I would hope we would all want to shed light on what they ARE and not what they aren’t. I would hope we would promote loving them, versus hating their shortcoming. Not everyone was as priviledged to grow up in a home surounding Torah.
@OURTorah: That was a beautiful post, and thank you for that. You are certainly right – both that (a) we must be careful what we write because we may be offending many people and (b) we should never, ever be judging people.
There is a difference between ‘judging’ and ‘accepting’, in my eyes. This is a very delicate point, and I hope I can express it properly. I truly have the utmost respect for people like your family, who continually strive to be good, upstanding Jews in spite of their backgrounds. And when it comes to the ‘shortcomings’, as you put it, we can never judge people until we experience the same things (I can tell you from experience a few eye-opening stories that made me realize this, even without the Mishna ?? ???? ?? ???? ?? ????? ??????). We must love every Jew for what they are. And I definitely condemn the ‘houlier-than-thou’ attitude.
Acceptance, however, is a different thing entirely. Turning a blind eye and saying “Live and Let Live”; not recognizing these shortcomings as shortcomings, but allowing them under the guise of ‘we are difference’, is something we won’t do. If something is below our standards, we will not lower to it out of respect to those who are on those standards. We cannot let our children see people with standards that fall short of what we feel is required, and laugh it off by saying that ‘we are different’. And while we very much respect people for what they are, and understand that they are not necessarily lesser people just because they started off on a lesser note, accepting them with open arms is not necessarily an ideal option. And more to the point, agreeing and supporting the ideals is also wrong.
This happens to almost everybody on a degree, wherever you are on the spectrum. I have family members who are incredibly polite but won’t eat in my house, won’t come out on trips with us, because we are not as super-Frum as them. And I don’t feel one bit offended, because I agree with them. Politeness and Love is not a reason to let down standards.
People on the receiving end often find it difficult to accept. When I won’t allow my kids [theoretical] to go to a friends house because the friend sits and watches TV and I don’t want my son doing the same, it isn’t an insult, nor does it mean I don’t value the person for what he is. We simply have a difference in standards; if you have a reliable source for your standards, ???? ???? ??. And if you don’t, then we hope and pray that you will have the strength to overcome the ??????? in due course, and we don’t judge you for taking time over it.
I was once learning with a boy who was not Shomer Shabbos, who came from a family who were anti-religious, and he was ‘checking out the frum world’ to see what it was like. He came to my yeshiva as part of a program, and I was learning with him. We started a discussion (the usual God and Holocaust, Prove your religion, molesting Rabbis…). In the middle, he suddenly burst out with a complaint: He said that it was all very good for me to be patiently explaining to him about right and wrong, but it’s not fair! I was born and raised in a frum loving home, so it is easy for me to ‘become a Rabbi’ [his words]. He was born in an environment that made it totally impossible for him to do the same. He was very bothered that he wasn’t given an equal opportunity.
I told him two points:
(a) HKB”H wants different things from different people – it could be that his entire tafkid is to make that move to keep Shabbos or eat Kosher, and nobody expects him to be giving a Shiur to 300 people. Not everyone is supposed to be a ‘Rabbi’.
(b) More importantly, I told him that not only do I not look down on him for being who he is, but I respect him a lot more than most of my peers. Because HKB”H doesn’t give anybody a nisayon they cannot overcome. If Hashem gave him this particular nisayon and not me, it may well be because he had the moral strength of character to overcome the hurdle which I would not be able to overcome. HKB”H gave me the head start of being Frum because I apparently wouldn’t have been able to make that jump. It is my shortcomings that placed me where I am, and his strengths that put him in that nisayon.