The truly interesting part is that the rabbis are apparently worried that Rabbi Eliezar will destroy the world after being shown up, and he almost does.
I guess you really didn’t want to piss off a rabbi in those days.
Well, not one who had God on his side!
I don’t agree. While I don’t think it’s invalid to think of them as a political entity, I suspect it’s a religious cult first, and the politics follows. They don’t behave in a cult like way to advance their politics, they advance their politics to protect their cult.
And at the very least, they are both a political entity and a cult.
Well, this is rich.
A self-described mother of eight who sends her kids to yeshivas is bemoaning “the multi-year campaign to undermine Hasidic education*” in New York, via an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal.
Sheva Tauby protests against the N.Y. Times “investigation” (scare quotes supplied) and thinks kids are getting a terrific education in these schools.
“Why, then, are some people so intent on interfering with the private religious yeshiva education that is working so well for my children and so many others? The effort is made worse by the fact that government intrusion into our religious education is a clear violation of our right to free exercise, enshrined in the Constitution. Children aren’t wards of the state. My husband and I have been blessed by God with them, and with the responsibility to raise them.”
I hear overtones of Sen. Rand Paul on vaccination. “The state doesn’t own your children, parents own the children”.
The op-ed (paywalled, or I’d link to it), suggests that the Hasidic community provides ample essential services for members. There is no mention of the taxpayer funding that props up their system. You want the dough, you accept the (probably still minimal) oversight and basic requirements that go with it.
I don’t think it is paywalled - I was able to read it and I don’t subscribe.
I read the comments in the NYT article for a while ( at some point, I could no longer keep up) and I was put off by some commenters who essentially justified the receipt of public money based on their choices - that of course they need public assistance , tuition might be $70K a year (which kind of suggests that there must be some off the books earning going on because people with enough reported income to pay that much tuition wouldn’t get assistance.)
I struggle to think of the Hasidic Judaism as a cult because it is so decentralized. Cults are very much like pyramids, with a clear leader on the top. This isn’t like the Mormons who had (have) strong central leadership despite splinter groups.
~Max
I think the local rabbi is fairly powerful.
There is no unified Hasidic school system. More than a dozen Hasidic groups each run their own schools. […]
The largest group, the Satmars, is made up of two competing factions led by the grand rabbis Aaron and Zalman Teitelbaum.
[…]
Before elections, teachers often give students sample ballots with names of the grand rabbis’ chosen candidates filled in, parents and former students said.
[…]
Hasidic people follow strict rules aimed at recreating a way of life that was nearly wiped out in the Holocaust.
Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.
Plus a little background I already knew about Hasidic judaism. Grand rabbis are not to be confused with anyone called rabbi, as rabbi is a respectful title for any teacher and grand rabbis lead hereditary Hasidic dynasties, of which there are like twelve in Borough Park, Brooklyn. So yeah, grand rabbis have significant power, but we’re talking about probably 15 of them competing for religious authority over the population of like 3 square miles. Mind you this is New York City so that’s like 150,000 people. The NYT mentions the Satmar dynasty, one of the big ones, which itself has two rival grand rabbis.
This all leads me to think of the Hasidic community as decentralized - the authors of the NYT article warn against treating them as a monolithic group. “Cult” very much implies centralized power in a single leader, which is why I take issue with that characterization.
~Max
I disagree. I think that Jehovah’s Witnesses exhibit many cult features, especially the shunning, and there’s no single leader. Scientologists, too.
Some cults are organized around a single person, but things like keeping away outside influences and cutting off anyone who leaves from the community are also features of cults.
Anyway, I’m leaving shortly and won’t be responding until tomorrow at the earliest.
Jehova’s Witnesses have a centralized council, called the Watch Tower Society if I recall correctly. And Scientology not only had a leader in living memory (the founder who wrote the book), but a central church with headquarters in a heavily guarded compound in SoCal.
Contrast with Hasidic dynasties, which from what I can tell answer to no higher religious authority except God Himself.
~Max
I don’t think the line between “cult” and “cult-like movement” (a phrase often used to describe the Quiverfull proponents I mentioned above, for example) is as clear and neat as you suggest. The term is used in practice to describe a lot of organizations like the Hasidim, and I doubt you’re going to get anywhere with trying to insist on artificially restricting it to a narrower definition.
Has the Quiverfull/natalist movement been described as a cult by the media? Or merely “cult-like”? Because it also seems to lack the centralized power characteristic of a cult.
ETA: Ditto with Hasidic Jews. Where I do find references to a Hasidic cult, it refers to a specific Hasidic group and not the entire denomination.
Example,
The case is tied to Hasidic cult leader Rabbi Eliezer Berland, a convicted sex offender and scammer who has also been arrested in connection with the teenager’s death.
[…]
The cult-like Shuvu Bonim offshoot of the Bratslav Hasidic sect has had repeated run-ins with the law, including attacking witnesses.
ETA2: (I have the lingering feeling that I missed your point - no, I don’t think it’s a big deal whether we call Hasidic Jews cultists or not, it’s just that was the only point of disagreement to my first post.)
~Max
Now you seem to be “just asking questions” as a rhetorical gambit to defend your artificially restrictive definition of “cult” as opposed to its actual usage.
If you do in fact want to know whether the Quiverfull movement has in fact “been described as a cult by the media”, literally two seconds’ Googling could have answered your question.
Quiverfull Cult Cries Christian Persecution After Backlash over Child Bride Retreat
You did miss my point. I think it probably is kind of a big deal whether Hasidic Jews are called “cultists” or not.
But I think your artificially rigid and specific criteria for determining what is a theoretically correct or incorrect use of the term “cult” are pretty much irrelevant and useless in terms of understanding real-life usage of the term, and that was the point I was trying to make.
I’m interested in how you think it’s helpful to describe Hasidism as a cult.
When I think of ‘cult’ I think authoritarian religious practices / religious control of many aspects of day-to-day life, centralized power, brainwashing, an isolated religious compound, paramilitary organization, proselytization, deviant sexual practices such as polygamy/orgies/rape of children, drug usage, communal shunning of apostates, etc.
If there’s a cult the connotation in my mind is that people are being harmed and it should be shut down. Religious freedom falls to the wayside. Cults actively harm people within and threaten people without, they break laws and resist secular authority, therefore they must go. Send the FBI, the ATF, whoever, arrest the leaders.
~Max
Your interest is unfortunately doomed to remain unsatisfied. I’m not concerned with considering or discussing whether or not it’s “helpful to describe Hasidism as a cult”, nor have I expressed an opinion one way or the other about whether it should be so described.
All I’m doing is pointing out that your artificially rigid and specific criteria for determining what is a theoretically correct or incorrect use of the term “cult” are pretty much irrelevant and useless in terms of understanding real-life usage of the term “cult”. As I just finished saying in my previous post.
You have told us in post #126 that you “struggle to think of the [sic] Hasidic Judaism as a cult because it is so decentralized”, and you have explained what you consider to be the proper semantic restrictions on the definition of the term “cult” that justify your opinion.
Fine. We now know what you think ought to be considered the proper definition of the term “cult”. And you now know that much real-world usage of the term “cult” does not meet the criteria imposed by what you consider the term’s proper definition.
Is there any point to nitpicking any of this semantic quibbling further in this thread? IMHO, no.
Okay, fair enough. I was trying to circle back to the original point of dispute which #126 was addressing.
ETA: I’ll also add that your summary of my position is spot-on and I appreciate you taking the time to do that.
~Max
And you may well have more success by discussing it with some less cranky fellow poster. 
The typical rabbi is an employee. I saw one get fired for lending out books from the synagogue’s library.
Would you say the rabbis of this particular sect are typical?