Hasidic, Devout, and Mad as Hell About COVID-19

With a few notable exceptions, secular society’s understanding of Hasidim is shaped by the accounts of people who have left it. Popular television shows such as Unorthodox portray the community as oppressive and harsh, filtered through the perspective of those who could not or did not want to subsume their identity into collective religious life. This is not Reuven’s experience. He believes that many people in the outside world are lost and isolated; he loves that his neighbors routinely raise thousands of dollars to pay for poor Hasidic brides’ wedding dresses, and that everyone has the number for the community’s volunteer ambulance corps saved in their phone. “It’s hard to tackle life when you don’t have this kind of safety net,” he said. “This is the type of luxury we grow up with, and some of us don’t even realize how amazing it is.” As joggers in brightly colored leggings and expensive sneakers streamed around us like schools of fish, Reuven knew he stood out in his dark overcoat and hat, his long curly sideburns, called peyos, swinging alongside his blue surgical mask. Even though he disagrees with how his community has handled the coronavirus pandemic, he still feels judgment targeted at him.

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Hasidic rabbis who have made public appearances over the past year or spoken about the pandemic have often been defiant. As the first wave hit in New York City last spring, the Satmar rebbe of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic village roughly 50 miles north of Manhattan, swore he wouldn’t shut down schools. Secular people “have a family of two or three children, with an apartment with a room for TV, a room for videos, entertainment, and when everyone is not going to school they’ll manage at home,” he said. Hasidic children have many siblings and sleep in rooms crowded with cots; if they stayed home from school, they’d be out in the streets around other people anyway. “A goyish head does not understand this,” he said, using the Yiddish version of a Hebrew word that describes non-Jews, which often carries a derogatory connotation. Rabbi Moishe Indig, a representative of the Satmar community of Kiryas Joel, told me that the rebbe had not ignored the pandemic. He insisted that most Hasidic people had followed CDC guidelines during its early stages. People started loosening up only “after two months, when a big percentage of the community had, already, the antibodies,” he said. Reuven is not impressed by this argument. “Even when people continued to die, they continued to claim that there is no need to do anything, because ‘everyone already had it,’” he said. He felt that, after the first weeks of the pandemic, the rabbis didn’t bother to talk directly about COVID-19 and continued with life as usual. If they had said, “‘We believe the virus doesn’t exist,’ or ‘We believe some crazy, crackpot doctor, and we want to do whatever he says,’ you know, that would have been a little bit better,” Reuven said. “That [would have] meant that they thought about it.”

Since he was a teenager, Reuven has hungered for an intellectual life beyond Jewish texts. In private, he “voraciously” consumed books about evolution written by Orthodox rabbis. (“Did I say the word correctly?” he asked, self-conscious about the English he obsessively reads and rarely speaks.) In his world, it’s a liability to become known as an oifgeklerter, or “enlightened person”—a know-it-all, someone who thinks they’re better than everyone else. No one wants to teach the children of an oifgeklerter. No one wants to marry that person’s kids.