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The Black-Hat Underground

Aderaba—the title means “On the Contrary”—is in danger of closing.  After four years of publication, the magazine by, for, and about frustrated Israeli ba’alei teshuvah, newcomers to Jewish Orthodoxy, can barely afford to continue.  It has garnered neither a big enough subscription base nor the amount of advertising it would need to make ends meet, and editors were only able to put out the last issue after a long fundraising campaign. 

Relevant Links
A Room of Their Own  Yoel Finkelman, Jewish Ideas Daily. The haredi revolution in Israel will come, if at all, from the bottom up.  And, in the 21st century, bottom-up is located online, on sites like B’hadrei Haredim.
Rav Elyashiv's Mixed Legacy  Yoel Finkelman, Jewish Ideas Daily. Despite being revered throughout the haredi world, Rav Elyashiv’s legacy both for his own community and for Israeli society in general is not all positive. 

That’s a shame, because Aderaba isn’t the typical ba’al teshuvah publication—the one that offers real or imagined proofs of the truths of Orthodox dogma or explains how much happier one will be as an observant Jew.  Nor is it the typical rebellious Hasid story—the one that seem to appear regularly, occasionally even on the New York Times bestseller list, telling the story of a young haredi person who feels stifled by the conformity and groupthink and, after a few trips to bars or strip joints, painfully finds a new and more authentic life on the outside. 

Instead, Aderaba is the work of people who look like, act like, and in many ways are ultra-Orthodox Jews, straight out of Bnei Brak.  But they have had enough of the hypocrisy, discrimination, and poverty of haredi life.  They want something more, something greater, something worth changing one’s life for, something that lives up to the promises they were given when they were in the process of becoming religiously observant.  It is a magazine for haredi nonconformists struggling, fighting, groping, kvetching, thinking, and crying toward something else, something just as pious as the life of the strictest haredim, but rid of the social pressure to look and act just like everyone else.  Aderaba’s audience is made up of people who want to escape the stigma attached to those who were not born into the haredi community and who don’t believe that working for a living necessarily makes a man into a second-class citizen.

The magazine focuses in part on criticism of the negative features of haredi culture: discrimination against ba’alei teshuvah in general, and Sephardic ones in particular; “extra stringencies” in Jewish law for which people pay a price in personal happiness or economic well-being; power politics that replaces piety in haredi institutions; haredim-by-birth who don’t appreciate the positive baggage—the talents, knowledge and perspectives—that the newly Orthodox bring with them from the outside.  It also presents critiques of the secular way of life. 

Most of all, however, the magazine offers something new, positive, and constructive, something unavailable in other venues.  Several of its contributors have  reflected on how Israel’s largely secular social protest movement of the summer of 2011 has challenged the haredi community to do more on behalf of the country as a whole and to rethink its approach to economic equality and social justice.  One issue contains an interview with a prize-winning secular architect who suggests ways in which synagogue space could be shaped to make prayer more inspiring and school buildings could be constructed to encourage young people to feel a sense of belonging within the educational community.  Combining Zionism’s long-standing stress on the importance of manual labor with an Orthodox enthusiasm for mitzvah observance, one writer describes a newly Orthodox carpenter who teaches his haredi-from-birth neighbors to cut wood and construct their own sukkah, transforming the commandment into something more personal for people who never saw value in such “goyish” skills.  A typical haredi publication wouldn’t dream of making room for a regular column of satire or humor; Aderaba includes one regularly.  Short stories reflect on longing, love, passion, and wanderlust, just the kinds of themes that haredi fiction typically avoids. 

In part, the magazine serves as a kind of literary support group for people struggling because they can’t find shidduchim—marriage partners—for their children, because they are not satisfied with the schools, or because their children are rebelling against the observant way of life.  But in part the magazine and its constituency are trying to rethink the question of what a pious, ultra-Orthodox community might look in the Jewish state.  For these writers and readers, being a ba’al teshuvah is more than being a secular Jew who is now haredi, someone who may have job skills unattainable within the haredi educational system but whose past may, for that very reason, reveal an embarrassing and unremovable tattoo. 

Being a ba’al teshuvah is an identity of its own, a combination of general culture and haredi Judaism that is more than the sum of its parts.  Haredim-from-birth are too busy putting up walls and protecting themselves to appreciate the good and valuable aspects of modernity.  Religious Zionists and modern Orthodox Jews in general are too comfortable, too confident that they know the right synthesis of tradition, modernity, and Zionism.  Ba’alei teshuvah, at least the ones who write for Aderaba, see themselves as caught up in a more fluid and complex situation.  They are uncomfortable and searching.  Their quest is not a transitional stage between one clear identity and a later clear identity, but involves searching as a way of life.  In their case, liminality is something positive and desirable in itself.

These people see their searching as something central to repairing the social and religious ills that plague modern Israel, not only within the narrow walls of the ultra-Orthodox community but within the country as a whole.  “You have to understand,” says one contributor, “that ba’alei teshuvah are the future leaders of the state of Israel.  They came from within the country and now they have the power of Torah and mitzvot.  Today they are fragmented, but as soon as they get organized they will lead on every plane. . . .  Ba’alei teshuvah are the elite of the State of Israel.”

The same magazine in which these overconfident words appeared also published a piece of self-deprecating satire, in which the editor roams the haredi street looking, without success, for someone—anyone—who has read and wants to respond to the latest issue of Aderaba.   Unfortunately, however, the magazine’s economic struggle is no joke.  It demonstrates all too clearly that the community of creative ba’alei teshuvah is not yet big enough and has not built up enough momentum.  The pushback from the mainstream haredi community and the suspicion of non-haredi Israelis are too great to overcome, at least at this stage.  The black-hat underground is not yet ready to surface.

Dr. Yoel Finkelman lives with his wife and five children in Beit Shemesh, Israel.  He is the author of Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy.

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COMMENTS

aviv itzhaky on May 6, 2013 at 6:24 am (Reply)
you missed mentioning that there are also non ultra orthodox ba'alei tshuva in this movement, closer to the national religious, and others, less easy to define.
Eliyahu Konn on May 6, 2013 at 10:29 am (Reply)
This movement is not strong enough because it is like the Reformation. It seeks to reform that which should be entirely rejected, medieval and inaccurate teachings of Torah.
chaim avigdor lieber on May 6, 2013 at 1:42 pm (Reply)
there are some who are fully convinced that their problems are both unique and world-shattering

and then they realize that nobody is listening

so they go back to their boring, mundane lives

and close down their failed publications
Mr. Cohen on May 6, 2013 at 3:39 pm (Reply)
Aderaba needs an English edition and an English section in its web site
and the voices of non-Chareidi Orthodox baalei teshuvah.
Shmuel on May 6, 2013 at 4:42 pm (Reply)
Dr. Finkelman - it is incorrect to say a haredi publication would "never" have a satire column. Have you read Mishpacha? there is a humour/satire column there each & every week.
    Yoel Finkelman on May 7, 2013 at 5:27 am (Reply)
    I read the Hebrew Mishpacha more regularly than the English one. There is sometimes humor, but not the kind of introspective and harsh satire that appears in the mainstream Israeli press. You are probably right that the sentence is a bit overstated, though.
      R Klempner on May 10, 2013 at 12:43 pm (Reply)
      Hamodia's English language edition has both a political satire column in the newspaper and social satire column in its magazine Inyan. The Inyan column is so funny and yet pertinent, it's sometimes picked up at Aish.com to be enjoyed by the non-chareidi audience.
Steve Brizel on May 6, 2013 at 9:12 pm (Reply)
Perhaps, Aderaba will resurface either in the form of a blog-there is one excellent blog for BTs ( Beyond BT) where many issues relevant to BTs both in the US and Israel are discussed with good doses of self deprecating humor.
Reuven Spolter on May 7, 2013 at 7:05 am (Reply)
"Instead, Aderaba is the work of people who look like, act like, and in many ways are ultra-Orthodox Jews, straight out of Bnei Brak. But they have had enough of the hypocrisy, discrimination, and poverty of haredi life. They want something more, something greater, something worth changing one’s life for, something that lives up to the promises they were given when they were in the process of becoming religiously observant. It is a magazine for haredi nonconformists struggling, fighting, groping, kvetching, thinking, and crying toward something else, something just as pious as the life of the strictest haredim, but rid of the social pressure to look and act just like everyone else."

This sounds like wanting to have your cake and eat it too...Chareidi lifestyle today, for better or for worse, means conformity to society and to the dictates of gedolim. That's what you sign up for when you become Chareidi. You don't sign up to then produce magazines complaining about not being fully accepted into a society that, by definition, is suspicious of any outsider, and perhaps most of the outsider who wants in.
I haven't yet wrapped my head around people who want to be chareidim...but don't. If you don't like it, there are plenty of other ways to be a religious, rigidly Orthodox Jew in Israel, and find acceptance. love and legitimacy. Why the insistence on belonging to a group that doesn't really want you?
    Yoel Finkelman on May 7, 2013 at 3:28 pm (Reply)
    Reuven, that's not totally fair. People want what Haredi life could and should be, different from what it actually is, much as people with other commitments or members of other communities want to be part of groups that live up to their own commitments. Or, they want to create something new, something that's a synthesis of the best of what they had before and what they moved into.

    According to your take, change should never happen, or at least people should never push for change.
Binyamin Klempner on May 7, 2013 at 9:02 am (Reply)
Thank you Dr. Finkelman, this article of yours gives me the goosebumps. A bit over a year ago I created an organization call Yad L'Shuv (yadlshuv.org). We provide mentorship and social advocacy to baalei teshuva both young an old. While we have been told over the course of the year, how great a service we provide, money has not been smooth in coming. The future will tell, if, like Adaraba, Yad L'Shuv also goes underground.
R Klempner on May 10, 2013 at 12:46 pm (Reply)
I like Beyond BT, too, as well as Pop Chassid.

Like someone mentioned, adding an English language component and going online might save magazines like Aderaba. While some of the audience might not have internet access, the many of the type of reader we're talking about does have some, with filters--especially if it were in an e-newsletter format that went straight to email.

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