As an interesting intellectual challenge, try steelmanning some of the hareidi sociopolitical positions, such as their extreme opposition to the Israeli draft law. And it does need steelmanning - I personally know several very well-thought-out, very smart, very well-meaning, very knowledgeable rabbis who strongly agree with the hareidi positions.

I think that actually if you accept a certain basic worldview, they have a rather strong case. I strongly disagree with that worldview, but that's a diffrent matter.

Let's lay it out:

Axiom 1: Everything happens acording to God's will.

Axiom 2: If we behave righeously, God's will will be favourable.

Example: Again and again in the past, this has happened. "בכל דור ודור עומדים עלינו לכלותינו והקדוש ברוך הוא מצילנו מידם" [Rough translation: "In each and every generation our foes have tried to destroy us, and each time the Holy One Blessed Be He saves us from them.]

Corollary 1: If we are righteous, we can expect this to carry on in the present and the future.

Axiom 3: The most righteous thing to be doing is to be studying the Holy Texts.

Lemma: We need to have as large a number of people as possible studing in yeshiva as their day-to-day occupation.

Proof of the lemma: Follows from Corollary 1 and Axiom 3.

Preposition: "Much as it pains us, we acknowledge that not everyone has it in them to spend all day studying Torah. We don't want to force people who don't want to study in yeshiva to do so (much as it aches the very bottoms of our souls), but at least you can let those who want to do so get on with it, and not waste their time on your secular 'army' nonsense, which has nothing to do with our defense, as our only true defense is God."

Proof of the preposition: The lemma says that we need lots of yeshiva bochers, so let's provide them! If you don't have the proper כונה we cannot effectivly force you to study Torah (even if the hareidim had the political power), but at least we can take the masses of willing hareidi young men and allow the to do their job for the defense of our people, in order to protect what fragment of spiritual defense we still have.

Corollary 2: The state of Israel shouldn't draft the yeshiva bochurs. Doing so removes our only true line of defense, and so is taramount to the genocide of the Jewish people.

If you accept the three axioms, it leads invariably to the Preposition, and so to Corollary 2.

Q.E.D.

it's assur for non-learned people to read them

Can you recommend such things to other people considered learned? (And: is there an important distinction between "assur" and "forbidden"? A little googling suggests that "assur" is less emphatic somehow; is that right?)

apikorsus ... apikores

Yup, inexcusably sloppy of me. Thanks.

Um... were you ever really Modern Orthodox? What about "Baruch Dayan Emes" after someone dies, or the continual affirmation of God after tragedy with kaddish? You, sirrah, have many blind points on this subject. I believe that God gave the Torah. God is not wrong. God created humanity, and He does not have to treat them as thinking beings beyond the dispensation He gave. He destroyed the Egyptian army, as was His right, and yet He STILL mourned and would not let the angels sing, yet He allowed the humans because He understood they could not be expected not to celebrate. You shouldn't talk about things you don't understand, since you clearly haven't learned very much of the Midrash or, for that matter, much about Judaism period.

I'm sorry your experience with religion scarred you. That doesn't give you the right to make broad generalizations.

EDIT: To those who down-voted me, my point is that his fundamental premise is that any "real" question will lead to his answers, i.e. rejection of faith. That's narrow-minded and not at all rational

For the record, the simplest answer may be the best way to go based off of information, but germs weren't the simplest answer when it came to figuring out where disease came from. History shows, again and again, that what seems to be the simplest answer is often wrong. So I don't like your logic.

And that's a lovely quote at the end. Truly. But I don't think it entails the rejection of God or Judaism to question what I believe.

Besides, how can we ever know what's true? I like Kant's system for this. We can't know what the real world looks like, only what our brain understands. For all I know, you're not real. I'm not real. The point is, knowing is impossible, and truth is impossible without some sort of leap of faith. You choose to trust your brain. I trust in God, which makes a lot more sense to me.

More accurately: Apikores = heretic in modern parlance; apikorsus = heretical views.

As an aside, Maimonides is the medieval Jewish authority generally associated with the view that the term apikores is not derived from the name Epicurus. Maimonides was a world-class Aristotelian philosopher and quotes Epicurus several times in his works. Since the words apikores and Epicurus have identical spellings in medieval Hebrew, the fact that Maimonides proposes a different etymological theory begs for an explanation. Maimonides' theory is that the term is from the Aramaic "apkeirusa" (this is hard to translate, especially in the way Maimonides seems to be using it; I think it implies something like "people doing whatever they feel like instead of listening to authority figures"). I've long felt that this derives from the fact that the Talmud's discussion of the term doesn't have anything to do with dogma or heretical beliefs but rather with belittling authority figures. Maimonides himself, however, converts the term in his other works into the current usage of referring to heretical beliefs. Based on this, I strongly suspect that Maimonides thought that the original term does stem from Epicurus (who held precisely those beliefs that Maimonides identifies as heretical), but that the rabbis of the Talmud borrowed the term and used it as a sort of Aramaic-Greek pun to refer to belittling authority figures.

Also in case anybody else is curious, Modern Orthodox is as opposed mainly to Ultra-Orthodox (also known as "hareidi" or "frum"). Hassidim are their own sub-group of Ultra-Orthodox.

As an interesting intellectual challenge, try steelmanning some of the hareidi sociopolitical positions, such as their extreme opposition to the Israeli draft law. And it does need steelmanning - I personally know several very well-thought-out, very smart, very well-meaning, very knowledgeable rabbis who strongly agree with the hareidi positions.

In case anyone else is curious, it appears that:

"apikorsus" has a range of meanings including "heretic", "damned person", "unbeliever"; the term may or may not be derived from the name of Epicurus.

[EDITED to add: As pointed out by kind respondents below, I was sloppy and mixed up "apikores" (which has the meanings above) and "apikorsus" (which means something more like "the sort of thing an apikores says"). My apologies.]

"l'havin ul'horos" means "to understand and to teach", as opposed to "to agree" or "to practice" or whatever. In the Bible, when the Israelites invade Canaan they are told not to learn to do as the natives do, and there's some famous commentary that says "but you are allowed to learn in order to understand and to teach".

[EDITED to add: I am not myself Jewish, nor do I know more than a handful of Hebrew words; if I have got the above wrong then I will be glad to learn.]

I'm an Orthodox Jew, and I'd be interested to connect with others on LW who are also Orthodox. More precisely, I'm interested in finding other LWers who (a) are Jewish, (b) are still religious in some form or fashion, and (c) are currently Orthodox or were at some point in the past.