Matrimonial Economics 101

The economics of matrimony can tell you a lot about a society. 


For example, the long-standing Indian custom of shaking down the bride's parents to the tune of several years' salary may be seeing its final days. The imminent shortage of brides, caused by widespread ultrasound exams and the subsequent  abortion of female fetuses, will have to tilt the demand in the girls' favor, and the grooms' parents might actually have to shell out. Or, they could just continue the innovative practice of "exchange marriages", which is a kind of cashless cross-shidduch in which a brother and sister in one family marry a sister and brother in another family. In the words of Lonestar - "so what does that make us?"....


Back to E. Israel, where the town fathers can only look with envy at the Indian children's servile acceptance of arranged marriages. 


One of the great mysteries surrounding the haredi community is how they manage to raise a family on very little income, and then support their newlywed children with sums of cash that most srugie couples can only dream about. The reward of illuyim with a sidur maleh has certainly done more to encourage serious torah study than any Artscroll mussar volume. Unfortunately, the desperate need for cash has also spawned get-rich-quick schemes preying on poor people without much financial savvy.


Enter the following ad spotted by Chadash Asur last week, in "Connections" magazine. Connections, incidentally, tries to keep so many people happy that it has to offend everyone all the time. Such as a recent issue giving advice to 12th graders across the full spectrum, from going straight to the army (R"L) to hiding out in the Mir until age 30. Not bad practice for drafting a new Egyptian constitution with less than 10,000 casualties in an ensuing sectarian war.

Witness Bank Poalei Agudat Yisrael (which is really the First International Bank using a heimish-sounding nickname in its branches located in Haredi areas) making a play on parents worried about the next negotiation with the prospective in-laws. Note the wise middle-aged father with the dopey looking son - presumably this is meant to appeal to some parents' protectionary instincts, and the feeling that their kids will forever be 3 years old and require ' sagacious parental guidance.

But let's look a little closer, specifically at the volume that the pair is studiously posing with:

Let's ignore the copywriter's negligence in showing a mirror image of text. Can you identify the edition of the Babylonian Talmud by the cover font? No? Then you must be a true tzaddik who doesn't read anything put in cherem by Rav Shach, such as the Steinzaltz edition of the Talmud.

That's right, the choson-in-waiting is learning from a Steinzaltz! (Note for the uninitiated - this is an edition of the Talmud with Hebrew translation and vowels, and is denigrated by even the lowliest Hesdernik spending his 5th year studying for the psychometric exam...). No Haredi young man would be caught dead holding one, and a picture like this would doubtlessly destroy his family's shidduch chances for at least ten generations.

Yet maybe Chadash Asur is too quick to criticize. Families of illuyim don't need the bank, or the stock market, or anything. Their son's mind and reputation are like an ATM machine under his shtender. Rather, it's the parents of the other 98% who need the loans and the pyramid schemes - like the dude in this picture who is obviously not going to get even a kiddush cup from his mechutanim by virtue of his talmud torah. His parents will have to come up with the dough if he is to merit a remotely reasonable meidel.

Targeted advertising indeed.

Rebbetzin Rosa Parks

(click to enlarge)

Hot on the heels of the pashkevilim admonishing mehadrin travelers not to use the back exit as a way of avoiding the fare, comes this adrenaline shot to the country's latest segregation effort.



And a segregation effort it is, but not to segregate haredi men from haredi women. Instead, by restricting their mostly unvehicled flock to mandated bus lines only, the geonim have finally succeeded in ensuring that these men and women never ever leave the Jerusalem - Kiryat Sefer - Betar Illit - Bet Shemesh - Bnei Brak pentagon, except on foot. I may have missed a few locales, but you get the idea. 


When the Gaon Kupshitz qualifies travel on non-mehadrin buses as being "פורש מן הציבור" - you know which tzibur he isn't talking about. If you are reading this online, Internet Rimmon or not, here's looking at you.


I also enjoyed the reference to "mizrachi" schools, as an analogy to the backsliding practice of taking mixed transportation. (For the uninitiated, "mizrachi" does not mean eastern or Sha"s, but is rather a jab at the Mafdal school system, an etymological artifact of the 19th century Chibat Zion's מרכז רוחני - מזר"ח that only haredim seem to use, and never as flattery). 


This poor blogger attended a "mizrachi" junior high in Jerusalem, and used non-segregated public transportation to get there. Since the school in question was located in Gival Shaul, I had a daily choice between the #11 and #15 buses. The former drove straight down Jaffa Rd, but at the time (mid-80s) still used one of those WWII-vintage cigar-shaped claustrophobia-inducing buses, and was populated exclusively by East Jerusalem laborers heading for construction sites. Not fun for a thin-wristed 12 year-old. That left the #15, which drove down Strauss and Malchei Yisrael St. (otherwise known as Geula). I spent many a ride reading the pashkevilim pasted along the route, and wondering at the tefillin-clad yeshiva students perched on the steps of yeshivos, presumably during the slower parts of davening.


What I never saw during these countless rides (and believe me, I was watching) was any interaction between the haredi and hiloni passengers that could in any way lead to Rachmana litzlan mixed dancing. Actually, there was no interaction at all. Either I was naive or things have really changed in the last 20 years.


My school, incidentally, was segregated from 1st grade.

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Here's a melaveh malka treat:
   

Compare with Deuteronomy 21:17 -

כִּי אֶת-הַבְּכֹר בֶּן-הַשְּׂנוּאָה יַכִּיר, לָתֶת לוֹ פִּי שְׁנַיִם, בְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר-יִמָּצֵא, לוֹ:  כִּי-הוּא רֵאשִׁית אֹנוֹ, לוֹ מִשְׁפַּט הַבְּכֹרָה.

That's right, numbers after פי always need to be in the masculine form. Simple grammatical ignorance? I think not. The daas torah underlying every page of Chodosh seems to have dictated that the word at the end of the title - like the passengers at the back of the bus - must belong to the fairer gender. 

ha-Tov she-ba-Rof'im - Part III

Had to read this one twice.

When Meuhedet wanted more haredi patients they paid some former Shas MK a couple million shekels quietly, appointed him de jure manager of a clinic, and let nature take its course. As Chadash Asur reported, this story came up when Meuhedet got busted for general corruption.

Meuhedet's competitor Clalit has drawn the appropriate conclusion, and decided not to sneak around with their own haredi "askan". So, pictured above on a full page ad in last Shaboss' Chadash is  Mr. Yeshayahu Erenreich, former mayor of Immanuel, a noted restaurateur in Ramat Gan and current Bet Shemesh city councilman and chairman of the local waterworks. Now tack on another title - "Clalit customer service rep for the haredi community"!

Just imagine the contribution Yeshayahu might offer Clalit's patients, being apparently bereft of an MD, any experience in health management, not to mention being strapped for time shuttling between the Ramat Gan restaurant and his new Bet Shemesh digs. Now imagine what he might be getting from Clalit's annual budget - a budget which is funded by innocent hard-working bloggers.

One marketing tactic  did occur to me - until about 2 years ago, Clalit still had not computerized its files, and when the doc saw you, an actual paper file circa 1990 was pulled out. Yeshayahu might capitalize on the haredi fear of all telecommunications, and particularly computers, when making his pitch.

Or, he could just tell roshei yeshiva that if at least 50% of their balebatim don't switch over to Clalit this year, they can expect some municipal inspectors to come knocking.

The Pharaonic Welfare State

I have a vague recollection of the 2003 political storm that brewed when Bibi Netanyahu (as finance minister) did away with a good part of the government child support payments to larger families. For a few years until that time, child allowances paid by Bitauch Leumi (the National Insurance Institute) geometrically increased from the fifth child onward, awarding large families considerable income for letting nature take its course. When the government had enough of that, there were cries of "population control" etc. But let's face it - reducing child allowances to $60 per month isn't exactly China's one-child policy or Sanjay Gandhi's forced vasectomy campaign (at least the guys got transistor radios for their trouble).


Last Pesach my kids received an illustrated hagadah, which, shall we say, started off with a haskomo from someone in Bnei Brak. After ascertaining that it didn't show little Jewish slaves wearing shtetl-caps and streimels I gave it my blessing. Until one day I came across this illustration:

The preceding frames show a Jewish mother hiding her newborn all-male sextuplets from Pharaoh's decree. The following frames show the soldiers throwing the kids to the Nile crocodiles (SPOILER: some miracle happens and they are saved).


Consider all of the contemporary elements in this cartoon: Six babies in a haimishe family (there were a few other siblings on the scene as well); a soldier from an "elite unit" which in Hebrew evokes Bnei Akiva kids dreaming of Sayeret Matkal instead of the Mir; a "law" - being a reference to laws passed by parliament rather than being sourced from the Shulchan Aruch; the soldier's paranoia that the innocent family is trying to deceive the state; and lastly, the "difficult financial situation" which seems to set the victims aside from the rest of society and serves as the basis for their persecution.

Aha - the copyright date on the hagadah is התשס"ד, or right after Bibi shut the shekel spigot in 2003. 

Sigh. I might be angry when the company car benefit is taxed at higher rates. And maybe I will call the finance minister some bad names. But changing the plot of the Exodus story just to make a political point is going a little too far.  I shouldn't be so surprised to see those "Zionists Out" signs along the road in RBS Bais.

Too big to report II

The history of journalism is rife with examples of concurrent events which result in one of the events, often the more significant one, being eclipsed by the other and thus ignored by the public.
Take, for example, the almost simultaneous deaths of Mother Theresa and Princess Diana in 1997. This blogger happened to be in Delhi at the time, in Mother Theresa's adopted country. Hard to say anyone noticed her during the media assault about Diana and Dodi Fayed. 
In 1991 everyone watched the Gulf War I and pretty much ignored the collapse of the Soviet Union (yawn).
In 2003 everyone watched Gulf War II and pretty much ignored the SARS virus (too depressing, no footage).
And in November 2010, as SWAT teams raided kollels in Jerusalem, Bet Shemesh and Bnei Brak, seizing forged ID cards and arresting rabbonim, the haredi community of Bet Shemeh was preoccupied with far more important matters, namely, the construction of a staircase between Maapilei Egoz St. and the Kirya Haredit (or Haredis or whatever). Truly profound. 

Chadash Asur eagerly perused the remaining 72-odd pages of Chadash (or Chodosh or whatever) in search of some buried reference to the events of the week. Apart from an editorial about farm animals that could have been a reference to anything, C.A came up with a small item on page 47 about some unexplained police raids during the week, but mostly about a slapstick police  raid on the wrong kollel. The NKVD can't tell Belz from Telz, apparently. 
Here, then, is the extent of Chadash's reporting of the events which rocked the haredi world this week:

In Chadash Asur's rather twisted mind, this self-censorship evokes the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's description of the only way to escape the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal:

A rather large creature that likes to eat things.
The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast is so mind-bogglingly stupid that it thinks that if you can't see it, it can't see you. Therefore, the best defense against a Bugblatter Beast is to wrap a towel around your head. 

Too big to report

As we speak, the she'erit hapleita of the haredi blogosphere is engaged primarily with the question of who ratted on the alleged kollelim-turned-forgery-mills, and the field day that the secular press is about to have. 


Call me improper, but the depiction in bhol.co.il (linked above) evokes the Warsaw Ghetto tragedies of the Nazis finding the local Laissez-passer fabricator, and the resulting search for the informant...  


ChadashAsur is the first to agree that no one save perhaps Marwan Barghuti gets a fair rap in the Israeli secular press. As a knitted-kipa-wearing alumnus of the Yigal Amir disaster I also don't expect the charedim to start tearing kria in the streets and assuming collective guilt.


So, come Friday's editions of Chadash and haShavua, we should expect either:
1. Complete silence about the allegations, and continued focus on which gaon's great-grandson had a bar-mitzva and what Shalom Lerner has done lately to stall the Bet Shemesh land grab;
or
2. Ferocious counter-attack alleging police brutality, fabricated evidence, persecution of innocent, simple Jews, and veiled legitimization of anything that could be cast as furthering talmud torah.


Can't wait.


Post-script: Someone will have to explain to me how a teudat zehut containing personal information about a non-existent person can be used to obtain funding from the Education Ministry. If they aren't cross-checking data to verify that these are real people, then they can't quite complain, and should refer to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket:

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: Private Pyle, why is your footlocker unlocked?

Private Gomer Pyle: Sir, I don't know, sir!

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: Private Pyle, if there is one thing in this world that I hate, it is an unlocked footlocker! You know that, don't you?

Private Gomer Pyle: Sir, yes, sir!

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: If it wasn't for ***heads like you, there wouldn't be any thievery in this world, would there?

Private Gomer Pyle: Sir, no, sir!

ha-Tov she-ba-Rof'im - Part II

This week, haShavua's "Kav l'Mishpacha" page adds its two kopeks to the haredi view of the public health system.

At first glance, this is but a rather poorly rendered satire about a family being swept into a physician's office and being summarily diagnosed with a petri dish of diseases, when all they wanted was some water from the clinic's drinking fountain. Have a read (click for larger image):

So much about the "Dr. Stella" depicted in this column symbolizes haredi prejudice against the Other, mainstream Israeli world. 

Take her name, a reference to the Slavic aliya which produced so many GP's but is seen by some haredim as something worse than the "airev rav" in Sinai. 

Dr. Stella, who has a distinctly non-haredi "diploma", not only misunderstands the circumstances of the family's presence in the clinic, but serially misdiagnoses each of the children with diseases such as dysentery, pneumonia, spinal malformation, and flat feet. Even worse, she accuses the mother of neglecting her children by not engaging in constant OCD-type bathing. The reader is shown that this physician is incompetent in the secular scientific profession she purports to practice. She probably has no children or perhaps one child, facilitating her fantasies about perfect pediatric hygiene in a family setting.

Frankly, the scene in which she bolts the exit and traps the family in the examination room is evocative of an NKVD interrogation, or worse.

Dr. Stella represents the alien, other, incompetent, uncomprehending, emotionally unstable and oppressive entity that is the public health system. Conclusion: "They are incapable of understanding us, and should not tell us what to do or how to live our lives. We will tolerate them as a necessary evil only to the extent that they obey the Geonic orders quietly."

Time for a little cheshbon nefesh, haShavua. The family doctors who selflessly put up with everything the public throws at them day after day deserve so much more.


See part III

ha-Tov she-ba-Rof'im ...

Skeptical haredi attitudes to vaccinations are nothing new. Earlier this year Haaretz and the rest of the secular press had a field day reporting outbreaks of measles and mumps infections in Rockland County,  Bet Shemesh and Jerusalem due to parents’ unwillingness to vaccinate their children.

Now, within reasonable limits I respect a parent’s choice to make educated decisions about his or her child, even when this goes against convention or even what I would call common sense.  Conventions undergo revision and improvement, and what is acceptable today may seem ridiculous tomorrow. We fondly remember the formula-industry-fueled attitude against breastfeeding in the 60’s and 70’s in the US, which in more recent times has been all but disregarded.

So much for educated decisions in RBS Bais. From my own experience I perceive a rebellious attitude among many haredim towards all scientific and, in fact, all non-haredi knowledge, as part of their crusade to dissociate themselves from the larger society in which they find themselves trapped.  This leads to grasping at any and all flimsy rumors purporting to undermine extra-haredi norms and credibility, paradoxically leading from the rejection of prevalent science to quacks and con-artists (not unlike how the disregard of academic or literary modern Hebrew makes many a Litvish yeshiva student sound like a fish merchant hawking his wares in Machane Yehuda).

Medicine, in which humanity has invested so much of its scientific research efforts, really is the perfect target for this type of adolescent-style rebelliousness. 

First, doctors are the first to admit that medicine cannot explain everything, and positions are constantly evolving due to statistical studies and new discoveries. People can fall ill and die without modern medicine having a clue as to the cause, and other people will recover without the aid of any treatment. This allows a layman to wonder whether the field is morally sound or perhaps linked to commercial or more sinister motives. 

Second, it is one of the few places in which closed communities intimately meet state-run institutions (another telling point of convergence is the justice system – more about that some other time). 

And third, this meeting between individual and institution takes place in a relatively public forum – everyone will see you walking into tipat chalav with your infant.

Laying no claims to being a torah scholar, I have grave misgivings about the authenticity of rabanim taking a stand on general health matters. Let’s face it, most haredi poskim don’t have a clue about modern medical research, statistical studies – and how many of them can even read English? Instead, this is part of the general effort to control every last facet of the community’s life, to embellish their distance from the rest of us, and to play power politics when convenient - whether or not the rulings make much sense halachically - or in this case medically.

This evokes the 2003 riots against(!) separate Egged buses in RBS, and the protests about damage to questionably Jewish gravesites despite rabbinic sources permitting this for the public good (well, except when the graves are in a new haredi neighborhood, when the matter is taken care of in one afternoon).

Politics is politics and I am certainly not saying that haredi askanim are – or even should be - any more moral and altruistic than their Zionist and secular counterparts. If your business interests compel you to get 400 bachurim out on the street to block Egged buses, such behavior isn’t really unprecedented or extraordinary in the national scene.

What gets to me is when this maneuvering plays with the minds of unwitting and often naïve young parents. When in doubt, I feel that one should follow the advice of a career professional, particularly in decisions relating to the medical care of young children. Haredi families are getting the opposite message: “Don’t believe anything doctors tell you. Don’t ever take vaccinations, and don’t believe any of their advice unless Chadash can round up enough rabanim to publicly support it. And if you see your neighbor walking into kupat cholim on Nahar Hayarden St., report it to the Shidduch Status Police immediately for further investigation.”

And let’s face the facts. Unlike some other extreme religious groups who go all the way to martyrdom, Hatzoloh marches the kid straight into the ER in Ein Karem or Shaarei Zedek when something goes very wrong, where the physicians - until then outside the Pale - deal with whatever is left.

Back to this article. After all that kvetching you would think I would be pleased to see so many members of the Gaonic class coming out in support of the flu vaccination, but alas I am not. The subtext of the article clearly reads “OK – but only this time! Don’t do anything unless all of the Geonim get together and decide it is kosher. We decide when you can listen to kupat cholim, in fact, we control them, and as soon as we are unhappy, we’ll just push the button and send 100,000 people to the post office to switch to Meuchedet”.*

* This may already have happened – in today’s exposé on corruption among the higher echelons of the Meuchedet HMO we are told of a former haredi MK getting a nice consulting fee for illegally soliciting HMO memberships. Hard to believe he went around the streets of Bnei Brak convincing people to switch over. If he used the more effective method of paying or otherwise incentivizing rabanim to order their flock to do so, well, you can’t help asking how this will influence the next negotiation about whether to allow kids to be vaccinated against fatal diseases.


[See Part II]

Ramat Beit Shemesh Bais

Self-determination and animosity along linguistic lines are nothing new - see last week's sedra about the Tower of Babel, the tribe of Ephraim tragically failing to pronounce Shibboleth, and more recently the secession of Bengali-speaking East Pakistan (Bangladesh) from Urdu-speaking West Pakistan (let's face it - another crummy British colonial legacy). See also Spain, Belgium, Wales, etc.

Until the events of the last century, we Yidden had as many different pronunciation traditions as there were communities, and only in the last few decades have we begun to coalesce around three basic liturgical pronunciation groupings - generic Ashkenazic, generic North African/Levant, and the modern Hebrew amalgamation. "Modern" Hebrew takes the easy way out and incorporates the more user-friendly features of the two.  No more distinction between the "hard" and "soft" letter tav (תּ/ת), no more gutturals (ע), no distinctive pronunciation of tet (ט) or tzaddi (צ), no accentuating the dagesh chazak (Avshalom Kor excluded). Sigh. Go back 100 years and if our ancestors could hear the way we speak, they would tear kriya and say we are all meshumadim.

Now, I am as reluctant as the next amateur linguist to condone Modern Hebrew's disposal of the distinction between different consonants and vowels, but at least it is consistent.

Not so our local charedi press.

We are fortunate that the weekly Chadash has made an overture to the vernacular of most of its target audience (i.e. charedim willing to read a newspaper, being somech on the Netziv's nephew as brought to everyone's attention by ק"ק Lakewood), by including a few pages of English. Fortunate for ChadashAsur because the use of the Latin alphabet for transliteration of Hebrew words shows the writers' preferred pronounciation - or the pronunciation they feel they need to be seen as using.

Problem is, the policy seems to vary from line to line, or even within the same line. A few weeks back, the English section featured the unforgettable "Ramat Beit Shemesh Bais" in font size 20. I neglected to clip that linguistic oxymoron, but have a look at a few similar transliterations from today's Chadash:

Compare and contrast "Beit Shemesh" with "parshas".

OK, I can't see how the term Sfas Emes would roll off a gerrer tongue in any other way (or, for that matter, a litvish tongue together with a healthy dose of Yiddish curses about someone's kup in dreird).

[Tangent: One can only imagine what the Sfas Emes ztz"l would think about lending his name to a street in the State of Israel, parallel to Levi Eshkol St., and perpendicular to that Litvisher, Hazon Ish St. Hashem Yerachem...]

The dichotomy, however, evokes the daily inner struggle inherent in a reclusive society reluctantly relating to the wider world. But that might be too profound for this blog.

Shabbas Shalom.

Cram 'em in

Chadash, Oct 8 2010

Warning: The charedi attitude to traffic safety might be a recurring rant on this blog. Hey, if you ever drive through Bet you will understand. Ever play Frogger?


Have a look at the picture on the upper left of the article. Looks like a Mitsubishi(?) five-seater sedan with the front bashed in. Now look at the caption: "six family members". Huh?

The article is rather clear that the six family members were all in this single vehicle, two parents and their four kids. Ever strap four kids into three seats? Maybe one or two are wearing proper seat belts. The rest aren't restrained or maybe sharing a seat belt. A fine opportunity to stress seat belts and maximum vehicle capacity.

Alas, no mention of such trifling matters. Instead, we are assured that after treating the passengers, the hatzolo volunteers "returned to Bet Shemesh upon the sounding of the siren heralding the beginning of Shabbat, and quickly attended to completing their preparations for Shabbat". True hashgacha pratis that the negligent parents didn't let any pikuach nefesh get in the way of licht bentching.

Leading off

We mild-mannered denizens of a distinctly non-charedi neighborhood the Givat Sharet neighborhood of Bet Shemesh have been treated of late to a stream of charedi weekly newspapers, giving us a taste of the sheltered life and times of the non-alphabetically ordered ramohs of this town.

Admittedly, no newspaper is a mirror image of its intended audience. Newspapers have been called "draft histories" and as such seek to highlight the new, noteworthy and exceptional, not the rule. But the charedi press, in tiring Artscroll fashion, seeks not to identify new trends but to impose its sanctioned view of what society should be, often by highlighting the mundane and ignoring what mainstream reporters would see as the main gist of a news item.

We Anglos are so accustomed to a free press (even with a thinly-veiled agenda) that the Ancien-Régime of a mass media controlled and censored by the top of a monolithic power structure is a sad novelty.

Happy reading.