Pou__bear: Good point. I’m sure there are Jews who are very close to accepting the truth of Orthodoxy and becoming complete ba’alei teshuvah, who see something like this (or some other ultra-machmir practice), and get turned off for good. How are we supposed to convince people that Orthodox Judaism is the only legitimate continuation of traditional rabbinic Judaism, if the Orthodox get progressively more stringent with time? To outsiders, such things make Orthodoxy look like a new deviant sect obsessed with stringency.
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