So do I want to step in the morass of whose gadol is greater, along the lines of the various comments at agudah-apologetics.com or at Gil's house? No, sir, I do not. (I must confess to being amused by the whole issue, as though there is some empirical means of comparison other than perceived popularity. Which, of course, Shabbetai Tzevi would have won in a landslide.)
I did want to comment on the delicious irony of it all. Essentially, the Anti-slifkinites are now using the paramount principle of "the gedoilim are always right" to defend dismissing the Rambam, Rav Hirsch, and Rav Dessler (Rav Dessler!) as irrelevant to hashgacha promulgated by, well, no names here.
Even more ironical (sorry 'bout 'dat), the segment of our community that believes in the primacy of text over mimeticism (a word I had never heard before the Rav, Jr. used it, of course) is also now dismissing texts that it believes are inconsistent with attitudes that are prevalent.
Look, in my experience, most rabbis are intelligent and well-meaning. But not all - and I say this from adequately personal experience of getting shafted by the system. And certainly the petition-pushers have even less of a chezkas kashrus.
I find myself reacting particularly badly to the "oh, no, there are very good reasons why we cannot protest Slifkin's being lynched without the opportunity to defend himself, but we just cannot tell you what these reasons are"-type assertions. After David Berger came out with his concerns over Chabadianity, he also received missives telling him that the self-important "leaders" - appointed to their positions of infallibility by, I suppose, Moshe Sherer and/or the editorial staff at the Yated - are contemplating his work, and they'll come out with a response real soon. By, say, 2001. Or 2003. Or never. Or when someone with a spine does first. Or never.
As was pointed out in several different contexts, all that is necessary for evil to prevail in the world is for good people to do nothing. Or to self-righteously ask, "Who am I to take a stand?"
- Moishe Potemkin, still alternating between rage and amusement
It's not my preference to spend much bandwidth on theological or religious issues. First of all, due to the nubile distractions of my youth, my own religious outlook resembles nothing so much as Frankenstein's monster, with pieces almost arbitrarily cobbled together from a variety of sources, designed such that little minds need not concern themselves over potential hobgoblins.
More fundamentally (and perhaps more troubling, at least for one such as myself brought up in an environment of impenetrably smug absolutism), there appears to be a layer of religiosity that is necessarily subjective, so my experiences are likely to be of little value to others anyhow.
Having said all that, and this being a slow week for any political lucubration (I could do a riff on the bad faith underlying the carefully phrased objections to addressing the inevitable shortfall in F.D. Ponzivelt's Social Security system, but the only people likely to care are the spammers who have recently happened upon my website and deluged the comments section with offers of third mortgages), I wanted to post my reaction to L'Affaire Slifkin. Without delving into the details - which would require far more textual familiarity than your humble correspondent boasts - I just wanted to observe that the unctuous, smarmy tone taken in the breathless denunciation of Rabbi Slifkin's heresy was appalling in its peurile vacuity, and not at all a credit to its professors. Which, by the way, will matter. One only hopes that this event, and the informed response of the folks over at Yashar et al, serve as another Rathergate for Those Who Decide.
- Moishe Potemkin