Repost: Yaakov's deleted blogpost "For the Children"

Keeping it here for context and posterity

Not Daas Torah cross-posted a post from Yaakov’s Defunct Substack

Ash

Jun 5 · Not Daas Torah

Excellent post with highly accurate criticisms of Chareidi society and highly inaccurate criticisms of me. For a full rebuttal of this post, please see my first comment, but in short, I think it is possible to raise your kids Chareidi without the trauma , which is a better situation than being raised Modern Orthodox or secular. If one cannot, Yaakov may well be correct, though he downplays the traumas and successes of secular society. Secular society has a far higher rate of mental health issues, and 95% of secularly raised kids have no idea who Pascal or Jung is either. But they do know the Kardashians!

For The Children

A response to a post attempting to justify the Chareidi educational system

Yaakov Terrae

Jun 5

I recently came across a surprising Substack post. In it, the author, an observant Ultra-Orthodox Jew, makes an argument that it is in a child’s best interest to be raised chareidi.

The author’s argument may be summarized as follows: the Western world at large is experiencing a child Internet overuse crisis. Therefore, it is best to raise kids chareidi. To quote:

“I work in the mental health profession by trade and deal with Jewish and non-Jewish kids. That is why I raise my kids chareidi.

Chareidi gedolim warned about television and the damages it causes…. about the internet and the damages it causes…. about smartphones and the damages it causes. They were right. Chareidim got kosher phones and tagged their smartphones….

….The results are obvious. Chareidi kids are generally getting a healthy childhood - an actual childhood. Modox and non-Jews are exposing their kids to the sewers of the world and starting off their lives with brainrot. For that alone, it is worth raising your kids chareidi.”

Such a claim, besides being shocking to any intellectually honest individual who has experienced the chareidi ‘education’ system (to briefly state my background: I learned in right-wing, Lakewood-style yeshivos), also has the potential to cause tremendous harm to children, as it serves to coat harmful extremism with a veneer of sophistication and even open-mindedness.

As such, I thought it beneficial to jot down my thoughts, notwithstanding the time that has elapsed since that post’s publication and this one’s.

In this post, I will examine the arguments made by the author and assess their validity, as well as point out certain thought patterns that are, in my opinion, markedly fundamentalist in nature and ultimately irrational (with the disclaimer that I have read much of the author’s writings, and I am impressed by his seemingly sincere commitment to intellectual honesty and rationalism, even though I think that the results often fall far short of the intentions.)

I will also list some of the ways that the chareidi educational system harms children, and then discuss the ways that chareidi leadership tends to deal with said issues.

There are two obvious and major flaws with this line of argument.

First Flaw

The first is that it creates a (characteristically fundamentalist) false dichotomy between allowing one’s child to be ‘raised by the Internet’ and raising them to be chareidi, one of the most radical religious groups in the world today. Such black and white thinking is, unfortunately, a common characteristic of all fundamentalist groups.

It is striking that the author quotes several articles detailing the harms associated with technology use, yet fails to recognize that they were written- not to mention researched- by non-Jews.

Clearly, the non-Jewish world is more than aware of the issues the author raises, and is working hard on their own solutions (it is my opinion that the author’s apparent impression that only he and The Gedolim are wise enough to recognize the harms of Internet usage, to the exclusion of practically the entirety of the educated world, is another manifestation of fundamentalist silliness).

(It is especially ironic to note that chareidi society itself would never even be able to carry out these studies- a widespread disdain for empiricism and data-based research in general, and the total lack of secular education in particular, precludes the bright minds of chareidi Jewry from contributing anything to the human endeavor of scientific research. It is odd to use a study to promote a worldview that, if widely held, would render that study incapable of existence.)

Second Flaw

The second issue with the article’s reasoning is that even if we were to accept the extraordinary idea that, vis a vis screen time, there is no healthy way to raise one’s children without raising them as Ultra-Orthodox, we would have to examine whether the risks associated with chareidi education outweigh the alleged benefits.

During my years as a successful student in a number of prominent chareidi yeshivos, I witnessed a number of incredibly harmful systemic issues, which I will outline shortly. Perhaps even more concerning, however, is the completely irrational and ineffective methodology that the leaders of the chareidi world uniformly employ to ‘deal’ with perceived internal issues.

After all, it can perhaps be argued that every society has its flaws (although it is my opinion that the painful issues caused by the chareidi lifestyle are far more severe than those found in most other cultures in first-world countries.) However, a society that is incapable of addressing its flaws in a rational and effective manner holds no hope for progress or alleviation of its population’s suffering- indeed, many of the issues I will discuss have been recognized and spoken about by chareidi Jews for decades, and yet nothing has been done to ameliorate them.

Issues within the chareidi educational system

To first present the issues I have witnessed:

Chareidism presents an extraordinarily harmful and stressful worldview. Chareidi children are taught as an immutable axiom of faith that there exists a hell wherein a single second is literally more painful than the worst pain imaginable on Earth.

They are taught that God is constantly watching and recording literally their every thought, and that he never forgives a sin (Ha’omer HaKadosh Baruch Hu Vatran Hu Yivatru Ma’ohi).

Furthermore, UOJ believes in thousands upon thousands of ways of ‘sinning’- it is nearly impossible for a Jew to get through a day without transgressing some portion of halacha (not to mention the Chafetz Chaim’s ruling that it is assur mi’deoiraysa to spend even a second not learning gemara), reducing many chareidi youth to states of anxiety and OCD.

A full 100 percent of my peers in yeshiva believed (and quoted gemaros and sefarim of the Chafetz Chaim to back this up) that literally everyone spends at least some time in gehennom, a belief that is approved of by the rabbeim, and were consequentially terrified.

The true amount of chareidi children who experience deeply damaging feelings of anxiety, guilt, and shame are astronomical, yet most of those who suffer will never speak out. After all, they are taught that only wicked or perverse people fail to find at least a modicum of joy and meaning in the keeping of halacha, and they are terrified to admit to anyone- most of all themselves- that there is something ‘wrong’ with them.

Chareidism teaches that the purpose of life is to not to enjoy it. It demands its adherents to sacrifice literally the entirety of their lives to it. Chareidi men are discouraged and disparaged from pursuing their interests. They are forced by societal pressure to spend at least the first 24 years of their life at absolute minimum learning gemara for at least 10 hours daily, and made to feel like failures and literally lower life forms (as Reb Yerucham famously writes) if they don’t exceed that minimum standard.

What of personal interests, intellectual inclinations, and, to use a blasphemous word, fun?

All of these are unavailable to the chareidi child, at least once he becomes a teenager. Which mesivta bachur has not heard his rebbe rail against the ‘goyishe, American concept of “fun”’?

A chareidi man is shamed and made to feel worthless for ever pursuing any interest other than learning gemara.

In addition, Orthodoxy shames and demonizes normal sexual behavior and even desire. Young boys in particular are made to feel twisted, sick, and evil for experiencing normal sexual thoughts. I have personally seen bachurim literally cry from shame and self-hatred over normal sexual drives and thoughts; but this issue, at least, is widely known. This is compounded by terror over the belief that they will be tortured in a gruesome hell after their death.

The Approach of Chareidi Leadership

Having discussed several of the issues I mentioned with several of my Rebbeim, who count amongst their ranks distinguished ‘Gedolim’, I am, painfully, intimately familiar with the way these ‘leaders’, well-intentioned and sincere as I know them to be, deal with internal problems. Upon reflection, it would perhaps be more accurate to call them powerless slaves to a bankrupt theology than leaders- their own beliefs often preclude them from employing critical thinking. One of my Roshei Yeshiva acknowledged that many of his bachurim were struggling with unaddressed anxiety relating to learning, but claimed to be powerless to make any meaningful changes to his yeshiva- to quote, ‘We run this yeshiva the way yeshivos have always been run. Do they do things differently in Paterson or Riverdale?’

Note that Paterson and Riverdale are notorious for their toxic environments (one of my friends who learnt in Paterson developed an eating disorder due to the extreme pressure, losing fifty pounds in a month, and another developed extreme anxiety and eventually dropped out of yeshiva, thankfully.) And yet, this Rosh Yeshiva, due to an irrational but deep-seated belief in ‘mesorah’, felt that he must imitate them for fear of ‘changing the yeshiva system’.

Instead of rationally assessing what the best plan of action would be, he chose to believe that the system he had inherited was Divinely sanctioned, constructed through the medium of Aharon Kotler, perfect and impossible to improve upon. This irrationality is a consistent theme throughout the affairs of the leaders of the chareidi world (see the Slifkin Affair for just one example, where they sabotaged their own interests in almost comical fashion), and is what dooms their followers to suffer with no hope of improvement.

I should note that I have spoken to therapists and psychologists within the frum community about these issues, as well as with very special, wonderful Talmidei Chachamim who have experience dealing with the inevitable broken bachurim, and they more or less share my concerns- but therapists and activist rabbis- even lamdanim- are not daas Torah.

The yeshiva world instead insists on adhering to the guidance of people who, having never stepped foot outside of the four amos of halacha (physically or intellectually), quite simply aren’t qualified to teach teenagers or lead a society, no matter how kind, thoughtful, and well-meaning they may be.

In all of this, I have not even touched upon the financial abuse perpetuated upon chareidi boys, who are societally forbidden from pursuing a career. I haven’t mentioned the extreme ignorance that yeshivos leave their students with.

My peers in yeshiva had no knowledge or understanding of basic mathematics, physics, biology, history, philosophy, or literature. Illiterate in three languages, they- and at the time, I- had no way of even fathoming the vast expanses and depths of knowledge and thought that we were totally oblivious to.

The study of any of these topics is actively disdained and ridiculed, leading to a society where even the intellectually curious have literally never even heard of Shakespeare, Twain, Hawthorne, or Dickens, let alone allow these greats to show them the world through a different set of eyes; have never had the dazzling complexity of the universe shown to them by Newton, Archimedes, or Einstein; never had their mind tantalized with fresh perspectives and thought-provoking ideas from Kant, Rousseau, or Plato.

Mozart, Galileo, Bayes, Pascal, Darwin, Freud, Jung- there are almost no yeshiva bachurim who can place any of these names. Most cannot tell you if they are the names of people or a Korean dish (this is neither conjecture nor hyperbole- I once asked around in my yeshiva). Yeshivos are an intellectual graveyard, filled to bursting with highly intelligent people who believe the world to be less than 6000 years old, and that there was never anything written that is worth studying except for Torah.

I have also refrained from detailing the harms particular to female students of the chareidi world, as I feel less qualified to speak about them. However, so as not to leave their suffering unaddressed, I’ll provide a brief, non-exhaustive overview of the gender-specific issues they face: they are taught that they are supposed to be subservient to men, that they must raise a family instead of doing what they actually want with their life, that men are all dangerous animals who might be unable to resist raping them should they ever wear short sleeves, that Jews all over the world die and suffer because of the way that they dress, and that they can’t exist in the public eye or be involved in decisions on matters of public policy.

The serious flaws and dangers inherent to the yeshiva world seem impossible for any honest observer to deny. I know from a lifetime of first-hand experience that chareidi parents love their children and want the best for them, and I certainly do not presume to be more intelligent or educated than many of my chareidi readers.

However, having grown up frum, I know well how hard it can be to question, the status quo in a society that romanticizes its past and demands unfaltering ideological loyalty to its leaders. I do not know if there is hope for the chareidi youth of tomorrow- that question lies in the hands of the chareidi people themselves.

But this much I do know: cherry-picking articles about an issue plaguing the free world is not a justification for traumatizing one’s children, indoctrinating them into a harmful worldview whose basis in reality is questionable at best, and utterly depriving them of the chance to learn anything substantial or meaningful about the world and the human condition.

Given the choice between raising my kids in a cheap, overstimulated, screen-attached society, or of raising them in an atmosphere that fosters guilt, shame, and self-hatred; allows for zero intellectual inquiry, pursuit of personal happiness, or even freedom of thought; and promotes ignorance as a virtue, I’ll choose the former every time.