Love has never been a dominant emotion on the Haredi street. In fact, it is almost nonexistent. Beneath it, there is an abundance of distance, hostility, hatred, and disgust. Lithuanians are hostile to Sephardim, Lithuanians hate Chabadniks, people of Purush curse people of 'Hamodiya', people of Faction A in Satmar, Vizhnitz, Toldot Aharon, and Bobov, despise Faction B in Satmar, Vizhnitz, Bobov, and Toldot Avraham Yitzhak, and everyone in general dislikes Lithuanians, and is afraid of Gur.
And yet, it seems that, in the face of traditional hatred, which is familiar and sometimes even endearing, the monster of Lithuanian internal enmity is growing and developing mutations that no one could have dreamed of until three years ago. In the new bionic world, great Torah rabbis are becoming the talk of the crowd, yeshiva students who still have difficulty deciphering the text of "Shav Shematata" are taking to the streets and demonstrating, acts of advertising terrorism and marketing embargoes are proposed in public almost shamelessly, and the rabbinical courtyards have become a place of refuge for rabbinical-styled thugs who are trying to impose their views on the great rabbis.
And the result? Friendships were severed, people stopped wishing their neighbors peace, families were broken up, piles of gittin swelled, and in Modi'in Illit, an ultra-Orthodox Jew almost murdered his neighbor, just because the name of their rabbi was not the same.
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The ridiculous actions of the activists surrounding the issue of etiquette, and the hotlines warning against dangerous proximity to those criminals who do not walk in the ways of our rabbis, could have elicited a forgiving smile from those fools, and associatively brought up the memory of Yated's funny wars against Rabbi Ovadia in the early 1990s.
Only then, no one tried to hit each other.
Then the frightening malice did not appear in the eyes, and the evil that spurted from people, gentle and soft until two days ago, did not burst from their tender mouths. Which raises the nagging question: Is this what the poet meant? Is the ideological struggle dripping with rabbinical blood a 'mistress on the hill' case of 2014? If so, we must forget everything and report to the KKOM. And preferably one hour earlier.
After all, we are facing a tribal war.
My sociologist friend Prof. A.A. You suggested that we meet on 'Saturday' evening, and I asked if you meant Saturday night, and after you repeated the date 'Saturday evening', I realized that the adjectives we give to the most trivial dates are completely different between you and me.
For example, Shabbat night is Friday evening for you, Shabbat dinner is Friday dinner, and so your Shabbat, or weekend, is our Shabbat eve and Shabbat. Yom Kippur is called by you, the non-religious, by the name of 'the fast', and in general, Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot are given the general name 'the holiday' by you. And what is Motzash ['we will talk about Motzash']? Well, this is already a national religious bias, which has not yet reached us, and certainly not to you.
Hagiography [biography that involves idealization or excessive worship] exists in every culture, and we Jews are not exempt from it either. Not all the miraculous stories, it must be said with caution, about the righteous actually happened in objective reality. And in any case, this week I was surprised to discover that sometimes we also attribute to our great ones... unreliable images.
What does this mean? An ultra-Orthodox historian has told me that the image attributed to Chafetz Chaim is not at all a reflection of Rabbi Yisrael Meir HaCohen. Apparently, it does not even resemble him. The author of the Mishna Berura is the man in the famous image in which the hat [casket] covers half of his face, not the famous image that hangs in every house and in every sukkah. So who is the man in the image anyway? It turns out that this is a God-fearing butcher from the town of Radin, and any connection between him and Chafetz Chaim is purely coincidental.
