August 14, 2013

There is no learning in the bathroom: Kollel saved the Jews just like Bais Yakov did

Slifkin only tells you the second half of the Rambam (In Talmud Torah chap 3), but he never tells you the first half, that you're only supposed to work a little bit just to make ends meet, and the rest of the time you're supposed to sit and learn, like it says in Avos p4,m10; you should work as little as possible, and the rest of the time learn Torah. This is the kind of work that the Rambam is talking about, and this is what the rabbis of the Talmud did. And if they only made a few dollars from this, too bad! (See Jun 4,b, 2013)


But if you showed the rabbis what's going on today in the workplace; from the dirty movies in the hotels, to the Internet, to the E-mailing and texting of frum married workers to other frum married female co-workers, talking about their intimate lives, to the business trips to Las Vegas, to the poker games when you tell your wife that you're just going to a shiur, and now I hear of a support group for ladies (In an ultra frum community) that the husbands are sex maniacs. How many women are in this group? 80. So if you told this to the rabbis what would they say? 

And we know that every chasidic story always has a 'kraichmer in it. A kraichmer is an inn where you sleep over. So what if you told the holy chasidic rabbis that today there is no such thing as a kraichmer without dirty movies, what would they say? And what would they say if you showed them some IDF girl video's? 

They would say, "what's gonna be with us? What's gonna be with Torah? No big rabbi is gonna come out of just one hour of learning! THE WORK BECAME VERY BIG AND THE LEARNING BECAME VERY SMALL. Thank G-d we have kollel to counteract this and make the learning big. If not for kollel we would all be as ignorant as the Modern Orthodox. Och in vay!

So along come these evil people like Slifkin and they complain that we have too much kollel. Did I ever stop a kollel guy from going to work? Absolutely not! If you feel like you're just rotting away then fine, go to work. But to pull them out of kollel and make them go to work when they're happy in kollel? Are you crazy? Are kollel guys a herd of cows that you pick out the best 1800 and you throw away the rest? 

Everyone knows that the Bais Yakov movement is against the Torah, but we had to do it in order to save klal yisrael. Should we now say that we have 'too much' success in Bais Yakov, and we should cut down Bais Yakov to only 1800 girls because it's really against the Torah?

And the same thing with writing down the oral Torah. We all know that's it's forbidden to write down the oral Torah, but we had to do it in order to save the Torah. Should we now say that 1800 books is more then enough, and we should burn the remaining 46,000 books, because it's against the Torah?

Either Slifkin just doesn't get it or he's a plain old anti-Semite. I'm not sure which one it is. (See Mar 10, May 7, 2013)