A week or so back the New York Times busted a big one, In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money. “New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight” ran the subhead. Well, over at Mosaic, Eli Spitzer was ahead of the Times by almost a year, with an excellent article, New York State vs. the Yeshivas, with a more or less “dueling” subhead, “Those who defend ḥasidic yeshivas against increasing state regulation have conjured up an unrecognizable fairy-tale world. But the arguments of the state’s defenders are even worse.”
Eli, who was a product of an ḥasidic yeshiva, has harsh words for those who defend such schools as providing their students with both a secular and an ḥasidic education. “I can tell you, as someone who attended mainstream ḥasidic schools, that by the age of fifteen I had forgotten almost entirely the smatterings of English and mathematics I had learned in elementary school and had to start again from scratch.” He goes on to say, “I have dedicated my career to ensuring that ḥasidic boys get better secular educations than I did.” But then he goes on to say, that, basically, it doesn’t matter that most ḥasidic schools—unlike the one of which he is now headmaster—don’t prepare their students for success in the secular world. They prepare them, instead, for success in the ḥasidic world, and that is enough.
The purpose of the ḥasidic education system, beginning at age three and ending with marriage, is, quite simply, cultivating Ḥasidim. Lessons in the Pentateuch or Talmud are not primarily, often not at all, about developing academic skills—they are about molding a particular type of religious personality, one that will be comfortable in, satisfied by, and loyal to the ḥasidic community and way of life. The American sociologist Samuel Heilman, no friend to Ḥasidim but one of their most acute observers, describes lessons in ḥasidic schools as “far more than a literary foray into a text; . . . they were pretexts for passing along values, tools for deflecting heresies, and . . . means for helping give substance to what it means to be a Jew in the world they inhabited.”
The problem is, to my thoroughly secular eyes, is that earlier in his piece Eli dismisses one of the complaints of secular critics of ḥasidic schools—that, because the schools don’t prepare students for success in the secular world, a large percentage of Ḥasidim end up on welfare:
First, YAFFED [Young Advocates for Fair Education, a group largely made up of disaffected Ḥasidim] consistently tries to link the high rates of welfare dependency among Ḥasidim to poor education. But the relationship between educational deficits and reliance on the welfare system is much less direct than YAFFED asserts. Welfare dependency within the community is primarily the product of an expensive lifestyle caused by large family sizes, high property prices, private-school fees, wedding after wedding, and the cost of more than 60 Shabbat and Yom Tov meals a year (the equivalent of having Thanksgiving at least once a week)—all of which make welfare a rational economic choice for many people. I am personally concerned about the reliance of the ḥasidic community on welfare, and the kind of attitudes it fosters. But comparisons with non-ḥasidic ḥaredi communities, where welfare dependency is also common despite standards of secular education being better, do not indicate that education is the chief source of the problem or its solution.
But, again to my thoroughly secular mind, this raises a new question: Why is New York State spending $250 million a year to equip people for a life style that makes “welfare a rational economic choice for many people”? Also, is the ḥasidic way of life entirely dependent on the availability of a (relatively) generous welfare system? Did ḥasidic Jews in 18th and 19th century Europe, where the sect originated, draw welfare from those heartily anti-Semitic societies? I wonder.
Afterwords
The “real” explanation for the ḥasidic school situation is of course political—because, yes, even in the Big Apple does politics rear its ugly head. New York’s Ḥasidim vote as a bloc as few groups do these days, causing even such thoroughly secular types as Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten to okay $2.75 billion for private schools nationwide, just as long as the Ḥasidim get their cut.
There is as well in these increasingly secular times a tendency to treat those groups that are overtly religious—like the Ḥasidim and the Little Sisters of Mercy, for example— with a sort of superstitious respect, as if deferring to them would somehow cut us a little slack with whatever deities might be out there, regardless of the fact that the Ḥasidim think of the Little Sisters as shiksas—“dirty girls” unclean in the sight of God while the Little Sisters regard the Ḥasidim as forever damned unless and until they accept the mercy of Christ. But only us atheists get the joke.
