[Avodah] Chilul Hashem in the Streets: Response to the Protests - Rav Mayer Twersky

Micha Berger micha at aishdas.org
Wed Oct 14 15:51:07 PDT 2020


On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 09:10:37PM +0000, Ben Bradley wrote:
> The elephant in the room is that the there is absolutely no recognition
> amongst the m'chalalei hashem that their actions constitute chilul
> hashem..

I think there is a more fundamental problem...

I don't think we should be talking about chilul hasheim. If we don't
create a culture where mitzvos BALC are thought of as at least as real
as mitzvos BALM, we are still set up for this problem.

Chazal say that the sum total of all of Torah is "that which you loathe,
don't do to others" or that it can be generalized as "ve'ahavta lerei'akha
kamokha" or "eileh toledos ha'adam". The actual inventor of "Yeshivish"
taught it was all about nosei be'ol im chaveiro (R Chaim Volozhiner
as per his repeated instruction to his son). Rav Shimon said that we
were created and given the Torah, "so that our greatest desire should
be lehitiv im zulaseinu ... bedemus haBorei kevayakhol." (Introduction
to Shaarei Yosher; WYT pg 45.)

But we, we replaced all this talk about being ehrlicher Yidn and now
call ourselves "frum" Jews. We call ourselves by the term people like
R Aharon Kotler, or my grandma, reserved for the hyperfocus on rituals
of the local Russian Orthodox priest.

Rav Wolbe defines "frumkeit" as an instinct to be holy, which like all
instincts is about the self. It's the attempt to use ritual mitzvos to
find holiness, without da'as or thinking about Retzon haBorei.

And it is unsurprising that we got here. O went through its Rupture
and Reconstruction, reborn after predictions of its demise that were
so common in the 1960s and early '70s. Understandable, the emergent
self-definition would be about those things that make O unique. And
this was an era when there was a lot less distinct about Torah Ethics
and Morality in contrast to Western values. We stood out from C by how
we kept Shabbos, Kashrus and Taharas HaMishapachah (as the idiom goes),
not by how we were trying to be givers rather than takers. (C.f. R'
Dessler's Qunterus haChessed in MmE vol I.)

So the emergent self-definition came to be about rituals. Add the Me
Generation and its zeitgeist. And voila! Frumkeit.

Now we're trapped in this culture where spirituality is about going to
shul to try to be holy. More so than about safeiq piquach nefesh. And
to deal with the resulting cognitive dissonance we grab on to anyone
suggesting that the risk is negligable, and invent new and anti-mesoretic
theologies that say the risk is metaphysically avoided, and that it is
okay to be somkhin al haneis with other people's lives.

Worrying about chilul hasheim when avaq retzichah is afoot is a total
distortion of Torah. And the cultural pendulum won't start swinging the
other way until we shine a spotlite on Ahavas Yisrael and Ahavas haBerios,
and mitzvos that can be reinterpreted within the Frum framework.

To me this is a "Mi Lashem Eilai!" kind of moment. People are literally
risking others' lives. We can't stay any longer at the "identifying the
problem" stage; we need to start working toward a solution. Now.

With so much of the Frum World having gone OTD, who is leading the
new kind of Orthodoxy, starting the old-new culture of shemiras Torah
umitzvos?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 I always give much away,
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   and so gather happiness instead of pleasure.
Author: Widen Your Tent              -  Rachel Levin Varnhagen
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF


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