The Jewish Israeli Ultra-Orthodox as a Case Study of the Benedict Option?

A note to an on going discussion.

In 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre burst onto the public scene with his famous book After Virtue. I won’t play ranking games, which I sometimes use to entice readers, but suffice it to say, this is an exceptionally good philosophy book – a rare event not just in the 20th century, but in the field of philosophy overall. The book’s general argument is illustrated in the introduction through a vivid analogy: our ability to think through ethical issues – that is, "moral dilemmas" – but more broadly, how we live, what kind of society we want, has been utterly destroyed with the rise of modernity.

Allow me to offer a free interpretation of the analogy MacIntyre dresses his historical argument in: Imagine for a moment that tomorrow, civilization experiences a nuclear catastrophe. Once the radioactive fallout clears, a few survivors stumble upon fragments of our civilization. They begin to develop “science,” but they only have tiny scraps of what once was, and certainly none of the spirit or methods of science. They start arguing: Is E=mc^2 more correct than natural selection? Gradually, different camps form, each convinced of their side’s absolute rightness. Eventually, they tire of the debate and start treating belief in one theory over another as a matter of personal preference.

MacIntyre argues, in broad strokes, that this is what happened to our civilization with the decline of Aristotelian philosophy, leading to our current state, which he terms “emotivism” – a kind of sentimental relativism where moral beliefs are treated like subjective preferences. This leads to the fragmentation of society and disintegration of individuals. Of course, MacIntyre’s argument is more complex, with historical nuances, but this summary suffices for our purposes here.

Toward the end of the book, MacIntyre asks, broadly, “So what do we do?” Of course, identifying a problem and proposing a solution are two different things, and as of his later book Conflicts in Modernity, MacIntyre has only refined the question further, without offering an operative solution – which is fine since that's not really his job. Nonetheless, he concludes After Virtue with the following paragraph:

“It is always dangerous to draw too sharp a parallel between one historical period and another. One of the most misleading of such parallels has been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the period in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. And yet, if my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached a turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.” (paraphrasing)

Fast forward to 2017, when Rod Dreher publishes his book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. In essence, Dreher “heard” MacIntyre’s critique, and like many conservative Christians, decided that the truth was clear to him and proposed a course of action. What is the plan? A strategy known in intellectual history as quietism, or withdrawal. In essence, Dreher’s message is: “You, dear liberals, are corrupt, and you control everything, and we are tired of it. We’re going to withdraw into our own small communities and forget about you.”

One of the fascinating things about Dreher's book is the enormous public debate it sparked among conservatives. Journals like The Imaginative Conservative published dozens of articles debating the merits of the proposal, while liberal outlets conducted anthropological analyses of what these conservatives were thinking. The debate is ongoing.

One particularly intriguing aspect of Dreher’s book is his choice of the American Orthodox Jewish community as a paradigmatic example of healthy religious insulation from the outside world. (Note: he’s referring to Orthodox Jews in America, not necessarily the ultra-Orthodox, and this distinction is important - and definitely not Israeli.) He cites an American rabbi in two significant contexts: (1) Orthodox Jews insist on living close to one another, and (2) Orthodox Jews will do almost anything, including nearing bankruptcy, to ensure their children receive a good Orthodox education. Dreher is interested in this because, for him, the American Orthodox have an extraordinary ability to maintain a committed and demanding religious life across generations, despite the surrounding culture.

While these are important achievements worth discussing, they do not address the problem MacIntyre identified in After Virtue, nor do they come close to solving it. How do I know this? Because in the same year, when MacIntyre delivered his annual lecture at Notre Dame, he was asked about Dreher’s Benedict Option, which was said to have drawn inspiration from MacIntyre’s book. MacIntyre used the opportunity to correct the misunderstanding:

“Let me clarify something. To the extent that what is known as ‘the Benedict Option’ takes any inspiration from me, it is from one sentence I wrote. Apparently, the people promoting it didn’t read any other sentence in the book. In that sentence, I suggest we are waiting for a new St. Benedict. So let me explain what I meant. What is interesting about St. Benedict is that, almost unintentionally, he created a new set of social forms. I mean unintentionally. He founded a monastic order. The thing about this order is that, for it to survive, they had to farm. So we had monks who were also farmers. The interesting thing about monks is they do not reproduce. [Audience laughter] They cannot reproduce. If you only had monks going off into the wilderness to farm, they would disappear quickly. So there had to be non-monks around. And that’s what always happened. The Benedictine community existed in proximity to villages. Sometimes one village, sometimes several. And they had a symbiotic relationship. First, the monks were farmers, so they participated in the kind of economic exchanges that farmers do. Second, from these villages, new monks would be found. So the monks had a significant interest in the education of the surrounding communities. Over time, the monastery became a place that provided education and liturgy. The villages provided new monks, and so on. But what was built there was a type of local community with relative independence from the feudal order. Not completely, but substantially. So this was not about retreating from society into isolation. It was, in fact, about creating a new set of social institutions capable of evolving. A very interesting set of social institutions.” (paraphrasing)

MacIntyre’s point is clear: the solution is not about withdrawing from society, as Dreher suggests, but about engaging with the social order to create new forms of community that can survive and evolve. This engagement is crucial. Simply pulling away into isolated communities doesn’t solve the problem of how to sustain meaningful intellectual and moral lives in a disintegrating world.

MacIntyre’s issue as a thinker begins and perhaps ends with the story of social institutions. In this context, American Orthodox Jews, including the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox), are indeed impressive, but they have no real connection to the problem MacIntyre is addressing. For him, the whole story is that we have lost the fundamental tools to sustain a productive practical life in the face of modernity in general, and specifically capitalist life (a discussion for another time). Our problem is not merely conceptual; it is far more social, a story of the disintegration of the Aristotelian tradition of virtues that MacIntyre argues we desperately need to revive.

This is where the Israeli Haredi Jews come into play as a case study for the so-called "Benedict Option." At first glance, it might seem that the Ultra-Orthodox way of life provides an answer to the collapse of moral and intellectual frameworks that MacIntyre describes. After all, they live in isolated communities, preserving a way of life that resists the corrosive effects of secular, capitalist modernity. They have a strong social fabric, community support, and a clear, shared ethical system. But in truth, the Haredi approach does not resolve the issues MacIntyre raises. Why? Because while the Ultra-Orthodox may preserve a traditional way of life, they do so without creating the new social structures that MacIntyre argues are necessary to counter the disintegration of modern society.

The Ultra-Orthodox have succeeded in maintaining a religious and communal way of life despite the surrounding secular culture, but they have done so by retreating from society, not by engaging with it in a constructive way. They have not developed new institutions that can offer a real alternative to modern capitalist society. Instead, they have created enclaves that survive by insulating themselves as much as possible from the outside world. This is quite different from what MacIntyre imagines when he calls for the creation of new social institutions that can sustain moral and intellectual life in the face of modernity.

To return to MacIntyre’s original analogy, the early Benedictine communities did not isolate themselves entirely from the surrounding society. Rather, they created new forms of social organization that allowed them to survive and thrive in a world dominated by feudal power structures. These communities had a symbiotic relationship with the surrounding villages and provided education, liturgy, and even economic exchanges. The key to their success was not withdrawal from society, but rather the development of independent institutions that could coexist with—and in some cases, challenge—the dominant social order.

MacIntyre’s vision is not about retreating into isolation or creating small, insulated communities. It’s about developing new social practices and institutions that can provide an alternative to the fragmented, emotivist culture of modernity. This is why the Ultra-Orthodox model, while impressive in many ways, does not provide a real answer to the problem MacIntyre describes.

So what do we take away from this? First, that the challenges of modernity cannot be solved by simply withdrawing from the world. The Benedict Option, in its popular form, represents a kind of resignation, a retreat from engagement with the larger society. But MacIntyre’s vision calls for something much more ambitious: the creation of new institutions that can support a moral and intellectual life in a world that no longer provides the necessary frameworks for such a life. The Ultra-Orthodox, impressive as they are in their commitment to tradition, do not offer this kind of solution. What is needed is not withdrawal, but the development of new ways of living and thinking that can withstand the pressures of modernity without retreating from it entirely.

In short, while the Ultra-Orthodox may serve as a fascinating case study in how communities can resist the forces of modernity, they do not offer a model for how to address the deeper problems that MacIntyre identifies. To solve these problems, we will need to look not just to the past, but to the future, and to the creation of new social forms that can sustain a flourishing moral and intellectual life in the face of the challenges of the modern world.