""We are guilty," my interlocutor, a judge and an important police officer, tells me.
A moment before, I had expressed my pain to him. A series of events that have occurred and are still occurring around us, give rise to the feeling that the hierarchy in our community, on which we prided ourselves, is falling apart. That the mishna in the Sota about the Messiah is becoming a reality before our eyes.
The "rebellion" in the Hebron Yeshiva was the trigger. The knowledge that the boys in this important yeshiva had the courage and audacity to go out against the yeshiva administration in this way, and to behave like the last hooligans from the bottom of the social ladder, is unbearable. Yes, I too was once a girl who loved to rebel against the system, or to rise up against what seemed to the eyes of a girl to be an injustice, but we knew: he who rebels, pays. And when we paid, we knew that we deserved it. And there in the yeshiva, instead of understanding this, dozens (or hundreds?) of boys came out in support of those boys who were thrown out after going out against the yeshiva administration. It was an echoing bell and a flashing red light. "Boys, old faces will turn white.".
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It was difficult for me to understand how this yeshiva, which raised generations of Torah scholars, and of which many yeshivahs in the Holy Land are "offspring," reached such a state.
Then I came across a "letter" from a body that claims to work for the "honor of our elders," which called, nothing less and nothing more, on seminary girls to rebel against their teachers. After the uproar over the very idea of teaching girls to disobey, I began to understand. This is where it started. And it didn't start today, it started many years ago.
Who is behind the body that wrote the letter? I have no idea. Maybe there really are people out there who have the honor of the esteemed rabbi, led by Maran the Grail Steinman Shlita, foremost in their minds. But, allow me to doubt that. This body and its ilk have flooded my email inbox for a long time with information that is all gossip that I was not interested in, and that any connection between them and any sainthood was purely coincidental. Besides, even if these are caring people, I would like to ask them: Have you noticed what you are doing? Today you teach these girls to doubt certain teachers, tomorrow they will take them for granted and rebel against other teachers, the day after tomorrow they will rebel against everything you taught them and will become a bad culture!
The Ashkenazim are also guilty.
And here we go back many years, to the days when certain newspapers preached, and their readers eagerly obeyed, against the great generation, Maran Ha-Gar"a Yosef zt"l. "Nisht onzera"? Not ours? It is permissible, possible and necessary to be against. These swift-witted men preached against those whose scythe was thicker than their waists, as they stuck their heads between two mountains in a dispute. We are eating the results to this very day.
Those who work with dropout youth know how to tell that they have heard from those same youths more than once that at home they would disdain one great Torah or another, and from there they made an equal decree for themselves and disdained all the great Torah teachings, even those that were very dear to their homes. Therefore, anyone who thought I exaggerated with my prophecy of wrath regarding the seminary girls should reconsider their thinking.
This is exactly what is happening right now before our eyes, and it makes my heart bleed. In the heat of the various disputes that are unfolding here, certain sides are taught to disparage "great men" or "merely" outstanding scholars, simply because they do not fit what the other specific side thinks. And so it seeps down: first the great man of the generation is disparaged, then his successors, and then also the heads of yeshivahs or the overseers. The destruction of this education is placed on the shoulders of these disparagers, with the fervor of holiness.
""We are guilty," that wise man told me, and I jumped.
It was he, the complete opposite of contempt, who fought for the honor of the Gra, even in the days when it was not popular.
“You? You, actually?”
""Yes, we are," he replied to me. "Because if we, from within the Sephardic community, had stood up for the dignity of the Gra and stopped the disrespect for him, perhaps this hierarchy, which is collapsing like a house of cards before our eyes, would have been preserved. Perhaps these destructive divisions within the Ashkenazi community would have been avoided.".
And I, the Ashkenazim, say: We are guilty. For not shouting, for not stopping the process. I think it is not yet too late. That those who have their eyes in their heads can still sober up. That this hierarchical ladder, which is so important to us because this is how our tradition was passed down from generation to generation, can still be preserved. But for this, each and every one of us can say: Enough. This scourge will not enter my house. Here we do not disdain the Torah scholars, and here we do not disdain the teachers either, whatever the opinion they lead. Because tomorrow, R"L, we may wake up and discover that this has hurt us, in our soft underbelly: the next generation.
