Only Horny Sluts Don’t Want to Become Frum

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein of Cross-Currents is not very happy about the Jerusalem Post’s article, “You’ve been Aish’d.” He claims that it “alternates between silliness and shallowness.”

Intriguingly, Adlerstein writes,

The author makes it clear that she believes that the claims of Orthodoxy have some facial appeal, but nothing rigorous to back them up, and then proceeds to pen many declarative sentences – with nothing to back them up. Perhaps she was more influenced by her kiruv experience than she realizes.

Huh. It seems Adlerstein actually is well aware of the pitfalls of kiruv. So what’s the problem, Rabbi Adlerstein?

Orthodoxy “fails to acknowledge that Halacha has had a variety of interpretations across different times and cultures.” Gosh. Guilty as charged. I have failed to tell newcomers that some people don’t brok on Pesach. I guess we are even, though. The author doesn’t tell the reader that in all those different times and cultures, at least in the last two thousand years, all the differences concerned how to observe halacha, not whether to observe it, which is the issue for Jews outside of Orthodoxy.

This is a grotesque attempt at glossing over a very real and serious problem in the ultra-Orthodox kiruv world. Do not be fooled by Adlerstein’s feigned outrage. I was there. Many of these places often view Modern Orthodoxy as the primary theological enemy. This is not a phenomenon limited to ultra-Orthodox Judaism, either. As I learned in Dr. Heilman’s class, “Comparative Fundamentalisms,” all fundamentalist movements in the Abrahamatic faiths view their respective traditional religious communities as their primary rivals, even though the fundamentalist strains are in fact, the new and different paradigms. The traditional communities challenge and in fact, contradict their revisionism.

This is the reason that Rabbi Shafran of the Agudath Israel and others yell and scream that there is no such thing as “ultra-Orthodox.” This is not to feign unity, but rather, to insist that THEY are the regular Orthodox. It is to suggest — through name — that it is the Modern Orthodox who have shifted in paradigm, while they have not.

And this is simply not true.

As is customary in these circles, sex drives are blamed as the primary – perhaps only – reason for not being haredi. The headline for this essay, “Hormonal Judaism,“ is revealingly, and Adlerstein writes,

In other words, at the core of Judaism is the mind leading the heart, not the reverse. There is always room for disagreement, but I will take the Judaism of the mind and soul over hormonal Judaism.

That’s right, Rabbi Adlerstein. Mind = fahfrumpt, or you are clearly merely following your hormones.

Adlerstein is saying the same thing as Big Aish’s boner rabbi, advocating what we should call the hormonal straw man. That if you aren’t doing things their way, if you don’t believe as they do, it’s clearly because of your hormones.

There is no other explanation. If you are a woman and you don’t want to be ultra-Orthodox, it is because you are a complete and utter slut.

Earlier: They’ve Been Aish’d