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There is no question that over the last generation there has been much more Torah study in this country than before. Also levels of dikduk in mitzvot have gone up. People are more aware about kashrut issues, Shabbat, etc. etc. due to many worthy Yeshivot and organizations.
However at the same time, people say that a certain erlechkeit that the last generations had is missing. Older people claim that people were less ostentatious and more true to life…people were less gashmiutdik as well as more mature. People were more excepting of others and less superficial.
I am interested in what older people think. Using the very big picture, macro not micro…what do you believe the overall frumkeit/erlechkeit/yiddishkeit curve has been like in the U.S over the last say fifty years.
Growing up in the 1960’s in an Orthodox community, carefulness in all manners dealing with money was emphasized. Cheating in school was a big no no.
I think that most people were still in “survivor” mode – meaning that everyone was happy to be alive and frum. When a simcha happened, they were just happy that there was a simcha. Granted you may have spent alot on the simcha, but a bar-mitzvah? Wow – we survived the Nazi’s!
There is a negative side to the survivor mode – there was not a strong emphasis on growing or asking – you just did. There were very few books on growth – I remember being fascinated by Rabbi Ezreil Taubers books – hashkafa. I even attended Discovery with all the non frums just to hear. What I did realize while attending the workshops is that I had Emunah Peshuta- I was taught to believe in Hashem and not question His existence.
I am wondering if other who grew up in the 80’s had similar experiences.
hey rb – thats my initals
Things have definitely changed, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. The generation one up from me – survivors and refugees – had a certain depth to them, an ability to engage with reality without slogans or “ideologies.” Also a feeling that “we’re all yidden” and a dislike of machlokes.
That seems to be lost now. The volume is up, in speech, in dress, in the whole mode of “Look at me! I’m FRUM!”
The words may be different, but the “tone of voice” that I’m reading here and in other places is strident in the same way that some of the revolutionary types of the ’60’s proclaimed their moral superiority over everyone else.
Why there should be this change of tone I don’t know. Perhaps because people growing up here have never known real anti-Semitism? I hear that cry over and over again, but where else can a Jew sue over being fired for wearing a yarmulkeh? We have rights here that we never had before, and we take them for granted, or as an entitlement. People seem to have forgotten that we’re still in Golus.
“Older people claim that people were less ostentatious and more true to life…people were less gashmiutdik as well as more mature. People were more excepting of others and less superficial.”
Two words: yiridas ha’doros.
Funny, whenever I point this out it gets deleted.
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