A duty of separation
Jews have a habit of sticking together, but certain lurid reports about rule-breakers had the Melbourne community smouldering. So what was all the fuss really about?
Click here to listen to an audio version of this piece, read by the writer.
I had heard that Jews were insular. And I suspected it was true because, whatever being Jewish meant, I wasn’t in on it. I never had been. Even at age 21, when I finally undertook with a measure of seriousness my search for Jewish knowledge, I knew that I remained an outsider. Texts dotted with words I couldn’t understand. Abstruse ceremonies which left me feeling bewildered and lost. Conversations betraying an enormous multiplicity of Jewish existence – its history, its practices, its sects, its people – which remained at an inviolable distance. I was peripheral, unable to see the candlelight through the smoke.
Specifically, it was when a certain friend of mine uttered a certain unforgettable phrase that my suspicions about Jewish insularity concretised into hard, undeniable truth. I was filling her in on my plan to take a course or two in Jewish education. She, who finds a placatory nourishment in her Jewish heritage like few I’ve ever met, responded with rapturous enthusiasm to what I was telling her. She was just so glad I was attempting to join the club. “Honestly, I feel bad for people who aren’t Jewish,” she said, with a sincerity and wry confidence that I knew must have been born of something unshakable. And yet, a part of me found it unfathomable that she’d said this, out loud, like she meant it.
A month after that conversation, I started taking classes at a shul in St Kilda. In one of our readings, I came across a quote which struck me so forcefully that I instantly circled it, then copied it out into my textbook, and then again into my black notebook. It came from Samson Raphael Hirsch, a nineteenth-century German rabbi who by any measure figured as an important contributor to the development of Jewish Orthodoxy. His claim was that, in being allocated the responsibility to fulfil God’s will, the Jews were imposed with “another duty, the duty of separation, of ethical and spiritual separateness.” And only then did I question whether what my friend had said was so unseemly after all. Perhaps it was, in fact, the culture.
Adam Yee, a 47-year-old music teacher who converted to Judaism when he was 26 and “self-identifies” (Adam’s word) as modern Orthodox, occupies, as you can probably tell, somewhat indefinite territory in the Melbourne Jewish community. Though he teaches at a Reform school, most of his acquaintances are on the ultra-Orthodox end of the scale. So perhaps liminal is a better word than indefinite––as in, Adam’s everyday encounters pull him between worlds in a fashion that many Jews wouldn’t recognise. “I tried to stay away from social media as much as possible during the pandemic,” he told me, “because it was driving me crazy. But I was surprised to see a good friend of mine – someone I’ve known for twenty years, a professional musician, a gay man, an activist, a real progressive on every front – posting: ‘It shouldn’t surprise us at all to see a group of Orthodox Jews just doing whatever the hell they want, without any regard for anyone else.’ Emphasising that they’re Orthodox Jews, and not progressive or Reform. So he was pushing a very specific kind of anti-Jewish message, directed against a particular part of the Jewish community. And this engagement party was the proof he needed.
“I wasn’t upset, but I was surprised. So I write to him, and say, ‘Look, I just want to point out to you that you’ve demonised an entire group of people on the basis of their religion. And I want you to know that I’m living in the midst of this community, and most people are doing the right thing. By way of example, I cancelled my own daughter’s bat mitzvah, I cancelled my own son’s engagement party, because that’s what we’re doing. So I’m wondering if maybe you could adopt a slightly more nuanced position.’ That was literally as intense as my comment was. And it wasn’t a comment on his post; I actually messaged him. He got back to me with one of those multi-paragraph, shouting, all-caps things. ‘You’ve judged me! You’ve backed me into a corner. How dare you do this!’ I knew that this was just him venting, so I said, ‘I’m not here to pick a fight with you. I’m really sorry if anything I’ve said has upset you.’ That was literally all I said. And then I got another megillah of abuse. When you get those kind of messages, you realise pretty quickly that it’s not about the issue. It’s about other stuff.”
He’s referring, of course, to the engagement party, an event so notorious now amongst Melbourne Jews that it almost warrants grammatical enshrinement as The Engagement Party. I asked a number of people about the response to it, not only their own but of those around them. What I received back, when added to the wailing chorus of media apology and the invocations of Chillul Hashem (desecrating the name), formed an imbroglio of passionate lamentations. “Perfect storm,” “tinder box,” “fucking disgusting,” “harsh scapegoating,” “really angry.” “There was a sense of disappointment that there was an engagement party and that people were not following the rules,” said Rabbi Kim Ettlinger, of Reform shul Temple Beth Israel. “People in the community that I would have assumed should have known better.”
Jeremy Weinstein, an engineer and ex-filmmaker with connections to the ultra-Orthodox Adass Israel community, provided an alternate synthesis of the event’s aftershock. “It affected me quite significantly,” he said. “But what affected me more was just how quick the other Jews, in particular on Facebook, were ready to throw them on the fire and disassociate and disconnect… That affected me much more than the non-compliance.” He mentioned to me that when rumours of an illegal gathering initially spread, the first Facebook post he saw featured the names and phone numbers of a significant portion of the attendees. This, in addition to the ensuing mania which had media parked outside houses for the entire next week, made him somewhat irate. “There were other humans involved in this. And whilst they may have done the wrong thing, there was a doctor who can’t work anymore, people who have lost their livelihoods, and I guess the question is: is that a fair punishment for the crime that they committed?”
This was the question left more or less untouched by most of the people I interviewed. For them, it seemed instead to be a game of damage control, of abjuration and sententiousness. But I couldn’t shake the impression that beneath the performative expressions of disdain lay a sea of unexamined assumptions about what is and isn’t modern-day Judaism. It was as if I were looking upon two warring linguistic factions who, though they were speaking the same language, were using entirely different registers, and responding to entirely different questions. I simply couldn’t accept that such furore was merely a matter of COVID compliance. To me the fundamental premise went deeper – in Adam Yee’s words, it had to be “about other stuff.”
It took some digging to unearth of what exactly that “other stuff” consisted. The only lead I had was the insularity. As it turned out, insularity is both the perimeter and the heart of the issue, the within and without. It means everything, and it means nothing. My early mistake was believing that those two things couldn’t coexist. I was soon to be corrected.
Melbourne Jews like to imagine that what they’ve erected is of the same nature as what you’d find in Chinatown, Roxburgh Park, Little Saigon. As in, it’s a matter of practical demographics. Jews need access to kosher butchers, to a mikveh (ritual bath), to schools and shuls in more or less close proximity. Then they’ll tell you that there’s also a historical aspect to be considered. Jews have, for generations now, congregated in ghettoes or zones set aside for their inhabitation. Sometimes these areas have developed forcibly, other times organically. But it seems to have bred a sort of expectation that Jews will surround themselves with other Jews, even if they feel no qualms driving to shul on Friday night nor disregarding kashrut. “Ultimately, Jewish life revolves around the community,” says Rabbi Gabi Kaltmann of ARK Centre, an Orthodox congregation in Hawthorn East.
This revolving around the community begins young. Youth movements, usually joined somewhere from the age of 9 to 12, are a critical structure in the Jewish cell, one of the true powerhouses which help to develop Jewish ideology, strengthen ties to Jewish practice, and institutionalise the division between secular and religious social circles. The spectrum of prominent youth movements in Melbourne is important to note. Allow me to reluctantly indulge in a puerile oversimplification, if only for illustrative purposes: we have Hashomer Hatzair, Habonim Dror, and Netzer on the “left,” Betar and Bnei Akiva on the “right,” and Hineni somewhere in the interstice (though it’s officially aligned with modern Orthodoxy). Worth noting too is that some movements are promoted by certain schools with whom they share an ideological affinity – Netzer with King David, Bnei with Yavneh, Habo with Bialik.
The connection is a significant one, because where the influence of Jewish schooling ends, the youth movements step in as the winged gossamer carrying young Jews from one stage of life to the next. Shnat, the year-long pilgrimage to Israel undertaken by 18-year-old Jews, is often organised through the youth movements themselves. This, so to speak, is where the rubber meets the road, where Jewish bonds are cast in bronze, where the process of adolescent Jewish becoming reaches its glorious peak. It is perhaps for this reason that, though not all Jewish kids join a youth movement, and though I’m told that rates of enrolment are diminishing, you will find across the community spectrum a stubbornly common desire for increased youth movement membership.
This, however, is not the key to the community’s self-referential power. The Melbourne Ghetto, Jewish schooling, shnat – these are all downstream of the other, more meaningful aspect at play, the thing that separates Caulfield and Malvern from Roxburgh Park. It’s the aspect given voice so fearlessly by Samson Hirsch: “the duty of separation, of ethical and spiritual separateness.” I asked a number of rabbis what they thought Hirsch had meant by “separateness.” Yaakov Glasman, of Orthodox congregation St Kilda Shule, waded in with a degree of florid compunction. “When it comes to leading a moral and ethical life,” he said, “the values that inform those decisions should not come from the ever-changing fads and fashions of society, because they really do change very, very quickly. They shouldn’t be a response to the demands and expectations of the secular undercurrents of our society, but rather, they should come from within, from our own internal framework.”
Rabbi Ettlinger ventured in another direction, highlighting the importance of distinguishing ethics and spirituality. “I think that’s the essence of who we are as Jews, and our ethics.” By that, she was referring to an aphorism by Hillel the Elder, a sage from the first-century BCE: “In a place where humanity lacks, strive to be human.” Kim continued: “And if our spirituality and our Jewishness gets in the way of our humanitarian drive and our humaneness, I think yes, we need to separate our ethics from our spirituality. Because our drive and our striving to be ethical people is more important than how we practice as Jews.”
This highlights, in rather loquacious fashion, the different hermeneutic and halakhic approaches which undergird the denominational divisions within modern Judaism. Where on one hand we witness an emphasis placed on the eternal and unchanging Torah as a governance, the other hand holds fast to the principal of canonical guidance without the need for prohibitive rules. In other words, a question of integration, of secular influence, of “fads and fashions.” A question which has proved a powerful and in some cases intractable wedge between congregations.
And yet, what transcends such divisions is precisely that element of Jewish centrality, the same element which demands the kinds of philosophical choices that cause the divisions in the first place. No matter the sect, Jews feel wedded to their Jewishness, and grip tight to it. They ensure to interact with other Jews, largely by ensuring to live near other Jews. The benefits of such an approach were illuminated in a story which my friend Hugo told me. At the airport, just about to depart on a trip to Bali, his father realised that the rest of the family’s passports were invalid for travel. So he did what any Melbourne Jew would do – he got on the phone to a friend, which in this case took the form of an extremely high-ranking government official who he’d known since their time together at a Jewish high school. After politely requesting extrajudicial assistance, new passports were delivered to the airport within three hours, and the family was on their way to Indonesia in no time. I laughed out loud. Hugo smiled, then said: “That’s why you send your kids to Scopus.”
An insular culture, however, is not without its drawbacks. As I see it, self-referential religious communities necessarily function according to a certain independent logic which, when made to comply with secular regulation, can sometimes chafe. The passport story is one example, a story whose logic is unimaginable to most non-Jews. Another: In 2019, Brooklyn’s Satmar community, a Hasidic sect, made news when slow uptake of a state-mandated measles vaccine led to a serious outbreak. That the Satmar community is notorious for its strict traditions, obedience to rabbinic decree, Yiddish centrality, and shunning of secular interaction made the story somewhat unsurprising. So, too, was it perhaps unsurprising to read of Satmar sects disobeying public health mandates during the pandemic – again, and again, and again.
So it is that the pandemic has brought to the fore the simmering intracommunal tension caused by differing levels of what we might call “integration of secular ideology.” This reached its narrative apotheosis with the non-compliance discourse – made particularly conspicuous by the rather tawdry engagement party, but buttressed by later stories of disobedience amongst the Orthodox over the High Holydays. Adam Yee referred to it as a “lightning rod” moment.
Indeed, after obliquely pulsating beneath Jewish life in Melbourne for so long, the question had finally surfaced: What, exactly, are the limits of Jewish centrality? By no means is this an easy question to answer. But it’s decisive. Entire worldviews, edifices, moral and spiritual frameworks can be based on how one responds to this question, how one navigates its contours.
As I saw it, the key was hiding somewhere in the details. If we accept that all Jews, no matter their denomination, are essentially bound to their community – through school, youth group, shnat, ritual, work, marriage, location – and that pride in being Jewish is a characteristic common to more or less the entire community, then what we have in the case of non-compliant Jews, be they engagement partiers or Yom Kippur worshippers, is that same idea of Jewish centrality extended to its logical conclusion. It’s the “internal framework,” it’s the “duty of separation.” It’s all of a piece. It’s all the same game.
But I kept talking to people; I couldn’t stop. I was burdened with the unshakable impression that there was more to everything. The multivalence of the community demanded my interest, and I fed the beast in turn. The result of which was not only the opening up of a whole host of new avenues, but, with them, doubt about the conclusions I thought I’d reached.
Youth movements, for example, was a subject which seemed to intrude into every conversation, and indeed, what at first appeared to be an open-and-shut case of institutionalised separatism suddenly appeared to me something more ambiguous. People talk about them with a certain august rhetoric, praising them for the way they encourage open dialogue and provide entry into the world of ideas, political and religious, in a purportedly non-doctrinaire fashion. Nat Court, who didn’t formally join a movement and attended Hashomer Hatzair maybe four or five times, spoke about the concept with curious if theoretical affection. “It’s a good space to be able to explore your Judaism in a non-religious way, and to talk about Israel, and to develop your ideology and the way you think.” This, by all indications, has been its style for a long time. Adam Starr, who attended Netzer in the 1980s, told me: “There was a lot of debate of ideology and contemporary issues, and that was all stimulating. And I didn’t feel like it was overly brainwashy.”
But this is where the plot thickens. Some of the more Orthodox Jews I spoke to expressed if not outright disinterest, then a shrewd insouciance about sending their kids to youth movements. It may not have been explicit, but I thought I caught on to an in-group out-group dynamic. An elevated suspicion about the utility of youth movements, a circumspection about the presumptive rhetoric in which they’re discussed. Adam Yee raised the question of Zionism as a specific example. Youth movements, he said, foster “a different kind of connection to Israel. I’m not going to say it’s a lesser kind, but it’s different. For many people, that connection with Israel is like another kind of Judaism. I’m not knocking it. But for those who have a stronger kind of religious connection, then Israel is an amazing country, and it’s where millions and millions of Jews live, and it’s a place where I’ll travel and study – but political Zionism isn’t necessarily a core of identity.”
What he’s identifying is something which requires very little pursuit to understand: that Zionism is the true non-negotiable of youth movement culture. It remains an untouched shibboleth, even while being considered somewhat outré outside of Jewish circles. I have admittedly been shocked at the degree of uniformity around the Israel question amongst so-called progressive Jews. But is it really just another manifestation of the politics-as-identity culture in which contemporary life is mired?
What’s so difficult about the matter of Zionism is the aspect of the felt, the cathartic, the ineffably spiritual which accompanies it. Adam Starr, for one, described to me the “earth-shattering year” he spent in Israel in 1987 – an era when freedom was real freedom, when physical distance from parents meant mental distance from parents, when self-expression wasn’t so self-conscious. Finding himself completely at the mercy of the Holy Land at such an impressionable age was, by all indications, the kind of revelatory experience we get so seldom in life. “It was like a switch went on… I immediately felt this amazing sense of home. A lot of the people kind of looked like me, and there was an energy there that I really related to. It was also really novel for me to feel like I was in the majority, as opposed to in the minority. And I think that’s something that kids who’ve gone to Scopus all their life take for granted.”
This kind of rhetoric is difficult to argue with. The aura of the place, I’m told, is supernaturally potent. Tomi Kalinski, an actor and performer, grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household in St Kilda. After attending Melbourne’s only Yiddish-language kindergarten, Bialystoker Kindergarten at 19 Robe St, her Jewish bonds were, so to speak, already bronze. “I became a Zionist at the age of nine,” she told me. No surprise, then, that her trip to Israel – the first ever shnat hajshara from Australia – was so portentous. “It all made sense in Israel,” she said.
Yes, exactly. It all makes sense in Israel. There’s a reason that, according to medieval poet Judah Halevi, “our heart is always in the East.” It’s because, while the mind vacillates, the heart accedes. And isn’t religion ultimately a question of eschewing the vacillations of the mind, in favour of the accessions of the heart?
One of the last interviews I conduct for this piece is with Simon Starr, brother of the aforementioned Adam. A musician and family friend, I’ve known Simon since I was an infant. Despite seeing Simon only a handful of times since those early days, he and his brother, in some vague way, came to stand as icons of Jewish life in my mind. Of course, when I began writing this piece, I knew I would end up talking to him.
I come prepared with a number of questions, dot-points, possible leads. “Growing up Jewish,” “YM,” “St Leonards,” “shul,” “Shabbat,” “Israel,” “friends,” “Music?,” “Insularity,” “non-compliance,” “Melbourne JCom,” “The ghetto.” I’m on the tram, on my way to meet him in Balaclava, and I’m looking at my notepad, flicking through notes from prior interviews, and I can’t help but feel a certain distance from my own words. I’m distracted, diffuse. I gaze out the window. Malvern passes by in a long, neat shawl of opulence, the great testament to Jewish achievement, Jewish assimilation, Jewish flourishing. But I’m left cold by it.
We meet up and order some Syrian coffee. I ask him first about his youth. About growing up in Burwood with parents who wished to distance themselves from Judaism rather than embrace it. About the “Jew jumping” at St Leonards. About his first trip to Israel. But when he begins answering, I feel heavy, vulnerable, like a pendulum is swinging in my chest. He reaches for the word “home” to elucidate what he felt upon stepping out onto the streets of Israel – the same word his brother used. He describes his estrangement from Australian culture, from the country’s people, from its mode de vie, an estrangement which could only be reconciled once he’d gone abroad. Above all, with a force born unmistakably of the purest kind of love, he speaks about the “soulful connection” he feels with Jewish life, especially in the Holy Land. It’s not just that he felt religious freedom there, nor that he was surrounded by successful and ambitious musicians in a way he never could be in Australia. No; “it’s the way you’re respected,” he tells me.
You’ll notice the paucity of quotes; that’s because I didn’t take my notebook out. I couldn’t. Instead, I’m letting things play as they lay, because beneath what Simon is unearthing, all my questions, preconceptions, academic tendencies – they’re all stripped clean of meaning. Simon tells me that he doesn’t see himself in the Judaism of Melbourne – its materialism, its separateness. Rather, his is a Judaism of another kind; one with its ineffable spiritual aspect intact. It’s almost a humanism. Eschewing the values of success imported from assimilated surrounds, it opts instead for a Jewish success: that is, love for a brother and sister. Love for “your fellow as yourself.” Love for “the stranger who resides with you[,] for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.”
Not a solitary time do I ask Simon about non-compliance, or engagement parties, or duties of separateness. Why should I? In the face of this great illumination, they feel scholastic, superfluous, the sorts of questions you ask to rabbis so they can quote Rashi and Hillel and Kabbalists and Shakespeare, their answers obfuscating, their meanings locked away. All along, I’d had a suspicion that beneath the smoke and noise of the question of non-compliance lay something truer. And with Simon, though I couldn’t know just how true it all was, I was sure that the smoke was beginning to clear.
very insightful read