[Avodah] R' Angel & Geirus Redux

[Michael Makovi]

> It seems clear from this letter of Rav Dovid Hoffman - that he also
>  views the ignorant as sinners who are degraded by their sins. The are
>  not viewed as innocent and blameless.
> R' Daniel Eidensohn

But his viewing them as not blameless, is rather ambivalent. He says
they shouldn't be counted in a minyan, etc., but he never actually
says they are mamash sinners; perhaps they are innocent but
nevertheless their sin has practical ramifications; if I accidentally
knock someone's mailbox down because my car malfunctioned, I'm chayav
even though I'm not at fault. Perhaps R' Hoffman means only this.

And even if he does view them at 100% sinful fault, he then
equivocates himself by quoting the approach that today's sinners are
b'shogeg TsN, and that in Austria and especially Germany and America,
the sinners are not reckless, but rather ignorant and misguided. He
says that a public Shabbat violator today is like the private ones of
yore, because to violate Shabbat publicly is not shameful or
conspicuous or noteworthy anymore. R' Hoffman says it is best not to
count them, but those who do have on whom to rely. His approach seems
FAR closer to Chazon Ish/Rav Kook than to Reb Moshe; Reb Moshe
explicitly said that are completely 100% b'meizid because they ought
to know that Torah is true even though they weren't raised with this.
In R' Hoffman's words, I see nothing of the sort.

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I'm not exactly sure what we're arguing about anymore. We've already
seen that there are two shitot on the matter, and Rabbi Henkin has
already said that Chazon Ish's is the more popular one, which would
explain why Reb Moshe's was so startling to me. You can keep bringing
more sources, and I won't object, but they're not proving anything
that hasn't already been said.

You then asked me for a source that says that even if today's
nonreligious are TsN (Chazon Ish), where do we learn that once they
are exposed to a smidgen of Torah they are still TsN. I brough R'
Aryeh Kaplan (whose sources you rejected), but I also brought a sevara
(that it is simply unreasonable to expect, like Reb Moshe, that
someone raised nonobservant to suddenly do teshuva when he learns a
random halacha, if he hasn't yet been convinced that Torah is m'Sinai)
that IMHO has some basis that I'd like to see a reply to, and I
brought a second sevara (stronger than the first IMHO), that surely
Chazon Ish presumed that every nonreligious today knows that Orthodox
Jews believe in one G-d and not two and that they don't eat pork -
this is some Torah knowledge, and yet Chazon Ish still called them TsN
- I'd like a reply to this too please.

Mikha'el Makovi