Haredim

Haredim, also described in the narrative as ultra-Orthodox Jews, represent the most visibly traditional pole in Israel’s religious-secular conflict. Their black hats, black coats, long beards, wigs, ritual garments, large families, and strict religious culture mark them as a distinct social world. For Chaim Lerner, however, they are more than a recognizable community. They are the people he most resists and most urgently wants to reach, because his effort to rescue Jewish faith after the Holocaust requires him to confront the theological and political positions he finds most troubling.

Identity and Religious World

Haredi life appears through its clothing, institutions, ritual language, and collective authority. Zehava Lerner jokes that Chaim spends all his time with “black hats,” and imagines him returning home in a fur-lined shtreimel and kapote, never touching a woman again. The joke emphasizes the distance between Chaim’s secular identity and the Haredi world he has begun studying, while also showing that this world has become his “new obsession.” He insists that his interest is research rather than conversion: he wants to persuade Haredim about God, Torah, and Israel.

The narrative places Haredi scholarship in a setting charged with sacred authority. In a chamber beneath the Western Wall, Chaim attends a study circle conducted by an elderly, white-bearded teacher, surrounded by men in dark clothing and large black yarmulkes. The participants include prominent public figures, among them a deputy defense minister, a former finance minister, the director general of the foreign ministry, and the chief executive of Bank Leumi. The gathering therefore joins religious learning to political, governmental, and financial power. Its formal subject is the Zohar, and Chaim explains that the rabbis treat “Who” as one of God’s names, turning a question into a theological statement: God’s name is inseparable from inquiry.

The class is not presented as passive reverence. Readings in Aramaic lead to explanations, questions, jokes, and fierce argument in Hebrew. Chaim’s brief intervention provokes shouted insults and laughter, and he answers in kind, arguing with the energy of a drill sergeant and a yeshiva student before the elderly teacher finally silences the room. Chaim calls the encounter a disputation, or a disagreement for the sake of heaven. Haredi learning thus appears as both an inherited sacred practice and a competitive intellectual arena in which disagreement can itself be a religious form.

Theology, Blame, and the Holocaust

The most consequential Haredi position in the book concerns responsibility for the Holocaust. Chaim explains that Haredim blame secular Zionists for returning from exile before the Messiah and thereby “pushing the fence.” In this interpretation, the Germans become instruments of divine punishment for Jewish impatience. The explanation preserves divine sovereignty, but at the cost of imagining a loving and just God as responsible for a punishment that includes babies being sent to crematoria.

Chaim presents this theology less as a coherent answer than as a form of displaced anger. The true target, he suggests, is the secular Zionist family within Judaism. Haredi condemnation turns the Holocaust into an indictment of Zionism and treats fellow Jews as the immediate cause of catastrophe. The moral problem is intensified by the gap between the scale of the alleged sin and the scale of the punishment: no argument about religious disobedience can adequately explain the murder of innocent children.

The secular Zionist response reverses the accusation. Secular Israelis look at Haredi clothing, ritual objects, long beards, wigs, strollers, and large families, then blame the ultra-Orthodox for failing to embrace Zionism before the Holocaust. According to this counterargument, if Haredim had moved to Palestine and joined the Zionist project, a Jewish state might have existed in the 1930s and the murdered children might have been saved. The two camps therefore accuse one another of having caused the disaster, producing a closed circuit of Jewish blame rather than a shared account of suffering.

This conflict forms the immediate background to Chaim’s “Three Irreconcilable Statements”: God is omnipotent, God is benevolent, and evil exists. If God possesses both the power and the desire to prevent evil, the existence of innocent suffering creates a logical contradiction. Chaim’s proposed solution is that God is not all-powerful. God wants to help but cannot prevent every catastrophe. To Haredi orthodoxy, this is not a minor revision but a direct challenge to the foundations of divine power.

Chaim’s Confrontation with Haredim

Chaim deliberately makes Haredim one of the audiences for his final intellectual project. After publishing his last book, he tells Judah Loeb that he will devote his remaining energy to Haredim and to religious settlers in the West Bank, identifying them as “all the people I hate” and “those who hate me.” The paradox defines his method: hostility is not a reason to avoid engagement but the reason engagement is necessary. He seeks reconciliation with the very groups least likely to accept his theology.

At a gathering of Modern Orthodox rabbis, Chaim praises the rabbis’ work, jokes with them, and recalls Holocaust stories before declaring that God is not all-powerful. The speech empties the hall. A few rabbis applaud politely, while most leave in anger or discomfort. The reaction establishes the limits of Chaim’s attempt to transfer his Holocaust theology into contemporary religious debate: his argument may be intelligible, but its heresy makes it unacceptable to much of the audience.

The encounter also produces an unexpected bridge. Rabbi Kaplowitz, the Haredi teacher from the Western Wall study circle, waits for Chaim after the others have departed, embraces him, kisses him, and offers what Chaim describes as a logical question about the claim that God is not all-powerful. Kaplowitz does not simply endorse Chaim, but his response confirms that Haredi disputation can leave room for intellectual recognition even when agreement is impossible. Chaim’s relationship with him becomes one of the book’s clearest examples of religious argument functioning as fellowship rather than exclusion.

Political Power and Opposition

Haredi theology is inseparable from the political conflicts of the modern Jewish state. Chaim’s opponents accuse him of deriving political prescriptions from Holocaust survival: he argues that Jews must have less power, withdraw from Lebanon, and relinquish control in places such as Hebron, Bethlehem, and Shechem lest Jewish power reproduce Nazi violence. His critics regard this as an obscene heresy and an insult to Israeli soldiers, because it suggests that defensive Jewish power can become morally equivalent to the power of the perpetrators.

In this dispute, Haredi opposition is linked to a broader struggle over who may interpret the Holocaust and what ethical conclusions follow from it. Chaim treats survival as a source of moral responsibility and restraint; his opponents treat survival as proof that Jews must never again surrender military power. The conflict is therefore not simply secular versus religious. It is a contest over authority, historical memory, Jewish vulnerability, and the meaning of sovereignty.

Chaim’s insistence that his politics emerge from theology also explains why Haredim remain central to his work even though he is secular. He believes that God stands at the center of Jewish consciousness and that Judaism cannot be sustained without a covenantal language. His goal is not to restore traditional observance but to create a theological framework capable of explaining God after the Holocaust. Haredim represent the custodians of the tradition he needs to challenge, and the audience whose resistance gives his project its greatest stakes.

Influence and Narrative Significance

The book refuses to make Haredim a single, undifferentiated enemy. Some figures appear as agents of condemnation, while others participate in disciplined study, argument, humor, and unexpected affection. Kaplowitz’s response to Chaim shows that a Haredi scholar can answer heresy with a question rather than immediate expulsion. The group’s internal world consequently contains both rigidity and intellectual vitality.

Haredi influence also extends beyond Chaim’s lifetime. The books Kaplowitz gives to Hannah Loeb, including Returning for the Answer: A Guide to Coming Home for the Young Jew, become important to her spiritual development. Years later, Hannah enters rabbinical school and identifies Kaplowitz’s book as her most important religious influence. She eventually urges audiences to consider Chaim’s theology of a God with infinite love but limited power. The Haredi world that initially unsettles Judah and seems opposed to Chaim thus becomes one channel through which his theological questions continue into the next generation.

The narrative’s treatment of Haredim finally exposes the danger of reducing religious communities to caricature. Their black clothing and uncompromising doctrines make them easy targets for secular disgust, just as their own theology makes secular Zionists easy targets for religious blame. Yet the study circle, the arguments, Kaplowitz’s embrace, and Hannah’s later spiritual path complicate that binary. Haredim embody the tradition’s capacity for exclusion, but also its capacity for inquiry, argument, transmission, and unexpected forms of solidarity.