Asylums of sanity

...Of several minds: John Garvey ASYLUMS OF SANITY LESSONS FOR A DISTRACTED TIME A few weeks AGO some friends and I drove to central Ilhnois's Vmish country There is a woman there who will cook for parties of ten or more You have to reach her by letter, because of the Armsh prohibition of electricity For not too much money we were served a couple of large helpings of ham, chicken (obviously raised by the family, because it was delicious and didn't have the damp cardboard taste of most of the chicken you can buy these days), chicken dressing, fine gravy, mashed potatoes, a wonderful cole slaw, corn, fresh bread and jam, coffee, iced tea, and two kinds of pie Substantial farm food for which you feel obliged to fast if you worry at all about moving from a walk to a waddle, but what was most interesting was the setting We were served in a long room at the side of the house It was suspiciously well-lit, given the fact that no power lines were strung from the road to the house, and then I noticed that the lights on the walls were fueled by gas The kitchen was illuminated in the same way The rest of the rooms had small kerosene lights It turned from light to dark during the time we spent there, and when we drove away we saw that the house looked absolutely dark from the outside, except for the rooms where we had eaten and the food had been cooked A horse and buggy stood outside the house, not because someone thought it picturesque, but because that's the only way — other than foot — that Amish travel who aren't on the way out of their tradition The food was fine, and the drive during autumn was a pretty one, but what I think of most is the young women moving around the kitchen, the young man with the mustache-less beard who helped to serve us, the children, shy but obviously very comfortable and at home, peenng around the legs of their elders at the outsiders through a kitchen door I think of the horse and buggy, the lack of 15 November 1985 631 power lines, the kerosene light What impressed me is nothing romantic, I kept thinking about how hard it must be to live that way By coincidence, I had read at just about that time Lis Harris's good New Yorker articles (recently published as Holy Days, Simon & Shuster, $16 95) about the Lubavitcher Hasidim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews whose life sets them apart not only from other Jews but from the society at large — or I should say sets them apart in some ways and not in others, because their support for the more Orthodox religious parties in Israel and their opposition to those Hasidim who oppose all Zionism show that even those Jews who in many ways resemble the Amish are simply not able to withdraw from what the Amish are able to consider "the world " What impressed me dnving past dark houses with buggies parked in front was how people like the Amish and the Hasids had separated themselves, at the obvious cost of knowing that they had made decisions not only for themselves but for their children They know they have done it They are not, I think, naive about the world they have separated themselves from Maybe some of them are, others certainly are not I don't mean to equate the Amish and Hasids Aside from the obvious fact that the Amish are Christians and the Hasids, Jews, there is the fact that the Amish do not proselytize among non-Amish Christians, whereas the Hasids actively seek to recruit non-Hasidic Jews The Hasids take a fundamentalist view of Scripture (they do not, for example, accept the theory of evolution, prefemng a literal reading of Genesis), but are not suspicious of education, the Amish, on the other hand, educate their children only to the eighth grade Still, they are similar in choosing to live in a way which is radically at odds with the culture that surrounds them Some would argue that this is really not a choice but a function of peer pressure — they are enveloped by their culture and would feel stranger separated from it than they feel within it But it is a choice, because the simple fact is that, peer pressure notwithstanding, many young Amish and Hasids do leave their communities and become assimilated into the surrounding culture It is too easy for us to understand why they make this choice What intngues me more is why so many stay Obviously, in some profound and no doubt complex way they find the lives they have in their communities better than they can imagine life being in the society around them And they may be right A recent review of Lenore J Weitzman's The Divorce Revolution (The Free Press, $ 19 95) in the New York Times Book Review details Weitzman's argument that no-fault divorce laws have actually worked against women and children Weitzman concludes that a woman who devotes herself to the family may be making a serious mistake "The traditional law embodied the partnership concept of marriage by rewarding sharing and mutual investments in the marital community Implicit in the new laws, in contrast, are incentives for investing in , oneself, maintaining one's separate identity, and being self-sufficient The new stress is on individual responsibility for one's future, rather than the partnership assumption of joint or reciprocal responsibilities " I hope it will be obvious that I am not arguing against the assumption that women have every nght to pursue careers of their own, or that the proper place for a woman is the kitchen This is about something much more important than feminism The problem with much of the feminist writing I've seen (here he clears his throat and prepares to deliver himself of a grave generality) is that, even while it opposes some of the worst directions of our culture, it is infected by some of our culture's worst assumptions The individualism Ms Weitzman writes about is one of those assumptions, so is the belief that having a career matters very much, that you are somehow defined by what you do to make money It may be that we are, but that ought to be an occasion for sorrow rather than something we assume to be inarguable and proper Lis Harris, writing about the Hasids, made it clear that the father of one family was impatient with questions about what he did for a living, regarding work as the least important part of his life What mattered was a life obedient to God's law And in the schools for Hasidic children which she observed, the little girls, asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, answered, "A mother " To be expected, maybe, in a society where women are hardly encouraged to pursue careers But the interesting thing is that the little boys answered the same question not by naming some line of work, as boys raised in a secular environment probably would, they said that when they grew up they wanted to be fathers The Amish and Hasids have this going for them granting those things about their culture which perplex and bother us (the place of women in Hasidic society, for example, or the Amish insistence that buttons are ungodly and that wire-borne electricity is morally offensive), they are closer to an essential truth than the culture in which they find themselves living as tolerated aliens They are nght to believe that only one thing matters, and our whole life should be devoted to it, and anything else is a distraction I know people who regard lives of this sort as an escape from "reality" reality being, apparently, the sort of thing we see advertised in magazines, or the determined pursuit of money and power, or the set of things which politicians tell us really matters They also see monasteries as places where "reality" is avoided There is no doubt that reality can be avoided in a monastery, or in a Hasidic household, or on an Amish farmstead But monasteries are something the world could use more of they are sane asylums, places where people are trying not to be distracted from the one necessary thing in the world The lives of the Hasids and the Amish are turned in the same direction Perhaps this is an escape of sorts, but if it is, it is not an avoidance of something more true and real than the Hasids and Amish know (Could Henry Kissinger tell the Lubavitcher rebbe something the rebbe really needs to know'' Could the rebbe tell Kissinger something even more important9) If this is an escape or flight from something, it is like an escape from a bad dream, or like fleeing a burning house JOHN GARVEY Commonweal 632...