Bnei Brak Is Not a Failure of Modernity

 https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/bnei-brak-is-not-a-failure-of-modernity/

The usual secular account sees Bnei Brak as a problem: crowded streets, poverty, political bargaining, educational separation, rabbinic authority, non-participation in military service, and a civic structure that seems to draw heavily from a state it does not fully join. Much of this criticism is legitimate. None of it should be dismissed. But criticism becomes shallow when it begins from contempt. Contempt does not analyze. It merely enjoys its own superiority.

The real question is not whether Bnei Brak is admirable or troubling. It is both. The real question is how it became possible, and what price its possibility now asks from everyone else.

 A city that preserves Torah life cannot pretend that preservation has no civic cost. A community cannot indefinitely treat the surrounding state as the military, economic, medical, infrastructural, and fiscal condition of its own protected separation.

That is not antisemitic. It is not anti-religious. It is not secular hatred. It is the minimum honesty required by political life.

But the Haredi fantasy is equally exhausted: the fantasy that a dense Torah society can remain protected while the broader state endlessly absorbs the military danger, economic pressure, and civic obligations that make such protection possible.