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anyone else notice this?
it has lifted up my heart.
there is very little anger and arrogance and machlokes here the last few days or so.
i think the Ribbono Shel Olam has come a little closer to his children during Elul
and we are sensing it, even if subconsciously.
if we can remember this, even after Yom Kippur, and try to be more civil and considerate here, what a Kiddush Hashem that would be!
yes feivel.
tis is true.
and its a good thing for sure.
may it always remain this way.
sometimes people forget themselves and type things they would never say in person.
sometimes people are to quick on the send button.
sometimes people are upset at an untruth or an untorah saying; and word their response too strongly.
but feivel, tell me.
if someone sees a comment that is so wrong, unacceptably so.
say, a comment says pork is kosher; or chillul shabbos is not so bad.
what should the response be?
If I may:
Scathing, insulting replies are ALWAYS wrong, no matter how justified they may seem to be. Especially on these boards, all hateful replies just look like the illiterate rantings of a high-schooler who has too much time on his hands. Especially if the offending comment you wish to reply to is well-written and intelligent-sounding, it is important to have your reply be equally compelling. If someone were to write as follows:
–Poster One: I don’t believe rabbis have the right to tell us what the Torah meant to say.–
And you reply:
Poster Two: WHAT??????!!!! HOW CAN YOU SPEAK SUCH GARBIJ ON THIS WEBSITE PEOPLE LIKE U SHOULD BURN IN GEHINNOM FOREVER CAUSE U THINK U HAVE THE RITE 2 SPEAK THAT WAY????!!!
Who do you think looks smarter in that exchange?
If you can’t reply intelligently, at least reply nicely. If you wish to argue, logic and cold facts go a long way.
My advance apologies if the writing style of my last post was objectionable.
BS”D
You see, that is why I love the Ku Klux Kartel! We may be divided as to their real impact, but everyone agrees they are nuts and no one agrees with their actions.
So, we can debate harmless stuff that no one gets too upset about, like whether they need to be whipped 10000 times with a wet loksh or whether a harsher punishment, such as listening to mp3’s (after all they are too frim to watch videos) of chickens being schechted at kappores.
And then there is the halachic question of whether Freeky Freedy is allowed to play with felt and plastic scissors on Shabbos….
BS”D
but feivel, tell me.
if someone sees a comment that is so wrong, unacceptably so.
say, a comment says pork is kosher; or chillul shabbos is not so bad.
what should the response be?
To ignore it because chances are whoever posted it is looking for attention. Alternately, if it looks like a cry for help disguised as hostility then the only reply is explaining everything with ahavas Yisroel as Hillel would have done.
BS”D
Yes, I would ignore it, because whoever posted it is just looking for attention and I don’t want to fall into their trap. The only way I would respond is if I could somehow figure out that the post is a disguised cry for help. Usually those posts contain something about the poster’s own life (which may or may not be true or accurate).
Posting on this board that tznius no longer applies is the equivalent of posting a recipe for baked cat on a board for people who keep pet cats. In other words, it is trolling. Don’t feed the trolls!
Itzik,
Indeed as Feivel pointed out, my language was rhetorical. I don’t literally expect someone to say pork is kosher, or even that tznius is inapplicable (to use that example) in such blatant language. Our misguided brothers may be off the Torah reservation, but dumb they are not. They know posting something in such stark language will be laughed away. So they tend to be more sophisticated in their attacks on our Holy Torah. Instead of saying tznius is no longer applicable, they will start yelling “Taliban” when the topic of tznius comes up. Then they will justify themselves with the sophistry of leftist ideology propogated in the university’s.
And it is comments like those, that will cause any Ben Torah to nausiate and jump up in defense of our Holy Torah, and sometimes get carried away with the choice of language in response to such sophisticated, yet blatantly anti-Torah ideology.
BS”D
I know what kind of posts you were referring to :).
The only value in replying (and actually I think I did see one post that was just about on the level of chalila tznius is not applicable anymore) is that our posts may be picked up on a search engine so that someone may see the troll post without a response.
Itzik,
I’m not sure they are trolls, as much as they are genuinely krum. They literally live, breath, and bought hook line and sinker into the egalitarian American secular culture with all its excesses and immoralities. And then they actually try to make their egalitarianism and secularism and immoralism into the new age Torah no less! And even worse propogate it and attempt to annihilate any true rendition of the Torah.
Literally on this very site you have more than a handful of such unashamed posters. I venture to say that in online forums they outnumber Torah True individuals. (Probably as a result of many Torah True Yidden eschewing usage of the internet.)
Our greatest Rabbonim have responded to such attacks on the Torah with a fiery bren, that it would make most of the posts here responding to these attackers seem quite lame.
BS”D
1) We are not “our greatest Rabbonim”.
2) As an Internet professional and someone who has also had the zechus to use the Net help people who have cried out, I think that in most cases I can tell the difference between someone who is just starved for attention (a/k/a a troll) and someone who is crying out because of real disillusionment. Even if the people posting some of what they post here do believe in their position, posting here is just a way of getting attention because they know they are in the minority and therefore will spark debate.
3) No matter what the case may be, none of the “krum” posters here is articulate enough to convince anyone of his position. So, the only possible danger is that the krum posts may show up on a search engine. But in the case of those who just look for attention, replying will just generate more and more krum verbiage in reply. If someone is looking for help, especially if he or she was mistreated or perceives to have been mistreated by our community, we need to reply very simply – we understand what happened but it is not representative of our world, and what can we do to help.
Itzik:
1) Should we not emulate our Rabbonim? Should we not stand up for Kavod HaTorah the same way they do?
2) I most certainly appreciate and respect your background. That being said, I think that a good number of the regular posters here are not what you call trolls, but rather richtige krumkeit. They earnestly believe that (like someone above pointed out) serious tznius observance is ‘talibanization’. They honestly hold that the Torah can be bent and shaped to current political trends. And yes they call themselves orthodox and in their minds really hold themselves to so be.
3) And many of these posters have a “higher education” and use this to mislead their readers in a “educated” manner that is very subtle and sometimes effective in its misleading abilities. If you tell a lie enough times, people (sometimes) will start believing it.
Unfortunately, this thread has moved from a thread trying to show how things were quieting down (“there is very little anger and arrogance and machlokes here the last few days or so.”) to a thread of rating and berating fellow posters.
It’s Erev Rosh Hashana.
Thread Closed!
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