Gazing in – On Charedim and ‘Voyeurism’

This was actually one of the first posts I wrote for this blog, a couple of months ago, but it seems I got distracted by writing about other things and didn’t quite find the opportunity to post it. Hopefully you’ll still find it relevant, especially given the renewed discussion about how we view the charedi world following the release of a video showing two ‘Ultra-Orthodox’ schoolgirls rapping. So, without further ado…

Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated with so-called ‘closed communities’ – groups of people whose way of life is so utterly different from my own, so sealed off from the outside world, that any opportunity to gain a glimpse into their culture is tantalising. From Catholic nuns to the Amish, Traveller communities to remote Amazon tribes, I welcome any chance to gain new insights into the everyday lives of those I may never get to know personally.

But what happens when one such community is an inextricable part of your own? Recently, during yet another bout of online procrastination, I happened to spot an article from the Daily Mail’s website with the headline, ‘Smothered in a veil of lace and beads, Ultra Orthodox Jewish bride is led by a ribbon to her wedding as thousands of men watch’. The article detailed the chassidic wedding of the grandson of the Sanz Rebbe (spiritual leader) to the granddaughter of the leader of the Toldos Avraham Yitzchak sect. The headline, aimed primarily at non-Jewish readers, emphasised the apparent strangeness of the event – the elaborate, ultra-modest bridal gown, the unique customs. I eagerly scrolled through the pictures of the young bride and groom, surrounded by black-clad men and women in tichels (headscarves). For me, the pictures, like those from other such huge ‘dynastic’ chassidic weddings, are an odd mix of familiar and unfamiliar. On the one hand, most of the wedding customs shown are common to many Jewish weddings, whether charedi (‘ultra-Orthodox’, itself an incredibly broad term) or entirely non-Orthodox. What’s more, it’s not as though the charedi world has always been closed off to me. I’ve studied in a seminary affiliated with the chassidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement, and have close friends belonging to that sect. The seminary even arranged for women from across the charedi spectrum, from relatively modern Litvish (‘Lithuanian’) to some of the more obscure chassidic sects, including one closely related to Toldos Avraham Yitzchak, to come and talk to us students about their lives. In France, Saturday mornings would often find me at a Litvish synagogue, whose wonderfully warm congregants welcomed me into their homes for Shabbat and festival meals. On the other hand, as far as these groups are concerned, I – who no longer even identify as Orthodox – will always remain an outsider.

In an article for Salon about her apparently contradictory experiences as an Orthodox rabbi’s wife and a professional journalist, Avital Chizik-Goldschmidt powerfully describes ‘the world’s obsessive voyeurism with the inner lives of the Orthodox, with our bedrooms, our ritual baths, our wigged women and skull-capped men. Eyes, eyes, eyes everywhere.’ As a Jewish woman, particularly one who was once firmly (Modern) Orthodox and who still tries to live an observant life, my own fascination with these ‘inner lives’, particularly those of women, largely stems from my own experiences and personal conflicts. Yet in continuing to see more insular chassidic sects as, to some extent, ‘other’, as groups whose lives must be looked in on from the outside, am I unwittingly guilty of that same ‘voyeurism’? Is that all my interest in ‘closed communities’ amounts to? And how can I even entertain such a perspective when I personally know individuals who are themselves chassidic (albeit from a sect more engaged with the outside world)? After all, at the end of the day, we are all human beings, not mere curiosities.

The answer may lie in an episode that happened nearly five years ago, shortly after my return from seminary. An American friend I’d met there who was a member of the Chabad community was visiting her grandmother in England and invited myself and another of our friends, a fellow ba’alat teshuva (newly Orthodox woman), to join them for Shabbat. It was in an area of London with a large charedi population and, for seuda shlishit (the last meal of Shabbat), we went next door to the house of a family belonging to the Belz chassidic sect, which is often seen as more insular than Chabad. The mother of the family, whose two older daughters were of a similar age to my friends and I, asked us about our lives, and so my fellow guest and I told her about how we were studying at university, something nearly unheard of in her community. Before we left, she told us, ‘It’s interesting to meet such different girls’. However fascinatingly ‘different’ I may have found her way of life, she had similar thoughts about mine, even as we bonded at her Shabbat table. We could view each other’s lifestyles as both familiar and unfamiliar, whilst connecting as individuals – and as Jews – and learning about each other’s experiences. I’d like to end with the immortal words of Pirkei Avot (‘Ethics of the Fathers’, a Talmudic tractate) – ‘Who is wise? One who learns from every person.’ I hope to be able to not only learn about those whose lives seem so distant from my own, but from them too.

Note on Terminology

The term charedi, literally meaning ‘those who tremble (before God)’, is often used to describe Jews from the strictest end of the Orthodox spectrum, as an alternative to ‘ultra-Orthodox’, which some find pejorative. However, some strictly Orthodox individuals also see charedi as an overly broad and inaccurate categorisation. Broadly speaking, charedi Jews are divided into chassidic (those who follow the philosophy of the 18^th-Century Polish rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer, known as the Ba’al Shem Tov) and Litvish/mitnagdish (those who follow the teachings of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s Lithuanian opponent, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, known as the Vilna Ga’on).