Reply To: Where are the Manhigim?

I’m focusing on those who did this and those who encouraged or enabled them, not the entire chareidi community. That would be ridiculous. So please, Health and others, keep the straw men in the cupboard.

Looking at Mea Shearim as an example of a regimented, guided community, with many manhigim, and a particular way of life, I am troubled, deeply troubled by some of the responses here.

When someone tells me that its the aimless, the young, those who won’t listen to guidance who perpetrate this, I first ask, are you sure? How are you sure?

Then I wonder even more. Its clear that in a community where compliance is not mandated, where codes of conduct, dress, conversation, courting, davening, doing business are less defined, There will certainly be those, perhaps many, who do not follow “guidance”, but the nature of the guidance and the communities are less strict and more fluid.

In this particular community, however, the guidance is defined, strict, and comprehensive. It includes EVERYONE, even the easy to blame youth. As I wrote above, this particular community has no problem evicting those who don’t comply with their standards of tzniyus. Why, if the posters above are right, and it is aimless youth who are involved, why are they not similarly removed from the community? I can only surmise that such actions as were perpetrated on this chayal are condoned, if not encouraged, by those who are listened to in this particular community.

The only implication that is broader, beyond this community in my view is that when posters here are saying that there’s nothing the Rabbis can do, or that if the Rabbis spoke up their life would be in danger, the idea of manhigus through daas Torah is endangered not from the outside, but from within. Very troubling.