Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea of this practice. I can easily see how this form of monasticism can be beneficial and harmful.

It’s far more than just looking to one set of scripture when it comes to the charedi movement in Israel. They’re reading in thousands of years of Rabbinic Judaism, most importantly the idea that the sacrificial cult of Ancient Israelite Religion (A.K.A. Torah) is the way God wants people to engage in worship. It’s using thousands of years of anti-Semitism as a cudgel to state “we can’t be oppressors because we were oppressed.”

My hot take is that one reason for a strong connection between the U.S. and Israel is that Israel is a settler-colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal, theocratic apartheid ethnostate. There’s a non-insignificant portion of the U.S. populace who wish the U.S. had the same kind of government.