WHY DO LITVOCKS ALWAYS SAY TACHNUN??

“How is the fact that someone in Baghdad did not say tachanun affected what happened in Vilna?”
I didn’t say it did (although, as a side point, I might contend that it is relevant). The poster was implying that the only reason not to say tachanun is if you’re “looking for excuses” not to.

“Chassidim changed minhagim of their communities, not litvakim.”
This is largely a fallacy, but one with so much traction that it would be hard to contend. At the very least, the second clause is easily debatable: how could any of minhag lita that is based on the Gra exist before the Gra? That means they at least changed those minhagim. In any case, I’m not defending skipping tachanun for a Rebbe’s Yahrzeit or anything like that; I just don’t think tachanun in general is as big of a deal and Litvaks like to pretend. Bare in mind, many if not most Litvish yeshivos skip korbanos every single day. We all have our weaknesses.

> how could any of minhag lita that is based on the Gra exist before the Gra?

How is debatable that Chassidim changed minhagim – whether in Lita or other places also? I don’t think any chassidim disagree with. Community separation went beyond davening – separate kehillot and shehita, leading to decrease in community income from taxes on meat and candles, etc.

I am not learned enough to evaluate how Gra’s changes relate to Chassidut. I’ve read that some of the R Chaim Volozhiner work is a response to chassidut, and I think mussar might be influenced also, but do not about the Gra.

“Chassidim don’t have a real Mesorah, because it only dates back a few hundred years….”

How many hundreds of years does it take to officially “have a real Mesorah” ? I’ve always viewed the term a process through which minhagim are transmitted from one generation to the next

Gadolhadorah: one can’t simply start a new mesorah. They were passed down from parent to child and Rebbe to student, and go all the way back to Moshe Rabbeinu. The reason some groups have different ways of doing things can be explained in various ways:
– There are opinions that each shevet had it’s own mehalech – maybe the different minhagim now are based on those?
– Sometimes different students could understand their Rebbe in different ways, and then there was a difference in how they practiced.

Chassidus did not have a mesorah. The Besht claimed that he ascended to Heaven, and Achiyah haShiloni taught it to him. There were many radical changes to traditional Judaism in the Besht’s teachings.

> Bash? No.

Are we going to have linux flavor wars now!?

to illuminate the discussion above:
Rabbi Avi Shafran wrote an article in Jewish Observer about Mendelssohn where he says, exactly as above,

> fact that many [frum] people have a visceral, automatic reaction to the name Mendelssohn – for whatever reason.

In 2010 interview, he describes negative reaction from multiple members of Moetses, such as
> In the Novominsker’s response, he wrote that the thing that the article may have accidentally obfuscated was that Mendelssohn’s philosophy is a synthesis, and a synthesis is bad. We can’t have a synthesis, it’s evil, it’s a total perversion of Torah… .. of Torah and secular studies. He then notes that Rav Hirsch’s philosophy is not a synthesis, and that’s why Rav Hirsch is different

R Shafran then explains, in a view similar to mine, that he is not holding Mendelssohn as a halachik authority, but as a Jew who help certain opinions:

> I think that Mendelssohn definitely embraced secular culture more, but he wasn’t a rabbi. In other words, I wasn’t extolling him as a Torah authority. I don’t think the Novominsker Rebbe was really addressing what I was addressing. I wasn’t putting Mendelssohn up as someone to emulate. I made very clear, he wasn’t a rabbi at all, he was a philosopher. He was, you know, his life was in the salons, not in the Beis Midrash. He made no claim otherwise! I was simply saying that as a Jew, we have a totally warped picture of who he was. He wasn’t a freethinking rejector of halacha, who ate treife meat privately. In Boro Park, if you ask them to act out Mendelssohn’s life in private, you know, they’d say: You take a piece of pork, be mechalel shabbos. He was meticulously observant! But [in my view,] he had some hashkafic fine points that didn’t click.