Hyehudi.org

‘Or at least should be…‘

Writes a reader of this one: מה פגם ראה הגאון מוילנא בתנועת החסידות? הרב יצחק שלמה זילברמן זצ”ל מבאר

Mishlei 21:10:

נפש רשע אותה רע לא יחן בעיניו רעהו.

Metzudos:

אותה רע, אין מעשה הרשע על כי יטעה לחשוב שמעשיו טובים אבל יודע הוא ברעתם ונפשו חשקה לה ולזה לא יוחן בעיניו רעהו רשע כמותו כ”א חשבה לטובה א”כ מהראוי לאהוב לרעהו כמשפט אנשי הצדק.

Rabbi Pinchas Winston tells over a personal story:

IT IS AMAZING how much we “fight” our parents as children, and then respect them later as adults. For the longest time as teenagers, we think our parents can’t “hear” us, and don’t understand who we really are. Once grown up, and especially after raising children of your own, we usually realize that our parents were just trying to share their gained wisdom with us, as we now try to do with our own children, who claim that WE don’t hear or understand THEM. It’s a cycle of foolishness.

Everything changed for me with MY father on a single day, and rather unexpectedly. I was at university at the time, but I had borrowed a book from a friend on the laws of honoring one’s father and mother. Needless to say, with each page that I turned, I also turned a new leaf. I could not believe how, in fighting for my personal childhood “rights,” I had violated so many Torah laws regarding the all-important mitzvah of “Kibud Av v’Eim.”

Before even finishing the book, I picked up the phone to call my father long-distance from school, and to apologize for years of inexcusable behavior. I told him about the book and what it said, and how I had completely come to realize and accept that even if I was right about the things I wanted, I had been wrong about the way I fought for them.

My father could tell, even long distance, that my apology was heartfelt. We had a decent relationship UNTIL that time, but a far closer one FROM that point…

Read the rest here.

Yes, I quoted Yeshayahu Leibowitz saying this before, but it bears repeating…

The word religion in English means “law” (as in Megillas Esther, and לבדות להם דת) from the Latin “religio” (רליגיוזה). This definition is undisputed. (The origin of “religio“, itself, however, is disputed.) Correct, there is an enormous chasm between Judaism and its competitors, but, contra Feiglin and many others, Judaism is neither more nor less than a religion.

Judaism is not a race, a nation, a “ReligioNation” (as Rabbi Meir Kahane coined it), a culture, whatever Rabbi S.R. Hirsch calls it, a “marriage” of sorts (Rabbi Kook’s explanation for why we must not worship other nations’ idols is that’s like stealing a man’s wife!), or “Sooo much more than a religion”. Awkward though this may be, I absolutely embrace the early Jewish Reform self-description (in the sense I intend it here) as: “_ Bnei Dat Moshe” (or: “Members of the Mosaic Faith”/”Persuasion” or, in short, “Mosaic Confessors”). (The “German” prefix is an anti-Zionist hedge, which as an anti-anti-Zionist I of course reject.)

It is not the case other religions are genuine “religion”, while Judaism belongs to another category. Rather, other “religions” are mere imitations of religion, while Judaism is the real thing. The tiny number of “mitzvos”, or laws, faux-religionists claim to observe are nothing but a way of evading all the rest of them.

The Cursedian “accusation” of Judaism being “legalistic” has it exactly right. Unlike antinomian (read: criminal, disobedient, rebellious, Godless, etc.) non-Jews, Jews do observe God’s laws.

Judaism IS Legalism!

And if we’re the “Law and Order” folks, what does that make you guys, eh…?