Schroedinger's Haredim

Super-based, totally cringe

“I’m sick of these guys with their peyos,” said the Russian guy at the hardware store. “It’s the 21st century, and they’re stuck in the Dark Ages.”

“How many kids do you have?” I asked.

“None.”

“They all have five or ten. So, they’ll be in the 22nd century with their peyos, and you’re gonna be extinct, like the dinosaurs. Who’s obsolete, you, or them?”

…

“This is,” I said to my Shabbat guest, duvid lowy, a Rachmastrivka Hasid, “the first shtreimel on this hilltop.”

“No way,” he said, “what about all the guys in Yitzhar with their shtreimels?”

“Those don’t count,” I said. “That’s just an affectation. When those guys put on their shtreimels, nobody cared, so it won’t matter if they take it off. It had no effect on their social standing, their kids’ marriage prospects or their financial well-being. It’s not a real shtreimel.”

What’s their problem?

Jews, famously, are just like people, only more so. The Haredim are like Jews, only more so. And the Chasidim are like the Haredim, only more so. As it is common with people, the political slogans of the Haredim are always different from their actual motivations, and serve to elevate those actual motivations and put a pretty face on them, both for external presentation and to avoid cognitive dissonance and (more) explicit cynicism within the party.

Curtis is the second most prominent modern follower of Machiavelli; Tupac, of course, being the most prominent

For the Haredim, the formulas vary between groups. The Litvaks have the especially excellent formula that the entire world’s existence at any given moment (and of course that of the State of Israel) depends on their Torah learning. Of course they don’t actually believe that, because they take breaks to sleep, and learn in shifts, and send their yeshivot home when the cities where they live are getting rocketed, instead of having all the students manning Emergency Battle Shtenders around the clock. The Chasidim have various areas of spiritual and ritual emphasis. Except for Chabad’s Messianic (“maybe, haha, we don’t really like to emphasize it, we’re the normal ones, hahaha”) emphasis, and Breslov’s tzadik-worship, these are all more or less interoperative and harmless. Even the gap between Chabad/Breslov and the other Chasiduyot is smaller sociologically than between those other Chasiduyot and, say, Religious Zionism.

All of these formulas mask the true underlying point, which is “we must do what our forefathers did, and raise our children to do so.” This is true even when those observant forefathers were virtual, and your actual forefathers were total shkutzim, or even goyim, which is the case for Haredi baalei teshuva and converts. The alternative is that your eventual descendants will either cease to exist or become goyim, with various stages of devolution from Religious Zionism to being a beige wigger ars in between. The allegiance to this formula and willingness to pay the price for it is signaled in various conspicuous ways; much like the outlaw motorcycle club members identify themselves by a distinctive style of clothing, way of speaking, lifestyle, so the Haredim. Nobody dressed like this has any illusion that the squares see them as anything but a bizarre freak:

If the caption hadn’t said it was Purim, I wouldn’t have known

Unlike membership in an outlaw motorcycle club, being part of normal Haredi society brings benefits beyond a meth habit, jailtime and dental issues. For instance, if you minimally have your stuff together, you’re guaranteed gainful employment or a sinecure. Unless you have severe physical or mental issues, you’re gonna get married off to someone with whom you are basically compatible. You’re going to live in a place with very low crime. When you have many kids-!כן ירבו-they’ll grow up in a place that’s full of kids, where kids and their behavior are normal and expected, not a bizarre imposition. You can have a high expectation of seeing those kids grow up to follow in your footsteps, to aspire to live as you lived in the ways that both you and them see as important, to marry early and have lots of children. You will not be lonely, uninvited to the party, because the parties are all simchas-kiddush, weddings, engagements, circumcisions-to which everyone is invited, and they happen constantly. You will always be in places where you belong. When you die, you will be buried and mourned by your children, nephews grandchildren, greatgrandchildren, instead of by a dwindling and sad bunch of your equally old siblings and cousins.

Because your community is ruled hierarchically, has a high median IQ and pools its resources towards explicitly defined and concrete political goals, you can punch way above your weight in politics, ranging from primitive block voting and mass protests to filling important positions with your members who are actually qualified to fill them instead of being Somali congressional diversity hires or whatever. All of this leads to political success (until Tucker gets his Harbor Freight pitchforks and torches shipment delivered.) The spoils of this success are distributed to the community.

If Paris was worth a mass-have you been to Paris lately?-then the Haredi lifestyle is worth rocking a funny beaver hat and silly stockings. The Zoomer kids call it “drip.” Unlike the drip of a “fashion nigga”, Haredi drip symbolizes being part of a group which has immunity from all the terrible parts of modernity, while enjoying its cooler parts. For instance, I guess Amish buggies can be pretty dope, but have you seen the cars the guys in Lakewood drive to shul to hear their mandatory lectures about the evils of gashmius (“materialism,” for the goyim out there)?

It’s the same here. Your kid has to go eat drones in Lebanon before returning to his normie tech job, on whose proceeds he pays 50% taxes. From the remaining half, he can pay for his car, taxed at 100%, and for his apartment, inflated to ten times its real value. Yoelie can hang out, show up at the beit midrash at 11 in the morning, ruin his tefillin because his hair is still wet from the mikve, and drive a car that’s at least as nice as your kid’s. The reason for this is that Yoelie belongs to a community which 1) acts as a political group instead of a gas cloud of atomized individuals floating around in Brownian motion and occasionally pushed in a general direction by television-induced magnetic fields, 2) has representatives who care about his quality of life deeply, and are willing to bargain hard over every measure which affects it, 3) has a political formula which serves the community, instead of those who formulated the formula.

Rousseau and Hobbes’ social contracts were bogus thought experiments. The Haredi social contract is very real. In addition to its material benefits, it also has meta-benefits. For instance, Chasidishe dress has the advantage of announcing that the wearer relies on God for everything, and that if, therefore, you have any issues, you should take them up with Him. When dealing with people who are a little bit religious, or not religious at all, this implicit argument carries way more weight than they’d be willing to explicitly admit. The drawback, of course, is that during those times that the argument fails, the accoutrements make it difficult to run quickly. But signaling your willingness to face that drawback recursively adds to the persuasiveness of your case, which all adds up to the reason that Zohran Mamdani had to go sit with Satmar to get their blessing for his campaign for mayor of NYC so that he could fight against exploitative bloodsucker landlords.

This looks like a wealthy ars trying to get his no-good bum kid into a decent yeshiva

You may consider this parasitism. In fact, the secular Israelis and Religious Zionists basically do. But to the extent that the Haredim even have to engage their arguments, they can dismiss them as sour grapes and the squeaking of an empty cart. “Why don’t you have your Knesset members promote your group interests like we do? Isn’t that democracy?” “We are above treating the state as our milk cow,” sniff the Religious Zionists proudly, and run off to have their already dry and cracked teats milked by the state.

All of this is, all things considered, kind of based. Unless you are into getting fin-dommed by the GOI because your brain has been eaten by a cordyceps outbreak traceable back to an air conditioner at Merkaz HaRav, you too would enjoy having an extended family and community which successfully promote your interests and well-being. Maybe you’d like to join the IDF and shoot terrorists with a cool gun or whatever, but it’s way more fun to live as a Haredi on balance.

Again, I’m saying all of this assuming that you have your stuff together-if you don’t, you’re in for a bad time wherever you go, but even then it’s way more fun being a dysfunctional Chasid than a dysfunctional secular or Religious Zionist. The “communities” of the latter have nothing to give their members, and nothing to take away from them except insofar as tattling to the authorities is concerned.

“bUt wHat aBouT BerLaNd anD tHE yEllOW fLAg ChaBaDniKs??”

Berland and the Yellow Flag Chabadniks are symptoms and the products of alienation. None of these people’s great-grandparents, from Casablanca to Chernobyl (but more Casablanca) would have believed in any of this nonsense. They are typical cult members, fleeing emptiness, dysfunction and alienation and seeking to remedy it with falsely perceived holiness. Their cults have their own styles, dogmas and excesses. Normal Haredi life prevents emptiness, dysfunction and alienation, and therefore prevents cults and their excesses. If you want to put a psychological spin on it, Haredi life sublimates the drives which motivate cultish excesses into productive channels. Or you can say that it elevates those sparks. Whatever. The point is that Shuvu Banim and the crazier wing of Chabad grow from a substrate of secularism-derived dysfunction.

“No! It’s caused by Shabtai Tzvi marrying a carp in 1652, itself caused by the Zohar! Read my 80 part series about it!”

Stupidity is simultaneously a crime and its own punishment. Nobody would look at a cult like Hare Krishnas and start combing through the Upanishads to explain why these rich white kids are being freaks. Nobody would read the works of Cotton Mather to find the theological roots of the Moonies. If we see cults forming and behaving in similar ways among the Jews and the goyim, it’s highly unlikely that the ultimate cause of cultish behavior among the Jews is a Jewish book written 700 years ago.

Again, if you want to get rid of cults, make sure that every Jew has a healthy and normal community to which he belongs. The only person who, to my knowledge, made a great and systemic effort to this end in the last couple of centuries was the Lubavicher Rebbe.

Are there side effects?

Yeah, you bet. Political formulas always come into tension with their underlying beliefs.

For instance, the meta-formula of Haredim is, “we have a functioning, self-sufficient society. If only you shrimp eaters were to leave us alone, we’d be fine. We aren’t parasites-we actually don’t need you.” But in reality, this isn’t true. When the Rebbe of the Peilishe Shtetlover Chasidim dies and his sons fight over the assets, they go to the shrimp eaters of the Tel Aviv district court instead of the Beit Din as a final arbiter. This isn’t because they’re greedy, evil and hypocritical, but because the Beit Din doesn’t solve their issues. Neither can the Beit Din solve the problem of the Sonim and the Mechablim beating each other up in Ponevezh Yeshiva, nor a million other problems.

And this is a best-case scenario. Imagine that tomorrow the Knesset passes a law providing self-governance for Haredi cities, like American Indian reservations. The Frimme Yidn’s Republic of Telz Stone could keep its Meuhedet clinics and supermarkets, and wouldn’t have to send its kids to the IDF. Can Telz Stone organize its own police force and courts? Will it allow its police to drive cars to catch thieves on Shabbat? It’s not pikuach nefesh, or is it? Who will decide for all the cops? And what will happen when you catch a murderer on camera, but there are not two kosher male witnesses? Who decides on what to do with him?

A very entertaining interview. Neither Goldknopf nor the people who vote for him really want him to run the country.

If you punt to the secular state and its arkaot hagoyim, and they’re willing to deal with it for you, then you’re admitting that your halacha is a utopia, for theoretical use only, and that the real authority is that of the shrimp eating Jews, worse than the goyim, and you freely choose to be under their ultimate authority. It’s one thing to punt the complex issues to a halachically appointed Jewish king, who has the halachic authority to override halacha on a temporary basis. But punting to Esther Hayut? This is very demoralizing and humiliating. And, of course, it’s antithetical to the Haredi ideology to attempt to usurp the position and authority of Esther Hayut. That’s all for Moshiach to worry about. Which is to say, a deus ex machina magical process.

“These are your lords, Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt”

So being Haredi is simultaneously based and lame, and being a Chasid more so?

Yes. Unless you suffer from mental issues such as an ideology beyond that strictly necessary to justify promoting your group and personal interests at the expense of others, or taking what it says in your siddur literally and believing that it’s the outline of a political program. In other words, if you are fine going with the flow wherever you find yourself, there’s nothing better than the Haredi belief system: “the main thing is that we should basically keep doing the same thing, and eventually God will just get sick of us and send us Moshiach.” If this is the program with which you find yourself, and you can accept it without too much nausea, you should stick with the regimen.