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And the story is true. He would tell bachurim in Ohr HaChaim and Shaarei Chaim that when he hears that the Yankees won, he would still get a little feeling of thrill.
Well yes, of course they are. Diamond tipped drills are the standard in certain industries and they are regularly used for boring holes of all shapes and sizes.
Can we go full bore PC and change Hebrew too? From now on instead of saying “בן אדם” or even “בן אנוש” in any conjugation, you have to specify “בת חוה” if it refers to women or “בן אדם/בת חוה” if it could be either. So when you want to say in Hebrew “Look at all those people there!” you would say instead of “תסתכל על כל בני אדם שמה” rather “תסתכל על כל בני אדם בנות חוה שמה”. That would simplify matter greatly I feel.
I’ve known many people who have been in and out of the Yeshiva. The only common denominator is the unfailing admiration for the Rosh HaYeshiva, Rav Moskowitz SHLITA. I’ve met him many times myself, and I must say he’s a phenomenal talmid chacham and human being in general.
Stupid question, but where are you ordering from? 2002? I haven’t seen packing peanuts in years. Most companies either use cardboard supports or inflated plastic bags.
A friend of mine put it like this:
People have to decide if they want to run the city or be the persecuted minority, you can’t have both.
Will he be “neutral” in between the Israelis and Palestinians?
Yes. A huge part of his campaign has been about isolationism. He will state his vocal support of Israel, but work very hard to stop the aid and to not get involved in any peace treaties or what have you.
Google can not. The best that they can do is point me in the right direction. Besides, Google’s first result is more often than not, Wikipedia. In this particular instance it happened to be the best resource (surprisingly more informative than Wolfram which is usually the front runner on all things math).
Point is, there are a huge host of topics which Wikipedia is by far the best resource for. And it can be enormously entertaining, either by reading up on interesting facts or by getting involved in edit wars like when I fought with those Meshichists that control all Lubavitch related articles.
There are far worse ways to spend your time and money.
Can Encyclopedia Brittanica elaborate on the different algorithms for Bayesian networks and have links to various implementations?
- Believe it or not, unless you’re planning on becoming a Rebbe/Morah for your entire life, you’re going to deal with goyim on a regular basis in the course of your work. I’m not sure why having goyim in your classes would be a such a terrible thing in that light. Unless you’re incredibly susceptible to peer pressure and head out to bars with them, your interactions will probably be limited to discussing classwork.
- You can always claim for religious reasons you cannot work on Saturday. Most schools are very liberal and will bend over backwards to accommodate other religions. Believe it or not, the world isn’t full of anti-Semites out to getcha.
- Does it run in to Shabbos? If yes, see above. If no, what’s the issue exactly? When my uncle was in medical school, he would finish his final then walk home for an hour because it was too close to Shabbos to take a taxi. And this is in the 60s, when people were afraid to wear a yarmulka in class and there was no “frum option” for the most part. Stop being such a sissy.
- Nu? You deal with it. Before we were married, my wife would get ready at 6am on Fridays, go to her job, then come home with less than an hour until candle-lighting.
The world isn’t some pretty plastic frum bubble that we can all live in (at least not until Moshiach comes). There’s a goyishe velt and the majority of us cannot help but interact with it. If going to Touro instead of a different college is an option, kol hakavod. But for most people it’s not. And even people in Touro end up working in non-frum places too. I’ve even heard Rebbeim telling people not to go to Touro, as in a goyish school you know to keep your distance from social events, but in a frum school you may end up with the wrong crowd.
Baruch Hashem we live in a time where it’s more possible than ever to be frum. Baruch Hashem we don’t have to hide our Yiddishkeit in the streets. Baruch Hashem rather than getting fired every Sunday, an employer can be in deep trouble for not accommodating a frum employee. Baruch Hashem we can even go to college and find well paying jobs, instead of either being rejected for our long skirts or peyos. Baruch Hashem attending a college doesn’t mean that we have to reject halacha.
Repeat after me: “Instead of complaining about the choices I made in my life, I will thank Hashem that I am able to make those choices.”
Ainay udway ereeway uchmay ikelay otay eepday riefay ehthay adioray andnay andhay itnay utay ehthay ostmanpay.
Overrated, too rich and heavy. That describes a lot of people and the Siegleman hazelnut cake that they like too.
I one time was at a kiddush out of the Tri State Area where one went almost completely uneaten. People unused to it just don’t really like it that much. Which cements my opinion that it’s more of a status symbol than an actual enjoyable dish.
Rav Moshe Heineman SHLITA of the Star K has a minhag to eat half a raisin and a piece of celery to “have a raise in salary”.
Wait wait, are we talking Chutz La’Aretz or Eretz Yisroel? Because in the US there’s a huge variety of people who refer to themselves as “Hareidi” and a similarly sized variety of Yeshivos. Some put nearly as much emphasis on secular education as limud Torah, and some barely (often not even) meet the minimal requirements stated by law.
So let me try to answer your question for both the Chutz La’aretz and Israel.
In Israel, there is a massive amount of distrust for the government and non-Torah studies in general. This stems from a history of the memshala trying to push Chareidim to go one way or another along with the huge anti-religious bent in a lot of Israeli universities. It lead to a culture of opposition to being machshiv anything that isn’t Torah. You can criticize it all you want, but that’s just how it is.
In the US, like I said for the most part there’s little open opposition to secular studies. Though there is a growing trend for High Schools to be more like Israeli Yeshivot Ketanot. Let’s focus on them. Those people who run those Yeshivos and the parent body have a modern Yeshivish mindset: That their little yingele will learn in Kollel his whole life and get a job as a Rebbi if he needs to make a chasuna. In that sense, yes. Secular studies are frowned upon. They are seen as a means to an end. The means in this case are the absolute minimal skills required to interact with the world outside the ? ????? ??? ????.
Chassidishe schools have a similar mindset, but not so much to train kids for Kollel as it is an idea that everything they need will come from the Chassidishe community so why would they ever need to learn trigonometry.
Personally, I am a ?? ????? ??? that comes from a long line of ?????? ????? which, for the last 5 generations as far as I could tell, have all gone to institutes of higher learning and taken secular education extremely seriously. My extended family consists of plenty of college grads few, if any, have strayed from the Derech and most of which are massive ?????? ?????. So I can tell you what the mindset is for people who frown upon secular studies, but I cannot explain it logically nor can I ever see myself agreeing with it.
SayIDidIt: Nazis also used the reverse swastika (which the tumedika internet tells me is called a sauwistika). But it’s more prominently displayed at a 45 degree angle, like on the Third Reich flag. In Eastern cultures it’s almost always lying flat.
Joseph: Yet you again refuse to address the majority of my comment and instead choose to focus on your disbelief of any journalist who doesn’t write for Ami. And it was 26 years, not 20. I admit my mistake about CPS, that was in Canada too. Everything else I said was accurate. You accuse me of not naming my sources, yet you adamantly refuse to name any either! Who are these Rabbonim that allegedly support them? Who is their Da’as Torah? I’ve heard numerous Rabbonim speak out against them, yet you seem to live in some sort of fantasy world where the gedolim support this abhorrent facsimile of Yiddishkeit.
Joseph: First off, you still didn’t address all the issues I pointed out very clearly. Namely, those issues where you don’t need a magazine article to verify are true.
The kidnapping charge was 25 years ago and there were Rabbonim then that stood behind him. More recently, around 10 years ago, New York authorities like Child Protective Services leveraged accusations and investigations against the cult which responded by moving to Canada. And in that case, no one stood behind him.
The accusations stem from far more than just “two non-frum people”, there have been multiple articles based on interviews with cult members and people who went into their compounds to investigate, including one by Ami the very magazine you source to defend them! Let’s focus on one: The Mishpacha. Was that by a, ahem, “bitter youngster” or was that by a frum person who dealt with them and spoke with current members?
Avi K: Only according to some versions of religious Zionism which was viewed as nonesense by the vast majority of frum Rabbonim 60 years ago and is still viewed as such by most gedolim.
The were only in Quebec because they had the same issues in Monsey! No Rabbonim or askonim stood up for them and several were very outspoken against them. Unless the “notoriously anti-Semitic Monseyites” were out to get them too? Explain that contradiction: How come Monsey has no problem with the thousands of Chassidim that live within its borders but gave endless tzores to this small group of a few dozen? Why does Montreal not treat Tosh the same way they treated LT?
You are ignoring most of my objections and comments instead repeating the same falsehoods and half-truths over and over again.
I repeat myself. Most of the articles written against LT came from frum authors in frum news sources who actually went and spoke with LT members themselves. Although there were some off the derech frum-hating people that accused them, they were the minority.
I repeat again. One of the reasons I stopped reading Ami magazine was because of how they addressed two of the major allegations against Lev Tahor. The teen marriages and taking kids from their parents. Both were brushed aside. My memory isn’t perfect, but it sure isn’t that faulty. If you have the article in front of you (as you claim) then read those parts again and explain them.
I repeat noch veiter. There is no Da’as Torah in the LT cult. Everything is dictated by their guru who is a Ba’al Teshuva that spent less time in Yeshiva than most people in CR. The members grow up barely knowing how to read a gemara, yet they spend all day reciting the words of this mans books.
I repeat for the last time. They have no support of gedolim. Only a small handful of Rabbonim have spoken in support of them. And said support usually consists of “Don’t be so harsh to them, you don’t know all the details.” But that’s eclipsed by all the Rabbonim who have publicly spoken out against them.
If you could answer those objections, I will see your argument as having merit. As it stands, all you’ve been doing is repeating the same thing: that my sources can’t be trusted as you don’t think that they are frum enough.
I know that NK and no one else endorses Palestinian rule. But NK has a decent amount of support from several major Chassiduses in the US and Israel. You should hang around Meah Shearim and ask people what they think of them.
And I mentioned the lack of alternative to bring to light what NK and their supporters are really saying. If you don’t support Israel, and you wish for it to go away, what you are doing is supporting total Palestinian rule.
Hotel lobby. Pretty boring in retrospect. I came to her house 10 minutes late due to being lost. Her mother answered the door and we exchanged pleasantries. We drove to a hotel, sat down, ordered a coke for me and water for her. We talked. I brought her home and said good night.
I wouldn’t say “treason” but they are most certainly bordering on, if not actually, a chillul Hashem. There’s nothing wrong with being opposed to Zionism. There’s probably nothing wrong with opposition to Israel as a Jewish state. There is a huge problem to publicly announce that Jews support the “Palestinian cause” as it’s essentially support for anti-Jewish terrorism.
I one time had to travel to the Far East for business. There were swastikas and reverse swastikas everywhere. It’s an old symbol for luck. The Nazi swastika is sort of at a 45 degree angle which is how it differs from the Eastern symbol.
Disparaging people who you disagree with? Now it’s up to you to decide who is and who isn’t frum? There’s no lies, you’re the only gullible one here.
Cross Currents is run in part by Rabbi Avi Shafran who was one of the head administrators of the Agudah for a very long time, and Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer who held a similar position in the OU. The Mispacha article was written by frum people who had first hand experience with the Lev Tahor cult. The Five Towns Jewish Times article was an interview with the family of a cult member who traveled to Guatemala to see what they’re all about.
Think about it for a minute, just think! How many Rabbonim have stood up to defend the Lev Tahor guru? Where are the askonim working night and day to get the children back to their families? No one defends them, except Ami magazine and you.
Meyer Lansky didn’t have any frum people accusing him either (as far as I know), why aren’t you defending his memory?
Joseph: Every frum magazine and website from our own YWN, the Aguda affiliated Cross Currents, to Mishpacha. Better yet, what Rav or gadol supports them, because they clearly have no da’as Torah.
I did not speak with them and my only interactions was occasionally running into frum naqib-clad women in Rockland Kosher 10 years ago. But virtually everyone who’s last name isn’t “Frankfurter” that had any interaction with them confirms the allegations. I don’t have the Ami article in front of me, but you clearly do. Frankfurter asks him about the teenage marriages and children being taken from their homes. Can you post what the LT guru responds to that?
And again, Ami didn’t address a lot of the accusations, like members not being allowed to work outside the commune, or the schools teaching only the stuff that the guru wrote, or the guru not actually having much experience in terms of learning. And, like I said, even Ami had at one point written an article attacking them.
In general we say that the burden of proof is on the accuser, but in this case there are about a dozen or so accusers (some frum some secular) and one very shakey defense. So I’m going to ignore the ??? ???? on this one. You’re more than welcome to keep defending them, but so long as your defense consists of “Come on guys! Be dan l’kaf z’chus!” I’m going to ask you to extend that to all Jews, including Meyer Lansky, Lepke Buchalter, Madoff, Gilad Atzmon, the entirety of the Israeli government, and all those horrific college going working people.
american_yerushalmi: It may be that no one outright endorses Palestinian rule, but they aren’t exactly supporting any sort of alternative. And the so-called Neturei Karta (to distinguish it from the historical organization of the same name that was supported by gedolei Yisroel) does openly support the destruction of Israel by the Palestinians. One of their late leaders was even Yasser Arafat’s minister of religion. And these people have a ton of acceptance and support among certain Chassidim and Yerushalmis.
Joseph: I honestly cannot believe that you are defending them. There have been multiple investigations, both by secular authorities and frum organizations. Almost all of them substantiate each other, with the sole exception of the Ami article. And even the Ami article never contradicts some of the more major accusations, as I mentioned in my previous comment. Even Frankfurter later begrudgingly acknowledged that the accusations need to be seriously looked in to. Oh, and Ami had also previously published an article bashing Lev Tahor like everyone else did.
It shouldn’t take a genius to realize that there’s something seriously seriously wrong with Lev Tahor. Their guru never received smicha and determines everything about their lives. The kids only learn chumash and books written by the guru. Their manner of dress and adherence to kashrus goes far beyond what would even be considered machmir to the point where it may be k’negged halacha. There is no possibility for a member to have an independent income, all money is handled by the guru. Interviews with former members and families of members confirm most of the accusations. Members are almost exclusively either lieutenants of the guru chosen from his family, or new ba’alei teshuva or people from broken homes who don’t have a complete understanding of Yiddishkeit and need an authority figure as they’ve lost the connection to their family.
How can you possibly defend them?
Jackson Pollack was a hack. Van Gogh was fascinating as he was one of the first artists not to paint realistically but how he saw the world.
Einstein is held up as a genius because he was near-uncontested in his secular knowledge. He discovered an entire field of physics and science that completely upended everything that preceded it. Werner Heisenberg did the same, but his stuff was more esoteric and less practical so he didn’t get the same attention.
BenK: Please write in a calm and coherent manner. I have difficulty reading your posts.
The super frum neighborhoods of Yerushalayim have a history of hating on the army. While I cannot agree with the actions of these people, I certainly am not surprised. This is the same neighborhood which pamphlets, petchkvilim, and graffiti are regularly being motzei shem ra on gedolei yisroel who have the audacity to say that joining the army is better than going off the derech.
Up until a few years ago, there was a goyishe place that was a lot worse than just a sports bar operating on Route 59 right in Monsey.
If a goy wants to open a sports bar in Monsey, fine. No one will care since no frum people will eat there. Sure frum people may come by to watch a game and get a beer, but that’s their own prerogative. It’s not under a hechsher, so no Rav is deeming their actions Kosher.
Joseph: Read it again. He was specifically asked about taking children away from parents and teen arranged marriages. Read his responses.
Everyone here is ignoring tuition breaks. Which I think is fine, as there are very few families that can afford a full tuition for more than one or two kids in Yeshiva. One kid in school can get by on a 100k salary. This is also obviously talking about the US. In Eretz Yisroel, having multiple children doesn’t add too much to the financial burden as there are much larger tax breaks and tuition for most Chedarim is less than a fifth of the US.
I mean, if we are arguing as to whether or not to believe the authorities, we can just take the word of their guru in his interview with Ami. Mind you, Rabbi Frankfurter tried really hard to paint Lev Tahor in a positive light but there were certain things that there’s just no good way of saying it. Like when asked about the allegations that kids are taken away from their parents, the guru openly admitted that it happened and gave a hand-wavey non response basically saying “We admit that there may be better ways to do chinuch”. When inquiring about the arranged marriages of 13 year olds, the response was “Well, they are gedolim according to halacha!”.
And it’s not anti-Semitism either. There are a thousand thousand different Chassidishe groups out there, and you don’t see the frum oilom unilaterally forming against them. Nor do you see authorities swooping into New Square to declare the parents negligent.
What hechsher is it under anyway? I know that I’ve seen TV’s in restaurants before, but never an entire restaurant centered around one.
Emmanuel was a single instance and resulted in a huge backlash against the medina stating rules for Yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs. There have only been a handful of similar incidents over the last few decades, such as the recent attempt at a ruling for the Misrad HaChinuch to define Bais Yaakov curriculum. It’s a song and dance that the government and Chareidim go through every few years. The government makes some decision, the Chareidim protest, and everything returns to normal.
I’d also like to get back to the thing I brought up earlier. These mythical people who somehow manage to spend their lives in ??? ???? without taking money from the government working for institutions that also take no Zionist money. Let me get this straight: They exist, but they probably number less than 100. I mean, when I was in Eretz Yisroel I heard of the idea. So did nearly every Israeli born Chareidi I knew. But when pressed, few of them could think of a single person who actually followed it.
There’s the Soleveitchik family, who support each other due to the fact that they have a lot of big American donors. Most of the money goes to one or two Yeshivas, which goes to the families as salaries. When they need medical attention, they fly to Europe and go to hospitals there so as not to have to rely on ???? ?????. I believe the Tannenbaums in Satmar B’nei Brak have a similar situation, but that’s about it. The vast majority of Chareidim, no matter how anti-medina/pro-Badatz they are, simply cannot live without government support.
And for that matter, Satmar and many other Chareidishe groups are pro-Palestinian rule. They aren’t all Neturei Karta, but they don’t exactly oppose their ????? either. How else do you interpret the words “?????? ??????? ??? ??? ???????”? Or setting clocks to “Islamic time” (12:00 is shekia) so as to not acknowledge “medina time”?
Joseph: So you’re justifying the nezek that happened to Touro? Not to mention the motzei shem ra? And sheker (as the quotes by R’ Moshe were fabrications)?
Look I’m glad that you, despite your obvious misgivings, have chosen a life of kollel. But for the vast majority of people, we cannot all live on tzedaka. And making a parnoso in most cases means some form of post-high school education.
R’ Elya was never against colleges. He was merely opposed to Touro as he felt it was trying to make college into an Yiddishe thing. R’ Shach also had very complex opinions on college that in no way can be summed up with a vague quote from one of his seforim about “YU type institutions” (of which Touro is a completely different zach). He was talking about Ma’arava in Eretz Yisroel and he privately encouraged people to attend even though for political reason he opposed it.
Joseph: Patently false. Both Satmar and Brisk have no problem accepting state funding for their shuls and Yeshivos (with the exception of the big ones that are funded by American dollars). And I’ve never heard of a sick person or pregnant woman pulling out a wad of cash at Bikur Cholim or Shaare Tzedek because they refuse to accept the state medical care.
In some languages that can be translated as “Welcome to Monsey!”. Amol, Touro College attempted to open shop in Monsey (above the bank on the corner of 59 and College next to the 7-11). In about a week, someone paid Pirsum to put signs all over the place declaring (falsely) how R’ Moshe ZT”L, R’ Yaakov ZT”L and any number of late gedolim opposed Touro on the grounds that they teach apikorsus. Next week their windows were smashed, their HVAC unit was broken, and someone broke in to the offices at night and vandalized the place. They left soon after.
mw13: (1) I don’t think it’s wrong for Chareidim to take state money. I think it’s wrong for Chareidim that take money to openly support Palestinian rule over the entire Eretz Yisroel (Satmar, some of Brisk, etc.). (2) Yes.
But I think that Chareidim would be much better off if we were self sustaining as opposed to relying on government handouts and tzedaka. I also think that Israel would be better off rejecting American weaponry.
akuperma: In what universe is the Chareidi community “largely funded by overseas money”? Do US askonim fund Tipat Chalav? Is Cheder tuition $1500 a year because of some hidden g’vir from Belgium?
Only if you first run it through the French, Esperanto, and Uzbekistani translations.
Actually, in most places you can vote “No Preference”. In my opinion (and the opinion of a respected Rosh Yeshiva I spoke with) it’s not so much who you vote for as is the mere act of voting.
Candidates could not care less about your personal issues. But if they see that the Jewish community has a 90% voter turnout rate, they will be tripping over themselves to declare their love for Israel, matzah, and eruvs.
????? ??? ???
Ich veis nischt. Maybe it’s like a pokey mons thing?
Meno: Ok. But those are no fun 🙁 Newtonian physics can basically just be boiled down to conservation of momentum.
How about Maxwell’s equations? You can never have perpetual motion, and you can never extract 100% of the energy from anything.
What do you mean “both” candidates? Last I checked there were four. One is a liberal power-hungry conniving liar, one is a bombastic demagogue, one has a vice president that openly hates Israel, and one is kind of alright.
Gary Johnson and What’s His Name, 2016.
L’havdil, when R’ Akiva Eiger would write ??? he wasn’t saying “There’s no explanation”, he was saying “I am not wise enough to understand this.” Same thing over here. There is a rational explanation for the Uncertainty Principle and it is well understood among physicists. It’s just far to complicated and, unless someone here is works in particle science, no one on this thread understands it.
It’s a lot more complicated than that, but essentially works out to the same thing. Certain subatomic particles have bizarre properties that defy our standard rational understanding of the physical world. They don’t actually exist in one particular place at one particular time, unless they are observed. So, an unobserved electron traveling from point A to point B can’t be visualized as a ball flying from one place to the next. Instead it’s more like a wave, with the peaks and troughs representing possibilities as to where the electron may travel. Technically, it’s actually traveling through all possibilities.
?????? ??? ???. Because it gets weirder.
Now, using classical Newtonian physics, we “know” that the particle must be somewhere along that wave. Like in the double slit experiment, it either travels through slit 1 or slit 2. Right? So we put sensors on each slit to see which one it goes through. Alright, now the sensors are sending back data telling us which side the electron went through. Except now that the electron-wave isn’t a wave anymore, it’s a particle, acting like a ball being thrown through a hoop. How does it “know” when it’s being observed? It has nothing to do with whether someone’s eyeballs are on it, or if someone watched the DVD, or any of that metaphysical nonesense. It’s merely a question of whether something “hit” the wave on. The sensors give off photons (or other equivalent sub-atomic particles) which interact with the wave, forcing it to stop being a wave and start being a particle.
Imagine, if you will, watching waves crash ashore on a beach. Now imagine that if you stick your hand in a wave, the water disappears and a beach ball appears, sometimes in your hand, sometimes a few feet away. That’s sort of what’s happening.
Confused yet? Good. It means you’re starting to get it.
Sparky: You are falling to a common fallacy of quantum mechanics. People who think they understand quantum mechanics (unlikely, as the “father” of the science, Werner Heisenberg, stated that nobody fully understands it) like to apply all sorts of metaphysical aspects from it. Truth is, its just another branch of physics, like momentum, gravity, or nuclear power. There’s nothing “special” about it, and certainly nothing that proves that there’s a Ribono Shel Olom. “Observing” a particle is just a fancy way of saying “shooting smaller particles at it”. If the particle is small enough, the smaller particles (usually photons) knock it off course making it impossible to measure. Hence the Double Slit Experiment and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theorom.
Do you know why Chazal say that looking up from Torah to say ?? ??? ???? ?? is chayiv misa? Because the person is learning the wrong way! How do we know? Because he sees the beauty in a tree, but not in Torah! If you need to look to science to see the “proof” of Hashem Yisborach, you are looking in the wrong place.
Joseph: Read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time or Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe
Special Relativity: There’s no such thing as “how fast is it going?” There’s only “how much faster than the other thing is it going?” All speeds are relative to something else. In our context, that’s usually the Earth. The one exception is light. No matter how fast you are going, the photons that make up light will always be traveling 299,792,458 meters per second faster than you.
General Relativity: Everything in physical existence is in a four dimensional medium called “the space-time continuum” (our three dimensions, plus time which in higher physics is treated as just another dimension). Picture it as an endless sheet of rubber. Everything with mass “bends” space-time, bigger objects bend it even more. So when you come near a really massive object, you start slipping down the a slope in space-time. That’s what we call gravity.
QUI MODERATE IPSO MODERTES
Not easy.
I have K9 web protection at home and my router is set up with the OpenDNS “Family Safety” which both work more or less fine, unless you try really hard to look for pritzus (which is why my wife can access my browsing history). Work is a different issue. They have a filter, but it’s not as strong as K9 and technically my boss can probably pull up my browsing history but he probably won’t unless there’s some sort of complaint.
I heard a speech by a mashkiach a number of years ago on this issue. I’ll try to convey the gist. I had mentioned that I once saw a group of bachurim in an airport, one of which was wearing a blindfold and being led about by the rest. I asked why we aren’t all going around like that all the time?
Rav Shlomo Wolbe ZT”L used to sit at the front of the bus not make any major effort to avert his eyes. He noticed that many men, mostly young bachurim, would sit in the back and stare at the floor the entire time. He commented “If you try to avoid the b’kiyus you’re just going to get the b’iyun.” In other words, unless you can guarantee that you will never look at a non-relative woman for your entire life (there are two or three tzadikim that can and do live such a life, but only with immense outside support) the first woman you see will have a much stronger effect on you, even if she’s 90 years old and toothless. So don’t go looking for problems, and try to avoid it when you can, but living as a hermit is a terrible idea.