David Brooks goes on a tour of Orthodox (Jewish) Brooklyn, and likes what he sees.  It starts in the parking lot of a supermarket that caters to the Orthodox. Excerpts:

Those of us in secular America live in a culture that takes the supremacy of individual autonomy as a given. Life is a journey. You choose your own path. You can live in the city or the suburbs, be a Wiccan or a biker.

For the people who shop at Pomegranate, the collective covenant with God is the primary reality and obedience to the laws is the primary obligation. They go shopping like the rest of us, but their shopping is minutely governed by an external moral order.

The laws, in this view, make for a decent society. They give structure to everyday life. They infuse everyday acts with spiritual significance. They build community. They regulate desires. They moderate religious zeal, making religion an everyday practical reality.

The laws are gradually internalized through a system of lifelong study, argument and practice. The external laws may seem, at first, like an imposition, but then they become welcome and finally seem like a person’s natural way of being.

Meir Soloveichik, my tour guide during this trip through Brooklyn, borrows a musical metaphor from the Catholic theologian George Weigel. At first piano practice seems like drudgery, like self-limitation, but mastering the technique gives you the freedom to play well and create new songs. Life is less a journey than it is mastering a discipline or craft.

More:

All of us navigate certain tensions, between community and mobility, autonomy and moral order. Mainstream Americans have gravitated toward one set of solutions. The families stuffing their groceries into their Honda Odyssey minivans in the Pomegranate parking lot represent a challenging counterculture. Mostly, I notice how incredibly self-confident they are. Once dismissed as relics, they now feel that they are the future.

Are they? For Judaism, they almost certainly are. They know what they believe, they sacrifice to live it out, and they have lots of children.

What lessons can the rest of us learn from their example, from the solution they’ve chosen — that is, sacrificing individual autonomy and choice to live by a countercultural set of beliefs, norms, and practices rooted in religious tradition?

Why are they so confident?

If anybody simply wants to gripe about the Hasidim, don’t bother posting here. I’m only interested in the philosophical, theological, and sociological aspects of what Brooks talks about, and how the Orthodox insight might be appropriated and applied by the rest of us.