TheBearIsBack

“think” they convincingly look and sound not chassidish

LOL. He is showing that Chassidim are human and fun and friendly by exaggerating his levush, singing in Yiddish, and stressing his tzebrochin Aynglish no matter where he performs. (If he is taking college courses in English it is so he can sing or even write lyrics in English and know what rhymes and what doesn’t – for instance, he could sing my “Food Shtemps far Alle Yidden” knowing he has to pronounce Tzu Drayt like a Litvak to get it to rhyme with Section 8 :)).

Brisket – I think there are plenty of Schneur Zalman ben Shlomos and Shlomo ben Schneur Zalmans out there.

Tzvi Hirsch, Arye Leib, Zeev Volf etc came from a time when only Yiddish was spoken and when loshon hakodesh names were meant only for shul etc.

Shaya and Shea are nicknames, although there is one Shaya I know of whose official name is not Yeshaya(hu). His name is spelled shin-yud-yud-aleph and it is roshei tyvois Shygetz Aross!

Yeshivish lite (Chassidish lite, tuna beigel) refers to someone who holds onto the ideology and the social norms of the community as best as possible, while bending either due to weakness or a mistaken feeling that he needs to bend to get ahead begashmius. Much of the bending has to do with external appearance, and many of those who bend later snap back or at least hope their children snap back.

A bum or an oisvorf is another story altogether – these unfortunates don’t believe and don’t want to keep the mitzvos or even lead productive lives, but they want to retain the benefits of community membership along with a certain superior attitude (really fear and a deep inferiority complex) that makes them want to rub their OTD status into everyone’s faces and take others down with them. These unfortunates need help, but really they can’t get help without being removed from our dalet amois so they do not continue to create a destructive subculture within our world. (Not all OTD are bums and oisvorfen either.)

It should also be noted that the ad for the watch is not there davka to get people to spend that kind of money on a watch. If the advertiser is the one I think it is, that store is upscale, but has plenty of items that are affordable for special occasions (ie chassune, vort).

First of all, the watch manufacturer picks up some of the cost of that ad, saving the owner of the store money. Then, the watch creates an image for the store by letting potential customers know that the store is respected enough to carry such watches.

Once you have given maaser, your money is yours to do as you wish. It says a lot for the prosperity of our communities if advertisers look to our publications to advertise such luxurious items.

We all know that sadly, there are moisdos and “poor” who just waste tzedoko money or really have no right whatsoever to collect it. Better to spend $150 for a bottle of whisky for Shabbos than to give even 15 cents to someone who is basically picking others’ pockets to line his own pocket.

Half the parnosso crisis in the community is a matter of half the people who cry about wanting parnosso being too lazy or hidebound to do anything about it. Three times I “gave someone a break” – three times it left me almost broke because the three heiliger Yidden acted as if they were entitled to money without working.

a feminine form of the word chief:

yachne, cholere, machsheifa…

Some people may realize that medical school tuition is a waste now.

The only way you can get ahead in medicine is through blatant or subtle insurance fraud. The problem is that in the end, you get caught. Otisville Medical Group is not a very profitable concern, and you can even end up in a facility where your chavrusa is a real Dwek.

Schmendrick is obviously joking or tee-rolling (or treading a fine line between the two).

Schmendrick is the name of a loser character in a Yiddish play, and it entered Yinglish (the old language of the Lower East Side more than today’s yeshivisher raid or Chassidish Aynglish-Lipa loshon) as yet another term for an incompetent jerk.

I have a friend and a former business associate whose names are the same, both beginning with a Sh. As my associate was, well, a schmendrick, I changed said associate’s first name to Schmendrick in my cell phone book so I would not inadvertently take his calls or pass up on my friend’s calls. (I still had to call him a couple of times to collect past due monies that he was holding before I changed my number and moved on.)

I also refer to a certain failed blogger as Schmendrick, even fooling people into believing that in Chernovitz, where my roots are, Schmendrick was the common nickname for Shmarya (vehamayvin yavin as to who I mean).

Learn a bit of history. There was nowhere to go during or prior to the war. A handful of visas were available here and there, some due to the work of heroes like Sugihara and Wallenberg (HY”D). The US did not even raise its quotas during the war and those quotas went unfulfilled. The whole argument is moot; the Shoah was a gezera and part of that gezera is that no one wanted to stop it by providing a refuge for Jews.

(And no, our lesson is not that we need a medine. There is only ONE place in the world where a maniac can kill millions of Jews again – and a regime of maniacs in Teheran is developing a way to do just that in one fell swoop. I suspect that before such a thing happens, the US will turn its back on the medine to save itself and save its access to Gulf oil, and that will bring about Reb Yoilish’s prediction of a peaceful end to the failed experiment that has cost so many lives, physically and spiritually.)

As for the calumny about the leadership saving itself – just think what Yiddishkeit would look like had a handful of leaders, some of whom were actually in the concentration camps, not made it to the free world. It was only one rov who could be accused of saving himself or being saved by reshoim in any event, and the accusation is not true at all. His escape was paid for with funds from the Torah-true community and not by those who ran the train.

Hashem has His ways. The churban is something we will never understand.

There is a big difference between going OTD and what Rav Soloveichik himself said his reasons for creating MO were. The epidemic of formerly frum Yidden working on Shabbos stopped gradually because of the post WW2 influx of “yeshivish and Chassidish people.” Those who arrived before WW2, except for a small group that was based around Torah voDaas (then in Williamsburgh), were lost. No one identified as “chassidish” before WW2 except the Malochim.

anon1m0us, you are just regurgitating the worst stereotypes of the Torah-true world. I am stating facts, based on what the major figure of MO himself stated. He felt he had to bend Yiddishkeit to the times. The European refugees who kept their emunah in Hitler’s or Stalin’s gehennom weren’t about to bend in America, and what’s more, they worked hard and built up a financial infrastructure of their own. Even some who compromised in the early days upon arrival in America were able to pull themselves back up because the social and financial infrastructure were there for them. Sadly, welfare became too readily available, and it enticed some characters to “learn all day” who should have been working, but that is another story altogether. Reb Yoilish ZYA told his followers to go out and work, and work they did, so it was no longer necessary to even change your dress to get ahead.

DaMoshe, you do not realize that serious MO and the yeshiva world are converging on each other. I remember what MO was in 1984, when it did serve as a step up for me (albeit a forced one – I preceded Chabad on my college campus, Aish was much smaller than it was today, and the MO community was all I had – I outgrew it in about a year). I was pleasantly shocked to see how much higher standards were in 2005-7 when I was last in the US. The Five Towns were pure MO, kippa off for work style, in 1984. Now, yeshiva leit and even Chassidim live in Cedarhurst and Woodmere, and they’ve strengthened the old MO community.

MO can serve as a kiruv stage for those coming from secular backgrounds, but not as a haven for dropouts. Dropouts of the type the great tolerant MO here call “bums” want to remain a part of their old social world, even as the objects of derision. (That goes for the MO dropouts I knew in college too – they wanted to be with their old friends from high school and their year in EY, but they also wanted to date non-Jews, and the latter won out.) Those who leave for (pseudo-)intellectual reasons don’t want any part of Judaism, and if they want spirituality, they find it in places we don’t want to mention here.

MO was a horaas shaah that certainly did save some people, mostly descendants of Americans who came before WW2. However, having quite nobly served its purpose, it is quietly fading away as its constituents realize that in a free society, you do not have to bend in any way, or accept kefiradige thought (aka Western philosophy) in any way to succeed.

Read Rav Mirvis’s history regarding “interfaith” and especially his contacts with imams and mosques before you get excited. Lord Sacks raised the stature of Judaism in the eyes of the goyim, and he knew to back down after he took a false intellectual premise related to “interfaith” and inadvertently ended up swimming in the cesspool of kfira. He was far from perfect, but most of the time he created only kiddush Hashem. Same for Lord Jacobowitz AH, especially during the time of Margaret Thatcher, who looked to him rather than to notzri clergy for moral leadership.

Today, with the Muslim mafia in control of most of Londonistan, Khan Manchester and many other parts of the United Caliphate, it is impossible for someone in this position to avoid “interfaith” unless he’d rather face death threats.

This is a “rav mi-taam” position in any case, and as Gatesheader points out, it is immaterial for the Torah-true world. The dayanim of the London Beis Din tend to be reliable talmidei chachomim (I do not know if Rav Ehrentreu is still the av beis din), and they are quite independent of the “Chief Rabbi.”

As for MO, until about a generation ago it was a diving board from which the sons and daughters of its stalwart members, especially those who wanted to enter the pulpit rabbinate, jumped down to the conman movement and even lower. Its members were similar to those who call themselves traditional in EY – baseline kashrus, shul in the morning, shopping in the afternoon.

Then, when the going became a bit easier for shomrei Shabbos in the workplace after the civil rights movement and, more importantly, when the Torah-true world was more firmly established in the 60s and 70s, MO had already dropped its “shvachers.” The remaining MO, who were more Torah-committed but tended to be of second-or-third generation American stock rather than immigrants and first-generation Americans like those who rebuilt yeshivos and Chassidus, began to move to the right. They started to look to the rabbonim and even the Rebbeim from Europe for leadership, as they realized their rabbonim lacked in scholarship and did not represent Torah values.

Now, it is only a matter of time before the right wing of MO (most of those who are committed to MO), most of the yeshiva world, and Chassidim who want to enter the modern world mostly to be able to raise families with dignity, converge. Gone will be welfare dependency on the one hand, but more important, “Torah uMada” will be buried with dignity, in favor of intensive Torah learning combined with secular studies for parnosso only. Even 25 years ago, I knew of no serious YU student who wasted his life studying philosophy or anthropology – most leveraged their year in EY to finish YU in three years or transfer to Columbia engineering school before going on for a law degree or MBA.

Left out will be the left wing MO, who will jump down to YCT (a malignancy that cannot last but a generation) and then to “renewal” or who knows what, and those who choose or are socially pressured to choose an isolationist way of life. The former will sadly join the secular Jewish malaise, and the latter will find it difficult to cope and eventually become a small minority.

Regardless of the above, the dropout rate among people who truly follow MO, as opposed to those who just go to MO shuls, cannot be 50%. Calling the crowd that was never observant “MO” is like calling the Israelis who come every Shabbos to eat at a Chabad House in Thailand or India “Lubavitchers.” It indeed WAS about 50% in the 50s and early 60s.

OK then:

1) Chavez should be put out of his misery

2) Ahmadinejad should join him in der erd

3) Obama should be replaced by the Admou”r meCreedmoor

It was the present Rav Ralba”g’s father, who set up his hechsher as a business venture that was aimed at those who just wanted to keep the very baseline standard of kashrus, who accepted gelatin at one time.

I knew Rav Y.C Ralba”g AH and I don’t think he would have eaten some of the things he supervised himself. He was not even competing with the OU but looking to find ways that traditional people who kept kashrus, of whom there were many at the time, could have more choices.

The producer happens to be affiliated with Chabad, so he filmed it in Crown Heights.

It is a commercial video, not an outreach film.

The difference between that & the other case is that YU will probably cooperate,

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It took a lot to get NCSY to cooperate during the Lanner case.

Frankly, Rav Shtarker’s Beis Din is the only one qualified to handle these cases.

Actually, when someone mentions that a bochur spends most of his spare time doing chessed, I ask which judge sentenced him to how many hours of community service for what.

I’m still just so mad about the whole thing, to maintain Omerta and prefer that the abuser continues abusing (to the point where bribes are offered & threats are made), rather than making a Cheshbon Hanefesh and fixing what is wrong.

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Is this YU? Leave the threats out, and it sure sounds like some recent revelations about the goings-on at YU, where offenders were shipped off, free to assume chinuch positions elsewhere.

This is The YESHIVA World. It should be geared to hashkafos that match the title of the site.

If anything, I am surprised at how much leeway posters who consistently post borderline apikorsus and out-and-out malicious leytzanus are given here.

One tzadik gomur even posted about boycotting stores that carry certain mehadrin products and he was not censored. If that is not tolerance, I don’t know what is.

The reason why MO has a higher OTD rate then other groups is because all the yeshivish, litvish and chassidish boys and girls who are frustrated with the insular way of life they are forced to lead got fed up and found a more enlightening derech to Hashem.

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Absolutely INCORRECT. That is not the history of MO – MO was started as a way to keep pre-WW2 Americans who wanted to retain some standard of shmiras hamitzvos from falling off altogether. Rav Soloveichik was a pessimist who felt Yiddishkeit had to be diluted to meet the demands of American life. (The Satmar Rov ZYA was a pessimist in the other direction – he felt that isolation was the way to preserve Judaism “on tryfe soil.”)

That being said, a 50% dropout rate sounds very high – in fact I’d guess it is 2.5 times the correct figure. Does that include those who leave MO to grow in Yiddishkeit? 🙂 Even so, the figure makes no sense.