Customer Reviews

Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry

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I opened this book with a great deal of suspicion, since I regard "ultra-orthodox" as a negative media buzzword that none of these Jews would ever use to describe themselves. Happily, the book turned out to be better than its cover, and is one I recommend.

The author, Samuel Heilman, while not himself "ultra-orthodox," is a religiously observant Jew trained in anthropology, making him an insider-outsider who is well-qualified to journey into the Jewish sector of Old Jerusalem. His methodology is that of a "participant observer," learning about the culture by doing it with the people. (Only a religious Jew could undertake such a project among the very orthodox. A non-Jewish anthropologist would probably not be admitted to many of the gatherings and ceremonies, and, even if he were admitted, could not fully participate.)

The book is well-balanced, presenting both the positive and negative aspects of the culture in a very readable format. Heilman combines personal experiences among the Haredim with well-written background information about the movement, making the book accessible to readers who might not be familiar with Jewish practices. I especially liked his descriptions of the different types of Hasidic gatherings, and his explanations of the spirit behind them. Unlike so many academics who write about Hasidism, he was able to see beyond the superficial plainness of the schools and synagogue buildings (often rather dilapidated) to the beautifully disciplined spirituality of the worshippers. At the same time, Heilman doesn't idealize the Haredi world. He covers the rebels and dissidents as well as the true believers.

Readers should keep in mind that these groups are the extremes of the extreme within Orthodox Judaism. As Heilman explains in the Prologue, he rejected the American Hasidic communities for his study, because they were not the "genuine article" (his words). He chose the Jerusalem community because he felt it had made the least acommodations to the modern world. Heilman was specifically looking for extremes, and studied them in the same manner that one might study a "lost tribe" in the Amazon. So, the Jerusalem Haredim are really a subculture within a subculture within a minority. One must be careful not to project the contents of this book onto all Jews --- even Orthodox ones. Taken within those narrowly-specified parameters, "Defenders of the Faith" is an excellent read.

This book presented a suprisingly well-balanced view into the world of Israel's Haredim. Written from an outsider perspective, you'd expect the text to be overly critical and harsh. However, I was pleased to find that it wasn't.

The author does a good job at portraying the life of the Haredim in a curious yet understanding way, while still being critical at appropriate times. Heilman does not rain down flattery but also does not shy away from asking difficult questions. While keeping an intellectually honest front, Heilman brings out thought-provoking discussions and presents perspectives that the rest of us outsides may not ever agree with, but can -- at the very least -- understand where the Haredim are coming from.

There are not a great deal of books on the so-called "ultra" Orthodox Jews available, and many that are are horribly biased against the way of life that seems so extreme to many of us. Heilman's text is definitely one I'd recommend because it keeps middle ground, explores deeply but still manages to be respectful to his subjects.

This book provides a very informative and insightful look into the world of the Hareidim, both from a personal perspective and from Mr. Heilman's trained perspective as a social anthropologist. He explains that he chose to study Israeli Hareidim as opposed to American Hareidim because, even though Hareidi communities in America do walk the walk and talk the talk, they're just too much a part of the modern world, such as in how they ride public transportation, work, and do business with people who aren't a part of their communities. In Israel, the Hareidim have much less contact with the modern secular world, and, on the surface at least, shun almost everything that has to do with it. However, as we come to discover, in spite of how they have clearly defined us vs. them boundaries and believe that there's no turning back if one, for example, goes to a university, with no happy middle existing between completely ultra-Orthodox and completely ultra-secular, they do benefit from the modern world. They rely on doctors to treat them, doctors who were trained in modern secular universities, sometimes have computers in their homes, even if it's just for the purposes of writing a religious newsletter, use specially-approved public buses to go on pilgrimages, the women sometimes wear modern clothes (within the dictates of modesty, of course), and they use modern smaller tefillin instead of the larger outdated impractical ones used by their forebears, feeling that the modern tefillin are superior and that anyone who would want the old kind made would have to be a fool, even in spite of how in many other matters they feel that the ways of previous generations are superior to anything the modern world has to offer.

I personally have very mixed feelings about the people described in these pages (except for the Lubavitchers, the most modern Hassidic group). On the one hand, we come to see these people, in all of their various groups (Belzers, Reb Arelach, Satmars, Neturei Karta, Sanzers, Breslovers, Lithuanians, etc.), as almost regular people in spite of the glaring differences, people who live decent upright lives even though they seem like people out of an 18th century shtetl, who are living the only way they know how to live, the only way they can imagine living, who have become so strict in response to what they feel is a corrupting of morals, Judaism, and the world in general, particularly after how their communities were all but decimated in the Shoah. However, as normal and sympathetic as the Hareidim come to seem during the course of this book, it is still unsettling to read the things they say about the modern world, such as how anyone who's not ultra-Orthodox isn't really religious, how a man who rushes to hug and kiss his wife after she's just had their baby is overcome by lust and can't wait to get back into bed with her instead of just being overcome by love and tenderness after such a powerful event, how a woman who doesn't dress the way a Hareidi woman does must be very lax in her morals, even if the clothes she's wearing are still rather modest by secular standards, how if someone comes out of a public university with his or her Judaism unaffected, s/he was never really observant to begin with, and how all goyim are adulterers, thieves, liars, and generally bad silly corrupt people. As lovely as these people are, it's dangerous to see the world in such black and white terms, to not want to venture outside for fear of contamination no matter how strong one's faith is, to group people into "self" and "other." Still, as a modern person, it's easy to judge them and be offended by some of the things they believe. For people who have lived and believed this way their entire lives, it's the most normal thing in the world. And they're so insulted in their communities that it doesn't seem like a problem that they receive no secular education or don't want to go outside of their neighborhoods. That's their world, and if it works for them, then great.

A lot of subjects are covered in this book, though they're grouped into three main sections--community life (such as the Belzer rebbe's son's bar mitzvah, the Belzer rebbe's Friday night tisch, the third ritual meal of Shabbos with the extreme sect the Reb Arelach, an offshoot of the Satmars, and a pilgrimage), education (going from gan [kindergarten] to the yeshiva attended by men in their twenties), and personal matters (funerals, weddings, matchmaking, sex). As has been already noted, Mr. Heilman had a special position as a partial insider. He's Modern Orthodox, so he was quite familiar with a lot of the rituals, prayers, and events; a non-Jew or someone of a more liberal denomination probably wouldn't have been allowed such wide-ranging access to all of these events and wouldn't have been allowed to observe schools or talk to couples about their sex lives. Although this stringent way of life isn't for me, I was left wanting more information about these communities, wanted more stories about them, wished there had been another chapter on their regular day-to-day lives as opposed to covering mainly ritual, education, and life passages. I also wished there had been more material on Hareidi women, outside of the chapters on matchmaking and sex. I understand that as a man, he couldn't really have access to women's lives the same way he was able to observe and talk with those of the male sex, but that did mean that a big part of what the Hareidi experience is all about wasn't covered as fully as it might have been. In spite of what the average modern person views as shortcomings or even offensive and highly outdated and inaccurate views and beliefs on the world, this is a fascinating society that has a rich warm vibrancy, and this book is a wonderful introduction to them.

I found this book surprisingly engaging. Here is a group of people I was not very sympathetic towards, but once I followed them with heilman's guidance, I discovered they were surprisingly human and fascinating. This book does what all good anthropology should: it takes the reader to a place he or she might not go alone and lets them sit on the anthropologist's shoulder and see the foreign so that it becomes familiar. A great read from an academic.

I'm thinking of this book read in conjunction with a book: Real Jews: Secular Versus Ultra-Orthodox: The Struggle for Jewish Identity in Israel by Noah Efron.

Good points:

1. At the very least, "Defenders of the Faith" recapitulates concepts such as Haskallah (The Jewish Enlightenment), "maskillim" (Enlightened Jews), "misnagdim" (Orthodox Jews with an emphasis on scholarship), "hasidim" (Orthodox Jews with an emphasis on spirituality) that were covered in the aforementioned book. But somehow this treatment was easier to follow.

2. The book was fabulously easy to read, and Heilman has a good gift for storytelling that elevates this book past the status of a dry documentary that just chronicled events.

3. Heilman seems to suggest here that Orthodox Judaism "hardened" sometime between the Holocaust and Haskallah. This is a good counter to another argument that I've heard that Judaism's move toward rigid Orthodoxy was after the publication of the Shulchan Aruch.

4. Another topic that the author addressed was the poverty of the Eastern European Jews compared to the German speaking Jews-- poverty that continued even when those respective sets of Jews migrated to the United States. (Mentioned briefly in Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New Worldand Sowell's Migrations And Cultures: A World View.) It seems that Haskallah did not reach as far into Eastern Europe as it did to Western Europe, and so those Eastern European Jews didn't have the benefit of modernity.

5. The book has a great index for all of the new terms that it defines. It also has a good number of references (I count 18 pages, with a good chunk of them being primary).

There are some things that I felt were lacking:

1. This book only dealt with Haredim in Israel, but there are also a large number of them in New York. Are Haredim in Israel representative of all of them everywhere? Or not?

2. This author does not treat the Hasidim that he observes as a cult (even though their fixation on their Rebbes seems a bit......excessive). What makes them different from a cult? Or are they (I have not found a place where Heilman explicitly denies that they are.)

Overall, this was much worth the second-hand purchase price.

What did I learn?

1. There is just SO MUCH bitterness, division and anger even within the Jews. Sephardim vs. Ashkenazim. Misnagdim vs Hasidim. Secular vs. Haredi. Hasidim of Sect X competing for adherents for Sect Y.

2. We got a revisit of many of the holidays and examples of what people did on them. (The Purim Festival, for example, was a chance for Haredim to demonstrate what they would NEVER be, by dressing as that. Analagous to Halloween in Western countries.)

Heilman is a student of Erving Goffman, and offers meticulous and insightful analyses of the haredi rituals he observes. He studies a category of Jews who insist upon their essential difference from the rest of humanity, and yet is able to communicate across these self-erected barriers. Marvelous, marvelous ethnography.

See the Kirkus review for a good description of the book's contents. Professor Heilman takes the reader deep into the ultra orthodox Hasidim of Israel and presents a remarkably balanced picture, often content to let them speak for themselves. While he starts mainly with the Belzers, there are protraits of some of the other Hasidic sects, including the extreme Reb Arelach Hasidim whose women shave their heads. The chaper on sex is worth the price of the book. An absolutely riveting and brilliant book which is essential for anyone who wants an understanding of the ultra right wing Hasidim, who, by the end of the century, may outnumber other Jews.

Heilman provides a fascinating glimpse of the inside world of the modern American Jewish anthropologist stuggling to overcome his bias. Like all "middle of the road" adherents of a belief system he feels uncomfortable in the company of more sure and more complete believers. Several errors of fact mar the book and it gives an outsider's superficial view of an extremely complex and and highly organised society.

Heilman is to mainstream Judaism what a car accident by the roadside is to mainstream highway traffic.

Here, he represents faithfully the paranoia of many North American Jews towards anyone whose level of practice is more traditional than their own. But Heilman makes the mistake of veering a little too closely to that world without first resolving to create an honest, respectful portrait.

Much of what he says in this book is true, but the beauty of the chareidi lifestyle shines through almost *despite* Heilman at times. Now, I'm not looking at them through rosy-coloured glasses either; I realize there are many problems between the chareidim and others, and that chareidim are frequently intolerant. But Heilman's perspective is often little more enlightened than theirs is, and too often, he ends up depicting them as lazy, ignorant (in the area of elementary-school geography, for instance) or misogynist.

Real life is not as simple as Heilman would perhaps like it to be. So when complexities arise, he just looks the other way and writes it the way he imagines it must be. This may make for gripping anthropology, but it is no way to capture the spiritual reality of an entire culture.

I couldn't wait to get this book since there aren't too many out there like it and the subject fascinates me, but I was very disappointed when I started reading it.

It reads like an academic paper. Heilman never fails to use 10 big, awkwardly put-together words when a few simple words would do. His word choice felt very thick and syrupy. This is fine for a school textbook or the like, but not really my prefernce for leisure reading.