Punk Rock and Orthodoxy

Personal anecdote. I made up a niggun once in the Bais Medresh in Staten Island Yeshiva. Well, I didn't make it up myself. I borrowed the White Stripe's "Fell in Love With a Girl," slowed it down, and hummed it as I bowed and rocked over a Talmud. Not just any Talmud, mind you. I hummed The White Stripes over a Talmud from the widest and longest set of Talmuds in the entire hall. It took up the width of the table, and I sat in the back of the room, where anyone leaving and entering could see me. Conspicuous to say the least.

Another student, black hat and jacketed out and twirling his peyot like a baton, stopped by my table and clucked his tongue. "Goyish music while you learn?" he asked. "Avak Avodah Zarah." Which translates to: If you hum secular music while you learn, it's a "taste" of worshiping idols. I'm still unsure why that would be, but what fascinated me, the anti-authoritarian punk music lover, was why a frummie (translation: ultra-religious) student would know the tune to "Fell in Love with a Girl." Did he just recognize a secular tune when he heard one, or was he intimately familiar with the Garage Rock darlings of the modern rock radio station?

The song exploded onto the airwaves in 2001. Staind, Disturbed and the rest of the Nu-metal genre fell like dinosaurs before the onslaught of the White Stripes (and the Strokes). A dozen Linkin Park singles still rotated on the radio. One would think that punks, people who hated nu-metal almost as much as they hated the bombast of heavy metal, would flock to the White Stripes. Yet almost to a tee, the anti-establishment movement derided the White Stripes to the extent that my Yeshivish friend did. No matter what cultural purpose the band served, they weren't DIY and punk enough for the Alternative Press crowd. Just as no matter what holy purpose I leashed to the band to aid in Torah learning, they could never substitute for a good Avraham Fried song. If selling out is tantamount to worshiping the false idols of music, than both sides tugging at my arms called the White Stripes "Avak Avodah Zarah."

This shouldn't surprise you. Both punk music and Orthodox Judaism find camaraderie in obsessing over authenticity. Orthodoxy calls it frum and fry, and punk music calls it selling out or having cred. Check out the "Cred Police" sidebar in Alternative Press ("Who's got it & Who's losing it"). Sometimes the linguistic lines cross. Black Hattitude raps a song about religious students going "off the derech" called "Selling Out." To this date, as far as I know, no punk song has been written called "Fryin' Out" about a punk band signing a record deal with a huge label.

Matthue Roth's first novel, "Nevermind the Goldbergs," performs a piercing examination of this phenomenon. Besides the typeset on the front cover of the book, the words Nevermind the Goldbergs reflecting the classic Nevermind the Bullocks album by the Sex Pistols, the book recounts the adventures of an Orthodox girl who finds more satisfaction in The Clash than the Chumash. As a religious Jew who suffered under the double yolk of Orthodoxy and anti-establishment tendencies in Yeshiva, I sadly found no catharsis in Chava's struggle. She may not get along with all the kids in her school, but her accessibility to the outside world is too easy. No one questions her religious convictions, and she doesn't have a yarmulke and tzitzit to contend with when chatting with mohawked strangers. Where Yeshiva trapped me between two worlds, equally exclusive, Chava breezes through both, only her personal integrity coming into sharp focus. (She does her own going "off the derech" before returning to Judaism, and ironically, New York). I don't believe that the lack of identification devalues the novel. Printed under the Scholastic Young Adult imprint, it clearly wasn't written for me anyway. But it does fail to blow open the obsessions of integrity between the two movements. In an ideal world, Chava would be accepted by both the punks and the Jews. In the real world, isolation just as commonly materializes.

Punk magazines write entire articles about the integrity of bands like Taking Back Sunday, Blink 182 and Green Day. The corollary in Judaism would have to be the plethora of cherems (bans), the most recent and famous being the ban on Rabbi Slifkin's book on Mythical Creatures. If Blink 182's recent self-titled album was a sellout to the emo movement, than Mythical Creatures sold out to scientific inquiry.

The cause? I'd like to say elitism. It would make sense that two very insular, counterculture groups would maintain a distance from anything undermining their foundations. If you believe strongly in absolute 6 days of creation, Gerald Schroeder's opinion must be invalidated. If you believe that George W. Bush is the root of evil (and for those that thought I wouldn't work another Bush reference into a music article, you've once again been made the fool), than conservative punks are off topic.

Interesting, then, that at least two Jewish punk groups exist. Yidcore, the Australians that do punk covers of songs like "Just One Shabbos" and Kletka Red. Kletka Red combines Klezmer and punk music, and has released an album on Tzadik's Radical Jewish Culture label. The former takes a Blink 182 irreverent position on punk, using it primarily as a mode to entertain. The latter experiments with both genres, and while it succeeds at being interesting, it fails to convey the frantic intensity of perfect punk music.

The best punk music drives 3 chord chops and screaming into your head with the ferocity of a riot. This leads me to a second anecdote. I heard from a Rabbi in the same Yeshiva mentioned above that Rav Aaron Kotler used to passionately scream at his students when he disagreed with them. One time, his student walked out of the room rather than continue the fight. Too impassioned to notice, Rav Kotler told the other students to throw that one out. They coughed nervously and explained that he already left, about ten minutes ago. "Well then drag him in and throw him out again!" Rav Kotler screamed.

Judaism and punk culture are completely compatible. That is Punk Rock.