by Nathan Cohen
Over the past month or so, we’ve seen a series of tragedies in the Charedi world, most painfully the babies dying in the playcare and the teenagers being run over in the street. Running people over is obviously wrong, but reckless behavior in public spaces (standing in the street?) points to something deeper:
a collapse of basic civic and moral sensibility.
I think the explanation is uncomfortable but unavoidable:
cultural Yiddishkeit has won. The Jewish ethical-culturalists won their battle, decades after seemingly going extinct.
Whether you date it to 150 years ago, 75 years ago, the late 19th century, or the first half of the 20th Century doesn’t really matter. There was a long-running struggle between what we might call the Torah world and the Jewish culture camp. Maybe it even goes back to Mendelssohn, or at least to the generations after him. The classic question was always the same: Is Judaism a religion, or is it a culture?
The traditional Torah world insisted that Judaism is all-encompassing. It’s not something you “do” on the side. It’s not just an ethnic marker, a costume, or a lifestyle aesthetic. It’s a total identity, rooted in a living relationship with God.
And yet, ironically, the Charedi world today seems to proudly espouse the opposite assumption. Despite seeing itself as the defender of the old European Torah world, it has come to function like an urban ethnic minority engaged in a cultural struggle. In practice, it has internalized the idea that Judaism is a culture, Haredi culture.
You see this most clearly in debates about the army. The question is almost never framed seriously around Torah learning itself. Nobody really asks who is actually learning, under what conditions, and why.
I once had an American yeshiva student studying here tell me that week after week, over Friday night meals, the question kept coming up with different visiting Rebbeim: under what circumstances would you ever allow anyone to go to the army? Not whether it might be a mitzvah, not whether some should learn and some should serve, just whether there is any condition under which it can ever be okay.
And the answer, of course, was never. Always no. Or it was evasions and appeals to alleged broken promises, with a flat refusal to imagine any situation at all.
Why is that?
Because once Judaism is understood primarily as identity and practice, rather than truth and obligation before God, there is no room to negotiate. The religion becomes the externals: the dress code, the behavioral markers, the group boundaries. Backing down feels like existential surrender.
This is exactly what the Yiddishist vision wanted:
Judaism as something you do because you’re Jewish. Belief doesn’t matter. God doesn’t really matter. Personal moral or spiritual transformation isn’t required. You keep some things like speaking Yiddish or Hebrew or names etc. because that’s what Jews do. It’s heritage, legacy, continuity, but nothing deeper than that.
And that model has now taken over large parts of the Charedi world in Israel (and perhaps elsewhere, though that’s a separate discussion).
Yiddishkeit, for them, has become minhag avoteinu be’yadeinu, not as a living covenant, but as inherited behavior.
Once that happens, a second transformation follows almost automatically. The community begins to resemble the familiar pattern of an angry, disenfranchised minority: young men without meaningful work, without responsibility, expressing frustration through aggression. We’ve seen this model again and again across countries and cultures over the last few decades.
And now we’re seeing it in Israel.
That’s why so many people, rightly or wrongly, complain about Charedi behavior:
cruelty, selfishness, lack of basic courtesy, pushing, shouting, callousness, blaming others for their mistakes (like with the babysitter tragedy). Yes, some of this is exaggerated. Yes, there’s hypocrisy and projection. But for anyone who actually knows that world, there’s also some undeniable truth here, Painful truth.
And that is the real tragedy.
A community that sees itself as children of God, that presents itself as more spiritual, more elevated than everyone else, ends up behaving as badly as others, ends up following at least some of the worst mores of the society it is part of. But even worse than that, it violates its own standards most of all.
That isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s a spiritual collapse.
And the human cost of it is now being paid in the street. But the greater cost is in our souls and in our future.
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