Pearls of Wisdom

Should we, as a society, have an obligation to tolerate religious hypocrisy?!

The First Amendment guarantees the “freedom of religion,” but exactly what does that mean? Is it limited to the practice of any religion without interference, or does it guarantee that religious entities have the right to do or say anything they choose under the protective veil of the Constitution?

Let’s look at some blatant examples of religious hypocrisy:

(1)   The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception. Millions of American Catholics use protection, while preaching “abstinence.” One result of this hypocrisy is the escalating numbers of teenage pregnancies. A second result is an increasing world population where natural resources will no longer be sufficient to provide for them, e.g. “Nigeria’s Population is Soaring” (NY Times article, 4/15/12). 

(2)   Priests, Rabbis and Ministers sexually abusing children and then protecting themselves with arcane religious councils withholding the truth.

(3)   Churches, Synagogues and Mosques vociferously supporting certain political candidates and legislation, while accepting a “tax exempt status.” Shouldn’t separation of Church and State prohibit this?

(4)   Political candidates changing their views on topics, e.g abortion, in order to garner votes.

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The most outrageous example of religious hypocrisy may be located right in our own backyard. Introducing the small New York village of Kiryas Joel. 

The village of Kiryas Joel is situated within a 1.1 square mile area. 99% of the villagers are white and predominately Hasidic Jews. 6.2% of the inhabitants speak English in their home; 46% were surveyed as speaking English poorly or not at all. For its size, it has extraordinary population growth. In 1990, there were 7,400 people in Kiryas Joel; in 2000, 13,100, nearly doubling the population. In 2005, the population had expanded to a total of 18,300. According to the 2010 census, Kiryas Joel’s population had exploded to 20,175, for a population growth rate of 53.6% between 2000 and 2010.

Wikipedia (census 2000) states that the median income for a family was slightly over $ 15,000. The per capita income for the village was $4,355. 62.2 percent of the population was below the poverty line. Derived from 2008 census figures, Kiryas Joel has the HIGHEST poverty rate in the nation and the largest percentage of residents receiving food stamps (40% according to American Community Survey). As an interesting aside, a 2011 report in the New York Times stated that despite the town's very high statistical poverty rates, "It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent."

In a quote from Reverberations of a Baby Boom" by Fernanda Santos, The New York Times, August 27, 2006, the reasons for the extraordinary growth and poverty is explained as follows: 

There are three religious tenets that drive our growth: our women don't use birth control, they get married young and after they get married, they stay in Kiryas Joel and start a family. Our growth comes simply from the fact that our families have a lot of babies, and we need to build homes to respond to the needs of our community. . . . As each successive generation of women becomes old enough to have children, the number of women of child-bearing age grows exponentially. The number of women who marry each year is the approximate number of new homes needed. 

In a May 23, 2011 article in the Jewish Daily Forward, Noam Neusner writes:

“In April, we learned that the poorest municipality in the country by income is Kiryas Joel, the Satmar Hasidic hamlet in Orange County, New York. To anyone who knows the community, this was no surprise. The families living there are younger, larger and more likely to be led by a full-time student of Torah who is earning a pittance, if anything.

It would appear, to the naked eye, that there is an inverse relationship between observing Torah and amassing wealth.

Clearly this can’t be the case. And yet there are many in the secular Jewish community who deeply resent the ultra-Orthodox precisely because of their grinding poverty. Secularists conclude that this is a poverty of choice: The ultra-Orthodox have more babies, they rarely work outside the yeshiva and they appear to be indifferent to the material needs of their families.

Such poverty is an affront to Jews raised on the stories of our bootstrapping grandparents and great-grandparents. We were brought up to honor and emulate those who labored intensively so that we might live comfortably — and by the by, we gave up much of the religious conventions of the Old World. We cannot deny that the dominant narrative of American Jewish life tilts away from Torah study and ritual and toward material success. Even if we do not institutionally say that, we believe it and value it, because that is, in fact, how most of us live.

 “The ultra-Orthodox are often guilty of the very same logic, but in reverse. They funnel their young men into the rabbinical kollels (talmudic institutes) and their young women into the OB/GYN wards, without regard to their potential talents to do other things and serve God in other ways. I will concede that there is little spiritual sustenance in material goods, but the Torah explicitly praises work and an industrious life beyond study. As if to prove the point, outside the ultra-Orthodox world a great many men and women are actively, rigorously and deeply Jewish while earning a good living doing something other than Torah study.”

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When analyzing the situation, the conclusions are obvious. We have a community that has made a viable decision to live in poverty and on the “public dole.” They have concluded that we, the taxpayers, should support them with our tax dollars because they have no obligation to support themselves. 40% of the population is on food stamps and many are undoubtedly on other welfare programs.

Kiryas Joel is the ultimate insult to our society. Residents do not use birth control by religious choice, and as a result, the population grows exponentially and irresponsibly. Our tax dollars support these “citizens” and all of this is allowed under the guise of “religious freedom!”

So to restate the original question: Should we tolerate religious hypocrisy?!