The sociologist, Professor A.A. Dear, best regards.
The ultra-Orthodox boy, I argued to you, has a privilege that the secular boy will never be granted in everything that concerns the phenomenon of groupism, namely, the passionate admiration of a famous personality. A privilege that perhaps does not exist in the entire universe.
You wonder: Why, and doesn't the phenomenon of adoration transcend religions, peoples, and species?
Want more news, videos and stories? Join the Haredim 10 WhatsApp channel >>
And the fascinating answer, certainly on a sociological level, but also on a religious one, is that the Haredi boy has direct access to the objects of his admiration.
Thus, the Rosh Yeshiva of Ponevezh, Rabbi Baruch Dov Povarsky, and the Rosh Yeshiva of Ateret Yisrael, Rabbi Baruch Mordechai Ezrachi, who are considered the most admired figures in the world of young Haredim, are accessible to almost anyone who is interested.
Their door is open almost at any time, and a stalker who wants to meet Rabbi Ezrachi (Rabbi Baruch Mordechai in the eyes of the crowd), for example, and raise a question about a subject in Tractate Zevachim, will enter without delay into his small room that opens from the living room.
Likewise, anyone who knocks on Rabbi Povarsky's door (Rabbi Berl, as the crowd calls him) and demands to talk about a 'sign from the sacred cloth' will make the elderly genius even happier.
And what is happening in the parallel world?
Idols of music and culture, football players, radio entertainers and television actresses, are completely inaccessible to the secular young man, who sees them as the object of his admiration. A significant number of them will respond rudely, or at best with indifference, and to a groupie who calls them more than once, they may threaten to file a police report.
Is a secular young man allowed to knock on Aviv Gefen's door in the evening and tell him about his personal impressions of his latest poem? How will the admired young man, who is accustomed to swearing from time to time, react? And what about intellectuals? They probably won't swear, but their response will probably not necessarily be particularly warm.
Even in the world of academia, the gap still exists. In the fields of knowledge, there is greater accessibility, but even a young first-year physics student understands that he should not expect a fruitful conversation with Stephen Hawking on a weekly basis.
There is also really no second-year psychology student who believes that it is unnatural for him to call Professor Daniel Kahneman and talk to him about the cognitive psychology terms he studied last semester.
A 17-year-old student in a large, Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and also national religious yeshiva, on the other hand, will feel completely comfortable confronting issues of the Gemara with the Talmudic meteors of the Haredi world - the Rosh Yeshiva of Hebron, Rabbi David Cohen, the Rosh Yeshiva of Archot Torah, Rabbi Garbuz, and the Rosh Yeshiva of Mir, Rabbi Arieli.
Where did this gap come from? How are the world's leading figures in the discipline of Torah study willing to talk to any 16-year-old Torah-nurse cadet? And is the answer to this question sociological, or perhaps it belongs to the channels of religion and theology? And what is happening in other religions?
I leave these questions open for now.
Between fasting and eating. A certain man, suffering from an acute eye disease, was informed by his ophthalmologist that if he fasted on Yom Kippur, he would go blind. When he came to Rabbi Elyashiv in his distress, the rabbi asked to find out if, according to the doctor, eating a raw potato would save him from blindness. The doctor replied in the affirmative, and the rabbi instructed him to feast his heart's content on this food.
What is special about raw potatoes? Rabbi Elyashiv was faced with the principle of 'eating in an improper manner', which obviously includes raw potatoes, and 'eating' There is no Torah prohibition against this kind of unconventionality.
But Rabbi Silberstein, the rabbi's son-in-law, met the Rebbe of Klausenburg, a Holocaust survivor who survived the inferno, and he was surprised: "A live potato is categorically considered 'inappropriate eating'? How much would we have been willing to pay for such a piece of live potato in the Nazi Freienbach camp in 1944?"
And what did Rabbi Elyashiv reply? Eating during wartime is excluded from conventional eating rules. 'Eating' is defined according to the socialization of eating in normal times.
During the years of the Third Reich, the socialization of 'cannibalism' collapsed, and the miserable skeletons that roamed the camps responded positively to animal food as well.
Chewing potato peels under the murderous eyes of the SS officers is not, therefore, human 'eating'; it is a survival act common to all organisms that tried to maintain physical and mental sanity in these delirious days.
