In a little more than 50 years, American Orthodoxy has gone from being a “marginal phenomenon” whose survival seemed to be in question to a religious option firmly established in America. However, there is a struggle for the heart of Orthodoxy in America to define what will best assure Jewish continuity that has grown intense in the last 20 years.
This is a time that the traditionalist right wing, the so-called haredi one, has not disappeared, as many predicted it would, but has instead been successful in building institutions, training rabbis, and asserting its place in the Orthodox world. This Orthodoxy appreciates American freedom but wishes to remain separate from its culture and values.
In contrast, the “Modern” (or “Centrist”) Orthodox have tried to remain standing with a foot both in the world of strict observance and loyal faith, while still engaged by the world outside the Jewish one. The Modern Orthodox see this approach as valuable and a way to allow Orthodoxy to survive into the future.
During this same time, the people who once called themselves Orthodox, because the synagogue they did not go to regularly was an Orthodox one, have stopped calling themselves Orthodox, in part because the demands of calling oneself Orthodox have become much greater during the last few decades.
As a result, Orthodox Jews who were once in the middle found themselves on the outer extreme, a place they were not used to inhabiting. Simultaneously, they faced an increasingly confident right wing warning them that they were now more likely to fall prey to the defilements of the outside world to which they were powerfully drawn.
Whereas in the past the Modern Orthodox ignored these warnings and continued to stand proudly in many worlds at once, increasingly they were influenced by their haredi co-religionists and began leaning back toward the right wing.
There are essentially four reasons that account for this new Modern Orthodox inclination: the perceived decline of American culture; the complete handover by the family of the responsibility of education to the day schools and yeshivot; the decline of modernists in the ranks of the Orthodox rabbinate and Jewish education; the emergence of study in Israeli yeshivot and women’s seminaries as an essential experience in Orthodox education.
As long as American society and culture represented a positive model, the Modern Orthodox ideal could be embraced without danger. However, when by the late 1960’s the sexual revolution and the emergence of the university counterculture aroused doubts among many conservative elements in the population – including many who called themselves “Orthodox Jews” – the attraction of American culture began to wear thin in some Orthodox circles.
In recent years the increasing moral relativism and tolerance of nontraditional lifestyles, from unmarried heterosexuals living together to gays wanting to get married, has only increased these doubts about American culture. At the same time, the Orthodox were becoming more self-confident in their ability to maintain their own standards of conduct and religious behavior without having to suffer in America. As a result, there emerged a backlash not only against some of the cherished ideals of Modern Orthodoxy, but even against the very name. The quest for modernity was increasingly viewed as a step down the slippery slope of compromise.
The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey and the resulting debate within American Jewry about continuity exposed the high rate of Jewish intermarriage and confirmed the continuing assimilation of American Jewry. It also demonstrated that younger college graduates were among the most assimilated and prone to intermarriage.
That made Modern Orthodox Jews even more concerned about the cultural costs of modernity and the unintended consequences of a college degree, so central to their ideological stance. They looked for more “Jewish insurance” that would protect them from the assimilationist trends of America. This led to many of them seeking an “inoculation” against the disease of assimilation and intermarriage. To many it was to be found in a more intensive Jewish education. This led to their handing over the Jewish education of the young to those who had made it their vocation.
Increasingly those educators were not Modern Orthodox Jews. Even though they were committed to full-time, intensive Jewish education, Modern Orthodox Jews did not get college degrees in order to be Jewish educators. Day-school heads often admitted that harder than finding students to fill their classrooms was the critical quest for teachers who would provide instruction in Judaica and who shared the Modern Orthodox ideological outlook. Those who had that outlook had pursued successful careers in the world outside the Jewish one.
Thus the Jewish educators to whom they handed over their children were the haredim who remained in Jewish education. By one count, nearly two-thirds of today’s Judaica teachers in day schools come from the haredi world.
Moreover, once parents who engaged in careers outside the Jewish world gave up a significant role in the education of their children, they became increasingly dependent upon those teachers. These teachers had control of the children throughout the entire day, from the earliest primary grades and through the end of high school. Orthodox parents gave these teachers the legitimate right to supersede them. Even when the teachers pushed their students toward the haredi right and away from modernist values, the parents allowed this, since they had no alternative teachers.
In effect, these teachers were “agents provocateurs” who inevitably undermined many of Modern Orthodox acculturationist values. Yet the consumers of their teaching were given to understand, both by the heads of the schools and by the Orthodox world, that these teachers were the guardians of the Jewish future. And the rabbi/ teachers believed this no less – that was one of the reasons they were willing to step out of their enclaves into the defiled domains of the day school (although to be sure some did it because they needed the money).
Much the same happened in the rabbinate. Few modernists chose to be rabbis, leaving the yeshivot who produced them to those on the haredi right. As a result increasingly American Orthodox rabbis were expressing haredi values and world views. They entered the pulpits and the classrooms, serving as the religious authorities to which all Orthodoxy had no choice but to turn.
Increasingly, they shaped the character of their congregations and students. They convinced their laity that to avoid the pitfalls of modern America their young needed more powerful religious inoculation. This they believed they would find in Israeli yeshivot and seminaries.
The parents bought this argument.
These institutions were, however, not simply educational. They were ideological ivory towers, engaged in fighting back against secular culture; and they had their charges 24/7 for a year or more. The teachers in them were far more influential than even the haredi teachers on the faculties of day schools. Moreover, the students who had spent more than one year in them engaged in haredi “outcasting” of all those who remained outside the institution.
In time, as these young people matured and returned to America, they inserted these haredi values and behaviors into Orthodox America, where the increasingly right-wing, young rabbinate was ready to serve them.
What the long-term consequences of these trends will be remains an open question. While those who call themselves Modern Orthodox may still be the majority, the center of gravity and confidence in the future appear to have moved to those on their religious right.
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