Nochum Eisenstein: No Heretical Old Earth Beliefs!
In the backdrop of Nancy’s story is rabbi Nochum Eisenstein. Eisenstein made Shmarya’s list of the top five worst Israeli haredi leaders. Failed Messiah noted,
The rabbi of the Ma’alot Dafna neighborhood of Jerusalem, he also heads the Vaad HaRabbonim Haolami LeInyonei Giyur, an international haredi organization whose goal is to make stricter conversion standards worldwide.
Eisenstein is a long-time enemy of Modern Orthodoxy and Religious Zionism, and is also an early backer of the Monsey, New York-based Eternal Jewish Family (EJF) and its founder, Rabbi Leib Tropper.
Speaking at an EJF convention late last year, Rabbi Eisenstein said anyone believing the universe to be older than 5768 years is a heretic who is unfit to serve on a beit din (religious court).
3 comments
Interesting…
The question no one is asking, well almost no one, is if born Jews are allowed to ignore kashrut, mitzvot, etc., and still be called Jews, then why are those who in daily practice far more than frum still in danger of conversion nullification for being less than perfect, especially when the rabbis who would invalidate them are themselves constantly in various troubles legally?
They’re reducing Judaism to a joke by saying if you’re lucky enough to be born into it, no one can take away being a Jew no matter what kind of mamzer you act like. Even rabbis can be accused repeatedly of crimes and walk away without their Jewishness being questioned.
But if you come over to it after birth, you’ll be forever questioned, never truly accepted, and even your kids and their kids will be under suspicion.
It reduces Judaism to pagan magic, that there’s some special quality about birth and blood, which is the same damn thing the Egyptian pharaohs believed, the rulers of every nation that every harried Israel in centuries past, etc. That it’s not what you do or how good a person you are, but in the blood. If you have the blood, you can get away with anything and no one has the right to question you.
However, that’s not where this will stop of course. The charedi world has never made its disdain of the non-charedi masses secret. It’s the next step to match blood with pedigree. What great rabbis does your family hail from? What train of rabbis going back to Babylon do they follow?
We already saw this at the dawn of chasidism in the vitriol of the mitnagdim. We still see it today when we hear the sneering towards Chabad-Lubavitch or sometimes Breslov. It’s country club elitism. Our brand is better than your brand. This is already happening within the Orthodox world, a taking of sides and calling out to see who is on what side.
The next step on the other end of the observance spectrum is to start ruling that there’s such a thing as a line of Jewishness that if broken requires proper conversion after that point to rejoin the nation. People whose parents were nominally if unobservantly Jewish will be questioned and challenged to document the family and where there’s a break and insufficient documentation told, oops, sorry, you’re not a real Jew anymore. Your neshama is damaged. You need to convert, not just do teshuva. Doesn’t matter that 4/5 of the family was slaughtered sixty something years ago, that’s not the rabbinate’s problem, that’s yours. Prove those people weren’t just some undesirables caught up in the Shoah and were real Jews. Good luck.
From there it will continue to escalate with Orthodoxy nibbled to death by ducks from within, and non-Orthodoxy run over and dragged under the mob mentality of the sense the ultra Orthodox behind this nonsense will have that they are righteously clearing house.
Well, maybe they should do this. Maybe a schism towards the many denominations and movements as seen in Christianity would be a good thing. Maybe diluting the extremist charedi numbers by taking away possible candidates for induction is what is needed. Maybe it is time for Born Again Judaism, or Neo-Chasidism, or whatever. A Jewish reformation.
I just don’t see it as being without tremendous peril and cost. I just don’t see it as being what G-d wants. He’s never been one for anything but compassionate unity.
“He’s never been one for anything but compassionate unity.”
Have you ever read the Tanakh?
this post is funny, because one of the last times i spoke to a charedi about the creation thing, he said that judaism believes in an old universe, so what is this, old universe but not old earth? O.o
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