i think “frum” boys who smoke should be considered OTD even if they go to yeshiva and learn all day, etc….
I know you didn’t meant this when you wrote it, but I have to tell you, I find your definition of OTD to be personally offensive.
My mother was raised in a non-oberservant home and began smoking as a teenager. After her marriage broke up (at age thirty) she became Orthodox as a single mother, encouraging my sister and I to become Shomrei Torah U’Mitzvos. She sacrificed personally and professionally to remain a Shomeres Torah U’Mitzvos and if you were to ask her if she could have any one thing in the world (and only that thing), it would have been that her children become/remain fine, upstanding frum Jews. She fought to get my sister and I into yeshivos, recognizing that public school was not the option that would serve our spiritual growth. She faced opposition from yeshivos that did not want us but, with the help of HKBH and some friends, she was able to prevail.
I was not the best of teens and certainly gave my mother a fair amount of grief. While I did not appreciate it as a child, I know that she shed plenty of tears in prayer that her children grow up to establish Torah-observant homes.
As her health failed (she had lots of health issues unrelated to her smoking [although the smoking certainly didn’t help them]), she would still do whatever she possibly could to observe the mitzvos to the best of her physical ability. Anyone who knew her would characterize her as an example of a pillar of faith. Anyone who had her extensive health problems after becoming observant could almost be excused for questioning their faith, but my mother, despite being in physical pain for the last twenty five years of her life, never questioned her faith. I never once heard the words “Why me?” (or the equivalent) escape her lips.
Over the years, she tried several times to stop smoking but was never successful. Despite all sorts of encouragement, cajoling and support from my sister and I and our children, she was just never able to kick the habit.
So, yeah, she should not have smoked. Granted. Bad on her for that. But to hear you cavalierly toss off this woman as “off the derech” and equate her with people who are mechallel Shabbos, eat pork and don’t observe the mitzvos in general is deeply offensive.
Of course, you didn’t know my mother and you were thinking of yeshiva bochrim rather than a woman who completely changed her life and made a major commitment to Yiddishkeit, sacrificed for it, cried for it and made it (and her childrens’ commitment to it) the central focus of her life. But that doens’t change the fact that you still want to lump her in with the completely non-observant.
Please be careful when you throw out the term OTD and who you decide to include in that category. I think that, given how much she demonstrated her commitment to Torah and Mitzvos over the course of her life, is it deeply unfair and (admittedly unintentionally) offensive to categorize her as “off the derech” for the habit she could not kick. It’s as if you’re saying “all that you did… meaningless, because you were still off the derech.”
The Wolf