So today's websnarfing brings us this attempt by Rabbi Rothstein to minimize the celebration of the Siyum HaShas, because he finds the daf yomi program to be an inducement to shallow talmudic study.
He's entitled to his opinion, of course, but one of the things that drives me nuts about the chareidi world is their willingness to allow the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly when it's their perfect against some other group's good. It's not a more palatable approach coming from my ideological compatriots.
"He who goes, and does not do, attains the reward for going."
I don't do the daf, mostly because I'm lazy, and I get the heebie-jeebies watching grown men hold hands and dance, but if it works for other people, celebrate it.
(Srugi tip: Ursine David)
- Moishe Potemkin
So, yet again, Rabbi Adlerstein has come up with another patronizing post defending indefensible chareidi behaviour because of its alleged sincerity.
Dispensing with the fundamental aspects of his argument is simple enough - rishonim including R' Bachya, the Rambam, the Ralbag, and many others were less willing to cavalierly and disrespectfully dismiss inquiries in deference to the tender sensitivities of the cloistered. The cloistered were invited to close the texts, but (with the exception of the incineration of the Moreh, an experience I imagine Rabbi Adlerstein is loathe to re-create) the texts were written, and were not banned as intrinsically heretical.
More to the point, what I find very uncomfortable about the chareidi approach on so many issues is that it refuses to consider either the costs of its actions or the benefits of what it proscribes.
Take the Israeli army as an easy example. We may or may not be approaching an improved long-term situation. Either way, over the past decades, Israel's neighbors were a significant threat for which military preparedness was necessary. The chareidi response to the legitimate complaints about the deleterious spiritual effects of serving in the army did nothing to improve the situation, and simply ignored the needs for which the army was created. This approach assumes ab initio that the 'real world' is something to be ignored, and is, as I understand it, absolutely contrary to an authentic Torah approach of tikkun olam.
Darn. Now my blood pressure's all elevated.
- Moishe Potemkin
This is essentially a trivial post, but I recently stumbled across this guy and I wanted to see how his right-handed column works.
Also, although he's fiercely partisan (like the Republicans whose entire vocabulary consisted of the words flip and flop throughout most of last year, Mr. Bear's political arguments against the Cowboy in Chief align almost verbatim with whatever was recently stated on Meet the Press), he's quite adept at keyboard sarcasm, which covers a multitude of sins in my book.
Besides, I haven't much to say.
- Moishe Potemkin
Let's leave aside the name-calling here, and defend Ward Churchill's right to say things that people will consider odious. And let's even assume (or pretend) that when he was describing my co-workers and colleagues as "little Eichmanns," his goal was to illustrate how the benighted savages of the Middle East perceived them, not, heaven forfend, giving his own opinion. He's not defending the practice of murdering civilians by piloting planes into building, of course, he's just pointing out the inevitability of this sort of response when the United Stated of Starbucks commits the faux pas of extending economic opportunity to countries populated by small, dark-skinned folks.
The amusing thing, to me at least, is that the response of the benighted savages of Middle America was just as predictable, and if one can hide behind Churchill's distinction-without-a-difference, then the responses of the bumpkin taxpayers whose efforts create the vile culture that the latter-day Churchills ostensibly loathe but somehow prefer to the cozy confines of ideologically pure (?) Cubas and Viet Nams are equaly foreseeable.
Just observing, of course.
- Moishe Potemkin