DY, please. If it was only me that thought that I would agree that I was reading too much into it. However, I was not the only one to pick up on the visceral reaction that you seemed to have to my query. And I’m not upset at you or anyone else. I was just pointing out that your reaction is typical these days. And its not such a puzzling statement at all. the Torah itself does not consider the learning of a mitzvah to be the actual doing of it. I cannot be mekayem lulav v’esrog by learning about it. Even in depth. I could not make a brochoh on them and then learn the appropriate mishnaoyos. If you don’t pick up the lulav and esrog, you didn’t do the mitzvah. Now you could say that if you were unable to get a set and you felt really bad and took up the learning you could get some s’char for the effort, but the schar is for the learning (that can “equate” to the mitzvah, but its certainly not the mitzvah. Look, we are getting off topic. I think FarEast is right. We are having a problem in orthodoxy. We are letting differences in Halachah drive a wedge between us in real practical life. We are turning minhag (which of course has its place) into halachah, and eschewing those that dont follow the ones that we do. Some of you read WolfishMusings posts and don’t seem to get that his self denigrating posts are tongue-in-cheek commentary on this exact situation. he is of course a perfectly fine Jew. I would hazard to say that he may even be approaching a really really fine Jew, yet there are those that would criticize him (for real) as he does to himself. We drive wedge after wedge after wedge between us. There is a difference in machlokes in learning which leads to better understanding and machlokes in in practice, which leads to divisiveness and destruction. Do a little historical research on Beis Shammai and Beis Hillel and their often public arguments that actually led to the killing of students from Beis Hillel. We are on a dangerous path when real halachic discourse translates to splintering of our people.
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