How to uphold societal ideals is one of the thorniest issues facing any community — chareidi society included. The vigor of a society depends on the existence of shared ideals. But if those principles are not promoted in the proper way they will be undermined.

First ideals must be advanced in a positive fashion rather than as a cudgel with which to beat others over the head and to assert one’s own superiority. The latter approach only leads to an ever-more-bitterly-divided society. Many years ago my rosh yeshivah told me a joke about two Jews who get together to survey the world. They proceed to divide the world into increasingly finer divisions — e.g. Jews and non-Jews religious and non religious chassidic and litvish. At every stage one side of the divide is dismissed as “stam nothing.” In the end one says to his friend “That leaves only you and me and you are stam nothing. So that leaves only me.” No society thrives when a large percentage of those who self-define as members are made to feel that they are “stam nothing.”

Second it is crucial to remember that every ideal is just that — an ideal. Almost by definition there will be both many individuals who cannot fully meet that elevated level (obviously we are not speaking of normative halachah) and a very large number of different circumstances that have to be reconciled to the ideal. Anyone who has ever had the privilege of being close to gedolei Yisrael has witnessed the nuanced way they balance the ideal versus the specific situation of each individual and family who consults them.

Decades ago a brilliant young baal teshuvah who had come to Ohr Somayach just before completing a graduate degree at Oxford University received a letter from Oxford that he had to return immediately for six weeks or forever forfeit his degree. He went to Rav Shach ztz”l together with his rosh yeshivah and to everyone’s surprise Rav Shach told him to complete the degree. (A few days later he returned to his rosh yeshivah and said “Libi chashka b’Torah” (My heart desires only Torah) and never went back. But Rav Shach wanted the choice to be fully his.)

Similarly during the two-and-a-half years that I was the editor of the English Yated Ne’eman I was still learning two full sedarim in kollel and thus I remained arguably eligible for an army deferment.

Yet when I asked about this with the management of Yated I was told that Rav Shach insisted that anyone earning a salary from the paper register for the army.

What follows from the balance between ideal and reality? That the ideal should not be presented in such a way as to convey the message that anyone who is not in full compliance is chutz l’machaneh outside the camp. Predictions of the dire consequences that will follow from any deviation from the ideal tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. If anyone who deviates in any fashion from the proclaimed ideal is treated as a leper he or she will inevitably feel rejected by the community and the desire to remain part of the community and conform to its standards will diminish accordingly. In such cases the feeling of rejection far more than the initial deviation is often the cause of the subsequent weakening of ties to the community.

In our large families it is rare that every single child fits in perfectly with the standardized education or can live up to every aspect of the societal ideal. Those who most ardently proclaim a certain ideal as an absolute from which no deviation can be tolerated may one day find themselves metaphorically eating their own young. In today’s world chareidi society must draw the wagons in a circle to protect itself from the moral onslaught from the surrounding world. But it is also possible to draw the wagons so tight that the numbers of those squeezed out of the circle is greater than the number of those being protected. The direct correlation between societal demands for absolute conformity and the rate of dropouts has been pointed out by numerous gedolim.

Finally the success of a communal ideal will depend on the purity of those espousing it. The more elevated the ideal the more important that those promoting it are living examples to the highest degree and that their purity of motivation be beyond cavil. The beauty of their ways should itself be an attraction to the ideals they promote.

But if the promoters lack those very qualities they may succeed only in fostering cynicism about the ideal itself. If their behavior fails to adhere fully to the vision they purport to uphold they may end up undermining their very purpose. That is one reason why the media is such an imperfect tool for the promotion of particular ideals. Often writers broadcasters and cartoonists promoting a particular ideal are imperfect embodiments of that paradigm if not outright contradictions. Similarly if a community that adheres to a particular set of values is dependent for support on those who are not exemplars of those values but who must be honored nonetheless the power of the ideal is lessened and a degree of cynicism enters.

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The threat by an obscure Florida pastor named Terry Jones to burn a Koran elicited strong condemnation from the president secretary of state and commander of US forces in Afghanistan. But perhaps the strangest response was that of Justice Stephen Breyer. Featured on ABC’s Good Morning America to promote his new book Justice Breyer was asked by George Stephanopoulos whether the possibility that Muslims in Afghanistan might riot would have implications for Terry Jones’ First Amendment rights to engage in “symbolic speech.” (The Supreme Court long ago ruled that burning the American flag is protected “symbolic speech.”)

Breyer did not directly answer the question. But he responded by citing Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famous dictum: free speech “doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Doing so is prohibited because of the high likelihood that people will be trampled to death in the ensuing panic Breyer explained. And then as befits a former Harvard law professor Breyer asked socratically “And what is the crowded theater today? What is being trampled to death?”

Breyer is a smart man but the comparison between the crowded theater and predictable Moslem violence is singularly stupid. Rushing for the exits upon hearing a “cry” of fire is an instinctive involuntary action. To react with murderous rage to the burning of the Koran half way around the world is an exercise of free choice unless Justice Breyer wants to argue that Moslems are uniquely subhuman and cannot control their rage response.

Unfortunately Breyer’s line of thinking is both typical of current Western thought about Islamists and profoundly dangerous. His approach creates an incentive for Moslems around the world to vent their rage with murder and mayhem whenever their sensitivities are touched — and that is very often indeed. When Westerners show unique deference to Moslem sensibilities out of sheer fear over a possible reaction they convey the message to Moslems that even members of other religions recognize the truth of Islam and will act to shield any discussion of Islam from the free marketplace of ideas. They thereby both encourage more murderous rage and feed the Islamist narrative of Islam spreading around the world under the crescent banner. And as the economists teach us when you “incentivize” certain behavior you get more of it.

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Mrs. Tzila Schneider is perhaps Israel’s most forceful advocate for the potential of the broader chareidi community to draw secular Jews closer to Judaism. When I first met her several years back she was running a program pairing more than 5000 chareidi women with secular study partners. With irresistible force she assured me then that chareidi women have the potential to effect a revolution in Israeli society.

Today she is focused through Kesher Yehudi on establishing chavrusa learning for university students and those in pre-army programs as well as developing programs on how to relate to secular Jews for those not involved professionally in kiruv. (Mishpacha’s Miriam Kosman is one of the leading figures in that effort.)

Mrs. Schneider recently shared with me a story about the chavrusashaft between a young yungerman in Jerusalem and a professed atheist in Haifa.

Over time a real friendship developed between the two. In Elul the yungerman heard a shiur from Rav Moshe Shapira in which Rav Moshe said that if a nonreligious Jew would keep Shabbos for the two Shabbosos prior to Rosh HaShanah it could bring about a geulah (redemption) at the individual level similar to that of all Klal Yisrael keeping two Shabbosos at the national level.

The yungerman became obsessed with the idea of getting his friend to keep the last two Shabbosos of the year but could not figure out how to prevail on him to do so. Finally he came up with an idea: He explained that his sister-in-law was getting older and had not been suggested an appropriate shidduch in a very long time and begged his friend to promise to keep two Shabbosos for her merit.

Eventually the friend agreed. His was so terrified by the thought of his first Shabbos that he spent nearly the entire twenty-four hours in bed.

Afterwards he told the yungerman that he could not possibly repeat that experience. So the latter invited him and four friends to spend the next Shabbos in his teeny one-room apartment (while he and his wife and two young children slept elsewhere.)

When Mrs. Schneider told me this story the point she emphasized was the power of the friendship that had developed in the course of the chavrusa such that an “atheist” agreed to keep two Shabbosos in order to help a friend’s sister-in-law whom he had never met.

And oh yes shortly thereafter the sister-in-law was suggested a shidduch and became a kallah a celebration in which the student from Haifa participated as an honored guest.