Frum people tend to believe naively that the Orthodox Jewish world doesn’t have cults. That’s a goyish thing. There are Christian cults, Buddhist cults. We get people out of cults and bring them home to Judaism. Right?
Yet, we all know that many of those cults are run by Jews, so why can’t there be cults in the OJ world? We see that Jews are fully capable of it. Consider Sol Newton (born Sol Cohen) of the Sullivanians, Andrew Cohen of the EnlightenNext cult, Werner Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg) of EST or Moishe Rosen of Jews for J. These are Jewish cult leaders. Jewish psychotherapist Eugene Landy had musician Brian Wilson in a one-person cult.
What was the Sullivanian cult? Here are excerpts from the article "The Sullivan Institute Was A Psychotherapy Cult Based In New York's West Side That Demonized Nuclear Families" by Jodi Smith.
The Sullivan Institute may not be as notorious as other cults in America, but that doesn't mean its intent or practices were any less sinister. The group emerged in the 1950s with an agenda to demonize the nuclear family, specifically women's roles as mothers. Much like the Grail Movement in Germany blended elements of Christianity with the New Age movement, the Institute's founder, Saul Newton, took pieces of psychotherapy, teachings from Marxism and Communism, and his idea of polygamy to form a uniquely cultish ideology.
Saul Newton's then-wife, Helen Fogarty, led the Institute at the side of her husband, working as a therapist to its members. During these sessions, Fogarty sometimes instructed members to have intercourse with Newton. If a woman expressed her desire to have a child with Fogarty, she made sure the future mother accepted the cult's mandate of including multiple potential fathers in the conception process.
A piece in New York magazine further outlined the strictly enforced intimacy regulations. Ex-members shared stories of being forced to share their beds with new partners on a nightly basis. Married couples were not permitted to live together. Former member Paul Sprecher recalled Newton engaging in relations with a woman for whom he cared deeply, simply out of spite.
... Some of the cult members received instructions as to which jobs they should take in order to make money for the Institute. The leaders levied fines against members who did things like show too much interest in their own children ($10,000). Other times, members received orders disguised as requests to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cult to assist in their "personal growth."
Although members cut off communication with family members outside of the cult, they did receive encouragement to beg for money from them to line the Institute's pockets. Moreover, members worked multiple jobs to assist the growth of the cult and pay for required babysitters and boarding school for children.
You get the point. That's some crazy situation. Cults do that. They normalize craziness. That's part of the appeal, the perversity of the ruling philosophies. When you encounter it, you feel as though you must be landing on some exciting truth. An example of that is the notion that Torah study, by which they mean lomdus on a few select sections of the Gemara, is the only worthy activity in life. Everything else is 'nourishkite.' More on that later.
There's an appeal to the ego in all of this. You feel like a genius, or that you have been let in on genius, for summing up life in one sentence.
Jews are uniquely able to concoct such philosophies. Why is that? It's because we are built to envision a dream that is not obvious. To live your life for an invisible Being, who never speaks to you, and to work towards a promised world that exists in another time and dimension. That takes imagination. We are built with that. Sadly, many of us misapply that ability to create fantasy lives. Some do it totally outside Torah constructs. Some do it within.
Yes, Jews are quite adept at running cults. And Jews who call themselves Orthodox are capable of some terrible behavior. One of the hit men for the mob group Murder, Incorporated was allegedly shomer Shabbos, albeit superficially. Murder Incorporated, which was active between 1929 to 1941, did much of the killing for the Italian Mafia and is responsible for 400 to 1000 contract murders. This Jewish gangster reportedly said, “I ain’t never wacked nobody on Shabbos.” There have been Orthodox Jewish crooks, child molesters, and cult leaders. Of course, they are not true Orthodox Jews, but they wear the garb, do the conspicuous mitzvos, and talk the talk. And there are people born to Jewish mothers who orchestrated the Ukrainian famine and ran the Soviet Gulags and Soviet secret police, killing millions. Jews, like any humans, are capable of some horrific actions. And so it goes that there are cults in the Orthodox Jewish world.
So is the yeshiva world a cult? Like with any disease, you look at the symptoms. Here's the basic list:
Deceptive recruiting
Isolation
Personality Breakdown/Life Control
Programming/brainwashing
Along with all that comes elitism, us vs them mentality, grandiose schemes, banning of questions, idolization of self-appointed leaders, radical life changes, celibacy and sexual manipulation, thought confusion, thought stopping, and financial exploitation.
Even though deceptive recruiting comes first, I'll discuss it last since we first must discuss what the yeshiva world is like before we can consider if we have been recruited deceptively.
Isolation:
I was considering moving to Cleveland. I had a friend there, a yeshiva guy, who along with his wife conveyed to me his attitude that the only option was to live in Cleveland Heights with the yeshiva crowd. Beachwood and Univ. Heights were not options. Why would you live with those people, you know non-hard-care yeshivish people? That was his attitude. I have encountered this attitude about many places including Monsey and Manhattan.
Similarly, a yeshivish Mesivta Rebbe I knew in a NJ town once commented to me critically that I wasn’t in the yeshiva world. I don't know what he was basing this on as out of respect I kept the conversation pretty yeshivish when I was at his house and he otherwise knew nothing about me (as he never asked.) I guess it was that I didn't daven at the local yeshivish shul, although I had tried but found the rabbi so obnoxious that I couldn't take it. His view: true Jews are yeshivish.
Another guy, a RY at RIETS, criticized my checkered blazer (it had dark brown tones) because of what people would think of me. I should add that this guy, like many at RIETS, was raised yeshivish in Brooklyn. Yet, of course, he's a Zionist, so he's yeshivish when he wants to be and Modern when he wants to be. Likewise, I have been talked out of moves to Manhattan, San Francisco, and Los Angeles because they were deemed traife environments as if New York is kosher. Meanwhile. Simcha Wasserman and the Rivnitzer Rebbe! have lived in LA and the UWS of Manhattan has a yeshivish kollel. I'm a BT who grew up eating cheeseburgers. If I'm keeping mitzvos, it's not tragedy if I live in one of those places.
What do all these guys have in common? Answer, they deem the yeshiva world to have the true Judaism. Sure, other groups are observant but are far inferior. This includes the Chassidim. Oh yeah, some of their observance is even superior. But who cares about that? Their learning is inferior (or so it's claimed), and that’s everything. I’m not agreeing with this attitude, just describing it.
You hear this so often. In many BT schools you’ll even get dissuaded openly from being involved in the Chassidic world. I can give you dozens of examples from people I know well, including me.
And certainly, the rest of the world is verboten. It’s all narishkite right? That’s the phrase they use again and again. The yeshiva world isolates you from academia and secular literature and certainly television and movies. I remember one shadchan in Paris going crazy on me because I said that I occasionally went to movies. I tried to explain that they weren’t Hollywood films but films of quality about human existence. That explanation didn’t help. That most of the women I dated went to movies - including the one she set me up with - didn't change her stance. Her position on Paris: "It is the filthiest city in the world." She said it with venom. I saw Paris as a pretty classy place. Historically, it did introduce lots of immodesty to Europe but at this point, it's no worse than any other place. Quite frankly, a 5 minute conversation with this angry woman, daughter of a talmid chocham, was more harmful to my soul than most movies.
They won’t even hear of a friendship with a gentile, even if you are a BT, even a childhood friend. I had a coworker who was kind of a friend. We were friendly at work and got together occasionally. If I described him as a friend to any yeshiva person they made faces. He was very respectful of religion, even encouraging. He was also very helpful to me in my career, giving me lots of free training. Not matter, he's a goy. \
The hatred of gentiles is automatic. I shared an idea with a local rabbi recently. I mentioned Rav Avigdor Millers reading of the Mishnah "There is nothing better for the body than silence." Why the body? You'd think it would say nothing better for human relations. It's the body because you can talk your way into a physical altercation or you can make yourself sick with self-talk. So I said, the Queen of England was famous for care with speech, that in 60 years of public life she never made an offensive comment that anyone can name. No matter what the situation, she kept her cool and her silence. And she lived until 96 in good health. Nice illustration, no? So what did he say to me, this rabbi? He said, "A goy?" He couldn't believe I was saying anything nice about a goy. I guess he doesn't study the Gemara which talks about learning from gentiles who do good.
Even to use a fancy vocabulary word disturbs them. "He persevered," I might say. "It was rather odious," I might say. Use words like that and you'll get that look that says, "What are you, a goy?" Have you ever noticed that many yeshiva people seem to try to sound unsophisticated, even boorish. Somehow, that makes you frummer. They isolate themselves from the English language.
Even within the yeshiva world you are isolated. This yeshiva doesn't approve of that one. They fight all the time. At the famed Ponovitch, they come to blows.
I heard a RY of a NY area yeshiva say at a dinner that the only truth in the world was in the yeshiva. He must have been talking about himself because I can't imagine he thought the bachurim had truth.
Even within the Torah they isolate you. I have a friend who told a yeshiva rabbi that he was reading Shar Yichud of Duties of the Heart. This 'rabbi' yanked the book from his hands and ripped out the chapter. Just ripped it out of the book because the rabbi deemed this student not ready for this. What's the chapter about? It's about God. No, we can't think about that. They skip over aggadatas. They study only a portion of the Gemara, at least in yeshiva.
And then there's their treatment of Rabbis Soloveitchik, Steinsoltz, Shlomo Carlebach, Zevin, Herzog, and even towards the Torah Im Derech Eretz of Rav Hirsch. One RY wrote a book in English that essentially is a screed against the parts of the frum world he doesn't like.
I can give a 100 more examples. And you can give examples too.
Now the rationale for this is that the world is soaked in craziness today. And I don't dispute that. The world is a madhouse. But the world also has cures for some of its madness and there's lots of madness in the frum world too. So perfect isolation isn't necessarily the answer. And the yeshiva world - at least in America - is open to some of the cures, does allow a certain kind of psychotherapy but only from frum therapists who generally barely qualify as therapists. As Rabbi Miller noted, there is a benefit to secular studies but the problem is that we generally take in the garbage too. I think that's true. My biggest gripe about isolation within the yeshiva world is the isolation from other segments of the Torah world and the Torah itself. Now, not everyone does this. Rabbi Miller certainly valued the Chassidim. And there are rabbis at YU who essentially are yeshivish who are open to different kinds of things. So it depends how you define yeshiva world. So I'll say it's the Charedi yeshivah world.
Now many full blown cults tend to lock people in rooms or buildings and yeshiva people do go out into the world. However, other cults lock you in a building during the initial indoctrination and then let you out to earn money for them. The yeshiva world is like this. I spent more than half my income on yeshiva tuition, which was very inflated due to all the kollel people who didn't pay. I was working day and night to give money for Torah, as they say. Isn't that what any cult convinces you to do, give your money to its cause?
Within the yeshiva world there are actually different perspectives and you can pursue them if you can get past the brain washing of whoever is handling you. But then again you are told to listen to your rav, obey your rav. So what does it matter if there are different perspectives. Your rav has his perspective. So I'd say that the verdict on isolation in the Charedi yeshiva world: guilty in many quarters, with some notable exceptions.
Personality Breakdown/Control:
Total life control produces personality breakdown. So do insults by the truckload. I once told a rabbi that I had studied economics in college. He said to me, "Isn't that all nonsense?"
First of all, it isn't all nonsense. And second of all, who would say such a thing to a person? Obviously, I had invested time in this. I saw this same guy 30 years later and the FIRST thing he said to me was that my stomach sure looked big. (Note, he always had a big stomach.) 30 years later and he picked up where he left off, with an insult.
I have been utterly amazed at the boorishness of many yeshiva guys. It's truly shocking. It's not all, but it's so common.
But much worse is all the life control. I'm not talking about halacha. It's more a matter of artificial behavior, controlled speech, conversation that consists of cliches. The black pants and white shirt getup is a bit much. Chassidim do that but they wear long coats and have funky hair. When the yeshiva guys switched over to black and white it didn't come out very well as their hair is all neat and trim and their little suits are dull.
Interests are not allowed. Hobbies? Ah that's bitul Torah. And even the Torah they study is so limited. A chaburah in Midrash at a yeshiva in Brooklyn was shut down for "not being what we study." And it's all done in one way, this Brisker Derech thing, which is a legitimate approach to study. But should it be the only approach? Even most BT schools are based nearly entirely on Gemara lomdus. Every one that I went to was like that.
Even parnassah isn't allowed. They want you to have 10 kids, but won't allow you to apprentice or get some kind of job skills. And the professions people do eventually embark on - out of necessity - are very limited.
Ever noticed how everyone on Shabbos seems to keep the same schedule? You know when the streets are empty and when they are full. You know what clothes they'll be wearing in the different neighborhoods. Everything is so predictable. Why? Because their lives are controlled. Have you looked at a yeshivish shiduch resume lately? Says nothing about the person, just what yeshivas their siblings are in.
A former rabbi of mine told me that "anybody can marry anybody." That's a guy who has no grasp of human psychology. He lives for his dogmas, so everything gets burned under that. Personality doesn't matter when you have dogma.
With BTs you have the added dimension of life change. You change your clothes, name, food, daily schedule, language, activities. Your mind can snap from this. The loneliness and sexual deprivation can also make a person snap. Many have married the wrong person to end the loneliness. But marrying the wrong person won't end your loneliness. It will increase it and make it permanent.
Now hard core cults take this to a ridiculous extent with multi-hour breaking sessions, public humiliation, sleep deprivation, and dishing out confusing logic that is designed to confuse the mind. (Over-complicated shiurim can have this effect.)
The yeshiva world replaces much of that with all day long Gemara study that is not preceded by much in the way of learning how to do it successfully. The Gemara is used to break people with confusion, with a feeling of failure.
Verdict on life control and personality breakdown: largely guilty, particularly when dealing with baalei teshuva.
Programming:
Cults steal your soul by conning you into exchanging your life and yourself for a synthetic ideology. As your thoughts, feelings, instincts, interests, resources, and basic dignity evaporate, you cling more tightly to the ideology and its expositors. This produces an artificial high that one confuses with spirituality. In actuality, it's the sensation of idol worship. You are getting dizzy via the abandonment of your soul. The simple certainties feel like truths, but truths come about through years of study, work, thinking, reflecting, and listening. You don't buy them at a takeout stand. The cult leaders tell you that by obeying them your ego will shrink but actually it expands radically as you cling to them and absorb their massive egos.
Programming usually involves a few simple notions, such as we live for Torah. I just described the contemporary yeshivish outlook on life. They laugh at everything else. It's all narishkite. Nothing else matters. How many times have you heard that? Particularly for the men, interests are irrelevant. Even love is irrelevant. That's all illusion. That's your yetzer hara. This is the programming.
Fear and neurosis are a major part of this. Disease, tragedy - all punishments for not obeying this or that.
And what does it produce? You leave your life behind. You lose a sense of feeling, of your own thoughts, your instincts, your values. Your personality is lost in the shuffle. I know people who married people they didn't even like because a rabbi ordered them to. Why would they listen? They are told over and over to obey their rav. They didn't even know who they were anymore. They were pursuing a vague goal: Torah. And that was re-enforced by lots of fear and phobias, specifically the fear of hell and sickness and poverty for not obeying.
A person can do immoral things in this state of mind. As Rav Soloveitchik noted:
[Many religious people today]"...act like children and experience religion like children. This is why they accept all types of fanaticism and superstition. Sometimes they are even ready to do things that border on the immoral. They lack the experiential component of religion, and simply substitute obscurantism for it....After all, I come from the ghetto. Yet I have never seen so much naïve and uncritical commitment to people and to ideas as I see in America....All extremism, fanaticism and obscurantism come from a lack of security. A person who is secure cannot be an extremist." A Reader's Companion to Ish Ha-Halakhah: Introductory Section, David Shatz, Yeshiva University, Joseph B. Soloveitchik Institute in Wikipedia.org.
Once you leave your mind behind, you'll do whatever you are told. This is what happens in the military and police departments. You have no tools to make decisions about what's right or wrong. You gave your brain away.
Part of the programming of the frum world is to built one's life around getting schar. Most people don't have a clue what that is. It's a kind of currency, of money to most. It's not much different from trying to get rich. And people will do all kinds of things to get rich. Many in the kiruv world are just trying to get schar off of you, that is spiritual money. But of course money isn't spiritual. Schar most likely is companionship with God and you don't get that by being a pig. But that's what many people become for schar. And you can become a pig too if you drop your values.
Now with Torah you do have some protection in that there are normal people around and you can get your hands on books from broadminded and wise people. You just have to watch out for the nutjobs and programmers. Verdict on programming: largely guilty.
Deceptive recruiting:
With FFBs, it's not as much an issue because they are born into it. So, too, are children born into gentile cults. Steven Hassan has videos about that. Once you are in, they brainwash you to keep you there. So what are the deceptions of the frum world?
There are so many points of deception that I could write 50 pages about it. And maybe I'll limit this post to that and make a series of this topic. Otherwise we have a book length post.
1) That you are allowed to think. Like many BTs. I was concerned that independent thinking wasn't allowed in the frum world. You see everyone dressed the same. You hear a lot about rabbis. You hear phrases like 'he ruled' and 'Torah authority.' Even before you come in you hear that. Many baalei teshuvah express concerns that becoming frum means shutting off of their brains. Kiruv people inevitably respond to that concern with words like these from Rabbi Uziel Milevsky of Ohr Somayach:
Christianity demands from its followers blind faith. Logic and reason are viewed as extrinsic to religion, and doubts are undesirable reactions that are to be stifled and purged from the mind of the believer. The approach of Judaism, on the other hand, is one that encourages questions. Faith that is not based on reason is considered fragile and dubious. Blind faith is for fools; the Torah demands that people think, that they attain faith by means of the intellect. One is expected first to examine every aspect of one's belief in God through the lens of reason before taking the final a logical step that is called emnuah. (Rabbi Uziel Milevsky, “Perspectives on the Parsha – Noach.”)
That’s the standard response, that we are not like those Christians. This eases the concern.
Yet, is this what happens in frum society? Is it what happens in yeshivas? What happens is more like this:
He taught his talmidim that most questions beginning with ‘Why?’ (unless they are in the form ‘Why does Rashi or Tosafos say this?’) are more likely than not to be products of the yetzer designed to deflect from a full Torah commitment. In question and answer sessions, he refused to answer as many questions as he was asked. First the questioner had to acknowledge what was really bothering him and how the information sought was relevant to his life.
That's from an article about a man who ran one of the BT schools. Doesn't sound like he was very open to questions. Doesn't sound like what Milevsky promised. How can you "examine every aspect of one's belief in God" if you can't ask why?
In the yeshiva world, they have 1,000 ways of shutting off your brain. Ever heard these phrases: How dare you? You think you know? What do you know? You're a nothing. You think you're Reb Moshe? How dare you question the Chazon Ish? Chutzpah! You think you know better? That's not for you. You are not ready for that? Have you finished Shas? Do you even know one mesechta?
How about this one: we obey the gadolim -- whoever that is. All day long, obey the gadolim. Who are they? Hardly any BT schools take students to see them. They remain mysterious figures who you must obey. And who decides who is a gadol? Your neighbor does that.
How about the relentless question, do you have a rav? And if you name some schmuck down the block, that's acceptable. They just want to see you being controlled by somebody. But is this Torah?
The Charedi world has a shita, my way or the highway. This to me goes against the very grain of what Torah is about. Open up any Gemara, the minute you begin ,מֵאֵימָתַי קוֹרִין אֶת שְׁמַע בָּעֲרָבִין three different opinions, everything has machlochet.... open up a midrash, open up a bereshis rabbah, shemot rabbah, etc. halachic midrash, so many different opinions, and outside of halacha, ....but hashkafa, philosophy, we leave very wide, each one is different, each one sees things differently, times are different, the trumpet is different, that's chinuch. i never in 62 years of teaching try to force my own thinking upon a student.
Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet (https://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/969741/rabbi-dr-aaron-rakeffet-rothkoff/hesped-for-rabbi-adin-steinsaltz/ 29:51 )
I agree with Rakeffet. The Torah does promote questions. But does the yeshiva world do it? For when you become frum, yeshiva people tell you that you have to be yeshivish. So they show the openness of the Torah as bait to get you into the yeshiva world which is not open, for the most part. This is deceptive recruiting.
2) That you can continue with your interests just as before. I have heard this phrased as "whatever you do know, you'll be better at." Machon Yaakov has this in its promotional video. One of the kiruv organizations used to have a campaign on its website that consisted of photos of various very handsome and pretty vaguely Jewish looking people and underneath their names was the suffix ism. So you had Bradism, Susanism, Stephanism. The meaning was that this religion is crafted around you! It's not Judaism. It's Bradism for Brad. The suggestion is that you don't have to change at all.
All of these promises are false promises. Because as soon as the idea that Torah life is obligatory gets into your head all that goes out the window. You hear all day long how you must have a rav and obey this and that. I'm not saying Judaism is all conformity, but to portray it as You-ism or that you can keep doing whatever it is you do now is so deceptive. And these are yeshivish organizations saying this when they fully believe that all free time is supposed to go to learning Torah.
The real Torah consists of Torah and mitzvos. When you first hear about the yoke of Torah, you are concerned. But you hear about all these mitzvos that enrich your life and engage all parts of you in "ways of pleasantness." That's what they tell you. But when you get there, they toss away the mitzvos. The yeshiva world doesn't care much about them. It cares about lomdus. That's where the schar is, right? And your life goes out the window at that point. You have been deceptively recruited.
3) You are promised wonderful communities. Are they really wonderful? They have their merits but most of them are so messed up, constantly at war with one another and within. Likewise the wonderful rabbinic leadership you are promised. You think, a rabbi running my life? You are told, but they are so wise. They know people. Tell me, does your rabbi know you? Does he know anything about you? Does he know anything about life other than cynical digs into it. The guys I have met have been pretty lame, not all of them all the time. But it's a far cry from the what is advertised.
Verdict on deceptive recruiting: largely guilty, particularly with BTs where they are completely guilty.
Verdict on the charedi yeshiva world being a cult: a person certainly can experience it that way.
But here are some alternatives:
Rabbi Soloveitchik and YU
Rav Hirsch and Torah Im Derech Eretz
Chabad
Breslov
Other Chassidic groups
Individuals within the yeshiva world that are better: Rav Frand for example.
True Litvish living, rather than militant neo-Litvishism. The Vilna Gaon was an example of the former.
