Syag – it’s not as though halacha ends and social matters begin…i hope that’s not what you were saying. As the chazon ish says, the halacha itself in our time is that we love and are mekarev reshoim – he didn’t say that we put aside halacha because of other considerations or to get along in society… halacha teaches us how to live as Jews in every time and place, and here the poskim are telling us what the halachik practice should be. They’re not starting off with the assumption that we should love OTD or frei-frum-birth people; if the halacha would be to hate them, as it was a few hundred years ago, then that’s what we would do in American society, shunned and looked down upon as we would be.
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