Reply To: Responsibility to serve – without the politics

Toi, maybe you have been away for a while, but none of the Rabonim I mentioned would fall into the YU spectrum. All are of a Yeshivish or Agudah or Chassidish persuasion.

Also, it may not have occurred to you that my “liberalness” isn’t a result of a trend. In many ways, especially politically, I am quite conservative. I’ve never been a blind follower, neither of liberal trends or of strict interpretations and chumros. I also try to be a realist, and deal with the status quo, not the stated ideal of a few.

I try to reintroduce (in my life) those elements of Yiddishkeit that go beyond personal halachic responsibilities and incorporate communal, social, and national halachic responsibilities as well that have lain dormant since the Romans booted us out of our land. I don’t think that’s liberalism. I think it is dealing with our changed realities.

As far as hate goes, I find it to be a cumbersome emotion that obscures and confuses an individual’s capacity to do what is necessary. An example would be a hamas terrorist. I could hate him, and expend my energy and emotion on that hate, but I care more about effectively destroying him because he is a grave threat to you and me than I do about how I feel about him. If he is a threat to me or a fellow Jew I don’t need to hate him to know he must be killed. One just needs to have the justification, means, and opportunity to do so.

So if you want or need to hate, its your prerogative, I suppose. My life as a Jew is about love for my Jewish brothers and sisters, all of them, and specific to Israel, about the ways and means to effectively safeguard her. I don’t have the time or the inclination to hate.

Finally, you seem to think that the Secular majority in Israel is intent on destroying your yiddishkeit. That, frankly, is a bit of a conceit. While there may (MAY) have been a small number of individuals who thought that way generations ago, the vast majority of secular Israelis simply don’t care how you practice yiddishkeit except where it intersects with shared responsibilities and rights. They are way more interested, for better or for worse, in other things, in their own lives, in their kids, in their jobs, in their leisure. You just aren’t that important to them. They don’t sit up nights thinking of ways to ruin your faith. They care if you tell them where to sit on a bus. They care if you want to treat public spaces as if they were your private domain. They care if you curse and spit at their daughters. But about your relationship with HKBH they simply don’t care. They are not misyavnim, they are not Czarists, they are not totalitarian communists. Painting them as such doesn’t change the reality.