Haredim to Destroy Israel’s Economy
JTA’s The Fundermentalist reports,
“The Israeli economy, despite all of the hoopla and excitement over foreign investment and the rising shekel, is a bubble that is going to pop,” [Landa] said.[...]
The gap between the wealthy and the poor is rapidly growing, and the majority of the poor are Israeli Arabs and Charedi Jews – two sectors that can cause considerable unrest.
Only 37 percent of Israelis actually work, he said, compared to the United States, where 50 percent of the population works. (He warned against looking at the unemployment rate, which only measures the percentage of those who have actually worked before who have jobs.)
Understand…haredim don’t work because their leaders don’t want them working. How do they justify this bizarre and quite recent phenomenon? By claiming it is “an emergency situation,” today being so spiritually dangerous that one cannot be a functional human being. True, in every generation in the past, people got up and went to work…BUT WE ARE NOT ON THEIR LEVEL! THE GENERATIONS HAVE FALLEN!
Today, one must be exceedingly cautious even before scratching his balls, while before, one could at least do some light bookkeeping. Today, one must sit in the Middle Eastern heat in black clothes and a black hat and avoid a career and even a job, lest someone sees someone else wearing something somewhere who says something and then at some point something happens.
These are the people whom secular and Modern Orthodox Israelis are expected to be increasingly sensitive to.
Increasingly large sectors of Traditional Judaism just get more and more dysfunctional. They are functionally retarded.
6 comments
it’s illegal to work in the zionist entity without serving in the iof. you can get killed in the army. normal people don’t risk their lives when there are reasonable alternatives. in my opinion, kollel, or jail for that matter is reasonable compared to the alternative.
“Today, one must be exceedingly cautious even before scratching his balls…”
Heh.
A person passing through the Haredi Chinuch system will, with luck end up just ignorant with the education level of a 17th century eastern European peasant. Many employers (including the Israeli army and other armies) could find some job for the uneducated. However, a greater problem is that Haredi Chinuch does not just leave you ignorant, it will in the vast majority of cases leave you neurotic and suffering from OCD and too unsocialized to function in modern elite institution (whether commercial, government or military) or work in a profession. This is why Haredi employments levels are low whether in Israel or elsewhere and explains why tax evasion and hucksterism is so important for the Haredi economy.
Mohammed - Don’t kid yourself that the Israeli Army wants Hareidim anymore than it wants drunks or drug users.
Haredi employment rates should not be compared to that of the USA or none Haredi Israeli society. It needs to be compared to a society with a similar educational achievement such as Equatorial Guinea or Botswana
it will in the vast majority of cases leave you neurotic and suffering from OCD
Yes of course. Just walk around any religious neighborhood and see for yourself.
RL
when you make idiotic, easily disproven assertions, it tells people exactly what weight to give to your other, less easily disproven idiotic assertions. Yeah, the moon is made of green cheese and what else did you say again?
P.J. O’Rourke once stated something about the idea of guns and butter which said that at the far end of the efficiency spectrum, cows are making howitzers. Similarly, at the far end of this spectrum, Israeli becomes synonymous with learning-boy charedi, and who is the welfare supplier then?
Unemployed people can’t be their own welfare system. Kashrut authorities have nothing to do if no one is a farmer, ditto for sochets without livestock coming in.
Don’t mistake them for “Traditional Judaism” though. They aren’t and never were. Most every famous sage, rabbi, etc. of note did something else and most every one of their followers as well. The same people who extol never holding a secular job and spending all your time with your nose buried in the Talmud like to quote endlessly from people who themselves held very secular jobs, but they did them with the same ruthlessly ethical and principled efficiency as their religious practice.
Today, that goes by the wayside, we hear of endless financial improprieties, and the reason is that religious ritual has taken the place of conscientious faith. Who cares if you don’t really even believe G-d exists, just keep quiet, read this, and fake it. Except they’re not coming out and saying that, but implying it by their action as if reading harder, more, studying better, will somehow magically make believers and faithful people out of them.
Cart before the horse. Religious ritual is a framework to hang faith on, to reinforce it, and to make commonality with our fellows to share it. Without faith, religious framework is worth no more than secular humanism. It’s equally hollow, and equally temporary. All it awaits is a faith in something totally new to come along and when that happens, that faith acquires a new framework displacing the old.
Put another way, if the reason for everyone learning is to deal with spiritual problems, but those problems are not being systematically rooted out, explored and exposed, and dealt with in a comprehensive way to solve them, then how much more successful can this self-chose oppression be than the Catholic Church was in medieval Europe or the Soviet Union was in eastern Europe. When Vatican hegemony waned, the Christian nations went at it sword to sword. When Communist hegemony waned, Bosnia/Serbia/Chechniya/etc.
What happens if the rabbis’ grip loosens in the future?
Mohammed - There is no need for me to walk through a Hareidi neighborhood to see the mental state of its inhabitants. Someone has already done so for me.
The permanent exhibit devoted to Einstein at the Jerusalem National Library (where his papers are kept) displays a letter detailing how he and Sir Herbert Samuels, the then High Commissioner of Palestine, walked on a shabbat afternoon to Jerusalem’s Old City where he found what he called the “pitiful sight” of a city “swarming with all kinds of holy men,” “dull minded fellow Jews, with a past and no present.”.
As for the moon being made of green cheese, how is this less believable than that it was created some Wednesday some 5768 years ago (a day after the trees were created)?
Leave a Comment