באמת הגיע הזמן לחדש את פא"י. נלחצים בין חרדל"ים גזעניים וחרדים מסכנים (מ"ם שווי"א, סמ"ך פתוחה, כ"ף שווי"א). זקוקים אנחנו לחרדיות שפויה שאיננה מחללת שם שמים מדי יום ביומו. אני מתבייש מהזדהות עם כל הפלגים הקיימים. זכור אזכור אמרתו של הרב שלמה ברויאר זצ"ל חתן מרן הרשר"ה זצ"ל כי רק תועד"א תביא לידי גאולה. יודע אני שהדברים לא יועילו, אבל זה לא פטור מלאמרם.
The time to renew PAI has truly arrived. We are pressed between racist Chardalim and endangering Charedim. We need a sane Charedism that is not mechallel Shem Shomayim on a daily basis. I am embarrassed to affiliate with any of the existing sectors. I recall the statement of Rabbi Shlomo Breuer zt"l, son in law of our teachr RSRH zt"l that only Torah Im Dereh Eretz will being about the Geulah. I know these words will have no effect, but that is not an exemption from stating them.
Something in particular bringing this up now?
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for the vowels pointer; I'd initially read it as *miskenim.*
The lawbreaking levayas today in Yerushalayaim in juxtaposition to the Noam Party's pact with Otzma Yehudit to run a platform of a Jewish State that is not a State for all its citizens.
DeleteRealpolitik is a German term
DeleteCan you blame Noam if they have zero chance of gaining seats without thisotherwise
If I understand correctly -- when R' Herzog zt"l wrote that the State would have to offer equal rights to non-Jews, citing the practical necessity and concepts such as *eivah*, do you feel there was a moral sense at work there that was then buttressed by practical halachic justifications? (Some are now arguing that his reasoning is obsolete because that hey, illiberal democracies or worse are doing just fine, thanks very much.)
DeleteWhat's your stance on lo-sechanem vis-a-vis real estate, by the way?
Y Cohen: Yes, I do.
DeleteShalom Rosenfeld: For sure. I don't believe Lo Sechanem applies to non-Jews who keep sheva mitzvos.
The laws are ridiculous, overbearing, and hazardous. You can break such laws. Covid is not a pandemic. The numbers are ridiculously exaggerated. You should be proud of the Charedim for standing up to the hysterical and oppressive government.
ReplyDeleteWe will have to agree to (vehemently) disagree. :-)
DeleteAmerican Jews need to stop whining about alleged chillul Hashem in israel. The cultures are radically different. Americans project American civility onto israel where there is none and the Chilonim are far worse than the Charedim in this regard. So rather than judge and whine, sympathize with your brothers. If you knew what the Charedim go through over here, you wouldn’t be so quick to criticize. You sit in your big houses with your polite policemen, your constitutional protections, and your volunteer army. We don't have any of that over here. The police provoke, the government constantly bears down on the Charedi communities, and life is a totally different experience than what you enjoy. The RAM of a school over here told me the Dept. of Health has contacted him over 80 times this year. israelis are maniacs. We have been in lockdown for a year, one way or another. 1000s of young people have left Torah observance. Schools open, close, open, close. Right now they are closed and children are being led to get addicted to the Internet. We don't have weddings. People daven in parking lots. The shuls are empty. We are required to wear masks whenever we are out of the house, even if you are alone in a park at 5 AM. It's absurd. The police ticket, harass, arrest. I know personally two people who have been arrested. My entire apartment building has been in bidud (quarantine), most people multiple times. Little kids can't leave their room for 2 weeks. They go nuts. Nobody is sick. I don't know one person who is sick. There are no shiva posters, no funerals. The death stats are a lie because they are not based on diagnosis but on the PCR test which was not intended to be used for diagnosis. It does not tell you that you have an infection, only that you have been exposed to some kind of coronavirus that your body likely fought off. The CDC said only 6% of the alleged American COVID deaths were COVID only. The average age of COVID death in israel is 80. Yet the schools are closed. Every year in israel 8,000 people die from cigarette smoking. That’s twice the COVID count even with the bogus stats. Yet, people smoke like chimneys as always. Nobody is trying to stop that. You naïve people are being conned. It's time to wake up. Most Charedim here follow all the stupid rules. But the minority that resist have a little spunk and I'm proud of them. You on the other hand want to be a good little German and obey orders. Well good luck with that. Didn't work out last time.
ReplyDeleteDeceptive
Deletewe are less gullible than that but go attempt to convince yourself in front of the mirror
Need to advertise how minimally is your care for others??
You guys will try every one irrespective if flat out full false to rationalize for yourself and us
Well aware we are that's the same type of crowd who flout the rules in Israel insinuating that were they to be in North America they would keep it yet ironically once in North America is the same type of crowd who flaunt & flout the rules here and ironically insinuate that actually were they in a place like Israel they keep it !
of course using virtually the same arguments in either place however contradictory
phonies
And by the way presently in North America it's remarkable how people they rationalize anything even regarding their reasons
they employed ignoring the health restrictions in the summer contradict diametrically contradict with their reasons in the winter
!
And even for some situation where it might be relevant to flout the regulations on occasion in Israel
Any intelligent person knows how to how to make a distinction
Furthermore,
how is it that invariably your crowd ever offers any argument
that goes in opposition to your self-aggrandizing self promoting interest in favor of the common good of others??
if you would we may actually buy it for once
There are no justifications for Chillul Hashem. Not even your personal assertions...
Delete"good little German"
ReplyDeletethat's not why there was a holocaust
Check up Weimar Republic
'Twas First Country to ever in modern era inaugurate transgender,etc
Read the Kovetz Ma’amarim printed in the ’30s of what was horribly bound to be coming due to too much undue acceptance and laissez faire for which he was decried
Jewish Radicals....trying to destroy society-Amalek
י[ "שמעתי מהגה"צ הגרא"א דסלר זצ"ל, שבעת השואה האיומה כאשר
צדיקים וקדושי עליון נחנקו ונהרגו בעינויים קשים יחד עם רבבות מעם
ישראל שנזרקו לתוך כבשן האש, אז שאלו כולם "איפה אלוקיך ישראל"
ואיך הקב"ה מיצר כל כך אפילו לצדיקים וקדושי עליון, וביאר אז הגרא"א
דסלר זצ"ל, שנכון שהיו הרבה צדיקים וחרדים, אבל לא דאגו לשמירת הדת
של אחרים ולא מחו ברשעים מספיק, ועל זה הקב"ה מאוד בחרון אף
וכמוש"כ בחטא העגל "ואנכי אסתר אסתיר את פני בעת ההיא", ובביאור
תוכן העניין, אמר הרב דסלר זצ"ל, שזהו מידה כנגד מידה, שהקב"ה אומר
"אתם לא מחיתם ולא התערבתם למחות על החילול ה', אז גם אני לא
מתערב למנוע את האויבים מלהרוג בכם", רח"ל.
When R' Boruch Ber came to New York in 1929 he was greeted by Mayor Walker. The mayor asked him "what can I do for you Rabbi?"
His prompt response [in Yiddish] was 'Separate the males and females at the beaches.'
He did not ask him for special favors for the Jewish community or e.g. "religious liberty" for religious Jews in the workplace..
Leaving aside the concept of the abandonment our role as descendants of Avraham Avinu who taught all the people of the world and preferring to follow the role of Noach and Shem who only cared for themselves "tzaddik in peltz"
Are we filing chap.11 on our mission?
How is this other than a sha'as ha'shmad?
What about their forcing curriculum changes ?
What about the public muzzling anyone who vaguely slightly insinuate that they might like traditional values?
Our communities have their heads in the sand?
So happens orthodox German Jews have higher percentage of surviving the Holocaust perhaps due to their care about others
Interesting that BT's same contentions should also be used in deference to Otzma Yehudit
the difference is in degree
and while you may disagree with them,
they actually have a better record and standing up for the common commonweal and the common good
Noam are the ones,the only ones,who truly stand unfortunately at the moment for Vayikra 26:15 18:25 for the sake of morality expanding
beyond their convenience for all
They unfortunately need to get a voice first somehow
so who else should they join together with
whose bears responsibility & fault if options have become limited ?
If you have no options, go teach in the streets. No one told you to go into the Knesset.
DeleteYGB,
ReplyDeleteWhile the Neo pa"i employ some highfalutin cute ideas
they are little more largely than self-centered Urban lapsed cool
Millennial haredim practically identical
to the center-left Dati who wish to enjoy their lifestyle with less obligations and
encumbrances on their conscience
Could be. Then they are not the answer.
DeletePAI in the sky. It ain't happening. There aren't any TIDE people to implement it.
ReplyDeleteYou are 100% right. That is the problem... :-(
DeleteJudging being favorably (dan l'chaf zechus) is how you should approach believers in Hashem and keepers of the mitzvos, not how you should approach apikorsim. When it comes to conflict between the heretical government of israel and the Charedim of Eretz Yisroel, side with the latter. If you want to believe the relentless propaganda and lies of the israeli press and see the Charedim as some kind of animals, well that is your folly. I had to come to Eretz Yisroel to see that the israeli press is so deceitful and so anti-semitic that they outdo Julius Streicher. I have seen many actual protests and what really goes on, I know many cases of government oppression and police abuse, I have seen how the secular israelis provoke and provoke and then read how the press covers the stories and gives you the completely wrong picture of what really happened. Nearly all conflict starts with the secular israeli authorities. You have frum Jews that keep mitzvos, that live basically humble disciplined lives and then you have wild secular chilonim who cast aside Hashem and His rules. The former aren’t perfect but they try to do the right thing. The latter are obnoxious and arrogant and proud of it. You side with the latter. Why do you do that? Jealousy perhaps. Jealous of the higher religious standards of the Charedim over here. But also you just believe the newspapers. Anything in print must be correct, Right? Right? No, wrong. You’ll find out the truth someday, you’ll find out that you should have supported your brothers in times of trouble. They are not stupid. You really think if people were dropping dead from COVID that the Charedim who are not so concerned about COVID wouldn’t become concerned? Are you so much more moral? They are as moral as you are. More so. People are not dropping dead from COVID. Boruch Hashem, there are no shiva posters, no funeral processions. People aren’t even sick. The government data is deceitful. The PCR test (do you even know what that is?) was not designed to detect infection of disease and is not supposed to be used above 30 cycles. The israeli government, like other governments, misuses the test to scare everyone. They do their best to hide this but the average age of death is 80. Therefore close the nursery schools? Does that make any sense? 15% of this country has been in quarantine. My entire apartment building has been in quarantine and nobody is sick. Many of my neighbors have been in quarantine numerous times. They can’t work. People are going broke. I know people who are broke because the government won’t let them work. 1000s of young people have gone off the derech. You have no idea how insane the israeli government is. It’s run by dictators. It’s run by a committee, just like the Soviet Union was. The courts don’t restrain them, there’s no tradition of protecting individual rights. They will decide what you should do with your life and they decide based on politics, selfishness, ignorance, and hatred, pure hatred of religion. Those are the people you support. So if the Charedim have a little guts and fight back a little you condemn them. No, you should honor them. What would you do if the Jews of Europe fought back during the Nazi era? Would you scream chillul Hashem? You probably would have.
ReplyDeleteclassic adage: When empty on defense , stay on the offense
Deleteeh
What's your background? What Was your family doing?
Members of my family were battling for Shabbos 60 years ago in Israel
Rav Aharon Kotler, warned that the greatest threat facing Jewry is (not intermarriage or assimilation, but rather) perversion of the Torah,
(Mishnas Reb Aharon 1:2,3:6).
We are in this world for the purpose of bringing moshiach
That is all
There are many (mouthing piousness ) whose goals are..very different
We have way too few working in whatever endeavor towards that goal
Only the gullible and guileless still believe that the continuous battle is about .. It's but a smokescreen for the most basic tenets of life and religion for all of us
Hogwash. My chevrusa's father in law was diagnosed with covid and was dead within 48 hours. Get real and stop exacerbating the CH.
DeleteYonoson Rosenblum | FEBRUARY 3, 2021
ReplyDelete"It's about bringing light to the world and not, chas v'shalom, the opposite"
It has been a very bad week for me. Over 40 years ago, my new wife and I joined the chareidi world. For 30 years, I have been a sometime spokesperson for that community, at least to the outside world. And suddenly, I find myself wondering whether I understand anything about the community, or at least a major swath of it, and its mindset.
My only solace came when I mentioned how disoriented I'm feeling to my rav, a major talmid chacham and respected dayan, and he expressed the same feelings, despite having been raised from birth in the heart of the Israeli chareidi world.
My bad week began Thursday night, parshas Bo, when someone sent me a clip of a melee in a Bnei Brak yeshivah, which some undercover cops entered to investigate whether COVID regulations were being kept. They were discovered and set upon by a mob. Police reinforcements were called in. The windows of police cars were smashed.
The following Monday, a municipal bus driver in Bnei Brak was dragged from his bus, and the bus was set on fire. In the Knesset, MK Rabbi Moshe Gafni described the perpetrators as chareidi youth "from the fringes." And photos from the scene seemed to confirm that. But even youth on the fringe are more likely to act violently when there is already violence in the air.
The police and fire departments did not respond to calls from neighborhood residents for hours as the bus burned, whether out of a desire to punish the chareidi community or out of fear of being attacked. Meanwhile the flames from the burning bus melted curtains in the adjacent apartment building, forcing residents to flee.
Also at the beginning of the week, protests in Jerusalem against the expansion of the light rail turned very violent. A neighbor who davens in the same minyan I do (with strictly enforced social distancing) was on the train, and described to me how terrified he was when it was attacked by a mob, who smashed every window on the train with hammers and threw black paint on the cars.
In what the US media would have described as "mostly peaceful protests," cement was also poured onto the tracks. According to a spokesperson for the light rail, the cement could have derailed a car and caused it to tip over, with lethal consequences. From blocking traffic and burning garbage cans in their own neighborhoods, certain elements in the chareidi community have moved on to potentially murderous actions. They have fully appropriated the "hands of Eisav."
But what really sent me into a tizzy was the photo of a large group of chareidi-attired Jews, some wearing tefillin, all without masks, on a recent United Airlines flight to Israel. According to the accompanying story in the Times of Israel, the other passengers repeatedly implored the chareidi passengers to wear masks and not to all daven together. They were ignored. Secular passengers reported having to go to the restrooms to eat their meals because they were terrified to lower their masks with so many unmasked fellow passengers around, including in the aisles through which they had to pass.
ReplyDeleteI imagine that many of those who did not deign to respond have learned the Gemara (Yoma 86a) that asks: "What is chillul Hashem (desecration of G-d's Name)?" and proceeds to describe its opposite, kiddush Hashem (sanctification of G-d's Name) terms of the verse, "You shall love the L-rd, your G-d." To love G-d, says the Gemara, means to make the Name of Heaven beloved through your actions. To conduct your business affairs with pleasantness. To cause those who see you to exclaim, "Happy is the father who taught him Torah! Happy is the rav who taught him Torah."
How was that achieved by failing to even acknowledge the fears of their fellow travelers? Was anyone even thinking about whether they were bringing other Jews closer to Torah or pushing them away? Callousness, disrespect, and a refusal to even take into account our fellow Jews will not bring them closer to Torah.
Rather, when they hear that we are demonstrating in order to show how precious Torah learning is to us, are they not likely to think, "If Torah teaches the kind of middos shown on the plane or in the recent violent demonstrations, better that they should not learn Torah"?
A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans express about the same degree of belief in G-d as they did 45 years ago — 87 percent. But their faith in organized religion has declined sharply, from 70 percent in 1975 to just 42 percent today. Yuval Levin explains that Americans increasingly "have trouble believing... that our churches, seminaries, religious schools and charities remain capable of forming trustworthy people who actually exhibit the [qualities] they preach."
Worse, I fear that too many of us do not view that as our task in life. And yet a constant awareness of the potential for kiddush Hashem or its opposite in our every action was the most prominent characteristic shared by all the great figures about whom I have written.
ReplyDeleteRabbi Meir Schuster, for instance, was a man of few words. Yet once he expressed himself with great intensity when his host, Sam Friedland, remarked offhandedly on a Shabbos morning walk to shul, "What's it all about?"
Rabbi Schuster became uncharacteristically animated, and placed his index finger on Friedland's chest. "You want to know what it's all about?" he asked. "You want to know? Well, I'll tell you. It's about bringing light to the world and not, chas v'shalom, the opposite."
A simple role for living, but one that many of us have lost sight of to a great extent.
THIS WEEK I had a conversation with my oldest grandson, 15. We were discussing the relative merits of Jerusalem and Bnei Brak as places to live, and he said that Bnei Brak has one clear advantage: It is an all-chareidi city.
I questioned whether that was a good thing, on two counts. First, I suggested that often having to define oneself in juxtaposition to one's surroundings results in a deeper, more thought-out religious identity. As a wise man once told me, "I raised four children in Tel Aviv, and four in Bnei Brak. In Tel Aviv I raised them; in Bnei Brak, the street raised them. I think I did a better job."
Secondly, living in an insular community can also lead to forgetting that there are lots of other Jews out there to whom we are bound and for whom we bear responsibility. The chareidi passengers on the plane either forgot that or, worse, were never taught it in the first place.
A very important article! I have already shared it. Yasher koach!
Delete