Tuvia Tenenbom's books all have the same style: Tenenbom goes around the world and uses his disarming personality to get people - often antisemites - to reveal things they would never tell anyone, or he uses faux-naivete to expose the hypocrisy of his targets.
One theme that goes through his books is that he genuinely likes most ordinary people (and especially their food) while he finds most leaders and officials to be hypocrites.
In his latest book, "
Careful, Beauties Ahead!", Tenenbom is using his trademark interview style, but the subject is more personal than in previous books. Tuvia grew up as a haredi Jew in Bnei Brak, and in this book he spends a year among the Chassidic and Litvish (yeshivish) Jews of Israel.
As a religious Jew myself, even though I am not haredi, this makes the book more personal for me as well.
Tuvia spends most of the time in Mea Shearim, the religious neighborhood in Jerusalem. He gravitates towards the most extreme anti-Zionist Jews but he doesn't ask them much about Zionism. He asks them about God, about spirituality, about angels, about the resurrection of the dead, about why women cover their hair after marriage. He then returns to the neighborhood of his youth in Bnei Brak.
It is easy to cheer him on when his targets are antisemites in Germany or the UK. When he talks about Torah leaders, it makes makes it more challenging to try to distinguish between his own personal biases and what he actually observed himself.
For example, he grew up near Rav Chaim Kanievsky, a giant of Torah learning, but he always regarded him as weird. He gets people to say negative things about the now-late leader of Orthodox Jewry, but doesn't mention
anything positive about him.
One striking part of the book is that he discusses how ordinary Chassidim make a "kvittel," a piece of paper that they write their names on, and have glorious stories about how their Rebbes have miraculously discerned amazing details of questioners' lives based just on the kvittel. When Tuvia manages to visit three separate Chassidic rebbes, every one of them tell him that they cannot do anything supernatural with the kvittels.
For me, who wants to see more Jewish unity, Tuvia's descriptions of infighting within the Chassidic community and antipathy towards Jews outside it are distressing. The book meanders with his travels, but one theme that emerges is the
split between the "old Ger" and the "new Ger" Chassidim, and the threats by the old Ger leaders to ostracize those who want to follow the new one.
Similarly but more amusingly, Tuvia documents how the the main Satmar study hall/bais medresh has an announcement prohibiting anyone from studying who does not wear an overcoat or who speaks Hebrew instead of Yiddish. An observer tells Tuvia that the rule has nothing to do with Zionism but is meant to exclude Sephardic Jews, whose own bais medresh does not have air conditioning or free coffee, so they would go to study at Satmar.
In Mea Shearim, there is a lot of anti-Zionist graffiti. Tennebom doesn't definitively identify those who are responsible, but it appears to be youths who really cannot hack all day study in yeshiva. Of course, these are the ones who would be first drafted into the Israeli army.
One of the sadder parts of the book, for me, was the ignorance of the subjects - and even some of the Chassidic leaders. They couldn't answer basic questions about Judaism. The main exception was a teacher at the ba'al teshuva yeshiva Aish HaTorah who answered most of Tenenbom's questions (not to Tuvia's satisfaction) and then emailed Tenenbom the sources to the answers he didn't know. But most of the Chassidim could not point to sources for customs; one could not distinguish between a midrash about Korah's followers and what it says in the Torah about him. He also makes a good point about how the haredi world is woefully ignorant of the books of the Prophets.
Tuvia being Tuvia, he also eviscerates an anti-Haredi secular scholar he interviewed who claims that every child in Mea Shearim is the victim of sexual abuse and none of them contribute to the economy (
80% of Haredi women work, but they don't seem to count in the calculations of the progressives.)
Tenenbom ends off with his observations that despite his criticisms, these are his people. He is more comfortable and feels more at home among the otherworldly Chassidim of Mea Shearim than with the genteel gentiles of Berlin or New York. Most of the religious Jews he meets, he loves. He describes the soulfulness of praying extremely slowly and of a Chassidic shalosh seudos that extends way past Shabbos.
Despite his many criticisms and jibes, and the book is filled with them, these are his people - and he feels that affinity with them far more than the secular and Reform Jews he meets along the way.
Conversely, Tuvia writes that he went back to visit the community on the following Simchat Torah . He didn't need more material for the book; he visited because he wanted to be with his new friends for a very happy holiday.
It was October 7, 2023.
His new friends asked him what all the sirens meant, since they couldn't see the news during the holiday. When he found out and told them, the universal response to the news of the Hamas massacre of mostly secular Jews was horror and prayers. All the rhetoric he had heard and seen about how much they hate non-haredim disappeared when there was a real tragedy among fellow Jews.
That is the real theme of the book. Jews love to argue, they disagree vehemently about everything, and in the Land of Israel they ironically have more freedom to be vociferous about their disagreements because one does not put on pretenses of civility among family. But in the end, we are all family, and the supposedly extreme "ultra-Orthodox" are more loving of their fellow Jews than the progressive, secular Jews who pretend to want a world like John Lennon's' "Imagine."
"Careful, Beauties Ahead!" is at least twice the size of Tenenbom's other books I've reviewed, possibly because the subject matter means so much more to him. Any discomfort one may feel when reading the book is more than offset by Tuvia's honesty, humor and humanity.
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Monday, August 26, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
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