How the Ultra-Orthodox Undermine Themselves

As Aharon Ariel Lavi cogently describes, Israel’s haredi community falls far short of realizing its economic potential. But economic underperformance is hardly its main problem. To understand how Israeli haredim are failing to achieve their own objectives, we must first understand what these objectives are and how haredim hope to achieve them.

Like all committed Jews, haredim aim to pass to their descendants the religious tradition they themselves have received from their parents. The strategies they use to do this are (somewhat exaggerated) versions of those familiar to conservatives in many cultures. I’ll review the positive features of these strategies before considering how they have been distorted by excess.

First, haredim are meticulous even about the apparently trivial details of traditional norms. They tend not to give special priority to norms displaying a specifically moral resonance or more venerable legal histories. Unlike the Modern Orthodox, they don’t attempt to reconstruct some supposedly authentic iteration of Jewish religious law (halakhah) out of historical sources in order to smooth inconsistencies and jagged edges. That would lead inevitably to subtle social engineering and to the undermining of organic tradition: something any conservative should wish to resist.