iamsamiam

I would like to suggest that this issue relates to Rav Dessler zt”l’s idea of nekudas habechira. The way I understand it, he recognizes that we are not malachim nor are we able to jump to be malachim. We are taking steps on the ladder that is “rosho magia hashaima”. Therefore, just because someone sees an individual not doing something properly, or even a significant portion of the community not doing something, correcting them on a communal level may not be helpful and may just embarrass the person or make things worse. Since everyone is on a different level and has a different point at which he or she makes a choice to be makpid on something or not or to keep a particular mitzva, rebuke and improvement must be undertaken by a person at that person’s level – as long as one is continuing to try to improve, that is what is expected. In my view – people need an individual like a rav who can understand them and where they stand and direct them accordingly as to how they can improve themselves individually and what is appropriate.

I think the schools would be well-served by centralizing scholarships, purchasing and healthcare/life insurance and this could provide a significant savings for schools that could have a real impact on tuition costs without dealing with church/state issues. I think we need someone to set up a business plan for this “entity” and push it through to the schools at conventions of yeshiva principals. The problem is twofold: no yeshiva principal or board wants to give up the control they have over “their” school, even over issues like these that shouldn’t have an educational impact and the loss of jobs of yeshiva administrators who are currently handling the processes that would be centralized. I doubt many schools would agree to cut their administrative staff for something like this.

I think the problem is that the direct approach doesn’t work. I think the frum community needs to look at the psychological motivations behind these behaviors and go after it that way. These people know the halachos from their bais yaakov days. Simply repeating them just makes people want to do them less (people have a tendency to rebel against restrictions that they feel are “forced” on them). It is important to stress self-esteem and self-confidence in women – this is primarily the job of parents, but also the husbands. The women need to understand that they are respected no matter what they wear and if those close to them are able to express that, then we can start heading in the right direction. The next step beyond this is shidduchim and the pressure parents place on their daughters to look a certain way, otherwise they can’t get a shidduch, so how do you think that makes them feel about their essential self, beyond the outward appearance. We have psychologists in the frum community who have studied these points and the rabbonim need to speak with them and work with their kehillos on an individual and general basis to bring home the importance of these points. These messages may be more important than the direct mussar about learning torah, keeping tznius and drinking. These psychological concepts are fundamental to creating people who are shomrei torah on the inside, and don’t just do mitzvos from from community pressure.

We need to dig deep down to the underlying issues and not just see things at the surface as I think many of the comments here suggest.