A Rabbi, a Politician, and a Fitness Fanatic

[Opinion]

A rabbi, a politician, and a fitness fanatic meet a journalist who asks them about Jacob. “What characteristics of Jacob your forefather would you say your people inherit and still possess?” he asks. The Rabbi thinks for a while and plays with a grey hair. After a while he says, “He had kids, many kids, many kids.” The ailing and mumbling politician mentions something to do with mirrors, and after a while it is inferred that he seems to be saying that Jacob was always looking over his shoulder.

The stocky fitness fanatic does not hesitate and can barely wait his turn. Swelling with pride and with a bright red face he says, “Well it is obvious, he did no exercise.”

This is not some bad joke on a neglected website with bad graphics. But this, to me, is the sum total of an article on Stamford Hill entitled “Inside the private world of London’s ultra-Orthodox Jews” in the Telegraph.

I know, Stamford Hill is a hard nut to crack, but surely a journalist should know better than to devote almost an entire article on those who speak time and again “for the community”. Official spokespeople tend to give you none other than the official line, but is that journalism? The easy regurgitation of idealised spin which at best poorly reflects reality?

The first official spokesperson in Mick Brown’s article is one fitness fanatic, a spokesperson for a vigilante group who tackle mostly the “met.” On his way to the interview, Brown haphazardly loses the address and finds himself lost. A woman approaches. “Isaac,” says Brown, “I am looking for Isaac.” First left, then right, number 16.” Mick, of course, goes on to say that everyone knows everyone and everything here. Oh, how cliché. But for a start, throw a stone in Stamford Hill, and the odds are not highly stacked against it falling on an Isaac, so forgive me for treating that story with a degree of suspicion.

If Brown’s recollection of events have any basis in reality, I suggest that the woman in question might have been none other than Mrs Kornbluh.

Yes, it is true that we are a pretty close knit community but keep it real, keep it real. Leave nostalgic simplification to Norman Jewson.

Kornbluh tells Mick just how busy and hard working, how wrapped up in spiritual pursuits we are when not making babies. He describes our very full lives and gives us “Life on the Hill” as described by the head vigilante.

It’s just a pity then that Mick was unsuccessful in his no doubt valiant attempt at obtaining a press pass for entry into a kollel or a shul, where incidentally the scene is not at all “a world apart from the idlers outside the betting shop.”

Had he wandered without announcement into a shul, sporting the said press pass (a kippah) on his head he would have found that coffee, gossip, and tobacco are very much the order of the day. And no, he would not have been set upon by hounds and hoodlums guarding the door.

Have you noticed how Hasidic men all seem to be wearing glasses? Myopia, which Brown conveniently links to “shokeling”, the swaying action Haredim engage in over small print Rashi typeset. No, he says. Nought to do with the fact that we read small print. Nah, that’s an old hat theory. Also nothing to do with the fact that there is greater prevalence of Myopia amongst Ashkenazy males across the board. And that has been proven to be genetic. Chromosome’s 18 and 12 apparently, or so they say.

And crime within the community is rare. Well, perhaps it is, but we simply cannot know one way or the other. There is no reason to believe that there are fewer paedophiles amongst Haredi Jews than there are amongst the general population and Mick mentions the community’s tendency to brush such issues under the carpet. But again the problem is that this argument too is made almost as an aside, keeping the article largely aligned with the officially presented view.

Next stop the one and only Rabbi Pinter, who is apparently respected across the board according to Brown. Too bad Brown does not read Geoffrey Alderman in the JC.

Rabbi Pinter has a Blackberry something Mick thinks is highly unusual, and that he thinks is a measure of the man’s worldliness. Well, granted, the iPhone does not do particularly well in Stamford Hill, but it is safe to assume that there are more Blackberry’s in Haredi Stamford Hill than there are Rabbinate-approved phones. To the extent that Blackberry groups have been mentioned from the pulpit here and there by a preacher-man or two.

Did Mick really visit the Stamford Hill I know?

The Rabbi purports not to know exactly what the X Factor is though, although he pauses (a Pinter pause), before he says that. We know the Rabbi reads the JC, and he must have somehow missed Stacy Solomon mania. But I can assure you Mick, many of Stamford Hill’s men and women, although they might not admit this, know of Cher Lloyd and of Katie Waissel’s nana.

The Rabbi carefully chooses a member of staff, one smiling Mrs. Greenhouse who states that she would rather a son in law who will stay in Torah study all his life. Perfectly stage managed I think, for Rabbi Pinter knows that Mrs. Greenhouse is a dying breed. In fact the vast majority of Stamford Hill parents would not be best pleased if their son in law did not provide for his dependents as expenses mount.

The local press do not deal with complaints since that would contravene the laws of shmiras halashon – ‘guarding the tongue,’ Mick tells us. Pinter maintains that such grievances are aired, however, through the Rabbinate. I am sure Rabbi Pinter would love it were that actually the case, instead of the JC performing that role.

Pinter thinks out of the box, he says so himself. He says that he thinks straight, horizontally, with his head, and that he is highly developed morally, ethically and intellectually. And I heard that the Rabbi who must praise himself has a congregation of one, in this case the congregant being Mick Brown.

Next stop Michoel Posen of Agudas Israel Community Services. Posen is, I must say, honest with Mick, in that although he gives Mick his idealised view, he presents it as just that.

From there on to the former Hackney councillor Joe Lobenstein who gives us his very profound views of cosmic significance.

All in all, Mick devotes little time to the only character, a blogger who writes under the name of “If You Tickle Us,” who seems prepared to have given us a more realistic picture, and instead focuses on picture perfect Shabbat meals where Torah and pious tears are all on the menu.

The reality is, that although most homes have no TV, many do have the Internet, and watch iPlayer. Theo Paphitis is a favourite dragon amongst young Haredi men, and gossip is spread through email and increasingly through Twitter. Charedim do not wear jeans, no, but fashion is universally important and is perhaps more expensive, even if set to our own trends and at our own pace.

The reality is that even though only a fringe attended Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish at the London Jewish Film Festival last year, vastly more will watch it if it is ever widely available on DVD.

Mick devotes few lines to discontent and to closeted slow-but-steady deviation from establishment ideals, yet that is the larger part of the story, and it is the one he has missed almost completely.

It is a pity that whilst Mick saw Tripoli from the eyes of Saif al Islam he did not take the time to see Benghazi through the eyes of its youth. We are not all rude and xenophobic as Christina Patterson would have you believe, but neither are we all perfectly subservient yes-men, prepared to wave the great flag, as  Mick Brown would have you believe.