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
Clearly, it's the wrong time of the lunar year to raise questions of potential heresy, but during the recent two-day toot-fest, I found myself wondering why the world has made so little religious progress over the past (select your own imponderably long epoch here). I can email myself over my telephone, and apparently we also have the technology that enables the beste mentschen to camera-video government witnesses right in the courtroom, to facilitate their decapitation whenever convenient.
And yet, for some reason, people still suck. I don't mean just our Mohammedan cousins that have somehow confused mental PMS with the divine will of Al-Lah. I mean, well, me. When I was a mere tad (lisp fully intact, scalp fully visible), there was a kindly old fellow named Mr. Klein at the neighborhood house of worship. Mr. Klein had, at some earlier point in time, suffered a stroke, leaving his gait and speech significantly impaired. I have few memories of the man, but what stands out is the fact that as a matter of course, my friends and I took to mocking him.
This isn't a diatribe against how cruel children can be - I have a chubby nine-year-old, and I'm reminded of this all too often. It's not a screed against any particular branch of what we lovingly call the frumme velt - we happened to be fairly right-wing, but I don't see its unique elements as contributing to our obtuseness. (Well, this example of obtuseness, anyhoo.)
Kellner makes a good case for progress, and by golly, we know much more about how the world works than ever before. We prob'ly learn more about stuff (including people) than earlier generations picked up in a generation.
And yet, when it comes to actually making people better (or is that better people? Or is better people too reminiscent of eugenics?), we got nothing. What the hey?
- Moishe Potemkin, in an insufferably maudlin mood