seek to sanctify life in the modern world, ultra-Orthodoxy tried to build a sacred preserve, apart from modern society. All of this, paradoxically, took place thanks to the funding of a rapidly modernizing and gloriously cacophonic democracy.

I should stress: in a democracy, a religious subculture has the right to make this choice. Their coreligionists have the right to argue—as I do—that this siege mentality misinterprets the tenets of the faith. But it is not a democracy’s legitimate business to intervene and finance a religious subculture. Nor should a democracy promote a kind of education that makes its graduates into economic captives of the sectarian community.

The ultra-Orthodox economy was a pyramid scheme, though no one planned it that way. At the start, any young
haredi
woman who finished secondary education could get a job teaching in elementary school. The supply of teachers was small, and the Agudat Yisrael school system was new and growing. But girls from those
haredi
elementary schools went on to seminaries, graduated, and were too numerous for the available teaching positions. They were investors who had entered the scheme too late. To support a husband who was a yeshivah student, some needed to find other jobs in business or public service, sometimes outside the
haredi
community.

Men were in a more difficult bind. They expected to find “Torah positions” when they left
kollel
. Originally, they could teach in the expanding
haredi
yeshivot, or in religious Zionists’ new high school yeshivot, which had many hours of Talmud along with general studies. Or they could get work in the state’s religious bureaucracy—for instance, supervising kosher food production for factories and restaurants that wanted the Chief Rabbinate’s seal of approval. This was another paradox: their livelihoods depended on the outside society from which they wanted to segregate themselves.

But Orthodox Zionist yeshivot began producing their own teachers of religious studies. The rabbinate bureaucracy did not expand as quickly as the
haredi
population. Exiting
kollel
to a Torah job gradually became harder. In the first generation, moreover, working
haredi
parents could help buy apartments for two or three or four children who were
kollel
students or students’ wives. In the next generation, the parents had five or seven or nine children, and some of the fathers were lifetime students. The pillars that supported the society of scholars were weak.

Yet it kept expanding, with the 1977 election supplying the means. For the first time, Menachem Begin’s Likud won a narrow plurality in parliament. As usual in Israel, Begin needed to build an alliance with other parties to govern. And for the first time since 1953, Agudat Yisrael joined the ruling coalition.

The
haredi
party had ideological reasons for working with Begin. Unlike the Zionist left, the right did not present itself as a replacement for religion. Begin, though not Orthodox, peppered his sentences with references to God. He was comfortable in a synagogue. Like American donors to yeshivot, he felt an aching nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish life.

But the real push was practical: Begin needed coalition partners and was willing to pay them well. The ultra-Orthodox community had needs and desires it could meet only through the government. The 1977 coalition agreement was a long list of promises to Agudat Yisrael on religious and budgetary issues. The 1981 agreement, after the Likud barely defeated Labor again, promised even more. The commitments included more funding for Agudat Yisrael’s schools, without touching the
haredi
system’s autonomy to teach—or not teach—what it wanted, and “special consideration” for other ultra-Orthodox educational institutions.

Not all the promises could be kept, but many were. The Begin government made it harder for businesses to get permits to operate on Saturday, the legal day of rest. Amending a relatively liberal law on abortion, the Knesset eliminated “difficult family or social circumstances” as grounds for the procedure. The government dissolved the committee that interviewed women to make sure they were Orthodox before granting them draft exemptions. Instead, a draft-age woman could simply sign a declaration that she was religious. The change encouraged non-Orthodox women to make false declarations, but Agudat Yisrael believed that having any female soldiers encouraged licentiousness and violated the honor of Jewish women.

These measures were meant to shape the wider society to fit
haredi
views. Other political gains protected the
haredi
subculture. The army removed the ceiling on draft deferments for yeshivah students. As a result, the number of men with deferments climbed from 8,000 in 1977 to 16,000 in 1985, eventually passing the 40,000 mark in 2005. The chairmanship of the Knesset Finance Committee became an Agudat Yisrael prerogative, in Begin’s time and after, giving the small party an outsize influence over the national budget. Funding for ultra-Orthodox schools, yeshivot, and adult religion classes rose.

The state’s social welfare system provided another funding pipeline. Rather than giving tax deductions to parents, Israel pays a stipend for each child, so that families below the tax threshold also get help. In the 1980s, the government reset the stipends so that small families got little or nothing. After the third child, the amounts climbed steeply. The ultra-Orthodox community, with low incomes and a high birthrate, got a cash infusion.

These policies allowed men to stay out of the workforce and entrenched ultra-Orthodox dependence on the state. Arye Naor, who served as cabinet secretary in the Begin governments, says the changes were a product of immediate coalition needs and “mutual dependency” between the Likud and the ultra-Orthodox. No one thought about the long-term impact.

In 1984 a new ultra-Orthodox party entered parliament. Known as Shas, it was led by Jews from Middle Eastern countries educated in Israeli ultra-Orthodox yeshivot. In
haredi
society, Middle Eastern Jews were kept from leadership; Shas represented a rebellion. But Shas also extended its appeal beyond
haredim
to the larger Middle Eastern Jewish underclass in Israel, portraying the community’s social problems as symptoms of loss of religious tradition. Combining faith with ethnic and economic resentment, Shas attracted former Likud and National Religious Party voters. As in Agudat Yisrael, the Knesset members followed orders from a rabbinic leadership. Adept at getting out the vote, Shas was a democratic success story on the outside and a theocracy internally.
Haredi
representation in the 120-member Knesset climbed from four seats in 1981 to eleven in 1988 to a high-water mark of twenty-two in 1999. Shas set up its own school system, generously financed and barely supervised by the state.

The longer a pyramid scheme continues, the more people are caught up in it, the more difficult maintaining it becomes, and the more catastrophic is its looming collapse. For the ultra-Orthodox themselves and for Israel as a whole, this is the economic meaning of the society of scholars.

A statistical picture of
haredi
society must be drawn in rough strokes, since defining who is ultra-Orthodox bedevils statisticians. But that rough picture is striking in its implications. In 2004, by one measure, there were 470,000
haredim
in Israel, about 7 percent of the country’s population, or 9 percent of Israeli Jews. The proportion was growing, because fertility was more than three times higher among the ultra-Orthodox than among other Israeli Jews. In 2002 the average
haredi
woman was likely to have more than seven children in her lifetime.

In 2003, during the Second Intifada, Prime Minister Sharon built a coalition without the ultra-Orthodox parties. It was a product of rare circumstances: in the election that year, a significant part of the electorate feared Sharon but had lost faith in Labor, and chose a party built on secular backlash. Sharon’s finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, began a cutback in child stipends for large families. The blow to
haredi
family finances brought only a small drop in childbearing. Economics can change culture, but not instantly. Besides, Diaspora donations to yeshivot partly ameliorated the government cuts, explains Rabbi Bezalel Cohen, a dissident former
kollel
student who has become an advocate of
haredim
getting jobs. The 2008 recession hit those donations as well, deepening the social crisis, he notes.

Again, a culture does not change direction easily, and the direction of ultra-Orthodox cultures had been set decades before. In 1979, during the Begin administration, just over 20 percent of ultra-Orthodox men aged thirty-five to fifty-four, the prime working years, were not employed. By 2000, 63 percent of
haredi
men in that age bracket were outside the workforce, and the number rose to 65 percent in 2008. By then, at least 55,000 men in Israel were
kollel
students, meaning that full-time study was the most common occupation of adult men. Despite the ideal of women supporting their scholar-husbands, employment was also low among ultra-Orthodox women. The National Insurance Institute, a state agency, reported that one-fifth of all Israeli families lived below the poverty line that year—and about two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox families.

In recent years, there has been more discussion in
haredi
society about the need to work. But there are two barriers to leaving
kollel
. On one hand, Torah jobs are scarce, despite the population growth. Yeshivot have let classes grow larger, Cohen explains. In some institutions, the teachers are paid off the books, with no social benefits, no pension fund. So teachers “keep teaching until they’re ninety,” Cohen says, rather than making way for younger teachers. On the other hand,
haredi
education has not given its graduates the basic tools for academic study or for work in a postindustrial economy.

And many more children are growing toward the ranks of the unemployable. Over a fifth of the Israeli
haredi
population is aged four or less. One-quarter of all kindergarten and preschool children in Israel were in ultra-Orthodox institutions in 2009. Unless those children receive a different kind of education than the one their parents and educators plan for them, they too will be lifetime dependents of the shrinking number of working Israelis. The pyramid scheme will bankrupt Israel and leave the
haredim
hungry.

This large picture is made up of many individuals whose world has gone out of kilter. In his father’s generation, a semi-employed
haredi
man told me, it was normal to leave the
kollel
by age thirty. Today, he said, men forty or fifty years old were still studying. He himself was approaching forty, with a relatively small family, just five children, and he made a bit of money teaching here and there. We sat in the living room of his apartment, in an entirely ultra-Orthodox neighborhood beyond the Green Line. Secretly, to himself, he was a social critic. He spoke slowly, as if each word was negotiated between a hundred arguing thoughts. His wife had work, so his family was getting along, but the Torah job he’d grown up to expect never materialized. “Little by little, a situation was created where everyone is studying in
kollel
and the number of Torah positions is shrinking,” he said.

Because of the economic situation, “people always have butterflies in their stomach. A
kollel
student arranges his daughter’s wedding and he has to commit himself to amounts [for the young couple] that he’s never seen in his life.” The society’s normal response is to stress faith. “They don’t like to speak in realistic terms. They like to speak in religious terms. They’ll say, ‘Before you ask about the future, look back—thirty years ago people already said things couldn’t go on this way, and look—miracles happen!’ ” A week before, a prominent rabbi had given a talk in his neighborhood on “trusting heaven and being satisfied with little.”

Haredi
life, he said, was built on believing in what rabbis say: “It’s far beyond honoring Torah scholars, as in previous generations—it’s trusting that they know more, understand more” about practical and political matters, not just religion. To begin to reach one’s own conclusions, he said, was a slow and dangerous process, because “when a person begins doubting what his rabbis told him, it’s hard to draw a line.” The whole structure of faith might collapse. Trust in rabbis, he said, “is the education they’re drumming into my children.” Yet he acknowledged that he had accepted the drift toward more restricted schooling. His father had attended a school that combined Talmudic studies and an academic curriculum, and whose alumni include professors and doctors as well as rabbis. He himself went to an Agudat Yisrael elementary school that taught history, math, and Hebrew composition, though no English—an essential subject in general Israeli education. His secondary school was a yeshivah with no secular studies. His sons attended
talmudei Torah
, schools outside the Agudat Yisrael system but still mostly state-funded, where general studies were allocated forty-five minutes a day. This is the normal progression of generations in Israeli ultra-Orthodoxy. The man across the table from me had joined a quiet rebellion by sending his eldest son to a private English class in the evenings, creating an opening for him to get an academic education later.