532 A History of Judaism
theological certainties, may vanish in the face of secular temptations in
those countries, like the United States, where Jews feel able to merge
into the general culture without suffering discrimination, and the most
powerful national identity to emerge from Israel over the next few gen-
erations may be aggressively secular and uninterested in any Jewish
religious heritage. But balancing these demographic changes will be the
extraordinary fecundity of haredi families determined to fulfil the divine
will by adding to the congregation of Israel through breeding, and the
high rate of retention within haredi communities of those who have
known no other way to live their lives.
Even harder to estimate is the attraction of the haredi lifestyle for the
secular and uncommitted, particularly among the young, who will join
the growing ranks of baalei teshuvah, ‘penitents’. The same search for
individual spirituality, particularly since the 1970s, which has spawned
renewal movements within Judaism in the United States, has led many
Jews dissatisfied with the insufficient religiosity of their upbringing to
‘return’ to orthodox religious observance. The phenomenon clearly
owes much to the encouragement of groups like Lubavitch, with their
distinctive messianic zeal, and Aish haTorah (‘Fire of the Torah’), which
uses websites and a whole range of social media as well as campus chap-
lains to attract diaspora students at an impressionable age into an
appreciation of their orthodox religious heritage. The message preached
by Aish from its headquarters, an impressive yeshivah building close to
the Western Wall of the Temple in the Old City in Jerusalem, is not
sophisticated – its Discovery Seminar makes much of Bible codes rem-
iniscent of the most fundamentalist of contemporary American
Christians. The mixture of a New Age search for self- fulfilment and
Lithuanian yeshivah traditions taught by its founder, the American
rabbi Noah Weinberg (who died in 2009), might seem to categorize
Aish as a renewal movement in itself, but that is not how the baalei
teshuvah see themselves: on the contrary, their hope is to be accepted as
full members of whichever orthodox congregation they happen to join.
Their ‘return’ to tradition characteristically starts not with the revela-
tions, miracles and dreams commonly reported by born- again Christians
but, more prosaically, with a change in lifestyle and the adoption of
practices which differentiate them from their past lives, most often
becoming stricter in Sabbath observance and observance of the food
laws. The resultant tension with friends and family may serve to vali-
date the significance of their new commitment. Learning the Talmud, as
a religious act in itself, becomes part of such observance from the start,