If I stopped an average Haredi on the street and asked him the following question, "Is there any value to this world other than what it is as a means of serving God?", after he had recovered from the shock of the encounter with the stranger who had fallen upon him, what would his answer be?
To better understand the question, let me ask you the same question in a sharper way, "Is there intrinsic value to a person's life regardless of what he does with it, whether he uses it to serve God or not?" (When you look at it, you notice that the root of both questions is the same.) The question may sound a little philosophical, but it is worth thinking about, because the answer to these questions is what shapes all of our relationships with the practical world, and has many implications for our private and public lives.
Work as an indication
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A good test of a person's or a public's approach to this fundamental question is their attitude toward work and manual labor. Work is an integral part of a healthy physical life, just like eating and drinking, and it is an expression of the needs of the 'body.' Despite the fact that "all your desires will not be equal to it," is there a legitimate and honorable place for work, because we respect the existence and place of the body, or is the need for work an undesirable and unacceptable thing that is done only when there is no other choice, because we view the body and its needs only as a means to the soul?
The answer that the Haredi way of life gives to this question is, "After the world has served its purpose of bringing me closer to God, there is no value in it and there is no virtue or even a place for engaging in work.".
What characterizes the Israeli ultra-Orthodox public today is a reluctance to "this world." The ideal is to define oneself within the four cubits of Halacha, to gather in the Beit Midrash and not let a single hair out. Did you go to work? You are 'in retrospect.' All the more so if you are studying academic studies and, even more so, if you are a son of a son of a son, even more so if you integrate into Israeli society.
What's more, the Haredi public is largely incapable, even if it were interested, of dealing with the 'outside' (i.e., Israeli culture and humanistic academia), and maintaining its religious character.
Lacks the ability to include the ultra-Orthodox
But one must ask a very basic question about these things. How did this situation come about? What preceded it? Did the aversion to the outside come about from an ideology that says this world has no intrinsic value and its function is only to serve as a means to serve God, or was it the opposite, that the inability to contain the external world gave rise to the ideology that says this world is devoid of intrinsic meaning?
The answer that will be revealed to us is that necessity created the ideology and the rebellious mindset on the Haredi street.
The evidence for this is that the face of religious society did not always look the way the Haredim do today. For centuries, Jews all over the world worked and did not see this as defective or retroactive. In other words, they saw the encounter with life as something that should not be objected to. The turnaround began about two hundred years ago during a period when Jews received legal permission to intervene in general society without being discriminated against, which caused many Jews to leave the religion. During this period, Haredi Judaism developed, which advocates as much objection as possible to the impure outside. Haredi society built a framework that would allow it to maintain the closures it needed to maintain the "world of Torah," and the framework it built for itself is essential to its existence. Indeed, thanks to this path, religious Judaism has been preserved in its purity.
But at the same time, would it be wrong to say that this reserved worldview has created an unhealthy situation in the Haredi street regarding the "necessities that will not be condemned" such as work, or a situation in which someone who is unable to study for a long time continuously and as a result is expelled from the yeshiva framework, does not find a solution to his needs, because in the current Haredi perception, such a situation should not exist?
There are also boarding schools for Torah
So what can and should we do about it? How can we maintain the purity of the world of the Torah along with clarity regarding the meaning of "this world," our responsibility for it, and our partnership in it?
The answer is by engaging in the inner workings of the Torah.
It is difficult for us to accept the legitimacy of our physical reality, of the 'body', because in this world it burdens us with so many difficulties and distances us from God, but the truth is that He is an inseparable part of us, not only in this world but also in the world to come. The interiority of the Torah aligns opinions and provides tools to deal with "this world", thereby solving the problem that created the reservation about it. It allows us to see with an open eye the positive and negative aspects of physicality, and thereby allows us to embrace and connect with good and to separate ourselves from evil.
Especially now, at a time when Haredi society is being pushed to "go out into the world" due to economic hardship, we must delve into the spiritual treasures of our Holy Torah in order to draw from them the strength that will allow us to deal with the world and understand that it is merely screens whose function is to dim the great light.
By truly understanding this, the screens will lose their power to harm. The time has come for the Haredi public to be able to provide clear answers to basic questions such as: Is the Jewish people a collection of individuals, or is the Jewish people more than a private screen? What is its role and obligation as such towards the world? What is the process that the Jewish people has been going through in recent generations and is it a positive or negative process? Etc. From this, not only will we succeed in preserving the character of the Torah world in a healthy spirit, but we will also help to correct and sanctify all of Israeli society and prepare it to be directed to the throne of God in the world.
