C is for Cookie-Cutter Models
“When your kids are babies, put speakers in their cribs telling them they need to be frum,” my friend jokingly responded to the rabbi. That week, my yeshiva’s biweekly discussion group was focused on how to ensure that your kids will grow up to be religious.
Obviously, there was something unsettling about my friend’s response. Although everyone in the group believed strongly in religiosity, it was clear that my friend’s suggestion was a joke. It would not be right to put the speakers in the crib.
This interaction reflects a critique people have about certain yeshivot and seminaries: Everyone is a clone of each other. At first thought, this criticism makes sense. It is unnatural for so many people to be so similar, and so the similarities must be because the yeshiva convinces them to act a certain way. This rings of inauthenticity. However, just like we established in our discussion group, we all want our kids to act like us. Why should we distinguish gap year programs from our families and communities? Should we feel revulsion towards our immediate families for making us all into clones of each other?
Clearly, we should not mistake adherence to halacha for mindless copying. Halacha is a value system, and so in situations that it dictates, its followers will act the same way. However, one cannot call them clones, which connotes identical personalities and mindless conformity. Halacha followers are not mindless conformers. Isaiah Berlin, in his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” writes that “integrity, love of truth, and fiery individualism grow at least as often in severely disciplined communities among, for example, the puritan Calvinists of Scotland or New England, or under military discipline, as in more tolerant or indifferent societies.” The same appraisal might be extended to observers of halacha.
Berlin’s observation might be due to the fact that adherents to a rule-based system don’t have to figure out age-old truths for themselves — they can rely on what has already been figured out by the best and the brightest. Instead, they can focus on developing the system and using it to make the world a better place.
In his book “The Righteous Mind,” Jonathan Haidt explains that without a system of law and morality, modern society tries to determine morality solely based on each person’s own logic. An example he gives is the secular left, which Haidt writes values the care, harm and fairness instincts almost exclusively, to the exclusion of considering loyalty, authority and sanctity. Personally, I agree that the care and harm consideration is an extraordinarily important part of life, but exclusive regard for it is unsustainable. Society also needs loyalty so that people will be willing to sacrifice for a greater cause, authority to ensure that there is order and sanctity to maintain respect for tradition. By attempting to logically derive morality from the ground up and then focusing primarily on one aspect, modern society’s morality fails. Any moral system that attempts a purely logical basis is prone to the same error.
The foil to this attitude towards morality is following a long and storied moral tradition. We should follow in the footsteps of what has worked before our time and what will continue to work after it.
One can make an analogy between morality and math. When I learn math, I don’t try to reinvent the wheel. I learn the system developed by those who have come before me, and if I were to innovate, I would build on top of what they have already discovered. It might be fun to try to discover the building blocks of math on my own, but I will go nowhere if I do. It is very unlikely that I will discover current math on my own and even less likely that I will discover anything new. The same applies to morality.
Society’s moral system allows adherents to strive for optimal living. Halacha goes even further: It provides G-d given principles for a spiritually elevated society and life. Growing up in the rule-based halachic system does not make a person a mindless clone. Rather, it builds a basis for each individual to become a functional, thinking person who can further develop themselves and the world morally. Everyone receives these values from society at large, but family members and role models also play a role. It is natural that people want to imitate them based on the beauty they see in the role model’s life.
It is for this reason that I am supportive of yeshivot and seminaries producing students who talk and act in very similar ways. This happens because many of the students shared a role model, and they now live their lives according to that person’s moral system. The fact that so many are inspired by that person might also indicate that their morals are laudable. We all seek to imitate our role models to differing levels, and we should view imitating greats as a way to grow as people. So what if certain people do it a little more than others?
Photo caption: A cookie cutter
Photo Credit: Razieh Bakhtom
