A Stranger Among Us

Hasidic schools and the challenge to liberalism of deeply illiberal subcultures

What value do explicitly anti-liberal enclaves have to a liberal state and society?

I’m asking that question because I feel it hovering in the background of the big New York Times exposé on the dismal state of secular education in Hasidic day schools. Actually, calling it an exposé isn’t quite right, because much of what it reveals has long been an open secret in New York, and well-reported in the Jewish press. But it’s a good piece, and the picture it paints is pretty grim. Hasidic schools have been failing to meet state standards for instruction for a very long time, have from some perspectives only been getting worse, and as they have grown in size and expense the state has become increasingly frustrated by that failure. The de Blasio administration was preparing a major report on Hasidic schools that would have been used to press for changes; the Times report can be understood as a replacement for that city-led effort, which was stalled by the pandemic and the future of which is unknown under the Adams administration.

I know some of the folks at Footsteps, as well as some of the people they’ve helped, so I have some idea of just how tough it is for some people with only a Hasidic yeshiva education to navigate the world outside the borders of Borough Park or Williamsburg. Hobbling someone that way just seems profoundly wrong to anyone (like myself) with liberal sensibilities. But it’s important to recognize that the entire point of a Hasidic yeshiva education is to prevent you from leaving the Hasidic world. If the objective (or at least the predictable effect) of would-be reformers coming from outside that world is to make it easier for future graduates to leave, well, I think the right phrase for what they’re going to face from the Hasidic community is “massive resistance.”

That’s my main takeaway from this piece from Mosaic (by Eli Spitzer, the headmaster of a British Hasidic boys’ school), which is critical of both Hasidic schools and the state-led efforts to change them, and is less a corrective than a valuable complement to the Times report. As Spitzer acknowledges, it is perfectly possible to get a good yeshiva education and also gain proficiency in English and mathematics and be well-prepared for the world of work. It’s not only modern Orthodox institutions that achieve this goal; many misnagdic (ultra-Orthodox but non-Hasidic) schools not only do a better job of providing a secular education than many Hasidic schools do, they do a better job at Talmudic instruction as well. The same can be said of many Lubavitch schools; the Lubavitch are a sect of Hasidim originating in Lithuania who are oriented around outreach to the non-Lubavitch Jewish world, so their education is oriented around making this outreach possible, which requires (among other things) learning English. (As an aside, the distinctive peculiarity of Lubavitch doctrines and sacred texts separates them from other Hasidic groups to the point where many other Hasidim consider them anathema.)

But given that the top priority of most Hasidic schools is preserving cultural insularity, it’s unsurprising to learn that these schools don’t always achieve excellence even in Jewish education, to say nothing of secular subjects. If you take that priority seriously, though, it follows that if you wanted to change those schools — even if only to reduce outright illiteracy — you’d need to convince the leadership of the Hasidic community that any proposed changes won’t impair that goal of insularity. That’s going to be an extremely difficult thing for the state to do when the state’s goal, always implicitly and sometimes explicitly, is precisely the opposite. This is the point which Spitzer drives home in the latter part of his piece, and why he believes, in the end, that the critics of Hasidic schools are more wrong than their defenders.

He has a point. We have compulsory public education for a variety of reasons, some of them economic: because a more educated populace is going to be more economically productive, which the state benefits from, and because profoundly uneducated people are more likely to be a financial drain on the state directly or indirectly. It’s possible to imagine these goals being achieved without breaching the insularity of groups like the Satmar Hasidim — which is what Spitzer ultimately would like to see happen — though it might be a delicate matter to accomplish. But some of them aren’t economic, like producing a citizenry capable of sustaining the commonwealth in both formal ways — voting, serving in the military — and in informal ways like carrying forward a culture recognizably connected to and derived from its antecedents. At a minimum, these things are in tension with any group’s desire to sustain its own insularity. Maximally, they are in direct conflict. In the case of the most insular Hasidic groups, the conflict is pretty obvious. It’s a testament to the liberality of the liberal state (as well as the political clout of Hasidic groups capable of voting as a bloc to protect their parochial interests) that the conflict hasn’t come to a head, but that the state has been notably indulgent of the Hasidic desire to sustain their distinct way of life.

But that indulgence may start to wear thin as both the general culture and Hasidic groups themselves change. One hundred years ago, the dominant culture would have looked on Hasidic groups as being backward: superstitious, unscientific, outmoded in its way of life. That’s a condescending attitude, but it’s one that makes it easy to be indulgent — even, at times, nostalgically affectionate. I don’t think that’s how the dominant culture looks at Hasidim today. There’s been an upsurge in ground-level antisemitism, reflected in both record numbers of attacks on the streets of Brooklyn and political conflict in areas like Orange County north of the city where large numbers of Satmar Hasidim have settled. That’s an alarming phenomenon in its own right, but it’s also naturally going to make Hasidic groups themselves more defensive. Then, Hasidic attitudes about sex, gender and personal autonomy that in the past might have been viewed as “outdated” by liberals are now frequently viewed as dangerous and abusive. Finally, Hasidic groups themselves have increasingly assimilated into the oppositional paranoid fringe of American life, expressed, for example, in increasing opposition to vaccination. (And they have in some cases grown more insular and paranoid for reasons having nothing to do with trends in the general society, for example, the splintering of the leadership of the Satmar sect.) If, in response to all of these developments, indulgence does wear thin, what then?

The usual framework within which these discussions take place is one of freedom of religion. More broadly, liberals sometimes profess that the state ought to be entirely neutral in questions of “the good life” and stick to facilitating “mere life.” That might imply that some kinds of believers are ineligible for public life, but it would also imply that, if the Hasidim want to live a life that the general culture finds abhorrent, that’s their business — and that’s a “liberal bargain” that the Hasidim might well take. But education is the key place where it becomes clear that the state cannot truly be neutral, because it has interests that can only be satisfied by raising the next generation to satisfy them. Moreover, there’s the matter of a liberal conception of rights. It’s all very well to nail the words of the First Amendment to the fence you’ve built around your community, but nobody thinks freedom of religion encompasses the right to sacrifice your children to Moloch. If the general culture starts to see Hasidic education that way, toleration is going to be hard to sustain. That’s why I say the question, “What value do explicitly anti-liberal enclaves have to a liberal state and society?” lurks in the background of debates about what to do about the manifest failure of Hasidic schools.

Spitzer gives his own answer to that question, but it’s not one that any liberal could possibly endorse. From his perspective, the Hasidim do need to change — enabling its people to be more economically productive — but they need to do this precisely so that they can keep what is most important just as it is, and what is most important is that oppositional stance vis-a-vis the general culture. And why is it important to keep their culture so radically oppositional? Because the general culture is deeply sick, and the Hasidim are amply justified in trying to keep it at bay by any means necessary. He and I agree that liberalism is “thicker” than its adherents like to admit — that there are liberal virtues that a liberal order necessarily tries to impart to the next generation and which can conflict with the virtues prized by profoundly illiberal cultures like that of the Hasidim. I just think that those virtues are, you know, virtues, not signs of illness or decay. But if I believe that, how can I imagine anything but conflict, when the alternative is for the liberal state to serve as, effectively, a handmaiden for cultures so diametrically opposed to what liberals most deeply believe?

I’ll tell you how. I’m comfortable professing a “thick” liberalism rather than a mere “procedural” liberalism — a liberalism that admits to beliefs and fundamental commitments rather than pretending to neutrality. I don’t have a problem saying that, in a liberal society, people will not merely be allowed to question and experiment, but encouraged to do so, with all the implications that has for how traditional institutions like the family may thereby be destabilized and rethought. But liberal belief is — or ought to be — categorically different from religious belief. Precisely because it is — or professes to be — the product of human reason, it ought to be less sure of itself, and therefore less-eager to stamp out heretical alternatives to its hegemony.

I can hear my more right-leaning readers scoffing already, so I want to be clear that I’m not making an empirical claim here; I’m making a philosophical claim. Liberalism should be humble about even its strongest claims, because all of those claims are by their nature provisional, contingent, subject to rethinking. They rest only on eminently fallible reason, and tenuously even on that. It’s just that, from a liberal perspective, there’s nothing stronger to rest on. So you can still hold to those claims very strongly, inasmuch as they seem clearly more right than the alternatives. But if you are genuinely humble in your liberalism, then you should be reluctant to crush out of existence cultures that actively reject those claims, and live out that rejection, because what “seems” right could easily change. Indeed, you should value those oppositional cultures for the same reason that you value biological diversity, because their presence makes the ecosystem more robustly able to adapt to environmental stresses than a monoculture is.

That’s a hard stance to maintain, I freely admit. It’s easier to romanticize illiberal cultures by refusing to understand them in their own terms, and then value them for your romantic misapprehension rather than for their reality. It’s also easier to simply become intolerant, to demand that “diversity” operate only within the narrow bounds that accord with whatever liberalism demands today. I see plenty of both attitudes all the time. What I’m asking is for liberals to value cultures they believe are not only wrong but potentially dangerous or harmful, and to value them simply because they (liberals) admit the possibility of being wrong, not only about that danger and that harm, but about their own core beliefs. I’m asking them to accept that doubt and uncertainty are inherent to the liberal enterprise — and yet to suffer no crisis of confidence thereby in living their own lives, building their own world.

Obviously there are still limits. We really aren’t going to turn a blind eye to sacrifices to Moloch. But if our overall orientation is toward a genuine appreciation of diversity — an attitude that says: what you’re doing seems not only strange but wrong, and I value it in part for that reason — then there’s a chance we could build enough mutual confidence to promote changes that from both of our perspectives are beneficial. And who knows: maybe a humbler, more appreciative approach might over time help soften the fierceness of those cultures’ own opposition.

They say good fences make good neighbors. But perhaps good neighbors make better fences as well.