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btw im not entirely sure why people here seem to think that tznius and l’shem shamayim are mutually exclusive these days…as was pointed out by several users, the standards of tznius in recent years have gone up. i have seen pictures of my grandmother where she wore dresses that didnt cover or cume up to her elbow, but now she wouldnt dream of it. why? because our adherence to tznius has become more stringent. (by our adherence i mean NYC and its environs…i cant speak for out of town)
another thing that our parents and grandparents were more lax on was music. there wasnt much jewish music back then so many if not most listened to whatever non-jewish music they could get their hands on. many of those people wouldnt dream of listening to anything that isnt sold by mostly music today. the standards have changed, is that not l’shem shamayim? today if a school finds a kid with a non-jewish music laden iPod or the like the kid is given detention, the iPod is confiscated and the parents may be called, is that because we’re simply outwardly being more frum while we really are no different from our parents and grandparents? i dont think so. they made us what we are today with all our chumros and hiddurim, it wasnt our invention, i think we can safely say that it was l’shem shamayim.
what about going to dances? i know that was common back in the day, now if it happened a kid would be thrown out of school faster than you could say “off the derech” does that mean that our standards of gender separation have gotten higher because of some bias against women? or was that always halacha and previous generations were lax, for whatever reason, and our new standards are l’shem shamayim? ill go with the latter.
my parents and grandparents used to be a little more lax with kashrus as children. ask your parents and grandparents if they chewed gum that didnt have a hechsher, or ate good and plenty even though it had no hechsher, i think you’ll find that they did. it was very common back then. it wouldnt happen today, and if a kid in school was caught doing it he would get yelled at by his menahel. is that wrong? are our standards in kashrus higher because we’re really less frum? does that make sense? no i’d say its l’shem shamayim.
im not judging previous generations, im sure that our children and grandchildren will have the same conversation as us. but to get stuck in the past and have the attitude that “we did it, if it was good enough for us its good enough for you” is completely ridiculous. what our parents and grandparents did obviously turned us into the people we are today, with all our chumros, and im sure they are and would be proud of us.
as for why a school would refuse to accept a child whose parents are lax on certain issues? firstly because the hashkafah may be wrong in the house of the parents are aware of communal and societal norms and despite that buck them and those hashkafos may rub off on other kids this kid befriends. secondly everyone knows that the responsibility of a yeshiva extends past the walls of the yeshiva to the entire spiritual wellbeing of every student. kids have friends over, and the yeshiva has no interest in that friend being negatively influenced, or introduced to things he may not otherwise have been aware of.
so the argument can be made that accepting this kid will influence him positively and that will diffuse to the parents and the whole family will grow as a result of the yeshiva accepting this kid, but realistically which is more likely: a kid influencing his family positively, or a kid influencing another student negatively? i would say the latter.
this is all for NYC or any major jewish community where there is a dearth of yeshivos from which to choose; there is always a yeshiva for everyone. in out of town communities this is obviously a much tougher decision for school administrators.
one thing i will say though (in addition to the many things i said above), is that if a kid isnt accepted my mainstream yeshivos then there are other places for him to go be it a kiruv yeshiva or maybe a more modern orthodox yeshiva or maybe a mix of both depending on the exact situation. however there is a certain stigma to attending such yeshivos and that, many times, backs parents into a corner and, in a way, forces them to got their kid into a mainstream yeshiva or else. i know many guys who should never have been in a regular yeshiva but were anyway because to their parents the idea of them attending anything but was untenable and they came off worse for it. i also know guys whose parents and rebbeim realized early on that mainstream yeshiva was not for him and switched him to another, more off the beaten track yeshiva and today hes doing just fine. its possible that its coincidence, but i dont think so.
jewish press and Ami i would say based on experience. of course it depends on the content…
the conclusion i reached is that there is no reason you can pin OTD on…all the reasons today are nothing new, going off the derech has been in vogue since the times of the beis hamikdash. what you CAN do is deal with these kids once it happens…
“Soliek, in your experience, what are the top 3 reasons kids of otd and end up in our place?”
abuse, wrong friends, and overlooked issues such as learning disabilities, mental illness, or emotional problems.
ultimately what does it is the wrong crowd, the other two are just reasons a kid joins that crowd…
all this other stuff is nothing but fluff. seriously…all this garbage that people say drives kids off the derech is completely contrived and rubbish. one or two kids perhaps, but certainly not the overwhelming majority. when people make threads like this its because someone did something that irked and they feel the need to tell the world just how peeved they are, and in making their point, since it is usually not valid enough to stand on its own, they pull out the OTD bogeyman.
“I am surprised that most of the posters have allowed the statement that covering “knees and elbows is halocha” go by unchallenged. Check with the gedolei horabbanim and find out if this is unanimously accepted halocha.”
just checked. it is.
“doughnuts are beauty
light fluffy clouds of heaven
transposed into food”
fascinating. haiku is rubbish.
btw…who in here actually works with OTD kids and is therefore qualified to decide why they go OTD?
about time
“(as far as I know it is used on facebook to mean ‘I agree’)”
that made me want to punch a puppy in the spleen…ITS FROM GOOGLE +
so youre wondering where you can find some deep-fried israelis?
“parve yapchik”
so its kugel without the meat? so its kugel…
i stubbed my toe
whoopdeedo.
why bother wasting your time poking your nose into other people’s lives? im sure you do things that they would find odd…just get a life (yep. i said that on the internet.)
im not seeing a problem…posting on an obviously frum forum where shabbos is observed is chillul shabbos b’farhesya. the OP was being moche…if you see someone IRL being mechallel shabbos b’farhesya who should know better (anyone who posts here knows what shabbos is, and how we feel about it) i sincerely hope you would be moche.
non jews tell me merry christmas all the time. i just respond with a polite “happy holidays”
“naivety”
mdd: when the rest of my family stops talking to their female cousins ill think about it. ive never seen any breaches in tznius between any of them.
“Soleik, what about “al tarbe sicha im ha’isha”?
ill take my chances
by the way, to address whoever it was who asked me why my cousin would be different from any other girl id be at a party with…i would do exactly the same thing with any girl i knew. i would be shomer negia, but i would not ignore her…i would talk to her because that is what human beings do…
“why my cousin would be different from any other girl id be at a party with”
im gonna head that off because i know someone is gonna say something. i dont make a habit of going to parties at which there are girls who arent family…hypothetically speaking if a couple of families we’re friends with got together and their daughters were there i would talk to them…thats what i meant.
i think we should just declare all women insane and mandate anti-depressants…problem solved?
please stop it…there is nothing wrong with getting what you pay for. and to head off the lengthy conversation that will inevitably follow…buying expensive items is not wrong. bneing ostentatious and flashy is.
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Chuck Norris can divide by zero.
merry christmas
and that required an all caps header because…
im still laffing 😀
“soliek – You must be very young & naive. Have you ever heard of legal terms like divorce, custody, judgments? The only real choice I had left was this MO school in Elizabeth or the default was P.S.
Since they didn’t accept my kid -it went to default.”
what has young and naive to do with it? i told you what i inferred from your post…your post contained nothing about any of that.
well what i understood from your post was that you tried a specific MO school which turned you down and therefore sent your kid to public school regardless of other possibilities. i say other possibilities based on the assumption that you live in the tri state area. actually scratch that…assuming you live in alabama and you were willing to send your kid to jersey then you still had other options which, as implied by your post, you excluded because it was not MO.
even assuming you didnt exclude the others because they were or were not MO, there are still plenty of fine yeshivos out there and i cannot come up with a single justification for sending a kid to public school as opposed to a frum (whatever level) yeshiva.
unless your problem was money in which case i apologize. or i completely misunderstood your post in which case you should explain.
in either case, since you decided to respond to me in the first place, care to explain exactly WHY you sent your kid to public school as opposed to yeshiva?
are you kidding me…seriously?! is this thread a joke? if my family is having a party and my cousins are there you bet ill be talking to them regardless of age or gender
“You think I could have stopped this and didn’t?”
really want me to answer that?
shut up
“Because my kid wasn’t accepted in some MO school in Elizabeth, he/she is now in public school.”
k’lomar: it was the MO school in Elizabeth or bust. am i misinterpreting that?
“and just as happy that he is NOT in jail,”
and the fact that he is very likely to do it again doesnt bother you in the slightest? or is that the next guys problem…
mewho: yeh except in this case it would men that one of the mods is a mechallel shabbos
“I would think – leave well enough alone unless they’re pushing an agenda that’s insulting, criticizing the other posters and Yiddishkeit. Am I right?”
nope. see most of the time you cant be moche because you simply dont know…but if you know? wouldnt it stand to reason that you have an obligation to be moche?
“exploits”
pardon?
MCP i was gonna say something like that but i didnt think it would get through 😛
“I choose to loudly protest chillul shabbos, and I refuse to defend those who are mechalel shabbos.”
i am now officially siding with Jothar on this
*whew* butliekyea…it was a poor example to choose, not to mention a straw man…of course thats assuming it isnt true, if it IS true then my question stands
“soliek – It depends on the situation. A lot of time the only tool a Shrink has in making a diagnosis is the history. Histories can be inaccurate esp. if the patient has mental problems. But most try to do the best they can. Some will see the pt. a few times before they decide what illness the pt. probably has.”
agreed. i wasnt knocking the doctors, i was just pointing out that the field and profession is still young
im about to completely hijack this thread…but Health, if youre ranting about lshem shamayim and stuff then why did you make the choice for your kid that it was MO school or bust?
“Stam, the difference would be that it usually stays in the server forever, rendering it a Ksiva that is Kayama.”
nope…doesnt work like that…magnetic fluxes on hard drives somewhere in the middle of nowhere is not ksiva