[Avodah] Where we are holding

[Micha Berger]

A story from Ami Magazine (written by a R' Rafael Borges) via RYGB's blog:
    The story is told that when the Telzer rosh yeshiva, Rabbi
    Eliyahu Meir Bloch, zt"l, once found a comic book in the dorm in
    the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland, he began crying. The person who
    was accompanying him downplayed the severity of the find, saying,
    "It's just a comic book."

    Rabbi Bloch replied, "In Europe, the bochurim who 'went off'
    were interested in intellectual subjects. They followed communism
    or Zionism, and we could deal with them by reintroducing them to
    the intellectual world of Torah. But if they are interested in the
    foolishness of comic books, they are very far away from intellectual
    matter of any kind."

FWIW, this sentiment has echoes in RAYK as well. R' Kook saw the often
misplaced idealism of the youth of his generation as a first step to
the return of Torah in the Messianic Age. He then expected those ideals
would slowly shift to be more in line with Emes.

(I already posted here my belief that RAYK's expectation that he was
living in the dawning of yemos hamashiach has major problems since a
couple weeks after his petirah the Nazis came to power. How can one speak
of seeing a progression to ge'ulah with such a trough in the middle?)

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Live as if you were living already for the
micha at aishdas.org        second time and as if you had acted the first
http://www.aishdas.org   time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
Fax: (270) 514-1507            - Victor Frankl, Man's search for Meaning