Everybody has their guesses why TIDE in its pure form didn't spread in America. Certainly, elements of TIDE have prospered. American yeshivot of all but perhaps the Chassidic camps study secular subjects. This has a lot to do with the US government of course. People may not know it but German Orthodox people were key in setting up the frum infrastructure in America. Kashrut, Mikvot, organizations like the Agudah. German Orthodox were key in that. Also, Torah u'Maddah is built largely off of TIDE, even though in many respects it departed from it. Also, R' Hirsch's Torah is all over klal Yisrael: his etymology, looking at mitvot via symbolism, his care to use reason and sound reasonable.
With that same, here are I believe some of the reasons for the struggle of TIDE in America:
The Holocaust. German Orthodoxy in the 19th century and beyond never had big numbers. When R' Hirsch got to Frankfurt, there were 100 frum families. He worked wonders there but still. So when the Holocaust destroyed German Jewry, well, think what that's going to do to TIDE which was taking place mostly in Germany.
Assimilation in Germany. Even without the Holocaust there weren't that many TIDE people. That's why R' Hirsch came up with the whole program - even though he intented it as a l'chatchila approach to Torah life. Emancipation of the Jews in Europe made this possible. So the two went together. Emancipation caused many to go off. Emancipation made TIDE possible.
The Holocaust. People lost faith in Western culture for obvious reasons. The prime example of it, the Germans, sank to the lowest of the low.
The Collapse of Culture in the 20th century. Can you image that there was a time when a book by Charles Dickens was new to the world? I believe that some of his books were serialized in magazines, ie released chapter by chapter. For us Dickens is a throwback. The new books of today are full of filth. It's hard for most people to get excited by old stuff. They want to see new stuff with contemporary imagery and language. In Hirsch's day the world of letters was clean. There was apikorsis in some, but you could easily distinguish by author. Today it's so hard to find a book or movie that's completely clean. There's always a problem. It takes a tremendous amount of work to find the clean stuff if you can find it at all. It is not unfair to say that people often are only as good as they have to be. So you see things like British actress Julie Andrews appearing as a nun and a proper nanny in movies in the early 1960's and in a state of undress in the 1970's. Everybody just lost it when the society in general lost it. Very few can hold up things by themselves. So who can you trust? You really have to go back to the 19th century and that isn't so appealling for most people. They want contemporary material.
The Shift in High Culture. The issue isn't merely schmutz or antinomianism or athieism. It's also cynacism and wounds. Art and literature in the 19th century was romantic, hopeful. By the 20th century it became fractured like the people. Think Hemingway and Picasso. The world wars damaged everybody, damaged innocence and the high culture reflected this. I don't criticize the high culture for this. It was needed to express what became of the world. But it doesn't fit so well with Torah, which is essentially positive. Picasso is useful, but more as an adjunct to Torah thought than Rembrant, which you could more easily integrate. I believe that Rabbi Soloveitchik is helpful here. He talks about despair and dichotomy. I use him to help along my TIDE, to make it fit for contemporary issues. But this isn't so easy to do and most people don't have the patience for it.
The Shift to Populist Culture. The young generation took over much of the creativity market. Rock music became to the 1960s what Mozart was to his day, whenever that was exactly. Problem is that Rock music and other popular art forms made a radical departure from many of the religious values. So you can't know of a really meaninful Who song but it's on an album with all kinds of problematic stuff. This makes it all so complicated. It's not as simple as opening a book of Schiller's poetry anymore.
The American personality. America is an informal country, especially since the 1960s. TIDE requires decorum and discipline. Think of the cliche of German punctuality. It's not a cliche. I once went to the 8:30 Shabbos minyan at KAJ in Monsey (decades ago). I got there 5 minutes early after hearing about German punctuality. But there was nobody there. I thought, I guess that's a myth. Guess what? The clock hit 8:30 and people poured through the door.
The German personality. They are not the friendliest. This has not helped. I know a BT who lived in Washington Heights and said he received all kinds of Shabbos invitations. So I'm not saying they don't do chesed. But they are not outgoing. Maybe that's a better term. To build a movement you need to be outgoing like Chabad. So how'd it work in Frankfurt? If you wanted to be Torah observant, you didn't have so many other choices. Today you do. Also, the choices are more in synch with the American style. Now, if TIDE had been adapted to have an American style, that surely would have helped.
Austritt. R' Hirsch needed to separate from the reform congregations which had taken over Germany. It's understandable. The Wash. Heights community kept this going when it probably didn't make much sense anymore. They even refused to talk to Yeshiva U., which was probably the biggest mistake. George Frankel writes about this in one of his essays. When everything has to be just so and the world changes radically, you can become irrelevant fast.
Immigration. The Eastern Europeans who always outnumbered the modern Germans by about 100 to 1 just took over by sheer numbers.
Zionism. R' Hirsch observed the three oaths from Sanhedrin. It's entirely possible he would have considered them nullified by the Holocaust and the San Remo Conference as did many others. But he passed away long before all that. Meanwhile, Zionism became a huge thing in the Modern Orthodox world which otherwise would have been prime territory for TIDE. So there's a big conflict there. In much of the MO world, Zionism plays too much of a role. It's like the number 1 mitzvah in many places. So it's going to be hard to follow someone whose writings criticized Zionism so much.
But none of that means you can't be TIDE. It just tells you why it faded. You might think it's not a viable derech since you don't see it. But it is viable. There were greats in our era like R' Breuer who practiced it and so can you.
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