My landsfrau Miriam and the quadriparous Orthomom have lately been railing about a tendency amongst certain elements of the Ultra-Orthodox set to exclude the children of the newly religious from their schools. Apparently the potential contamination that might be transferred by these children (who presumably have some contact with their heinously irreligious family members) outweighs the biblical imperative of education.
It's easy to snidely dismiss this as wrong-headed, and I'm regrettably not above doing so here. By way of analogy, imagine someone who is extremely scrupulous in the rules of kashrut. So scrupulous, in fact, that he refuses to rely upon the neighborhood rabbinate and its potential for error or leniency, and instead, he kills pigs in his backyard with a hatchet, and eats them.
Snidenss number two emerges in the form of the hope that these folks consistently excise all Talmudic quotations of Rabbi Akiva, whose own existence was adulterated by a non-observant upbringing.
Okay, having gotten that bitterness out of my system, let me more dispassionately observe that aside from the evil inherent in this attitude, it's also dopey. (Perhaps someday I'll craft a post on the evilness of dopiness. They're viewed as distinct, but I see it as a false distinction.) While there are probably people that turn to observance out of weakness, there are also sincere people that can see the beauty of a system that they have adopted consciously. Excluding such people creates an insular environment in which that element is sadly absent. Besides, even the Satmar lulav incorporates chozrei bitshuvah.
Yeesh.
- Moishe Potemkin
Posted by MoisheP at October 9, 2005 02:20 PM | TrackBack