Braindrops

Jew-Hating Selfs

Last week, Cross-Currents featured a very distasteful posting by Toby Katz, supported by Yakov Menken, justifying the chareidi world's indifference to Yom Hashoa.

My own impression, based on my years in this world, is that DovBear's interpretation is correct, in that this indifference is only one example of a chareidi cultural phenomenon in which all ideas that originated by someone "outside of the camp" are derided, with backfilled halachic nyaah-nyaah-ing as appropriate. This is, as commentor Lumpy Rutherford states in a different context, an idea that resonates with me, but we're all different, and perhaps what I perceive as provincialist snobbery is, in fact, sincere.

Except the logic is so incoherent, it's difficult to make that assumption. Rabbi Menken, in a later comment, has the audacity to criticise a comment simply because it is offensive. This in the midst of a discussion explaining why the (ahem) Secular Zionists - hundreds of whom lost their lives developing a country where Jews could hopefully live in peace - are so impure that we must impute only the worst motives to all of their actions.

But be that as it may - Rabbi Menken, earlier in the discussion, claims that since Yom HaShoa also incorporates a commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the date disgracefully insists that all of the other victims of the holocaust are being insulted. He later suggests that January 27th would be an appropriate date, although by his logic this date similarly derides those who either did not survive, or were imprisoned in camps other than Auschwitz.

Again, the entire discussion is distasteful, and I'm somewhat loathe to pick through the details. A better understanding of this topic requires a more detailed analysis of the charedi world's attitude towards the state of Israel. I close by quoting Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits' comments on the observed lack of any scintilla of religiosity among many of the early Zionist pioneers:

"To be blamed are those who sat back in their easy-chairs and wrote verbose protestations, instead of joining in the work and showing practically how Tora was to be realized while creating the new eretz yisrael. It will ever remain a stigma on a great part of Orthodox Jewry that they protested instead of encouraging, that they hampered instead of helping, that they stood behind instead of taking the lead, that they separated and did not join."

- Moishe Potemkin

Posted by MoisheP at May 8, 2005 08:37 PM | TrackBack