My great grandfather was, from the records I have, a person who spent all his time studying. The Bible is not considered something that makes its meaning clear. There is a massive amount of commentary on it, which includes arguments. My Cantor said his father memorized the Talmud which would be very impressive. So it is not like you memorize the Bible and you’re done. What are the implications of this statement, or that statement, and how might it apply can be a never ending thing.
Yeah, plenty of Orthodox Jews are fully worldly. When my Boy Scout troop was sponsored by a temple (Conservative) I went to a kosher scout camp for the summer. I suspect at least some of the troops there were Orthodox, I really couldn’t tell.
Great place - they didn’t trust us kids to do the dishes.
Not in the sense of being the leader of a congregation, although many of them will become rabbis, but actually, yes, they are training them all to be full-time biblical scholars. This is not preparation for a career, it’s preparation to do nothing other than study the bible for a lifetime. As I mentioned above, these boys are not expected to grow up, get a job, and support a family. They are expected to grow up and get married to a woman who will support them and their children while the men study Torah and Talmud.
Now, one difference between any Jewish bible study (even in the Hasidic yeshivas) and, for instance, the madrassas mentioned above is that the former is usually a pretty good training in critical thinking. This is because it is not mere memorization, but close reading of the original text, as well as the Talmud, which is a voluminous commentary on the text, surrounded (literally) by commentary on the commentary, and so on, onion-like, compiled over centuries. Every side of every possible viewpoint and argument is examined and discussed among a group of students.
On the other hand, from the limited amount that I have seen, apparently a fairly significant amount of study of the Quran is nothing but rote memorization of the original text, often by people who don’t know any Arabic, and therefore don’t understand a word of what they’re memorizing. I saw a documentary about contests in which boys demonstrate their perfect memorization of the whole Quran. The winner, praised to the skies by the imams for how religious he was, had no idea what any of it actually meant. Much less interpreting or debating its meaning.
Now obviously, this is not representative of all of Islam, any more than the Hasids are representative of Judaism. But what the extremists in all religions have in common is that they insist their interpretation of the text is the only right one.
I still don’t really get it. Do they discover new insights that are shared across the Hasidic world? Are new concepts and insights added to the Talmud from time to time? How many new arguments and discussions can there be over those texts after thousands and thousands of scholars have done nothing else for thousands of years?
I mean, even here we’ve decided that some subjects are just done to death and are banned. I don’t read any more gun control threads here because it’s the same thing over and over.
Anyway, this will be my last comment of this kind in this thread, but I’m still curious.
I don’t know about new insights. Maimonides/Rambam published his Guide To The Perplexed when? Rashi lived a few hundred years ago IIRC. But I don’t know when new insights and commentaries stopped being added to the average talmud.
I don’t think the point is that they are living a cultish isolated lifestyle, problematic as that is in other ways. Or that they are not contributing to any branch of knowledge with all their studying. The point is that they are wholly dependent on government support to do so. It isn’t just the schools, they also are dependent on public welfare of every other kind as well. But schools are a straightforward place to focus, as, outside this culture, they have quite specific, widely-shared goals. One of the most important being that everyone has access to a basic education. This is being denied Hasidic children on the taxpayers’ dime. Essentially they have gamed the system in what most people would feel is a destructive way.
What would happen if public monies were withdrawn, I wonder?
It takes a certain kind of “spirituality” to tell yourself “Y’know, I’ll bet God wants me to sit here and memorize a bunch of words, instead of going out and helping people and working at making the world a better place.”
In Telushkin’s great book Jewish Literacy, he quotes somebody saying of the state of Judaism in America “There are two kinds of Rabbis- Those who think Judaism is a social justice movement, and those who know Hebrew.” Telushkin properly points out that it cuts both ways and that to be a fully realized Jew one should both know Hebrew and be involved in social justice.
I (before this thread) would have thought that was already the case, but apparently not? Either way, there is also the matter of enforcement.
It is always a contentious issue what should and should not be required in school curricula and school textbooks, but New York at least has standardized Board of Regents examinations, which include things like English, mathematics, science, and social studies.
I am certainly not a Hasid. But I think what they’re doing is orthogonal to what you think they’re doing. I don’t think they’re doing scientific or historical research. I think they’re studying what they believe is the Word of God because they believe that it’s the Word of God and because they believe God put it here in order for them to study it. That isn’t something, from that frame of mind, that’s going to come to an end.
As an analogy, consider that people have been reading and debating and interpreting the meaning of Shakespeare’s works for hundreds of years, and it’s not like we’ve figured them all out and come to a perfect and universally agreed-upon understanding.
How much more is there to discuss, ponder, and debate when the subject matter is something vastly more important to millions of people than a few plays and poems? (For the record, I am an atheist, but halachically Jewish.)
To answer the question about additions to the Talmud, no, the text has been fixed for about 700 years, but additional commentaries have continued to be written and published since.
As I understand it, the constant study of the Torah is to discover how to interpret it as to influence living in the modern world. There are literally thousands of tiny, nit-picky rules for every step in day to day living. The Torah certainly does not give exact rules as to when Saturday begins, and what type of effort can be spent without offending God.
Those “rules” were studied, debated, prayed upon until the scholars were able to conclude the exact meaning.
Most people (and I’m one) would consider this to be an insufferable waste of time. We all need to step away from our judgment, and try to understand that the men who do this work see it as a fulfillment of their faith and devotion to God.
The system would collapse, of course. They’d scream it was anti-Semitic bigotry to cut them off, never mind all the millions of other Jews who manage to support themselves without such aid. At least some of the men would have to get real jobs. It would be a hell of a lot harder to keep kosher when you’re dependent on food pantries, because most of 'em don’t pay attention to Jewish dietary regulations. You’d see a lot more women wearing snoods because if you can’t pay your rent or afford food it’s a lot harder to buy a $3,000 wig to cover your hair.
I suppose some might emigrate to Israel, although some of those groups are opposed to the modern state of Israel. (They’re offended that it was founded by people, as opposed to the Messiah doing it)
I can certainly admire a people who believe that they made an eternal and unalterable contract with God and have spent the 3,000 years since then trying to find the loopholes in it.
I don’t consider it a waste of time at all, much less insufferable. Far be it from me to dictate what is or is not a waste of time for others. I do consider it an insufferable waste of taxpayer money. Think of all the other religious groups who manage to run themselves without resort to what amounts to coercive fraud. Essentially they have decided that the accepted community agreements – only the neediest get welfare, schools are for learning basic skills required to live in our society – don’t apply to them. That’s unacceptable.
Probably a mix of (some?) people’s nerdish enjoyment of learning endless detail about a pointless subject*, and social status. In a social system where studying the Torah is a “mark of wealth and prestige”, knowing it and being able to endlessly quibble about it has become a social status marker.
Male satin bower birds collect blue objects. They just do. People do other things but it’s no different really.
Answers above are the approximate equivalent of asking a male bower bird why they collect blue objects. If they could talk they’d probably say “because blue objects are good” or something. It’s a non-answer.
*and I’m not putting myself above that, to be clear