The cover-up of abuse is an extreme but pervasive example of the seclusion enforced by faith schools.
There is resistance to the discovery and prosecution of such abuse even the Jewish Chronicle, for which Rocker writes, has reported on a rabbinical council's warning about the "danger" to teachers of legally required training on observing and reporting abuse, and an incident in which an American rabbi who uncovered abuse in Orthodox communities was chased by 200 Haredi men, leaving him fearing for his life.
Orthodox youth's lack of access to adults outside the community can lead to child sexual abuse by family members and religious leaders. Their selective adherence to Sofer's doctrine aggregates power at the top of the traditional patriarchal structure of the community, while disempowering those who are vulnerable. Orthodox groups may espouse rabbi Moses Sofer's doctrine, quoted by Rocker, that "The new is forbidden" but, unlike the Amish of North America, they participate in the modern world of cars, mobile phones and international air travel. And thinkers from all faiths, including great Jewish intellectuals such as Gershom Scholem, have advocated a faith that is proven not by the cloistering practised by the Haredim and other Orthodox sects, but by its robust survival in a multivocal world. In the 17th century John Milton wrote that he could not "praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary". While Rocker states that "the renaissance of the strictly Orthodox poses a wider question: could it be that only the most traditionalist forms of religion possess the inner resolve to withstand the challenge of secularism?", this challenge is not new.
But in stating merely that "Haredim are far warier of secular culture", Rocker glosses over the level of ideological control to which young Orthodox Jews are subjected via a total exclusion from civil society, including an education entirely composed of faith schools from synagogue-administered nursery school to yeshiva or seminary. S imon Rocker, in his article on Haredim (strictly Orthodox) Jews, may be correct to say that they "suffer little defection from their ranks" ( Face to Faith, 7 March).
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