Category — Daas Torah

The Gedoylim Offer Salvation!

One of the many things not taught either in liberal Judaism or Modern “Orthodoxy” (Remember! A little Torah is sometimes worse than no Torah!) is to trust the Great Ones to protect you from spiritually damaging information. This is a popular concept in right-wing ultra-Orthodoxy. So popular, in fact, that a post on this very subject is touted as the most popular editorial ever online for the haredi Dei’ah V’ Dibur, which has strong ties apparently to the Israeli Yated Ne’eman.

In “Why We Censor,” DVD notes,

Yet the spirit of the Western world, in its media, in its science, in its art, in its politics, is a challenge to the authentic Torah spirit from the floor to the rafters.

Learn this. It says it all. This is the Harediban mentality.

What is their solution?

FOLLOW THE GEDOYLIM!

Whoever wants to, is free to go it alone. He or she can plunge in to the treacherous waters of the modern world alone, and try to reach the truth heroically alone. It is a big task for an individual.

The rest of us will take shelter under the banner of gedolei Yisroel. As in the generation of Chanukah, so too in our generation — the gedolei veziknei hador cry out to us all: Mi laSheim eilai!

Whoever wants to reach Hashem should join them!

Agudath Israel, an umbrella group servicing the charedi world in its entirety, appears to be eying its own ban on the Internet, thereby ratifying and extending the ban into the Left-Wing Ultra-Orthodox world, which does not take orders from Lakewood. If so, it will be interesting if the details of the ban are the same, or if the ban is in any way less strict.

But it should be no shock to anyone that the main concern is openly not porn, not even heresy, but rather, the challenge to authority of “daas Torah�? by bloggers.

As Rabbi Zwiebel told the Yated,

“Due to a variety of factors, the authority of daas Torah has been significantly undermined, even within our own chareidi circles. Most troubling has been the proliferation of Internet ‘blogs’ where misguided individuals feel free to spread every bit of rechilus and loshon hora about rabbonim and roshei yeshiva, all with the intended effect of undermining any semblance of Torah authority in our community.�?

Hat Tip: Failed Messiah