Daniel's been chewing on something since he got back from the States. He had a few conversations with Jewish American relatives about Israel, and he noticed this overlap of concern around the ultra-Orthodox. What he landed on isn't the usual complaint about religious coercion or intolerance. It's more specific. He's looking at the core operating logic of Haredi life — this idea that adult men should, by default, spend their lives studying religious texts in yeshivas, and that this is the highest purpose of existence. And he's asking: does Judaism actually promote that? That learning and debating religious texts is the goal every adult man should aspire toward? Because if you take that to its logical endpoint, you get a society with no bus drivers, no electricians, no doctors. The model is inherently impossible to sustain. And then there's the biblical angle — you read the text at face value, and you see a culture where people knew religious law but also had what we'd call jobs today. So what's going on here?
The short answer is that what Daniel's describing — this all-consuming, lifelong, exclusive study model — is not the historical Jewish norm. It's a radical innovation, and it's about two hundred years old in its current form. Before we get into the theology, let's put a number on what we're talking about. The Haredi population in Israel is roughly one point three million people, about thirteen and a half percent of the country. That's grown from about forty thousand in nineteen forty-eight. The fertility rate is around six and a half children per woman. At current growth rates, the Israel Democracy Institute projects they'll be about sixteen percent of the population by twenty-thirty, and somewhere north of thirty percent by twenty-sixty-five. So the sustainability question Daniel's asking isn't theoretical — it's a demographic freight train.
Thirteen percent of the population that, by design, doesn't participate in the economy or the military in any significant way. The labor force participation rate for Haredi men is about fifty-five percent. For non-Haredi Jewish men it's around eighty-seven. So you've got a thirty-point gap.
And that fifty-five percent number is actually the good news. It's been climbing. In two thousand three it was more like thirty-six percent. So there's been real movement. But the participation that does exist is heavily concentrated in a few sectors — education, religious services, some real estate, some tech. It's not a broad integration into the economy. And the military exemption is the other half of this. Since the founding of the state, there's been an arrangement where full-time yeshiva students get deferments from military service. What started as a few hundred exemptions in the early years is now tens of thousands annually. The High Court ruled in June of twenty twenty-four that the exemption framework was illegal and that the state had to start drafting Haredi men. The government has been scrambling to find a legislative fix ever since, and as of mid-twenty twenty-six it's still not resolved.
So Daniel's looking at this and saying — forget the political fight for a minute, I want to understand the worldview that makes this seem coherent to the people inside it. Because from the outside, it looks like a society that's decided its men will do nothing but study religious texts forever, and someone else will pay for it. And that can't possibly scale.
Right. And that's where the history matters. Let me trace the idea of Torah study as a value in Judaism, because it's real and it's ancient — but it looked nothing like what we see today. The foundational text here is the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot, which says something like "the study of Torah is equal to them all" — meaning it's as important as all the other commandments combined. There's a line from Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai that if a person is plowing and stops to recite the Shema at the proper time, it's as if he's engaged in Torah study. The idea being that study punctuates labor, it organizes the day around sacred time. But nobody in the Mishnah is saying quit your job.
The Shema example is instructive because the person is literally in the middle of plowing. He stops, does the obligation, and that act of stopping is itself the study. The labor doesn't disappear.
And then you get to Maimonides in the twelfth century, and this is where a lot of the modern debate traces back to. Maimonides codified Jewish law in the Mishneh Torah, and he has a section called Hilchot Talmud Torah — the laws of Torah study. He lays out an ideal: a person should work for a living and study Torah in the remaining time. He describes a daily rhythm — work three hours, study nine hours. But here's the part people skip: Maimonides is describing this as the ideal for someone who has already achieved a certain level of scholarship and can sustain that schedule. He's not saying every Jewish male should do this from age eighteen onward. And critically, he also says that someone who decides to devote himself entirely to Torah study and rely on charity is profaning God's name. His words, not mine.
That's a pretty direct hit. Maimonides says living off charity to study full-time is a chillul Hashem. And yet that's exactly the model that's become institutionalized.
The model we see today really crystallizes in early nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. The key figure is the Chatam Sofer, Rabbi Moses Sofer, who was responding to the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — and to the early Reform movement. His famous line was "chadash asur min haTorah" — anything new is forbidden by the Torah. He wasn't just making a legal ruling. He was drawing a battle line. And part of that battle line was elevating full-time Torah study as the ultimate ideal, as a bulwark against secularization. Then the Volozhin Yeshiva, founded in eighteen-oh-three by Rabbi Chaim Volozhin, becomes the prototype for the modern yeshiva — an institution where young men go to study full-time, supported by community donations. That model spreads through Lithuania and Eastern Europe, and it's the direct ancestor of what we see in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem today.
So we go from a world where study punctuates labor, to Maimonides saying the ideal is work plus study and charity-study is disgraceful, to the nineteenth century where a new model emerges as a defensive reaction against modernity. And that model gets transplanted to Israel after the Holocaust, where it scales from a few hundred students to a hundred and fifty thousand.
And the Holocaust is the other piece of this that you can't skip. The Haredi leadership that survived and came to Israel saw themselves as rebuilding a world that had been destroyed. There was a conscious project to reconstruct the yeshiva system at a scale that had never existed before, as a kind of living memorial and also as a demographic strategy. The thinking was: we nearly went extinct, we need numbers, and we need institutions that will produce the next generation of scholars and leaders. The state of Israel, in its early years, was mostly secular but saw value in preserving a remnant of the old yeshiva world. David Ben-Gurion agreed to the initial exemption of four hundred yeshiva students in nineteen forty-eight. He reportedly thought it was a symbolic gesture that would fade. It didn't fade.
Four hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand. That's the scaling problem in one sentence. And it's not just the numbers — it's that the ideological justification hardened over time. The original exemption was framed as preserving a scholarly elite. Now the expectation is that every Haredi male belongs in a yeshiva or kollel indefinitely. It went from elite to universal.
And this is where Daniel's question about "what's the point of the learning" gets really interesting. Because the learning in a yeshiva isn't like a university seminar. The method is called havruta — paired study, where two students read a passage of Talmud and its commentaries and argue about it, often quite loudly. The goal isn't to finish the text or to acquire information. The goal is the process itself. The Talmudic method is deliberately dialectical — you're tracing arguments across centuries, comparing the opinions of rabbis who lived hundreds of years apart, finding contradictions and resolving them. The act of wrestling with the text is understood as a form of worship. It's not learning about God. It's learning with God, in a sense.
So the frame shift is: this isn't education in the sense of acquiring knowledge that you then apply. It's a spiritual practice whose content happens to be legal texts. The text is the medium, not the message.
And that's why the question "what are you learning for" doesn't land the same way inside the system. From inside, the learning is intrinsically valuable. It's not preparation for something else. It is the something else. There's a concept called "Torah lishmah" — Torah for its own sake. And the Haredi world has taken that concept and built an entire social structure around it.
Which brings us to the problem Daniel's really poking at. If you universalize Torah lishmah — if every man is supposed to do this forever — then who drives the bus? And the answer the Haredi system gives, historically, has been: the women.
Right. The Haredi model is not that nobody works. It's that the men study and the women work. Haredi women have a labor force participation rate of about seventy-eight percent, which is actually higher than the general Israeli female average. They're the breadwinners. They also run the households and raise the children — six and a half of them on average. And they often do this with relatively limited secular education, because the Haredi school system for girls, while it does include some secular subjects, is not designed to produce high-earning professionals. Although that's changing — there's been a significant push in the last decade to get Haredi women into tech and other higher-paying fields.
So the model isn't "nobody works." It's "men don't work, women do everything." Which is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the system's sustainability, because you're asking women to be the entire economic engine of a community with very high fertility, on limited educational foundations, while also running large households. That's a lot of load-bearing walls resting on one demographic.
And the cracks are showing. Poverty rates in the Haredi community are around forty-four percent. About half of Haredi families live below the poverty line. The community is heavily dependent on government transfers — child allowances, income supplements, housing subsidies. The Netanyahu governments, particularly from two thousand nine onward, increased child allowances and yeshiva funding significantly as part of coalition agreements with the Haredi parties. So the model Daniel describes — "the taxpayer is expected to endlessly and unquestionably fund their lifestyle" — that's not a caricature. That's the actual fiscal arrangement.
Let's put a number on that. How much are we talking about?
The total direct government support to yeshivas and kollels is in the range of one point seven billion shekels annually — that's about four hundred fifty million dollars. That doesn't include the child allowances and other welfare transfers that flow disproportionately to large Haredi families. And it doesn't include the indirect costs — the lost tax revenue from men who aren't in the workforce, the lost military manpower. The economic research institute at the Hebrew University has estimated that if current trends continue, the fiscal burden of supporting the Haredi population will become unsustainable sometime in the twenty-thirties. We're not far from that.
So Daniel's intuition that the model is "inherently impossible to sustain" — the economists agree with him. This isn't a values judgment. It's a math problem.
And here's where I want to complicate something Daniel said. He said "the ultra-Orthodox" as if it's a monolith. It's not. There are significant internal divisions. The Hasidic groups — Ger, Belz, Vizhnitz — tend to be more insular, more opposed to secular education and workforce participation. The Lithuanian stream, sometimes called the Litvaks or the Yeshivish world, has historically been more open to certain kinds of secular engagement, though they're still deeply conservative. And then there's the Sephardic Haredi world, centered on the Shas party, which has always had a somewhat different relationship to work and to the state. Shas voters are more likely to be in the workforce, more likely to have served in the military in some capacity. And then there's a growing "modern Haredi" segment — people who maintain Haredi religious observance and community affiliation but pursue higher education and professional careers. They're still a minority, but they're growing.
The modern Haredi thing is interesting because it suggests the model can adapt. But the political leadership has every incentive to resist adaptation. The Haredi parties — United Torah Judaism and Shas — their entire political raison d'être is preserving the yeshiva funding and the draft exemption. If those go away, they lose their reason for existing as political entities.
That's the political economy of it. UTJ and Shas together hold about eighteen to twenty Knesset seats in a typical election. In a sixty-one-seat majority, that's often the difference between a government and no government. So they've been able to extract enormous concessions. And it's not just about the money. It's about autonomy. The Haredi education system is largely independent — it teaches minimal secular subjects, especially for boys. The state funds it but has very little oversight. The result is a population where a significant percentage of men reach adulthood with math and English skills at an elementary school level.
Which makes workforce integration even harder, even for those who want to integrate. You can't just decide at thirty to get a job if you don't have the educational foundation.
There's a program called the Haredi Institutes for Higher Education that's been trying to bridge this gap. They run pre-academic programs that compress twelve years of math and English into about eighteen months, then feed students into degree programs in law, business, computer science. The results have been decent — about three thousand Haredi students graduate per year now. But it's a drop in the bucket relative to the population.
Let me pull us back to Daniel's core theological question. Does Judaism promote the idea that learning and studying religious texts is the goal every adult man should aspire toward? I think the honest answer is: it's complicated, but the mainstream Jewish tradition says no, not as an exclusive, all-consuming activity. The tradition values Torah study enormously. But it also values work. It values family. It values community. The rabbis of the Talmud almost all had jobs. Rabbi Yochanan was a blacksmith. Rabbi Joshua was a charcoal maker. Rabbi Meir was a scribe. Hillel was a woodcutter. The model of the rabbi as a full-time scholar supported by the community is a much later development.
And even in the medieval period, Maimonides — who we already quoted — practiced medicine. He was a physician to the royal court in Egypt. Rashi, the great biblical and Talmudic commentator, was a wine merchant. The idea that Torah study should be the exclusive occupation of adult men is not the historical Jewish position. It's a specific innovation of nineteenth-century Eastern European Orthodoxy that got scaled up in post-Holocaust Israel.
When Daniel says "reading the Bible at face value, one reads about a culture in which people were simultaneously versed in religious law but also people who had what we would call today jobs" — he's right. That's exactly what the text describes. The biblical economy was agricultural, everyone worked, and religious knowledge was integrated into daily life, not separated from it.
There's a verse in Deuteronomy — "you shall gather your grain" — that became a major point of debate in rabbinic literature. Rabbi Yishmael says it means you should gather your grain, meaning work for a living, and study Torah in your remaining time. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai says if you're gathering grain, you'll neglect Torah study entirely. The Talmud itself records this debate and doesn't fully resolve it. But for most of Jewish history, Rabbi Yishmael's position — work and study — was the norm. The Haredi model is essentially Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai's position, universalized.
Rabbi Shimon's position was considered extreme even in its own time. The Talmud says "many tried to follow Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and did not succeed." It was understood as an elite path, not a mass model.
That's really the answer to Daniel's question. Does Judaism promote the idea that full-time study is the goal for every adult man? No. It promotes Torah study as a central value, but within a framework that includes work, family, and community obligation. The Haredi model takes one authentic Jewish value — Torah study — and elevates it to the exclusion of all other values. It's not that they invented the value. It's that they removed all the counterbalancing values.
Which is why it feels so strange from the outside. You're looking at a system that has taken something real and made it totalizing. And totalizing systems tend to break when they hit reality. The reality here is demography plus economics. You can't have thirteen percent of the population opting out of the economy and the military indefinitely, especially when that thirteen percent is growing faster than the rest.
The counterargument from within the Haredi world would be that they're not opting out — they're providing spiritual protection. There's a concept that Torah study literally protects the Jewish people from harm. That the yeshiva students are, in effect, the spiritual equivalent of the army. It's not just a metaphor for them. They believe this. And if you believe that studying Talmud in a yeshiva is what keeps missiles from falling on Tel Aviv, then the economic arguments seem trivial by comparison.
Right. If you accept the premise, the behavior is rational. If Torah study is literally the most important thing anyone can do — more important than military service, more important than economic productivity — then devoting your life to it and expecting the state to fund it is perfectly logical. The problem is the premise is unverifiable and unfalsifiable. You can't prove or disprove that Torah study prevents missile attacks. So there's no way to have an evidence-based conversation about it.
That's what makes the political debate so intractable. The secular and religious-Zionist camps are arguing from a framework of citizenship, reciprocity, economic sustainability. The Haredi leadership is arguing from a framework of cosmic significance. Those frameworks don't intersect. You can't negotiate a compromise between "the economy will collapse" and "the angels are counting our pages of Talmud."
There's a phrase for that. Incommensurable worldviews. You're not disagreeing about facts. You're disagreeing about what counts as a fact.
Yes. And the incommensurability goes both ways. From the Haredi perspective, the secular Israeli who says "just get a job and serve in the army" is asking them to abandon the most meaningful activity in the universe for something trivial. It's not that they're lazy or parasitic in their own self-understanding. They see themselves as the ones doing the real work, and the rest of society as tragically misguided about what matters.
Which brings us to something Daniel said that I want to highlight. He said the counterargument would be that he's mischaracterizing what the ultra-Orthodox actually believe. And I think he's partly right — there's diversity in the community, not everyone is a full-time learner, there's a growing working segment. But I think he's accurately characterising the dominant ideology as expressed through the political leadership and the educational system. The official line, the thing the parties fight for in the Knesset, is that full-time study is the ideal and the state should fund it. That's not a straw man.
No, it's not. The party platforms are explicit about this. UTJ's core demand in every coalition negotiation is more yeshiva funding and maintaining the draft exemption. This is public, documented, non-controversial.
Where does this leave us? Daniel's asking for help understanding what seems like a perplexing and impossible worldview. I think the understanding is: it's a worldview that took one authentic Jewish value, elevated it to exclusivity as a defensive response to modernity, transplanted it to a state that didn't share its premises, and then scaled it demographically to the point where the contradictions are becoming impossible to ignore. The worldview is internally coherent if you accept the premise that Torah study is the supreme cosmic activity. It's perplexing from the outside because most people don't accept that premise, and the people inside the system can't explain why you should accept it in terms you'd find convincing.
The impossibility — Daniel's word — is real. The model can't sustain itself at current growth rates without either massive economic transformation within the community or a fiscal crisis that forces change. The question is whether the change happens gradually, through integration programs and cultural evolution, or abruptly, through a budget crisis or a court ruling that actually gets enforced. My bet is on some combination of both, messily, over the next decade.
The one thing I'd add is that Daniel's framing — "what strikes me as weird" — is actually the right instinct. It is weird. It's weird to build an entire society around the idea that adult men should study religious texts forever while women work and the state pays. The weirdness isn't a failure of understanding. It's an accurate perception that this is a historical anomaly dressed up as eternal tradition.
Hilbert: They're right.
Hilbert: Not about the weirdness. About the math. I did the books for a yeshiva in Bnei Brak for about six months in two thousand and four. Small place, maybe eighty students. The kollel stipends came from three different government ministries and a fourth stream from a nonprofit in Brooklyn that was mostly just a guy with a checkbook. Nobody could tell me what the total was. I added it up and it came to about four thousand two hundred shekels per student per month, which in two thousand four was a decent salary. For sitting in a room arguing about ox goring laws.
How'd you end up doing the books for a yeshiva?
Hilbert: My brother-in-law knew the rosh yeshiva. They needed someone who wouldn't ask questions. I asked questions anyway, which is why it was six months.
Hilbert: The thing nobody says out loud is that a lot of the students weren't actually studying. They were in the building, they were at the table, the book was open. But you walk through at eleven in the morning and half of them are on their phones. This was two thousand four, so it was Nokia phones. Snake. They were playing Snake. I'm not saying that's everyone. I'm saying the system is looser than the official story admits, and the people inside it know that. The rosh yeshiva certainly knew it. He just didn't want it quantified.
That's a version of something the research bears out. The yeshiva and kollel system has a significant dropout rate that's not well tracked. Men who leave the system often don't announce it — they just stop showing up, or they're physically present but mentally checked out. The official enrollment numbers probably overstate actual participation.
Hilbert: The enrollment numbers are what the funding is based on. So there's an incentive to keep them high. I'm not saying fraud. I'm saying nobody's in a hurry to update the head count.
You've got a system where the funding depends on enrollment, the enrollment numbers are soft, and the people inside the system have reasons not to look too closely. That's a recipe for exactly the kind of fiscal drift we're talking about.
Hilbert: Four thousand two hundred shekels a month, twenty years ago. I don't know what the number is now. I don't want to know. I still have the spreadsheet somewhere.
Hilbert: The other thing is the snout. I don't know how they sit in those chairs all day. The chairs are terrible. Little plastic things, no back support. You'd think a system built around sitting would invest in chairs. They don't. I brought my own after the first week and the rosh yeshiva looked at me like I'd wheeled in a throne.
You were the only anteater in a yeshiva with his own office chair.
Hilbert: It was a good chair. I still have it.
I want to circle back to something Daniel said about the Bible describing a culture where people had jobs. The thing that strikes me is that the Haredi model doesn't just depart from the biblical norm. It departs from the rabbinic norm too. The Talmud is full of working rabbis. And yet the Haredi world treats the Talmud as the supreme authority while ignoring what it actually says about work. That's a tension I don't think gets enough attention.
It's a real tension. The Haredi response would be that the Talmud also contains the minority view — Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai's position — and that in times of spiritual emergency, the minority view becomes the norm. The spiritual emergency, in their framing, is modernity itself. Secularism, Zionism, the abandonment of tradition. The full-time study model is the emergency response.
But emergencies are supposed to be temporary. This one's been going for two hundred years.
That's the problem. The emergency became permanent. The temporary measure became the institution. And now you've got a hundred and fifty thousand men in a system that was designed for four hundred, and the original justification doesn't scale.
The misconception we should name, I think, is that the Haredi study model is the authentic, traditional Jewish approach to Torah learning. It's not. It's a specific historical innovation that took one strand of the tradition and made it the whole thing. The traditional Jewish approach — biblical, rabbinic, medieval — integrated study with work. The Haredi model is the exception, not the rule.
The reason that misconception matters is that it lets the Haredi leadership claim they're preserving tradition when they're actually preserving a very recent innovation. The tradition they're defending is about two centuries old in a tradition that spans three millennia. That doesn't make it invalid, but it does mean the claim to authenticity needs to be examined, not just accepted.
Daniel's question — does Judaism promote the idea that learning religious texts is the goal every adult man should aspire toward — the answer is no, it promotes study as a central value within a balanced life that includes work, family, and community. The Haredi model is one interpretation, not the interpretation.
The sustainability question — can this model continue — the answer is also no, at least not at current growth rates and current levels of economic integration. Something will have to change. The only question is whether the change is managed or forced.
We've been at this a while. Herman, anything you want to leave listeners with?
Just that Daniel's instinct — that there's something strange about this, something that doesn't add up — is correct. It's not a failure of understanding on his part. The worldview is internally consistent but built on a premise that most people don't share, and it's running into the hard limits of demography and economics. The next ten years are going to be very interesting.
We'd like to thank our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping this show running. And for the chair story, which I'm going to be thinking about for a while.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps other people find the show.
You can also visit us at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
