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Positivist Rhetoric and Its Functions in Haredi Orthodoxy

Positivist Rhetoric and Its Functions in Haredi Orthodoxy

April 20, 1996
Haredi, or so-called "ultra-Orthodox/ Jewry contends that it is the most strict and therefore the most authentic expression of Jewish Orthodoxy. Its authenticity is insured by the devotion and loyalty of its adherents to its leading sages or gedolim, "great ones." In addition to the requirements of explicit Jewish law, and, on occasion, in spite of those requirements, the Haredi adherent obeys the Daas Torah, or Torah views of his or her gedolim. By viewing Daas Torah as a norm within the Jewish legal order, Haredi Judaism reformulates the Jewish legal order in order to delegitimize those halakhic voices which believe that Jewish law does not require a radical countercultural withdrawal from the condition of modernity. According to Haredi Judaism, the culture which Eastern European Jewry has created to safeguard the Torah must be guarded so that the Torah observance enshrined in that culture is not violated.