The sociologist Charles Murray has been writing important books about American life for decades. Recently he published another incisive work Coming Apart which diagnoses America as “coming apart at the seams — not seams of race or ethnicity but of class.” His argument is that a “new lower class” has developed in this country that no longer holds dear and lives by the four essential ingredients that since its founding served to make America great and indeed exceptional: marriage and family; pursuit of a vocation predicated on industriousness; community built on a bedrock of social trust and honesty; and faith. The large and growing welfare state Murray contends is disruptive in each of these areas.
And while a corresponding “new upper class” has formed as well which does subscribe to and practice these values it shrinks from promoting their importance to those in other social classes. This chasm between the classes is the “coming apart” of whichMurraywrites.
Recently a think tank asked five Modern Orthodox rabbis to viewMurray’s thesis through a Jewish lens and share their observations. Rabbi Yosie Levine made the point that Judaism has a built-in system for combating the phenomenon in which “[m]embers of the upper class are woefully out of touch with their lower class counterparts partly because contact between the two groups is simply too infrequent:”
For devout practitioners daily obligations require regular contact with people outside the immediate social circle [because] individual duties in Jewish law cannot be outsourced.… Mitzvot like visiting the sick comforting the bereaved lifting up the widow orphan and stranger and inviting guests into one’s home demand continuous interaction with people who are by definition in a different life situation.…
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