I Worry I’m Going Soft. Why Am I Republishing This?!

Were We Wrong About Chabad?

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For decades, Chabad’s want-to-wrap-tefillin legions made us feel uncomfortable. More bluntly, we mocked them.

To be sure, that was only half of the picture. We openly admired Chabad’s mesiras nefesh, and their very real love for all Jews. Parts of their modus operandi, including the tefillin thing however, just struck us as goofy. We couldn’t relate to hundreds of people spending all that time just trying to put tefillin on bemused non-religious Jews. Just how important could that single moment be? If anything, it seemed to violate our sense of the extreme kedushah of tefillin. We didn’t buy into the idea that acquiescing one time to humor a guy in a Fiddler On The Roof outfit would erase a lifetime of ignoring the mitzvah – something no one thought was his fault in the first place, having been disconnected from Torah for generations – and save him from the Talmud’s description of the fate of those who did not wear tefillin. Lots of wasted energy there. Better that the folks who manned the booths should be in the beis medrash.

Looking back at recent events in Israel, it appears that we were all wrong. So wrong, that perhaps we should be reevaluating how we do what is popularly called “kiruv.”

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From Cross-Currents, here.

The Ukraine War Propaganda Is EVERWHERE…

Two examples:

I saw a Playmobil toy soldier with a NATO legend. (I guess a swastika was too much!)

One of our readers told me his filtering service now shadow-bans the Russian Yandex search engine.

As Alan Stevo writes:

Yandex — Yandex.com — is another favorite. It is Russian Big Tech, which means that it is still big tech, but it comes from a different perspective. It has been criticized for censoring results that are critical of the Kremlin. I have no idea whether or not it does. What it does not do is censor results that are critical of Washington, D.C. If I were a political dissident in Russia, I might not use Yandex. As a political dissident in the United States, it does a pretty good job of being what Google used to be.

So, the filter “allows” Yandex, but anything searched (say, a letter) is flagged as inappropriate… Sneaky!