My previous forays into the role of maskilic literature in Judaism in the early 19th century, I hope, will set the stage for what is significant in the new iteration of Jewish satire in the Internet age. While traditional maskilim used the varied genres of the printed word, including serialized journals, parables, short stories, and other popular forms, one popular satiric venue online, Frumsatire.net, takes the form of an Internet blog. In the context of orthodox Jewish religious community standards, an ordinary blog has a special advantage: anonymity. Anonymity ensures that contributors and commenters can maintain a pseudonym that is different than Facebook, for the most part, where “true identities” are the norm. Facebook has already been the subject of orthodox filtering, to an extent, as the recent controversy surrounding the (likely now defunct) tznius version of Facebook, Flaceglat, separating women and men, can only attest. Many ultra-orthodox have gotten around this Facebook tznius issue by simply having a fake name and profile picture if single, or in some cases, a “married couple” account with both the husband and wife’s face in the picture. Blogging brings anonymity to an even higher level since no profile pics and no actual names are required, and therefore there is no conflict with issues of tznius, nor with being discovered by their frum communities if they continue to live in them. While participants (commentators) in the Frum Satire blog remain anonymous, the blog owner, Heshy Fried, does not. It’s also important to mention that he is not a maskil!
The frum Jewish blog culture of Frum Satire does not replace communal practices, many contributors go to shul and shiur and keeps shabes in real life. A dvar torah is often posted on Frum Satire on Thursday evening or Friday morning by one of the blog’s collaborators and it is not satirically oriented. At the same time, the motto of the website, the “one man’s apikoros is another man’s Talmud chochim” suggests at the outset that what this blog is not promoting an ordinary frumness as it is practiced in ultra-orthodox communities but a seeks to cast a critical eye toward religious authority from the inside of religious education and community. A series on “Yeshiva memories” exposes the tawdry realities of youthful male culture existing in named Jewish educational institutions. Since the leaders of ultra-orthodox communities, such as a rosh yeshiva have the ability to ban people and the social pressure of the community can effectively rob a family’s attempt to make a shidduch between their children and others of the community, the anonymity of the internet is likely the only venue for the ultra-orthodox to openly criticize religious community practices. A strong distinction is drawn between a negative image of community behavior of the born frum in Hassidic and ultra-orthodox centers such as Boro Park, Crown Heights or Monsey for example and the commitment of those wishing to be more religious, whether as baal teshuvas or converts. For this reason, one of the rallying cries of the Frum Satire blog is a greater tolerance and acceptance of converts. (This was never an interest in the maskilic world since conversion to Judaism was a nearly unheard of event in Europe of the 19th century.) While the characterization of frum social behavior is deemed insular by the Frum Satire community, the tenor of the satire community is not to throw out the entire system, but rather to improve the community’s flexibility, openness and scholarly knowledge. When certain blog commenters challenged the hashkafah of the blog as “not frum” or posing as frum just to pillory the frum community, a blog post by Heshy Fried entitled “Top 10 Ways Frum Satire Blog Makes Me More Frum” appeared along with letters to the editor from individuals undergoing conversion to orthodox Judaism who expressed that Frum Satire blog had made it possible for them to imagine a more varied orthodox community than the ones they entered during their conversion. This in turn, made them more frum, or religiously observant, the post claimed. This satiric reversal of the ultra-orthodox prejudice of the Internet as the gateway drug towards modern thinking is typical of the effective resolution of the community critique on the Frum Satire blog. Under the auspices of Frum Satire, a greater variety of hashkafas exist than in the real world frum community. Among those on Frum Satire who one can be for example, as one subgroup of participants declare “on the derech but off the beaten path,” others are “flexidox” “frum and flipping” or “modern unorthodox machmir,” all ironic reversals of actual religious outlooks that define people in the frum community. That is, the satire of frum satire is apparently not meant to undermine the idea of observance or piety (the actual original meaning of frum in Yiddish) but rather to open up the paths to that piety, and the varieties of that experience by allowing for greater openness toward difference. Like its maskilic predecessors, Frum Satire is deeply skeptical toward rabbinic courts and their authority as deciders of community standards. For example, it casts as hysterical the rabbinic bans and chumras (or stringencies, ostensibly in order to “build a fence around the Torah” in the logic of the frum community) governing questions of whether, for example, there are microscopic particles of bugs in the New York City municipal water supply that need to be filtered, whether there are too many unmarried frum women aka. a “shidduch crisis,” or whether or not the hair that is used to make ultra-orthodox sheitels (the wig used by married women as a head covering for the purpose of modesty) is the product of a non-Jewish ritual act of cleansing in India, making that hair treif. A common bête noir is the ongoing stringency in the frum community whether clothing, texting, chatting, smoking, or other common practices frum Jews pretend not to do are assur activities. Other contributors of the Frum Satire blog will defend its author Heshy Fried by reminding readers that he was never pretending to be frum in the sense of a Hassidic sect, still his level of practice is higher than most of the more frum readers, an observation that drives a wedge between those living as insiders in the ultra-orthodox community who are orthoprax, or observant with an emphasis on following the rules, or shomer mitzvos without much kavanah, or “direction of the heart” and “intention,” as opposed to the blog’s author Heshy Fried, who, along with many of his readers, bend some rules and spend time online discussing and negotiating which rules have becorme obsolete or worthy of ridicule, all while continuing to hold by the basic aspects of Jewish orthodox daily life. Like the maskilim, contributors of Frum Satire enjoy satirizing irrational behaviors in the ultra-orthodox community. The idea of having Jewish apikorsim, a function of rabbinical decree, much less becoming one, is used as a frequent rhetorical device on the blog but is largely discredited by its contributors for being an excessive reach of rabbinical authority. Indeed, the participants’ relative anonymity and their ability to conduct another life online from that which they represent in their communities renders them somewhat impervious to this community charge of apikoros or being banned. While the subtext of Frum Satire is the demand for reform in the orthodox Jewish community, like the maskilim of the 19th century, it is by no means a call for an abandonment of Judaism or Jewish identity, nor an orientation toward secularization. What distinguishes Frum Satire’s contributors from their maskilic satiric predecessors is their openness toward more mystical aspects of Judaism – many Frum Satire readers are Hassidic in orientation, most of them Lubavitch (Chabad), but there are also other sects represented. The Chabad success as a kiruv organization that at least on some level is in dialogue with the outside world, and though not modern, is nevertheless “with it” enough that it gains respect in the Frum Satire community. Members of the Satmar Hassidim are the least represented, and it is perhaps then no surprise that the Satmars are often a target of Frum Satire’s polemics, for the very reason that they have been the strongest to resist the internet among ultra-orthodox in the United States. They are known for speaking Yiddish and not being able to speak English in the United States where they live which limits their participation in American civil life, which is an attribute valued by the Frum Satire blog. Finally, the Satmar community is known as the most hostile toward secular education, the internet which is banned without a rabbinically approved filter, they are the most strict about laws of tznius, and the most oppositional toward the independence of women (a much cited example of which is the Satmar ban on women driving automobiles in their upstate New York enclave, Kiryas Joel). And herein lie a few additional differences between the ideology of the maskilim and that of Frum Satire: although the demand for reform within the Jewish community follows along similar lines as that of the maskils, Frum Satire makes a particular focus on the role of women, who are active participants in Frum Satire (unlike the maskilic community which was entirely composed of men). Issues of the role of the shadchan, shidduch profiling and sexual abstinence before marriage (the idea of the tefillin date), the laws of shomer negiah (hilariously parodied by Heshy Fried in his posts on “Shomer Negiah Loopholes”), and the extreme separation of the genders in ultra-orthodoxy beginning in late 20th century are all points of Frum Satire’s attack. Ironically, it is the partial reform of Orthodoxy with respect to the education of women in beis yakov schools and yeshivas that have allowed frum women to become active participants in a satire of the frum world, because only since the 20th century have women had even partial access to traditional Jewish knowledge. Secondly, Frum Satire is written in English, and this limits the audience of Frum Satire somewhat to those ultra-orthodox and Hasidim who have had enough secular education to read and write in English well. A working knowledge of Yeshivish English (fast speech punctuated by references to fragments of liturgy and interpretation, responsa literature and Torah, including frequent phrases in Hebrew and Yiddish) is absolutely necessary to follow the blog, though a glossary does exists, which also includes concepts Fried and other contributors coined. The subversive language in Frum Satire is in English, and never in loshon koydesh or Yiddish. One might add too that the existence of modern Israel and its Modern Hebrew literature makes the topography of language politics very different in Frum Satire as it has more generally in the frum world.
However I want to stress in conclusion that what binds Frum Satire and maskilic writing of the 19th century is the profound flexibility within Judaism and Jewish identity of the genre and attitude of satire itself, whether the medium is new or old: its liminality allows it to endure where other written forms do not, it offers subtle critique of the frum community through humor which circumvents the Jewish halachich prohibition of lashon hara (or “evil tongue”), and it overcomes sectarian differences, while still promoting change in Jewish religious life without obvious tendentiousness. As with the maskilim, the use of satire in Frum Satire is to make life livable in a traditional community, which furthers the goal of that community’s continuity, and the medium used, whether print or digital, does not determine the message the text seeks to convey. Rather, as Heidi Campbell writes about the encounter between new media and religion: “It is not the medium itself, but its use in relation to the motives and desires of its users and designers which determines if the internet is kosher […].”[1]
[1] Campbell 39.