Is Orthodox Culture Low- Brow?

Once one gets past Orthodoxy and its environs, it is not always useful to think in terms of degrees of observance and commitment to Torah. Such a perception is essentially Orthocentric and is not the only informative tool for understanding American Jewish life. There are endless categories…some Jews are tall, some short, some thin, some fat, but these are not useful distinctions. One idea that carries some punch is to divide all Jews by degrees of culture. Following the old distinction of Dwight Macdonald that everyone is high-brow, low-brow, or middle-brow, we can use a binary cut. Let’s say every Jew has a commitment either to high culture (high brow) or popular culture (low brow). This distinction cuts across denominational lines since there are more than enough people on each side of the divide all across the Jewish spectrum.

We need three more premises and we might have a small result. The first is that high-brow culture is more valuable than popular culture. It is better to read Shakespeare than People magazine. It is better to listen to Mahler than Kanye West and so on.

The second is that one cannot be high-brow without a serious and life long commitment to high culture. A young person who goes to college and takes a survey course in the history of philosophy, where Monday it’s Aristotle, Tuesday it’s Aquinas, and by Friday we’re up to Descartes, is receiving a pop culture version of a high-brow subject. Reading “Wittgenstein for Dummies” is dumb and not a serious study of the philosopher. So, to be a maven in some area of high culture takes lots of time…years of reading, looking, thinking, and studying. If you take a child to a museum, even if it’s done once every year, it’s very nice but the kid is far from being knowledgeable in art. If you want to understand art, you have to start looking and reading when you’re young and never stop. Similar comments apply to music and all the rest.

My third premise is that Orthodox Jews spend half the year serving God and living the Orthodox life. I’ll count the exact number of days tomorrow. Assuming this is true and assuming people have to make a living, raise families, etc., etc., there isn’t a lot of time left over to cultivate high culture. Some Orthodox people do, most don’t. Liberal Jews have an extra half a year and have internalized, in a big way, the importance of culture and the arts in a good life. The expression is “culture vultures.” Liberal vultures have more time and more energy to run after culture than Orthodox vultures and would-be vultures. In addition, the Orthodox Rabbinate either condemns non-religious culture and the arts, is lukewarm, or ambivalent, each rabbi, according to his degree of alienation from secular life. I’ve already had the opportunity to discuss the Torah, Torah, Torah ideology of the Orthodox Rabbinate.

Adding it all up, I think it’s fair to say that apples for apples, liberal Jews, as a group, are much more involved in high culture than Orthodox Jews, both historically over the last two hundred years and even today. Certainly in the future this will be true because of the charedization of Orthodox life.

The flipside of this phenomenon is that Torah study itself is a high culture of the first order. In fact, there is no other literary tradition in the world quite like it in terms of antiquity, development, ingenuity, depth, and much else. We all know, however, that not every Orthodox Jew is seriously involved in the study of Torah. For each person who devotes his life to the holy books, there are many who pay lip service but do little. This latter group, I want to suggest, generally consume popular culture…movies, television, magazines, blogs and so forth, or nothing at all…work, money, and family. The Orthodox lifestyle prevents most from having the energy, time, or interest to pursue high cultural pursuits. There aren’t many artists, serious musicians, poets, and literati in Orthodoxy. Nor are there many chassidim of literature, philosophy, social science, humanities, and the arts.

Offsetting the generally low brow tastes of most of Orthodoxy, it must be said that Orthodoxy as a whole is a high culture, where culture is now being used in the very broad sense of total way of life. The way of eating, dressing, conducting oneself in private and public are all governed by traditions that have the net effect of elevating the entire community into a more formal,refined and noble life. All this can be true and consistent with an Orthodox public that is uninterested in the arts, humanities and even science.

Orthodox Jews are quick to say that liberal Jews miss out on the beauty of Jewish life, the community, the holidays, and the wonders of Torah. They are more reluctant to acknowledge that they are missing anything of value in the secular world, but they are.