Reply To: Modern Orthodoxy at a crossroads

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#817486

From my involvement with YU-right wingers, I can say that they are at least as aidel and Torah-dig as other right-wingers.

This was the case even 25 years ago when the YU right wing started to take shape.

YCT (Yeshivas Chovlei Torah), on the other hand, is an outgrowth of the Upper West Side “chattering classes,” composed of borderline con-servative, a handful of followers of Rabbi David Weiss-Halivni, Soviet Jewry activists who were “fellow travelers” as far as Yiddishkeit was concerned and then they were left without a cause when Communism fell, and “social” baalei tshuva who came out of the 60s and 70s counter-culture. All of these people kept their krum values including a desire to add leftist “social justice,” feminism, environMENTALism etc to Yiddishkeit. (C.H. was our representative of that crowd; many of them were raised with almost Communist values by the children of Bund leftovers, labor organizers etc and they really don’t know any better.)

YCT won’t last, but sadly it will take a few hundred or even a couple of thousand Yiddishe neshomos down with it. They are really no more significant or authentic than the US Neturei Karta, except that they are placing “rabbis” in congregations where a real kiruv organization might otherwise have gone.

YU and much of the rest of non-Chassidic American right-wing orthodoxy will converge together and become a Torah-true but more open society.