In New York yesterday, forty thousand Haredim (“ultra Orthodox”) and Hassidic male Jews crammed into Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets, in an asifa (rally) against the Internet. It was a striking sight, a sea of austere black clothes, forelocks, beards. Like the Haredi women unable to attend this single-sex gathering, I, of course, watched it on the internet live stream.
It is an anxiety as old as modernity itself–the fear that technological change will destroy relationships, families, communities, souls-and one apparently so pressing that an organisation called Ichud HaKehillos LeTohar HaMachane (Union of Communities for the Unity of the Camp) considered it worthwhile to rent out the stadium at a cost of a mere $1.5 million.
Rabbi Ephraim Waschman charged that the Internet said is “changing who we are…You can see it in the ebbing eyes of the younger generation, of the jittery inattentiveness of our children, in the flippant and callous language and attitude, the cynicism … the unbelievable breaches of [modesty in Orthodox communities].” Rabbi Don Segal told the story of a man who, forced to use the Internet for work, “became completely spoiled. This device destroyed his yiddishkeit” (Jewish values).
The rally has provoked a surprising amount of interest outside the ultra-Orthodox world, with a mixture of scorn, bewilderment and levity among the responses. More seriously, counter-protesters outside the asifa noted there has not been a similar rally against the wave of molestation which has been exposed in ultra-Orthodox communities recently with writing in the New York Times, The Jewish Forward, and others. The immoral abuse of power by rabbis against their vulnerable charges has not been met with similar outrage as Internet porn.
In short, to rail against the Internet today in 2012 feels much like protesting the printing press or electricity or modern medicine – pointless and self-defeating.
But unlike anti-technology groups like the Amish, Orthodoxy has never rejected modernity tout court, incorporating modern technology judiciously and sometimes inventively into Jewish life, mediated by halakhic (Jewish religious law) principles. The question of how to use technology in a Jewish way has long pre-occupied many rabbis, while entrepreneurs have produced numerous devices that obey Orthodox laws about the Sabbath, where switching an electrical current on or off is forbidden.
It is this that is in part fueling the asifa, which was not uncoincidentally sponsored in part by an Internet filtering software company. While some of the rabbis allowed for the necessity of Internet usage for work, at its more extreme elements, others advocated Orthodox Jews stay away from the Internet entirely.
One rabbi in a large Hassidic group, speaking anonymously to the The Times of Israel argued that even filtering software provides an insufficient response to the dangers of the Internet:
“A whitelist, where you are allowed to surf only to specific sites, is the only way you could possibly allow the Internet into the home. There really is no choice today but to take the most extreme position you can against Internet use,” he said.
“It’s just too easy to surf to inappropriate sites. Not too long ago you had to go through a great deal of work if you wanted to, for example, view pornography and keep your interest private. Today it comes to you. This is a major crisis for religious Jews, and it is just as much a tragedy for everyone else as well,” said Reb C. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that life has gotten so much shakier, with depression, suicides, drug addiction etc. at an all-time high, during these days of unlimited Internet access.”
As the secular Jewish philosopher Karl Marx once famously noted with Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, in capitalism, “all fixed, fast frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
The diagnostician of capitalism par excellence, Marx recognised that it was the relations of commodity production and consumption that drive our engagement with technology. Businesses and governments are online now, irrevocably, and indeed many can no longer be conducted offline at all. Haredim may pack as many stadiums as many times as they wish, but so long as they want or need to do business with the plugged-in world around them, it is doubtful that it will result in much.
And indeed, as threatening as the world outside might appear, it is clear that the real danger is inside. Rabbi Yechiel Meir Katz told the crowd that the problem is a lack of self-discipline and discernment about appropriateness: “there is not sufficient integrity among the generation today for people to be able to sit in front of a screen with the Internet, and to be able to decide what is acceptable and what is not.”
But perhaps the rabbi is mistaking integrity for desire. The Internet, and more particularly the Internet porn which occupied centre stage at the rally, exerts a pull because it is desirable, because we desire. Haredim often follow the doctrine of shomer negiah, abstaining from contact with the opposite sex, but sexuality is not so easily repressed (Freud didn’t call it a sex drive for nothing). Indeed its suppression very often results in an eroticisation of the very forbidden object or practice. To ban the Internet through religious mandate, or demonise those who do use it, is essentially pointless, since an unfollowed law is no law at all.
It would be better if the Haredim gave sexual desire a place in their religious practice where it could thrive more openly and honestly. But then again, if that were possible, perhaps the asifa never would have taken place in the first place.
When you suggest – in your closing lines – that “it would be better if the Haredim gave sexual desire a place in their religious practice where it could thrive more openly and honestly,” what sort of adjustments do you have in mind? What openness are you imagining?
Sexuality is an essential part of life, of Jewish married life. This human form of expression is present in Charedi life already, and each couple, of course, can work to improve their relationship in multiple ways.
Are you promoting some additional forms of sexual expression or recreation – pre-marital, perhaps, or forms of secular entertainment that appeal to human desires?
Please be specific. The closing paragraph in any written piece is a strategic asset and here I think you’ve left more than one reader wondering what options are available and qualify as healthy for society in general, and certainly Charedi society which strives to lead a more meaningful – yes, religious – life, serving higher values than self-enjoyment and the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake alone.
“It would be better if the Haredim gave sexual desire a place in their religious practice where it could thrive more openly and honestly.”
It’s called “marriage”! Orthodox Jewish marriage is seething enthusiasticly with channeled sexuality due to rules that prevent other outlets. Restraint is a healthy thing for building a fulfilling human life.
@JS
Yes, I know how sexuality is expressed as an essential part of married life. I find that appealing but incomplete, because it doesn’t account for the totality and vagaries of sexual desire.
Specifics, well. I don’t think large Haredim families help very much – too strong a link between desire and reproduction does not do good things for a woman’s sex drive, and neither does caring for that many children. Having children is a mitzvah, but making space for sex might mean restricting *that* in order to give sexual desire a space to take place. An honest acknowledgment of the necessity of sexual desire would take in holistically the whole conditions of a couple’s life, including distribution of work, etc.
Further, I think that shomer unnecessarily sexualises and fetishises everyday contact between men and women. Physical non-sexual contact between the sexes is healthy and diffuses more sexual tension more than it creates. Being able to see contact with other people as *not* sexual is good.
I see sexuality holistically and more broadly than sexual intercourse itself, and I think that while the rabbis are right about the ease of accessing Internet porn, my conclusion is different: looking for ease comes about because what we *really* need is too hard and requires too much change to our lives.
@Michael
If it’s so fulfilling, why are forty thousand men packing a stadium, worried about something which a completely fulfilling life would make irrelevant and undesirable?
I agree that restraint is very often productive (that principle is obviously solidly Jewish), but to hold out “marriage” in total as a panacea… no. To talk about “marriages” as ever being one thing is reductive and tells us very, very little. I think that Tolstoy got it wrong in his famous opening to Anna Karenina – unhappy families are so frequently alike, but every happy family is happy in its own way. I would rather look for the “hap” in happiness, the happenstance, the possibility, and accept that the familiar forms and stories we tell ourselves about marriage are no guarantee of anything.
Appreciate some good points made in response. There is tension and more imposed by adherence to, or attempts to adhere to religious doctrine. They say the Torah gave no test that humankind couldn’t muster. They didn’t say it would be easy. How to find extra-marriage opportunity for physical expression? The Law doesn’t permit this and believes that even the simple sense of touch is too powerful to dilute (by allowing with a non-partner; partner meaning spouse). It entourages marriage early on (not in later years, as has become rampant). It defines pleasure as a worthwhile goal in itself, but in a context that strengthens relationship and not suffices merely appetites of the moment. The immortality that each human being seeks (even if they don’t ponder it extensively) is forged here on earth, during a temporal existence that provides such spiritual and physical opportunities. The soul, we are taught, can not interact with this world without the medium, or mediation, of the physical existence. The body and the psychology of the human being enable the soul to engage and to be engaged by the individual. There are forces that can also prevent any connection or interaction.