Rischa D'Araisa Season 8 Episode 17:
Extreme Insulation?
Trying to Comprehend
Rav Dov Landau's Refusal
to Allow Bnei Torah
to Visit the Wounded
and Attend the Funerals
for the Fallen
See the videos and links below
Rabbi Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer הרב יוסף גבריאל בקהופר
Consider: one of the things that ensured Jewish survival after the destruction of the Temple (hopefully to be speedily rebuilt) was universal hatred of our nation. Wherever we went in Europe or the Muslim lands, we were hated. We were forced into segregated neighbourhoods and ghettos and excluded from common society. In a perverse way, this kept us together and faithful to Am Yisrael.
ReplyDeleteAll that changed with the Emancipation. Modernization meant a diminishing of hatreds. Jews could now become part of society, as long as they jettisoned everything Jewish about them and sadly many did but could you blame them? Misery and Judaism or prosperity and Enlightenment?
The ultimate challenge, though, was the State of Israel, finally a country where a Jew could be a Jew openly and without fear of persecution. For the Chareidi community, this was the biggest threat even faced. Chareidim were never persecuted in Israel. Taunted, maybe. Surrounded by secular Jews showing no interest in Torah or mitzvos? Yes, but the Zionists never walked into a yeshiva and shoved pork down anyone's throat or walked into a shul on Shabbos with a stereo system to start a dance party.
Jewish fidelity had been built on hatred by and exclusion from the outside world and now it was gone. How to maintain that fidelity?
Well the simplest way is to act in a despicable fashion so that you incite hatred of your community in the surrounding population. Then you go back to your followers and say "See! They hate us! We hate to hide behind our ghetto walls for safety!"
And that's what's at work here. "The Gedolim" need secular Israel to be hostile to the Chareidi community so they can justify isolating their followers from the real world "for their own good and the purity of the Torah camp!" These kinds of edicts are designed to do just that.