Reply To: Letter circulated in Brooklyn about Motzei Shabbos hangouts

The little I know

If you have a fire what do you do first put it out or try to figure out how it started to prevent future fires? The hangouts are fires burning up good kids. It has to be stopped. These kids are not OTD. They are regular teens in regular yeshivas who are young curious bored have raging yetzer horas and and need to be protected from these pitfalls. Once boys and girls get involved with each other the ruchnius is out the door and the (scholastic grades tend to tank as well.)

These are not bad kids and many are not looking to do anything bad but if they are in a pitza shop or whatever and a girl comes over or their friends walk over to some girls or some similar scenario its very easy to start talking and get sucked in.

If you want to know the truth the issue in my opinion and I heard this from Rav Shafier of the shmuz as well, is that the schools are not teaching yiras shomayim. But I think more than that, with todays matzav of prustkeit in the streets the schools need to spend significant time with boys and girls grade 7 and up teaching the halachas explaining about issur histaklus bnashim and discuss inyanei shmiras eynayim.

I didn’t want to share this but I will. On Friday I was at the barber to get my pre lag baomer haircut. Well you know how all barbers have a stack of magazines and news papers? Well I saw that every boy that came in for a haircut sat down and unhesitatingly picked up a new york post and also read the GQ magazine and other trash that he had there . These newspapers and magazines have many bad pictures in them and litvish yeshiva bachurim as well as a few chassidish bachurim were reading these things without hesitation. Most Yeshiva bachurim have no concept of shmiras eynayim. The emes is grls need it to and girls shouldn’t read trash or look at trashy magazines because everything you look at goes into your brain and later affects you in tznius and your hashkafos.