Good idea, Sam2.
Jothar, I read the part about octogenarians. (I am embarrassed to say that I had to look up the word.) I couldn’t find anything the Rav said indicating that he was wrong about Modern Orthodoxy. In fact, he doesn’t even us the words “Modern Orthodoxy.” I’ll post that section here:
There is no doubt that there is a movement, whether people are conscious of it or not, an inner desire, an inner drive, to come closer to the Ribono Shel Olam. It expresses itself in a variety of ways. Of course, if we had the proper people, properly prepared, who knew how to talk to these people, they would accomplish miracles. And a lot has been accomplished.
What has been accomplished is that Orthodoxy now is not a problem in America. When the New York Times has a question about what is our approach to abortion, other topics, where they used to go straight to Stephen WIse or Abba Hillel Silver, who used to give them the basics and goodbye, today they go to Orthodox rabbis. The New York Times is the most vain, most non-religious paper, completely secular, but they know there is an Orthodoxy, that we do exist. The goyim know about us. This is number one.
Number two, when you walk in – I remember when I came to the United States, and for years later, walking into a Conservative synagogue meant to be confronted by youth, and walking into an Orthodox shul meant to meet octogenarians. (For those Coffeeroom members who are as stupid as I am, that means people in their eighties.) Now the opposite is true.
AR: (AR is Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet.) Was it really that way, rebbe, when you came here? The Conservatives really had the youth?
I felt the Conservatives were about to win the battle. I made a mistake. I thought that what we had been doing was just futile, an exercise in futility. But it isn’t. Conservatives have lost – they cannot organize an academic colloquium. They simply couldn’t organize a colloquium in Columbia. We have youths. They couldn’t, they simply have no youths.