When periodically a news story highlights a frum community member’s unsavory business practices or other misdeeds implying — subtly or otherwise — a critique of the broader community the reflexive reaction is often to point to the network of chesed of volunteerism of mutual concern and support that is interwoven into the very fabric of religious Jewish life. There truly is an astonishing abundance of good works in all segments of the Torah community and these are most often accompanied by a degree of selflessness and a lack of any expectation of acclaim that is profoundly inspiring.
But referencing this cornucopia of giving isn’t necessarily the most potent way to counter a biased narrative about us. That’s not because it isn’t true or worthy of noting at every turn —it surely is — but because when one has a limited opportunity to make a point it’s preferable to lead with something that is both unassailable and unique.
The continuous giving that marks religious Jewish society is sometimes downplayed as being of an inwardly directed only-Orthodox-recipients-need-apply sort which is partially true —though surely not entirely. It’s also precisely as it should be in ethical terms. One should help those closest to him first just as the halachah dictates and Heaven only knows there’s more than enough neediness in the Orthodox community to keep doers of chesed and tzedakah busy for a very long time.
It also happens to be a natural human impulse to prioritize helping one’s kin and community and one can see this manifest in places where familial and communal bonds remain strong like Middle America. It’s ironic that many moderns send their charity money to help poor children in Asia and the like fancying themselves morally superior for doing so when this is due in part to the fact that 21st-century urban life has left them bereft of the traditional ties to family and community.
Still pointing to the profusion of tzedakah v’chesed in our midst rings somewhat hollow in response to charges that we are plagued for example by endemic financial corruption. Given what we know about human nature those two are sadly not altogether mutually exclusive. Dare I say it’s conceivable for there to even be a symbiosis of sorts between them when an individual uses generous charity pledges to “buy” HaKadosh Baruch Hu’s forbearance of shady business dealings?
But there is an aspect of the Orthodox world that is indeed both an incontrovertible and strikingly unique reality yet goes sorely underreported if at all. Media outlets seeing no salacious angle aren’t particularly keen to cover it and the Orthodox for all their supposed triumphalism see no reason to trumpet it to the world. I refer to the matter of moral seriousness.
What I mean with that phrase is the extent to which ethical issues — development of positive character traits our obligations to fellow man striving for ethical excellence — are matters of individual and communal concern on a consistent and ongoing basis. The case I make here is not for the existence of some utopian society of angels in human form; to the contrary Chazal teach that lo nitnah Torah l’malachei hashareis; it is flawed humans who desperately need Torah not angelic beings On High. And we indeed have our work cut out for us.
But are ethical terms and concepts a part of the lexicon of old and very young alike? Are our moral obligations regarding proper speech other people’s money helping the poor the sick the elderly the stuff of everyday conversation at home in shul at school? Is there a sustained educational focus through lectures classes and production and consumption of a wide spectrum of material in both written and spoken form on bettering our conduct in interpersonal relationships and business?  

STRAPPED I apologize to those for whom no talk of phylactery isn’t satisfactory but I won’t be featuring here an extended discussion of women and tefillin neither Rashi’s nor Rabbeinu Tam’s.
To paraphrase Michael Bloomberg who urged New Yorkers to go shopping after the 9/11 attacks because to stay home in fear would be “letting the terrorists win ” to seriously address the current brouhaha (or some would say just plain ha-ha) would be granting undeserved victory to people like the Forward reporter who breathlessly reported that because high school girls in Manhattan are tying little boxes on their heads and arms “it’s looking increasingly like Orthodoxy is undergoing a schism.”
And although he says it’s “difficult to say when it all began ” our earnest reporter takes a stab at it: “Was the original Bais Yaakov school for girls opened in Poland in 1917 the first breach breaking the traditional ban on giving girls a formalized Torah education?” And so on.
So sorry but I’ll wrap up the discussion right here with one observation: At one of the two schools figuring in the tefillin story over 100 of its self-described “open-minded intellectually honest and unprejudiced” students have submitted a petition demanding that Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi a rabidly anti-Israel former PLO spokesman be invited to speak there.
Here’s what the confluence of these two stories illuminates: The tale of the tefillin isn’t one of a failure of Judaism but of a failure of mussar. At the core of that exalted Jewish discipline is the hard lifelong work of achieving self-awareness through an unsparing examination of the endless wiles of the human subconscious and its effects on our thoughts and actions.
One illustrative anecdote among hundreds: Rav Yisrael Salanter was a riveting speaker to whose drashos Jews would flock in the hundreds. He is said to have remarked “When I enter a shul to speak and the entire assemblage of hundreds rises as one in my honor I am repulsed by the kavod — and if by chance I spy one Jew in the far corner who has remained seated I sense myself getting even more upset.” That is the acute awareness that mussar seeks to achieve.
If I sound like I’m questioning the motives of the tefillin wearers and their fellow travelerettes in the “Orthodox feminist” movement I confess that’s so. Outrageously condescending? Not really and here’s why: What learning a bit of mussar teaches us is that we’re all guilty in various aspects of our lives of acting with blissful ignorance and denial that our true motivations are colored by personal biases and ego and physical drives. The only difference is that most of us don’t necessarily broadcast our psychological cluelessness by making a public spectacle as seekers of nothing more than a “genuine connection to G-d” — or for that matter as “intellectually honest unprejudiced” seekers of dialogue with terrorist sympathizers.
The good news is it’s nothing that membership in an intensive mussar vaad can’t cure.

The answer to all of those questions is an emphatic “yes.” Is it enough? Are we as the kids like to say “there yet”? Not by a long shot. Are we going about our moral education whether in schools or in programs for adults the right way or are there things we should be doing differently? The likely answer is the latter and that’s an important discussion to have.
My purpose here isn’t to discuss the comparable levels of moral seriousness in other segments of society both Jewish and non-Jewish. Everyone can do his own calculus. But I’m familiar with both and to my mind the Torah community’s degree of moral seriousness — the extent to which ethical character and behavior is seen as life’s goal and how to achieve it is squarely on the agenda of individual and community alike — is a singularity.