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Yserbius123,
“different hashkafas have different things that put their teens at risk and have to put out different ways of helping them.”
I’m not sure that I agree with this – can you be more specific?
“In many MO communities, teens become too enamored with the dark sides of secular society so they have organizations like NCSY to steer them on the right path. In some communities, however, they close their ears and say “La la la can’t hear you learn more Torah!” instead of addressing the 800 pound gorilla.”
I don’t think this is true or fair. Sometimes NCSY helps a teen connect to Yiddishkeit and steer him away from trouble. Sometimes it does not. Should an outsider to the MO community then conclude from those not helped that the MO community is doing nothing to help these troubled teens? There’s some troubled teens in my community who disrupted a NCSY social party-type event to the point that they were told to leave and (allegedly) police were called. I’ve seen those same teens attending evening youth-focused learning programs offered by a local kollel and not disrupting it. I think the big difference was in the atmosphere – one was a swarm of teens plus 1 or 2 adults there to shout a dvar Torah, and one was a beis medrash with many adults and some teens mixed in attending a shiur. Is the NCSY route really superior to the derided “learn more Torah”? And as Gadolhadorah noted earlier, studies, outlets, and activities are not sufficient to really help the underlying problems these kids are having.
DaasYochid,
“The ludicrous assumption that the troubled kids who haven’t connected with Torah would have connected with secular studies”
Right, when people here keep saying “outlets”, they seem to be thinking algebra and history tests. I don’t think the troubled teens would see those as “outlets”, lol.
n0mesorah,
“Some people in chinuch dropped their own nuanced hands off approach when it came to yeshiva bachurim and their phones.”
Hands off is not the same thing as nuanced. And in your previous post you wrote essentially the same thing, but attributing it to brainwashing from an overarching anti-technology movement. Maybe the menahel or yeshiva staff decided to give smartphones the boot after witnessing firsthand how disruptive they were, or after parents pulled their kids out because other kids were showing them inappropriate images.
“The fall out -even today- is tremendous. The yeshiva staff did not see anything from the angle of the student body. They were continually at war with some talmidim.”
You can’t really have it both ways – arguing on the one hand that the specter of smartphone addiction is overblown, but then catastrophizing the impact of their removal from the Yeshiva.
“2) The boys that were not committing to permanently giving up their phone, had no one to talk to. Half the yeshiva was put on a pedestal for not having a phone”
Were they banned, or were they not? This makes it seem like they were not banned, but rather those who opted to keep their phones were treated differently?
“and overlooked them for everything.”
What does this mean?
“3) Bachurim had to get rid of their phones within a week. They had to figure out if they should cancel or not. They had to put all their info somewhere else. Some had to figure out new travel arrangements. It disrupted a lot of the routine.”
These are reasonable points. It sounds like the Yeshiva should have been more judicious with the timing of the ban; maybe instituting it bein hazmanim to give students more time to adjust or decide what to do, and providing more resources and support for the logistical impacts of the policy. But these impacts are different than the vague and ominous “fallout” you’re referring to above.
“And it encouraged face to face encounters that were not desirable.”
Please explain.
Always_Ask_Questions,
“Maybe, it is so clear to them that murders relate to drugs”
I’ve seen other studies at a glance that suggest that drugs play a role in a substantial percentage of murders… perhaps up to 50 percent in some areas. And a disproportionate number of drug-related murder victims are young.
“I personally would suggest a more general explanation – teens are sitting in front of the screen (possibly doing computer crimes or aveiros) rather than with other human beings.”
So asking עוד פעם, please explain to me how smartphone screen time distractions played a role in the reduction of murders in the late 1990s, a decade before the first smartphone was released. I’m not sure that your generalization is valid or follows from this study.
Always_Ask_Questions,
“It’s the Phone, Stupid: Mobiles and Murder Lena Edlund and Cecilia Machado
NBER Working Paper No. 25883 May 2019
New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago”Yes, I already mentioned finding this paper above. But it says nothing about smartphone distractions being the potential cause of the link between cell phones and decreasing murder rates. The rates decreased starting in the late 1990s, which was a decade before Steve Jobs walked on stage. The study authors posit that the decreased murder rate was due to cell phones changing the illegal drug economy from street corner dealing to pre-arranged meet-ups, thus reducing the incidence of turf wars. And the Brazil paper seems to refer to a change in the number of phone number digits, not the introduction of cell phones.
n0mesorah,
“But the hanhala was told by the technology experts that it is all because of the phone. And they became conditioned to only see the phone issue and not the real issue. It got so bad, that these boys couldn’t ask for help. Some of them even knew that the phone was stopping them from worse things. It was like the biggest mitzva to get the phones out of yeshiva. Even if it killed a whole winter zman and half a dozen bachurim.”
This reads like hyperbolic arguments a teenager who doesn’t want limits on his phone would make. It’s a fairly limited perspective.
1.) Sure there can be a bad hanhala, but I wouldn’t assume a hanhala is stupid, shallow, and brainwashed because he made a decision regarding phones you disagree with.
2.) What was “so bad”?
3.) How was the winter zman “killed”?Always_Ask_Questions,
“I think it is less understood that the opposite – focusing on miracles and special moments, while denying the logic – and laws – of the world that Hashem created – is equally bad – and is way more widespread in our communities.”
Explain how it is equally bad.
“At the same time, Einstein’s physics is a significant part of theory that allows for Creation … So, Einstein and other 20th century scientists helped us to finally
win the argument”Yet Einstein was later than his colleagues to the Big Bang party. He initially introduced the “cosmological constant” (lamda) as a theoretical opposing force to gravitation in 1917 (otherwise, the universe would collapse), and had a hard time letting go of the conception that the universe was static, even as late as 1931. He did think through the evidence and accepted the concept of a dynamic and expanding universe, and was able to drop lambda from his equations, but I think it’s incorrect to suggest that he was trying to prove a creation of the universe through his theories of relativity. Interestingly, lamba has made a comeback with more recent observations that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Are Roster,
“There is a mountain of evidence that his work was stolen from others, including from his gentile wife who he later divorced, and never gave any credit.”
This is simply untrue. One accusation that his wife worked with him was based on a letter to her where he referred to “our” work, but it is pretty clear that he meant this as a romantic attachment. Many of his letters to her contain details of his work, but her letters to him only had general, supportive comments.
“Physicists who “spoke to him in learning” report that his own contributions were “junk.” “
This is also untrue. He debated extensively with Niels Bohr about quantum mechanics, and while Bohr’s views are more accepted today, their exchanges were replete with mutual respect.
n0mesorah,
“I feel the movement as a whole is misguided. It produces a lot of of very public messaging. The main practical purpose of all their media is avoiding technology. There should be more about what is good discipline. Especially when it comes to using our free time.”
I think the so-called “movement as a whole” disagrees with you on this. I think they’d argue that “good discipline” as you define it is tantamount to fighting a forest fire with a water pistol, and that not purchasing a smartphone at all or filtering a smartphone’s content is good discipline. This post was a recapitulation of our discussion, so we’re now going in circles. But re-reading some posts above, I have a couple more comments:
“It is obvious to the phone addict that s/he has way too much screen time.”
I don’t think that this is true. Some people are painfully aware that they spend too much time on their phones, but their attempts to limit screen time are unsuccessful. What would you tell these people? That they’re failures and need to try harder? That advice would probably cause them to become depressed. Others are completely unaware of how much screen time they use, and get shocked when they view the statistics.
Also – smartphone issues and bitul zman issues are not equivalent as you make them out to be. Sure a Venn diagram would feature some overlap (the guy ignoring his kids and tapping on a phone in his living room in 2023 may have been the guy with his nose in the newspaper or watching TV in 1983), but this is not the sole issue with smartphones. And would you seriously contend that smartphones don’t seriously exacerbate the bitul zman issue? 3.5 hours a day on average.
n0mesorah,
“About bachurim getting into trouble after giving up their phones. Their yeshiva went all in on the no phone holiness. They left some boys with an unfilled void.”
A normal teen deprived of a phone won’t suddenly up and do drugs, alcohol, or other trouble. “They” didn’t leave those boys with a void. The void was already there. I wrote in another thread: there are boys in my neighborhood rocking the latest and greatest iPhones and still doing drugs, alcohol, and trouble.
WolfishMusings,
“I ended up fasting most of the day (until about 3:30PM)”
Why?
Yserbius123,
Kuvult’s post was likely to be read dripping with sarcasm.
“Not every teenager is equipped to learning eight hours a day. When they get frustrated at the extremely limited options they are given, they lash out and become rebels… Kids need an outlet!”
So in my community there are plenty of secular studies, sports, extracurricular activities, etc. Some boys have the latest and greatest in smartphones, and plenty of outlets. Yet there is still a problem with some of the teens who lash out, become rebels, and are violent. Why is this so? It’s fun to blame whatever hashkafa we already don’t like, but I think it fails us when trying to understand the root causes.
Always_Ask_Questions,
“Note that google et al personalize your search results based on your history (middah k’neged middah, or they are letting you go where you choose to)…”
They do a lot more than that.
“for some reason, I can’t find all these nasty things people here are saying are out there on Internets – what I search for, I got scientific papers as results. (or you can search scholar google com or books google com to begin with)”
Can you use your helige search prowess to find the paper you’re referencing and give me some keywords to find it?
Always_Ask_Questions,
“We don’t need to presume that the authors were stupid and do not know correlation from causation
I’m not presuming that anyone is stupid. In my own experience with “reading something”, conflating correlation with causation is a pretty common practice, particularly in polemical pieces and news articles, so I felt justified pointing it out.
“so it stands teiku unless you want to google and read about it”
You’re shifting the burden of proof onto me, but I did not make the claim, you did. But I did do a quick Web search and found a news article reporting on a paper by Lena Edlund that posited that cell phone adoption may explain some of the decrease in the murder rate in the late 1990s because it shifted the illegal drug “economy” from mainly street corner dealing to pre-arranged meet-ups at secret locations, which cut down on deadly turf battles. That predates smartphones and has nothing to do with distracted kids though.
n0mesorah,
“I know a few kids who gave up their phones and now spend their days looking for drugs, alcohol, or trouble. . But that is not really my point.”
Do you know what motivated them to give up their phones?
“I have come across a whole bunch of people who think it is terribly important for me to get rid of my smartphone without knowing what I do with my time.”
One of my relatives is thoroughly secular, but has the most impressive smartphone discipline I’ve ever seen. She does not check it, but only picks it up when she wants to do something like send a message. Perhaps you are also one of those people with the innate ability to resist the pull. But this is an exception rather than the rule.
I’m also curious about these interactions that you have with the whole bunch of people. Do they accost you and ask if you have a smartphone out of the blue? Do you spend your time with people who don’t like smartphones and pull yours out in front of them? Do you engage in debates with them? I don’t fully understand why smartphones are so front and center.
“When I confront them with what do they do all day, their answer boils down to not having a smartphone.”
Not that they are being polite either, but you are hitting them with whataboutisms, so I imagine they’d get defensive.
“They will openly say, a yeshiva bachur who barely learns but doesn’t have a phone, is better than a serious masmid that has the internet in his pocket.”
They feel an unfiltered smartphone is a spiritual danger, so I’m not surprised by this statement. This may be a clumsy analogy, but how they’re potentially viewing it is: who’s likelier to live a longer life: the guy who sits all day and doesn’t exercise, or the guy who works out 5 days a week, eats a paleo diet, but keeps a rod of plutonium in his pocket?
“My point is that the anti smartphone movement is misguided.”
I wouldn’t judge a “movement” based on some interactions with individuals.
n0mesorah,
“When advocating against too much screen time, also advocate for better uses of time in general. Otherwise nobody really improves.”
Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. Should we stop highlighting the dangers of cigarette smoking because some former smokers may keep drinking? Just because we can’t solve everything does not mean we should do nothing.
Always_Ask_Questions,
“Also important what is the trade off between. I believe (meaning read something, but did not check) that there is a general decline in teenage crime & pregnancies attributed to teens spending times on the phone instead of in malls & gangs.”
Another false equivalence. There’d be an even bigger decline in teenage crime and pregnancy if humans went extinct. Also, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. Violent crime among youth skyrocketed in the 1980s and early 1990s, but started declining in the late 1990s, well before the first iPhone was introduced.
n0mesorah,
“It is obvious to the phone addict that s/he has way too much screen time. It’s not obvious to the kosher phone crusader how much time s/he devotes to a pointless crusade.”
False equivalence fallacy. The average American screen time on a smartphone is around 3.25 hours per day, contributing to a total daily screen time just north of 7 hours per day. Do you think the average “kosher phone crusader” is spending that amount of time per day on the crusade?
Also, I have already disputed your contention that advocating for kosher phones, filters, etc. is pointless.
SQUARE_ROOT,
“In the secular world, people who are the most intelligent and the most highly-educated already know this.”
I agree with you regarding ad hominem arguments; however, why are you juxtaposing the frum community unfavorably with the secular world? Do you think that the “most intelligent and most highly-educated” frum people don’t understand logical fallacies? Or that secular online forums are not rife with ad hominem attacks?
1a2b3c,
I suspect AAQ had some typos in his post and meant “appropriate” instead of “inappropriate”.
Who are “they” who are angry or not angry?
I think the riots were a chillul Hashem.
n0mesorah,
“My point is that instead of saying to stop looking at this or you might see this, it would be better to say put your full attention on what you are trying to be immersed in.”
That’s nice in theory; however, it ignores the reality of how smartphones and their apps are designed. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. have a vested interest in users spending time in their apps, viewing as much content as possible, and coughing up personal data. Smartphone apps and Web sites play on human psychology to accomplish this, providing a constant stream of dopamine-inducing stimuli in an easy to carry form factor that also has a lot of useful tools people want available (phone, messaging, flashlight, camera, etc.). A person may intentionally seek out one piece of information, but the app or Web site then throws a ton of unsolicited content back – links to other articles, pictures, etc. So is it really a bad thing that some people would prefer to stay off that battlefield?
“I wish people without smart phones would fill the void by being more attentive. But they are just as unaware of their surroundings as when they were phone addicts.”
This seems rather negative, and doesn’t fit with my own observations. How do you define being “aware” of your surroundings?
AviraDeArah,
“To put ourselves in situations where the best we can do is posit ad-hoc theories about what the halacha “might” be, is to push avodas Hashem on the back burner and put our own interests first. This is what “I” want to do, now let’s see how we can fit halacha into it… that’s not an eved to a master, it’s a person who is living for themselves and trying to assuage his guilty conscience.”
Why such hostility and assuming the worst of intentions? Going into space is likely assur for a much more simple reason: pikuach nefesh. Rockets are dangerous, as is outer space. Very few people go into space at all right now, and those who do go at most stay in a low Earth orbit. Most space tourism right now doesn’t even achieve orbit, so the whole trip takes less than an hour from launch to landing (you get to see the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth for a few minutes, and experience weightlessness as the capsule free-falls back towards Earth).
If rocket or novel transportation technologies become safer and cheaper, more advanced space tourism, e.g., orbiting hotels, lunar resorts, may become feasible. Large-scale lunar or Martian colonization is further off, as there is mounting evidence that the challenges are greater than previously believed, due to harmful effects of long stays in space, radiation exposure due to weak magnetic fields on the moon or Mars, solar flares, etc. It’s also possible that mining asteroids for raw materials could become big business, though I imagine that much of that work would be done by robots. So maybe in our lifetimes we’d see shailos come up about whether a 2 week vacation to the Moon is appropriate, or if a frum business man needs to take a trip to a space station overseeing a mining operation, but who knows? Nobody is trying to skirt mitzvos by taking a hyperwarp cruiser to planet Xorkon 7. It’s purely science fiction and a theoretical exercise. And the latest astronomy research has been suggesting that Earth-like potentially habitable planets are much more rare than previously thought, as the most common star type (red dwarf) likely emits atmosphere-stripping amounts of solar wind. Not that we even have the capability of interstellar travel.
AviraDeArah,
“we indeed kept the mitzvos in the midbar for 40 years before going into EY.”
A lot of mitzvos were learned in the midbar but had to wait until we were in E”Y to perform them. We couldn’t fulfill mitzvos such as kelayim or shemitta in the midbar, where there was no agriculture.
“Every part of the world has a shkiah, a tzeis…and yes, living in problematic areas such as Hawaii or Shanghai are discouraged bh poskim, because it isn’t clear how to keep zmanim.”
Not the polar regions, though poskim also discourage living there too.
“Trees planted hydroponically or in an atzitz sheaino nakuv aren’t considered gidulei karka for things like schach, etc… according to most poskim.”
Great points!
AviraDeArah,
“the mitzvos are all earth-centered; zmanim, 4 minim, all food related mitzvos, etc, are all based on earth. It’s untenable that they would go to a place where they can’t keep mitzvos properly”
Not Earth centered, but E”Y centered. Zmanim are challenging north of the Arctic circle. In past generations when transportation was harder, the arba minim were hard to come by in much of Europe, as citrus trees do not grow in cold climates. We start saying mashiv haruach by Shemini Atzeres and stop by Pesach because that is the beginning and ending of E”Y’s wet season, but Florida’s rainy season tapers off after Shemini Atzeres and picks up after Pesach. And the seasons and agriculture in the Southern Hemisphere are flipped from the Northern, meaning they plant when E”Y harvests, and harvest when E”Y plants. Your argument could be applied to living on Earth as well. And until we have the Beis Hamikdash, we cannot keep the mitzvos properly anywhere, even in E”Y.
Always_Ask_Questions,
“are there TCim that are not ben Torah? learning well, but sometimes reads newspapers?”
I know some. Extremely learned but a terror to their wives and children.
“are there BT that are not TChim? guided by the Torah but not so good at learning it?”
Perhaps, though learning Torah is part and parcel of being a ben Torah.
Always_Ask_Questions,
I’m not sure that ranking from better to worse is the right way to compare the terms talmid chacham and ben Torah. Talmid chacham specifically refers to prowess in learning, and I think ben Torah is a broader term referring to a person who makes the Torah his guiding force in life, of which learning is certainly a part.
Gadolhadorah,
“That is NOT the issue in the Karen syndrome. As I understand it, that term was originally being applied to a narrow subset of cases where individuals engaged in baseless assumptions clearly tied to race/ethnicity to summon police to investigate the innocent behavior of a minority.”
Nah, it was a guy on the social media platform reddit who wanted to get back at his ex-wife named Karen, which then merged with older stereotypes like Becky (the privileged white woman) or Stacy (misogynistic stereotype), and went supernova because the left wing media wanted to absolutely destroy the woman who called the cops on the black birdwatcher who complained about her dog. It was never a narrow application and it has never been about racial justice. How is racial justice served by stereotyping and denigrating others? How is it served when a man follows a woman all of the way to her home because she was allegedly rude to him on the road, harassing her until she is in hysterics in front of her house, filming and doxxing her on social media, all to sell Karen T-shirts?
“Yidden have suffered enough from stereotyping and we should avoid engaging in such behavior. That does not mean we should be discouraged from seeking assistance when we feel at risk.”
The “woke” movement has a serious problem with sexism and antisemitism. To deal with the cognitive dissonance of hating some groups while professing to be anti-hate, women and Jews are said to have privilege while weaponizing their supposed victimhood to oppress others. Therefore Jewish college students reporting discrimination are accused of oppressing Palestinians. Women who dare tell their server that he messed up the order are called a Karen. This produces a chilling effect on seeking assistance when we feel at risk.
Always_Ask_Questions,
It’s already Adar where you are??
n0mesorah,
“Please do tell what the counter obsession with the pitfalls of smartphones achieves? All I see is a bunch of people blocking out their surroundings.”
No, rather it is a bunch of people realizing that they have a choice in what surrounds them. As for what the “counter obsession” has achieved, look no further than the title of this thread. Do you mean to argue that it is worse for a person to make conscious choices rather than unconscious ones, just because you personally disagree with the choices some make?
“I don’t realize a difference if it’s by being stuck in technology or stuck being anti technology.”
It’s not anti-technology. Jews are not the Amish. It’s deciding how best to integrate technology into your life so that your life is enhanced, not distracted, and elevated, not brought down. To make tech your tool, and not be its tool.
Of course I realize that we’re talking past each other here, because we’re making different assumptions. Your assumption seems to be that advocates for filtered smartphones or no smartphones believe most smartphone users will eventually seek out inappropriate images. I don’t think that’s accurate. What I do believe is that, due to how smartphones and the Internet work, a person using an unfiltered or inadequately filtered smartphone has a high probability of unintentionally encountering images they wouldn’t otherwise seek out. Maybe a stock photo on a news article. Or a pop-up ad. Or images associated with clickbait at the end of a news article. And images are just one piece of the puzzle of the challenges smartphones pose.
“Either way, people in today’s day are not really cognizant of what is right in front of them.
Maybe because they’re looking down at their phones? 😛
Gadolhadorah,
“The term also seems to be invoked in the context of white women who invoke racist stereotypes of minorities to rationalize their fears and accuse individuals of nonexistent crimes, invasion of their “personal space” or simply breathing while black.”
That’s the sugarcoat that the left puts on it, but in reality the “Karen” meme is straight up misogyny. Some people can’t stand it when a woman dares speak up, so let’s call her a Karen and unleash the Internet shame machine! Now other women will be afraid to advocate for themselves, whether in a store, on the street, or in the hospital, lest they too be labeled a Karen. It’s insidious.
Sure, there are times when women (or men) may misinterpret situations due to prejudices or even act maliciously. And that should be rightly called out. But not by generating a stereotype that can be used as a cudgel against any woman who dares stand up for herself. Note that men who do the same aren’t called “Kens” or “Roberts”, or whatever. I don’t want my daughters to be afraid to speak up if they received inadequate service, are getting pushed around by their doctor, or to hesitate for even one second to get away from a situation or call the police if their instincts tell them there is danger.
“The tag could be used in a gender-neutral context since you don’t have to be a woman to be a Karen.”
But it’s not.
n0mesorah,
“That’s not what appearances mean in this context”
I think that AAQ is closer to the mark on the context than you are.
n0mesorah,
“So you don’t have a life and would spend your time looking at obscene pictures. It’s not for me and it’s not for most people. Only the extremely secular or the extremely religious normalize this garbage”
This comment completely misses the mark. Maybe try to understand people who think differently from you before resorting to insults.
n0mesorah,
“The reason the MO bashing is toleratated in this context is because the yeshivish or chassidish yidden who are slipping are just called not yeshivish or chassidish. It’s an easy fix which MO has been unable to enact.”
This is not true. The difference I think lies more in what causes the slipper to be declared outside the fold. When Sholom Rubashkin was released from prison, he was greeted with dancing in the streets of Brooklyn, with much hand wringing over the spectacle in MO circles. In contrast, when Jack Abramoff was released from prison, he was persona non grata in his former DC/Baltimore area MO communities. MO rabbis have had no trouble excommunicating people for not adhering to Covid orthodoxy. The dispute here perhaps seems to be what each community is willing to tolerate.
“Which must cause great displeasure to hashem. Well, he can always start a new ‘who is a jew’ battle, to cheer himself up. “
Uhh, what does this mean?
n0mesorah,
“The only reason the yesivishe velt is not being tried for institutionalized sin and heresy”
What heresy is promulgated in the “yeshivishe velt”? And who would conduct the trials?
AviraDeArah,
“Avram, as with kany studies, it’s important to look at the raw data and not focus on the conclusions that the pollster makes.”
I didn’t rely on or reference any of the subjective statements made by Nishma. I just noted that they included OO and LWMO respondents in the survey.
ujm,
“Avram: Isn’t that a No True Scotsman?”
Yes, it could be. However, I think that the left and right within MO are heading towards a schism. The open-orthodox have already started the process, giving their movement a unique name and establishing separate communal infrastructures. Some clear lines in the sand have been drawn, though some will say not clear enough. Given that, I think there’s legitimacy to a MO person declaring that someone holding certain OO “shittos” are outside the bounds of MO.
“That would be similar, perhaps, to Ultra-Orthodox excluding ganovim and molesters from their own definition of Ultra-Orthodox.”
So similar to what I wrote to Gadolhadofi, I think there’s a difference between those within a group who fail as people, and questions about the shittos a group holds. This debate is not making those differences clear at all.
Gadolhadofi,
“No single group of Jews has an “exclusive mantle of victimhood” and none deserves this kind of bashing. My point was that this thread became open season on a specific group and the worst bashers would react with righteous indignation if their group was in the gunsights.”
That’s fair. I will admit that I have not followed this thread closely, so I may have missed a lot, but the “those in glass houses” retorts seem to be bringing up faults of “Yeshivish” or “Chassidish” people that reflect personal failures to maintain ideals, rather than problematic shittos. Do you feel AviraDeArah is doing the same?
GadolHadofi,
“So which group of Jews should get bashed next, Yeshivish or Chasidish?”
Like they don’t already? Why do MO get the exclusive mantle of victimhood? I have been in many MO environments, and they give just as good as they get, if not more. I’m in full agreement with the “let’s not bash” philosophy – though I don’t think debating a legitimate tayna is bashing. But to use the “bashing is bad” as a shield while wielding a club to bash others?
AviraDeArah,
“While we’re on the subject of the nishma study…”
I took a very brief look at the summary of the survey – and they note that 12% of the respondents self-identify as “open-orthodox”, and 22% as LWMO. A lot of the MO posters here exclude these groups from their own definition of Modern Orthodox. The survey summary noted a polarization within modern orthodoxy, with the right-leaning going more towards the right, and the left-leaning going more towards the left. This seems somewhat similar to the mechitza wars in the mid-20th century US, which ultimately resulted in shuls that were strictly Orthodox, and shuls that were Conservative. Though the flashpoint issues are different today, ein chadash tachas hashemmesh.
Always_Ask_Questions,
“producing people with balanced lifestyle that integrate Torah into normal life”
And this, right here, is the epitome of the world view that has AviraDeArah up in arms. Hopefully Yserbius123 can acknowledge that the “YV” do not hold a monopoly on the “holier than thou” mentality.
Always_Ask_Questions,
“Same as when a person is sick – is it a gezera or a cure is possible?”
It’s both – the two are not mutually exclusive.
“Maybe, you have a similar cognitive dissonance with the meteor: you clearly need to know physics and engineering to confront the meteor, but this would require you to admit that going to college is useful, and you would rather have the whole world destroyed than admit you were wrong. Understandable. “
This broadside is not apropos to the discussion – I think AviraDeArah was trying to come up with an example of a prediction of unavoidable destruction and how we should respond as Jews. He did posit leaving Earth as a potential solution that he then rejected, which is also a separate yet interesting discussion.
emes nisht sheker,
“the word “mabul” was in quotes (single quotes) because it was a hebrew word. If you look I put “environmentalists” in double quotes to give emphasis to that word. The single quotes was to indicate the change in language. Hope that makes sense.”
That is an atypical usage of quotation marks, and I have never seen them used in that manner before. Double-quotes are used for quoting, and single-quotes are used for quotes within quotes. For informal usage in forums like this one, quotation marks are frequently applied to words that are not actual quotes, with the intention of indicating doubt, casting aspersions, or to distancing the writer from what is written. For example, imagine a Trump supporter writing “Liz Cheney, the former ‘Republican’ representative from Wyoming”. The function of the quotes around Republican is to indicate that the writer does not believe she is a real Republican. Now imagine a Democrat writing “the annual ‘March for Life’ recently wrapped up in Washington, DC.” Again, March for Life was not a quotation, but the writer put it in quotes to imply that s/he does not support that name. This is how I initially interpreted your quotes, and it confused me.
AviraDeArah,
“But are we commanded not to do actions which harm the environment?”
This is an excellent question, and I think it gets to the heart of the matter. It seems that your position is that actions that change the environment are forbidden if they harm humans – garbage on the head or toxic pollution being some concrete examples. AGW is more complex, because the effects on people are unclear and long term. Akuperma wants to argue that warming will be a net benefit to humanity. Climate change doomsayers focus only on the perceived threats. But only Hashem knows and controls the results.
Environmental thought seems to fall into two camps. One camp views human interference with the environment as a bad thing, and their ideal of environmental action is to lessen humanity’s footprint on the planet. The most benign policies from this camp are the carving out of wild, natural areas. The most malignant policies advocate for human population reduction. A crazy loon shot up the Discovery building in Silver Spring, MD years ago because the television network aired reality shows featuring large families, and he demanded the voluntary extinction of the human species. This camp is antithetical to Torah.
A second camp acknowledges the damage humans cause to the environment, and advocates for humans to continue molding their environment, but to do so with better thought and planning – i.e., instead of the extremes of wild nature or high pollution, build clean gardens that benefit both people and other life. If the focus is on benefiting people, I don’t see this position as a conflict with Torah thought.
“It would be similar to a scientific prediction that a meteor is about to hit earth in 25 years”
The simplistic difference between a meteor and AGW is that the latter is presumably caused by people, and thus it is within the scope of human ability to change it (though even if human CO2 and methane emissions went to zero today, various planetary systems are still slowly responding to warming that’s already baked into the system). Whether something is within our abilities to handle or not, we should certainly daven and do teshuva.
As far as moon colonies – that leads to some other interesting questions that I’ll have to think about before articulating,
AviraDeArah,
“Avram, bechira allows a person to decide to do something, but does not allow it to happen unless it’s min hashomayim. There’s no other power besides Hashem in the world.”
I agree. This doesn’t really answer my question; however. Hashem set up our universe with a sense of cause and effect to allow us to participate in it. If I walk across the street, I’ll find myself on the other side. If I put a flame to a candle wick, the candle will light. If I turn the furnace on in my home, the home warms up. And I don’t have to be desiring or even cognizant of the effect for the effect to occur. If I dump garbage out of my window, it may land on someone’s head, even if I didn’t know someone was there. So on the one hand, that garbage would not have landed on the person’s head unless Hashem willed it, but on the other hand, the garbage landing on his head was a result of my action. So could we say that of course AGW will not occur unless Hashem wills it, but if Hashem does will it, its physical cause is due to human activities?
The reverse of this is that had I not dumped the garbage from my window and the person below deserved a petch, he would have gotten it by some other means. But does this mean I can be unconcerned with the impacts of dumping garbage out my window?
AviraDeArah,
I think it’s not kefira to say that a human being can change or even destroy his house. And on a bigger scale, his block. Or neighborhood, or city, or even region. Fly across the expanse of the U.S. on an airplane and one can see that humans have drastically altered the entire countryside, with roads, cities, and farmland like patchwork quilts. At what point or scale do we say that the idea that humans can change their environment becomes kefira? I’m honestly curious where the boundary is.
emes nisht sheker,
“I find this whole conversation funny as frankly many of the ideas “environmentalists” want to enact are beneficial regardless of whether climate change is or is not an issue.”
You perceive the notion that environmental policies are objectively beneficial to humanity as poshut, but actually this is one of the cruxes of the disagreement, so if you actually want to convince people instead of just insulting them to demonstrate your intellectual superiority, maybe tone down the laughter and hostility.
“What type of lunatic do you have to be to not want us to move off fossil fuels? The streets of our cities will be quieter and the air cleaner.”
The streets would be quieter and cleaner, and electric vehicles are certainly a better prospect than diesel, which Europe adopted en masse to reduce emissions, and are now dealing with the far more toxic exhaust in urban areas than gasoline emissions as a reward for their short-sightedness. However, electric cars are currently more expensive to produce and buy than conventional combustion based vehicles. Their reliability is perceived to be poorer. The distance they can travel before requiring recharging is shorter than the distance between each refueling of a conventional vehicle. Charging an electric vehicle takes longer than refueling a gasoline vehicle. So I’m not surprised that consumers who are already stressed by increasing costs and demands with decreasing time in the day for family, learning, and personal needs would feel resentful towards shaming, “nudging” or outright regulating (i.e., California) the purchase of vehicles that would increase the stress. For this to change, electric cars must become superior to conventional combustion cars. Then people will buy them!
Now move beyond the consumer perspective. Electric cars must be charged. This requires them to be plugged into power grids that are already decrepit, functionally obsolete, and overtaxed. When Californians hear that electric vehicles will be mandated, but the state cannot even provide sufficient electricity to its citizens over the summers right now, and we hear nothing of big plans to improve the power-supply infrastructure, why shouldn’t there be opposition?
Also, what impact on places such as Africa where the materials originate would the dramatic expansion of demand for large lithium based batteries have? When mandating electric vehicles, is California being a good global citizen by ensuring other places are not negatively impacted?
“breathing in partially combusted hydrocarbons that were buried at least since the ‘mabul’ is fine with them.”
Just curious – why did you put mabul in quotation marks?
“As to garbage… Where does all that garbage we produce go? It is not an easy job transporting it. If we can figure out a better way to handle garbage, such as better recycling and the like, it would save places like NYC lots of money.”
So demonstrate this benefit clearly and calmly to people. The current perception is that recycling has little overall benefit, as the material has to be transported long distances, much of it is ultimately landfilled anyway, and there are companies who are make a lot of money from recycling operations while those who are actively separating the materials see little benefit, e.g., reduced taxes or increased services from the supposed savings.
Gadolhadorah,
“adopting such practices was either minhag hagoyim”
Given your high level of hostility to and unfamiliarity with frum Jews, I suspect that either you did not understand the responses you got, or are making up this response. I have never heard “minhag hagoyim” as a reason to not recycle.
“or simply encouraged more “extreme” demands from environmentalists (e.g. not paving over your front lawn to park 2 minivans or not trashing local parks during chol hamoed outings).”
Wow, who needs anti-Semites? You’ll perhaps be disappointed to know that when I went to Hershey Park for the first time on chol hamoed Sukkos, there were thousands of frum Jews in attendance, yet the park was clean and orderly, and the patrons well behaved.
Quayboardwarrior,
“I wonder why Jewish people have such a strong bias against environmentalism?”
It’s not environmentalism that engenders frum opposition per se, but rather the anti-humanism expressed by many so-called environmentalists under the guise of environmentalism. Separate the two successfully and you’ll find that the hostility drops considerably.
Shimon Nodel,
Just curious why you assume that concern about microplastics and other toxins is a liberal issue?