Rabbi Landau is a one man band. Sitting around the Shabbat table at a community dinner, throughout the Shabbat zmirot (songs) and sharing the sound of a trumpet, kazoo and a variety of drum beats emanated from Rabbi Landau's table corner into the upstairs women's gallery serving as a dining room, of the Beit-El Synagogue on Frishman Street in Tel Aviv. During introductions he told of his six children and two grandchildren, his service in the I.D.F. and his time spent in Irvine, California, as a rabbi and teacher. Not even fifty years old, Rabbi Landau's blue eyes sparkled from beneath his tall, stiff black hat, announcing his Haredi Jewish practice.
Due to my horrifying and scarring experience of having to prove myself a Jew to the Rabbinic Authority of Israel over the past year and a half (a saga for future entries when I am ready to write), the moment I see any man in a black hat and black suit,I assume the worst. Misogynist, sexist, bigot, racist, Ayatollah, etc...So when Rabbi Landau began to speak of the Divine in terms of energies, positive and negative, I was intrigued, yet still suspicious. Perhaps he was "different"?
Dinner progressed nicely, all English speakers from South Africa, England, the United States, Israel and Venezuela. The new rabbi at Beit-El is from Long Island and his wife grew up in Los Angeles. If she and I played a short round of Jewish geography I have no doubt we would have found acquaintances and friends in common. Between two married couples and another woman who works at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, there were nearly ten children running around the table and up and down the stairs, to and from the sanctuary with its high ceilings and dripping glass-bead chandeliers.
At the close of dinner and the blessings after the meal, the group returned to the sanctuary to listen to an after-dinner talk given by Rabbi Landau, before dessert.
Rabbi Landau ascended to the slightly elevated pulpit, introduced himself and the topic of his talk, an organization by the name of Kemach, the Hebrew word for flour..."Without flour there is no Torah," he told me later.
In Israel, amidst the myriad of problems with which this society wrestles, there is the issue of religious men, Haredim, who are not part of the work force, collect child allowances from social security, receive a stipend for all day learning, and who expect their wives to raise one dozen children as well as earn an income that attempts to make ends meet. This dynamic is problematic for a number of reasons. The amount of shekels spent each year on these studious (I have other adjectives to express but won't) religious men is astonishing, enough to be a serious concern to the state. The number of enrolled yeshiva students has reached such high numbers that the State of Israel knows now, that the system as it exists will cause great financial hardship, that is already unjust and unacceptable, to the rest of the population, and will only worsen in the next decade or so.
While it seems as though no one is doing anything about this except for the government, which has thus far failed to make much of a difference through incentive programs for work-study and/or professional training of these masses of yeshiva students, members of the Haredi community, in fact, are coming up with solutions themselves. Baruch HaShem.
According to Rabbi Landau, and to Jewish Law, it is not and never was the norm for Jewish men to study all day and all night, not earning or contributing to the livelihood of the family. Every great Jewish scholar or mystic had some profession -- carpentry, astronomy, medicine, banking etc...If one reads any aspect of Jewish marriage law it becomes very clear very quickly that the onus for providing food, clothing, shelter, and a general standard of living for the family falls upon the male, the husband. In the event of divorce, the husband is also responsible for maintaining the lifestyle of his now former wife, preserving the standard of living to which she and their children were accustomed during the marriage. Thus, the trend that prevails in Israel today amongst Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and also probably in the Diaspora is not only an historical anomaly, it is also not in keeping with Jewish law.
Well I'll be damned. So what happened?
Rabbi Landau recounted that all of this started in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Six million Jews perished. Rabbis, teachers, scholars, texts, traditions, and so on were destroyed and imperiled. The Jewish world had to respond to the crisis of losing the faith, the tradition and the scholarly study of Judaism, and quickly. Thus came the yeshivas, the all-day study, the exclusive concentration on advancing the Jewish world from near extinction to landing back on its feet.
Over the past sixty years and change, the method worked. There are more Jewish scholars, learners of Torah, rabbis, etc., than there have ever been in Jewish history. However, with this reality has also come the reality of an impoverished population that is detached from the understanding of how a state operates, functions and provides for its citizens.
Rabbi Landau offered an example of a young man living in B'nai Brak (a religious city second only to Jerusalem, perhaps). Landau asked, let's call him Yossi -- how Yossi thought electricity was paid for to provide light in the street lamps of B'nai Brak at night. Yossi replied, "The city provides the electricity."
To which Rabbi Landau responded, "And where does the city get the funding to pay for the electricity?"
"From the government," exclaimed an exasperated Yossi.
"And from where does the government get the money to provide the city with the funds to generate electricity?," asked Landau.
To this question Yossi shrugged his shoulders in reply, allowing for Rabbi Landau to explain to Yossi that the money comes from the people, who pay taxes, who work -- all of which Yossi didn't do, and moreover, his study stipend came from these people as well.
In Judaism there is a concept of parnassah b'kavod, making a living in a dignified way. Kemach is an organization that works gently and carefully within the Haredi community to encourage professional education and training that leads to job placement in viable markets such as computer software, engineering and law, to name but a few. Providing 85% of tuition costs to Kemach participants, those who receive funding are tracked by the organization to ensure that the money is going to the appropriate institution of learning. If the participant fails to finish whatever academic or skills-training program they started, they are held accountable for every shekel of the grant they were given by the organization. Landau boasted that out of 3,000 participants thus far, only forty-something students dropped out, and they were made to pay back what funds they had taken.
In addition to Kemach's placing and funding scores of young to middle-aged men in education programs, they also assist in the job search, marketing responsible and "moral" workers to companies throughout Israel.
Of course there are numerous problems and potential glitches with this. First of all, no Haredi rabbi or religious Knesset member has or will publicly endorse the work of Kemach lest they be accused of supporting the secularization of the men of their community. Furthermore, the men who sign up for these grants have to sometimes hide it from their families or break the news to them after a certain amount of time, for fear of shaming and disgracing the family.
Imagine, a 20th century, fabricated crisis-management mechanism -- that of intensive no-work yeshiva learning -- has actually become more powerful and influential upon rabbis and their disciples than thousands of years of historical precedence of balance between religion and livelihood. This pressure exists to such an extent that Landau retold conversations with rabbis who feared bodily harm if they openly supported such a venture that will put the Haredim amidst the hilonim (secular people).
From another angle, one of my problems with the ultra-Orthodox is their lack of respect for my choices and my lifestyle, "my" meaning a secular way of life. Israel has yet to become a theocracy, it is still a pluralistic state and quite simply, the demographic targeted by Kemach is made up of people who are hostile and sometimes violent toward secular society as evidenced in the recent and ongoing attacks against a software firm in Jerusalem that decided to open for business on Shabbat, as well as a parking lot that decided to accept payment and cars on Friday nights and Saturdays.
While Landau was extremely enthusiastic and positive, hopeful and charismatic, and I too found my heart beating a little faster at the prospect of a brighter future, I couldn't help but think how far could this actually go if religious leaders aren't willing to condone these sorts of ventures publicly? Moreover, if Haredi men come into the secular, non-segregated workforce of Israel where men and women interact freely, "modest" dress codes are not enforced and people of all levels of observance from much to none share the same space, what will happen? Will the workplace start to accommodate them or vice versa? And what happens if some men do start to secularize a bit, exposed to new information and alternative ways of life, with the freedom to think for themselves in an environment completely different than that in which they were raised? Will the program prove itself stronger than the force of the fear of change?
Although Rabbi Landau, even with his millions of dollars-strong budget, has a seemingly insurmountable uphill battle to fight, and the extent of his work is curtailed by the very leaders of the people he's trying to reach, after his talk I couldn't help but feel uplifted.
There is no doubt that having more people contributing to the Israeli economy versus sucking it dry would help the state greatly. Also, trying to bridge the gap between secular and religious people maybe helpful to more (Jewish) citizens of Israel feeling that that is exactly what they are, citizens of a country with a common cause and interest in long-term survival, and not just until the Messiah comes.
No comments:
Post a Comment