Weekly Torah Portions, Languages, and Culture Among Israeli Haredim

Recently I overheard a conversation between two of the worshippers in the shtibl (small Hasidic synagogue) where I attend a shiur (religious lesson) on Saturday mornings. "Do you have Bratzlav?" asked one of the men. "No, but I have both Habad and Pinto," replied the other. "I already have Pinto," stated the first, "but I'm still looking for Shas." "No problem," answered the second man, "there are a few left, but the Mizrahi ones were already gone last night." Had these been young boys, one would think that they were trading baseball cards, but these were men in their seventies talking about the various movements' Dapei parshat ha-shavua (Weekly Torah Portion Pages), bringing Torah, stories, news, and politics to the masses.

One of the "make or break" issues in the existence of almost every political and ideological movement or organization is communication: the conduits through which leadership makes its wishes known to the rank and file; the means by which information is disseminated, either officially or unofficially; and the forms by which particular dictates or decisions are brought to the attention of both membership and the public at large.¹ During the past few years, numerous studies have focused on various forms of intergroup communication, particularly within minority groups, examining them from the standpoints of history, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines. A number of them have focused on intergroup communication among minorities in Israel;² however, few have concentrated on official and popular communication forms within Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox (haredi) society in that country.³

This article examines a growing form of popular communication among Orthodox and haredi Jews in Israel: the Dapei parshat ha-shavua distributed to synagogues throughout the country. In the 1980s, a number of religious movements and organizations began printing short pamphlets (or individual, two-sided pages), based in part on the weekly Torah portion. These were distributed to synagogues and made available on Friday nights, initially to those in geographical proximity to that movement's followers and later to a much wider radius. In fact, these Dapim (pages; singular, Daf) as they are known colloquially, are much more than a brief Torah exegesis. Although the lead essays address the weekly Torah portion, other parts address different issues, often political, almost always contemporary.

An examination of a particular movement's Dapei parshat ha-shavua provides a gold mine of political, sociological, cultural, and linguistic information about the group in question.⁴ Furthermore, a broad examination of a particular movement's Dapim over a period of several years can be revealing in charting the group's internal dynamics, whereas a comparative examination of several movement's Dapim during the same period is a fascinating exercise in intra-religious dynamics in the ever-crowded and complex Israeli socioreligious scene.

In this article, I examine haredi language and culture as expressed in the Hebrew language Dapim of three major haredi movements in Israel—Habad (Lubavitch), the Mitnagdim (Lithuanians), and Shas (Sepharadi haredim)—from 1994 to 2001, using them as an indicator of social development and change. I will not be analyzing the development of the haredi world in general, or Israeli haredi society in particular, topics that have been dealt with in depth by a number of scholars.⁵ Nor will I explore the broader topic of mass communication in haredi society, something that has been done elsewhere by sociologists, historians, political scientists, and linguists.⁶ Instead, after briefly explaining the nature of the haredi world and the history of Dapei parshat ha-shavua in general, I will examine the dynamics of Israeli haredi society through a textual analysis of topics such as language, advertisements, gendered texts, and textual omissions. By doing so, I hope to shed light on the various forms of haredi linguistic culture as they developed during the last years of the twentieth century.

Who Are the Haredim?

The term "haredi" literally means "fearful," with the reference being to...