Rabbi Nachman once said that the books of the idolaters themselves often contain their own rebuttal (Likutei Moharan 17):
ואזי זה הדבור נכתב בספריהם של העכו”ם, מדינה ומדינה ככתבה, ואזי מוצאים העכו”ם בספריהם הפך אמונתם, כמו שמצינו כמה גרים שנתגירו מחמת זה, מחמת שמצאו בספריהם הפך אמונתם.
See too Chayei Moharan chapter 7.
Here are some possible examples of self-admitted ‘pious fraud’, from Anti-missionary site Drazin.com.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef once complained that the plaques of Ashkenazi yeshivas bear names of Sefardi patrons, whereas Sefardi yeshivas show no evidence of Ashkenazi benefactors.
While certainly true that the Sefardi world has fattened the Ashkenazi yeshivas, far more than the other way around, I don’t believe this to be a fair example of the phenomenon. Rabbi Ovadiah himself studied at Talmud Torah Bnei Tziyon which was founded and funded by Moshe Porush. And there are other examples, too, especially farther back in history.
And excuse the question, but how many Sefardi yeshivas are/were there, anyway in comparison?
As I understand it, the Israeli state has forced young Jews (but not Arabs!) into three-track welfare. You can choose which track, but you can’t escape them all. Not easily, anyway.
Study Torah, learn a profession, go to work; just stay away from the state army! Suicide Is the Primary Cause of Death Among Israeli Soldiers (bored out of their sanity). You’re not helping anyone by getting dressed up in green!
From Rafi Farber:
Let’s assume the IDF is holy. Let’s accept that, for argument’s sake. From a minarchist libertarian perspective that public defense is legitimate, that could certainly be argued from a religious Zionist minimal State perspective. But that doesn’t mean that serving in the IDF is holy. If everyone served in the IDF, everyone would starve because there would be no profit-driven division of labor. We’d turn into Mao’s Great Leap Forward where everyone was a soldier and simply die of starvation, just like the Chinese did, 45 million of them from 1958-62, when the whole country was drafted into a Chinese army all at once with Mao directing it.
If the IDF is holy, it needs support. It needs people outside of it in the economy to feed it. I’m one of those. Other people in Israel need people in the private sector to supply them with goods and services. When you get a job and make money, you are doing something holy because you are supporting the IDF that way. You are supporting the army, but you are also supporting everyone.
When you sit in the army and do nothing, you are not supporting the army. You are not supporting anyone. You are obeying politicians. That’s it. You are burdening the army. So the most courageous thing to do would be to simply leave and accept the consequences. If you are worried about prison, you need not be. You’re already in one.
Excerpted from The Jewish Libertarian, here.
We have ‘Bein adam lachaveiro’ and ‘Bein adam lamakom’. We even have new inventions from the progressive Mussarites in this vein, such as ‘Bein adam le’atzmo’ (see here too)… Jewish environmentalists are gunning for us, too, just wait.
Why not add a new category (so to speak), wonders Shmuel Sackett: ‘Bein adam le’artzo‘?
Here are the four stages of popular fame (inspired by this):
Learn and teach Torah (as well?) if you can. Torah doesn’t cruelly abandon you this way.