THE SOURCES OF CHAREIDI CORRUPTION

Recently Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv the posek hador (the ultimate living authority on halachah) for Lithuanian chareidim (ultra-orthodox Jews) issued a ban against accepting money from the Intenational Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ). According to Yair Ettinger in Haaretz (10-26-09), this was done to damage Rabbi Yitzhak David Grossman’s chances of becoming the next Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. Grossman the Chief Rabbi of Migdal HaEmek operates an orphanage, Migdal Ohr, which receives money from IFCJ. According to Haaretz, the timing of R. Elyashiv’s ruling is suspicious. Eight years earlier, Elyashiv decided not to join a ruling by other rabbis against IFCJ monies. If he had supported that ruling, Grossman and other Lithuanian chareidi groups would have stopped taking IFCJ money.

The critics of chareidism see this as yet another example of politicization and corruption. Chareidi defenders claim the timing is coincidental, and Rabbi Elyashiv is impartial. I am inclined to believe Elyashiv is a learned and pious man. But this does not preclude the possibility that the process was corrupt. The quality of a ruling  also depends on the system within which it is generated.

It seems as if R. Elyashiv reached his decision without meeting with Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the Director of the IFCJ. Eckstein would have been the best person to make the case that the donations were not motivated by missionary goals and the funds were not used to support missionary activity. If Elyashiv’s decision was made without regard to the other side’s argument, the process was corrupted. I also suspect that those who advocated the ban were trying to exploit halachah to advance their own political agenda of opposing Rabbi Grossman. If that is true than the process was corrupted, unless the posek was aware of the complainant’s motives and took steps to independently confirm the allegations against IFCJ.

Seven years ago R. Elyashiv banned Rabbi Nosson Kamanetsky’s book, The Making of a Godol, without reading it (he doesn’t read English) and without hearing R. Kamanetsky’s rejoinder. According to Kamenetsky in his lecture The Anatomy of a Ban, Elyashiv later apologized to him and said he was misled into believing Kamenetsky was not willing to appear and defend the book. If this is true I think it shows that R. Elyashiv is susceptible to manipulation by others who are corrupt. Moreover, once he recognized that he was misinformed he did not apologize and reverse his position. This failure to admit and correct the mistake, imposed heavy burdens on Kamenetsky, a member of Elyashiv’s community. He deferred to the ruling and withdrew the book, suffered a loss of status in his community which interfered with his ability to find suitable matches for unmarried members of his family, and lost an opportunity to share a portrait of his father and Rabbi Aaron Kotler which he has spent  15 years researching.

Elyashiv should have publicly apologized and withdrawn the ban. But that would have involved admitting that he and his fellow rabbis sometimes make mistakes. Moses, Aaron, Miriam, Judah, King David and other gadolim in the torah had flaws for which they repented. However, due the refinements of chareidi leadership in the last century, it is no longer necessary or desirable to describe leadership flaws. Such descriptions constitute insults to our great ones. That was one of the the stated reason for banning Kamenetsky’s book. The other was the insinuation that the torah greats of the past believed that it could be desirable to combine torah study with secular learning.

The Making of a Godol described at length two Rabbis that chareidim celebrate as gadolim of an earlier generation, R. Aaron Kotler and R. Yaacov Kamenetsky (the author’s father). As indicated by the title, the author celebrates them as gadolim who reached that level by struggling to attain greatnes and overcoming weaknesses. This is wrong since we know that they are gadolim from the get-go. No one disputed the accuracy of his facts. But he should not have reported that his father and Aaron Kotler read Russian novels when they were young men. Aaron Kotler’s occasional outbursts of temper were unworthy of description; though to Kotler’s credit he deterred other young people from repeating his youthful mistake of indulging in the consumption of Alexander Pushkin’s novels. Kamanetsky’s father stopped reading the stuff, but even in later years he let his students believe that they ought to also seek wisdom outside of the torah.

No wonder Elyashiv could not retract his ruling. That would have been a triple whammy directed at the core of the chareidi value system. It would mean that a posek hador could make a mistake, two gadolim could be imperfect, and that the writings of non-chareidi thinkers can be a useful adjunct to the training of a yeshiva boy.

Chareidism is corrupted by the presumptuous and exaggerated claims of its leadership and its insistence that all necessary wisdom can be found inside its walls. When truth conflicts with these claims, truth has to be suppressed. Chareidi leadership bases it’s authority on the claim that they are the authentic continuation of the Jewish tradition embodied in the teachings of previous generations of rabbis. Chareidism is corrupted by its misrepresentation of the Jewish past to deny that many of celebrated rabbis learned from non-Jewish sources and respected aspects of non-Jewish wisdom. No system of justice can maintain its integrity when it denies the truth, distorts the truth, suppresses the truth even when told lovingly by its own faithful adherents, and excludes any outside knowledge that might challenge its monopoly in defining the truth. My complaint about chareidism is not that it is too traditional, but that it is not traditional enough. It violates and distorts the tradition, in the name of that very tradition. As this bunker tendency accelerates, the distortions pile up.

Rabbi Elyashiv is 99 years old. Almost all abilities decline with age and the rate of decline accelerates somewhere around the age of 75. The designation of posek hador implies more than just competence or even impressive competence. It implies competence at the very highest level. Why should we believe that great poskim are immune to the effects of aging? Are there any precedents for poskei hador losing that status or being bypassed because there has been too much decline in capacity? I would argue that a system lacks integrity if its posek hador can retain that status even if he suffers significant impairments. In the chareidi world such impairments are covered up even as they are exploited and manipulated.

Ordinarily, when we read a psak we don’t have a full picture of what information was considered or excluded, which parties played important roles in pursuing the ruling, and what precautions were taken against improper influence. When critics complain about a lack of accountability, chareidi stalwarts insist that their great poskim are known for exercising due diligence. I cannot accept that answer unless it can be supported with facts about the norms for due diligence and facts about how it was exercised in the cases of Eckstein and Kamenetsky

It was alleged that the ruling’s timing was driven by a desire to affect an unrelated matter, the outcome of the election for Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. I would assume that anyone who had a preference for or against Rabbi Grossman was nogeiah b’davar (involved in the matter) and thus should be suspected as a witness or advisor on this matter. I suspect the integrity of the halachic system was compromised by reliance on the opponents of Rabbi Grossman.

It is possible that Rabbi Elyashiv would have ruled the same way if the information had been presented a few years earlier. If a faction in an election can determine the timing of a decision, the halachic process becomes a political tool and it is corrupted. That was exactly the issue in the scandal surrounding the US attorney firings in the Bush administration. The administration was not trying to get false convictions. It was just trying to have charges raised against Democratic politicians in the lead up to elections to hurt their electoral campaigns. The strategy relied on timing. In this case, even if the result was not affected by political considerations, the timing of the ruling turned halachah into a factional tool.

In sum, I would argue that in these two cases the halachic process was corrupted. Those who wish to argue otherwise have to show:

1. That R. Elyashiv retains his abilities notwithstanding his age,
2. That the system has mechanisms for dealing with formerly great poskim who are no longer at the highest level of excellence,
3. That the system’s hierarchical preference for selecting leaders on the basis of age is capable of producing leaders who can wisely exercise their powers,
4. That the system has adequate protections from those who seek to manipulate it,
5. That the system genuinely considers both sides of a case and gives affected parties the chance to make their case,
6. That the system admits and corrects mistakes when they happen, and
7. That the system will accept the truth about the past, even when it contradicts the doctrine of daas torah, or causes embarassement to its leading members and political allies.

I am open to being proven wrong, but it will take more than waving the title posek hador, invoking Rabbi Eliyashev’s piety or brandishing the slogan daas Torah. While I wait for the rejoinder I am wondering how long it will be before the leadership furnishes us with an enhanced version of the Tanach where  King David, Moses, Judah and others are portrayed without flaws so they can better correspond to the gadolim in this generation. If you chuckled, you get it. There is a problem.

For more examples of dysfunction in the chareidi halachic process see this article on the latest ruling about shabbat elevators in the Jewish Press of  Oct 21, 2009