Ask & Ye Shall Be Grieved
Ok. So maybe you have a kashye regarding Haskafa, discover what you believe to be a chidush in a popular suyga gemara, or have some sefeykos. Possibly, you’ve been learning Nevi’im and coming across some disturbing information or an obvious stirah, and the mefarshim just aren’t helping at all. You do your job well when it comes to Torah. ‘Vehagisa ba yamim velayla’ is your raison d'etre, and yet, you can’t seem to get these problems worked out. You continue to ponder them anyhow, because you are driven to be mekayim the mitzvah b’hidur. The standard answers, though, don’t seem right. Sometimes it looks as if the teretz begets more kashyos, or has nothing to do with the inyan whatsoever.
You shouldn’t worry yourself over this. As an Eved of the Rabbinic Cult of Superhuman Genius, you aren’t really secheldig enough to understand, nor do you need to be. If Rav X did not address it, then who are you to ask about it? Do you think you’re a bigger chochom than the Rav X? Don’t you think that if this issue were important, that Rav X would have already put out a teshuva on it? How dare you imagine yourself smart enough to question a Gadol! What chutzpah! A frass in punim zol ich dir geben! Don’t you realize mochin de’gadlus when you see it? Have you read all the seforim by Rav X? How about Rav Y? Or Z? (I don’t have any available to lend you, but we do sell them through the Rav’s website.)
Maybe you should seek therapy. Only meshugoyim think they are smart enough to question! We can refer you to a good frumme psychologist or a mashgiach that specializes in deprogramming anyone who thinks they can question Rav X’s infallibility and get away with it. For now, please do as you are told and stop distracting yourself and others from Limud HaTorah with your silly little chidushim and sha’alos. Nobody cares. Take your little pshetlach and your delusions of grandeur, and run along.
Play nice and obey the cult or your children will end up having to marry ba’alei teshuva or gerim, and nobody will ever trust your kashrus. Remember, Yiddishkeit is not about you. It’s about what is important for Klal Yisroel, and Rav X is not here to solve your nishtike klotz-kashyos. He has far more important concerns.
What was that? You’re wealthy? Hust gelt? Kumm arrayn Reb Menadevzeyn! So sorry to have kept you waiting! You know Rav X is always so busy serving his kehilla and answering their many questions about a wide variety of subjects in every minute detail! So now, what was your question? Oh and by the way, hust ihr a tochter efsher?
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” (The Buddha)
posted by Shlomo Leib Aronovitz @ 5:10 AM
12 Comments
12 Comments:
ר.א.ט.פ.ל!
?
He hebrew-ed ROTFL.
ok. I get it! Ty.
Here's a question for Rav X. It states in the Torah that when the Jewish people were given the Torah, they said "we will do and we will understand." How are folks supposed to understand if questioning is suppressed at worst, or dismissed as frivolous at best?
I've addressed your post @ my newest:
http://rachack.blogspot.com/2005/06/i-have-question.html
Rachack,
Know what satire is?
Many midgets piled to the sky do NOT a giant make.
Beautiful post.
In my experience, kashas and teretzes (in american yeshivish, terutzim are excuses) are entirely unrelated to real searching questions. The kinds of kashas that you're supposed to ask might sound occassionaly like apikoirisishe questions but the entire attitide is relkated to the gane of kashas and teretzes and no true apikorisishe doubts cross the questioner's mind in the asking.
However.
Every so often, oine such innocent question will make the mechanech nervous and thus rend from him a charge that rthe bachur is asking a klutz kasha. All that it takes is a few of those accusations and the innocent bachur, now chutz lamachaneh, will begin to see that his questions are more serious than he had ever intended them. And that can lead him over to unzere camp, in fact it often does.
Mneuz,
Very well said.
From the perspective of the asker, he fully assumes that the Rebbe has the answer to his question
Absolutely. Or better yet, isn't actually asking any question at all, he's just playing the kasha-teretz game that the yeshiva community calls learning. Only the rebbe's upsetness shows that his kasha is actually a question.
Mnuez,
Gut gezogt!
I remember learning to play chess at around five or six years old. (In spite of much study and effort since then my game has not improved.) My father o'h and I sat down with a chess board and he showed me all the proper moves for each piece. During that first game, I would move my Kohain (we didn't use the word Bishop and the Tzelem was broken off the Melech) straight up the board. Father would then say "Torr menn nit!" This would go on with each piece until I became fluent in how they would move.
Now clever as they are, and beautiful as the game of chess may be (that is if you're actually good at it- it's not pretty when you suck), no one knows who wrote those rules or why those rules cannot ever be changed. They have become sacrosanct
with time and the regimen of strict discipline.
Amazing as it seems, chess is still just a GAME. Had the founders of chess decided that the bishop would move diagonally and then make a sharp left backwards, it would change the way the game looked, but it wouldn't be any more or less than a game. We would have never known the difference from where we sit now. We would have adapted our vision of the game to that style and never imagined it to be different.
The essential rules come from the Braysa d'Rabi Yishmoel (Psika L'Sifra), and I have spent many, many hours analyzing their use and application. I don't even think that the Chazal play by their own rules sometimes. This was my first major contention with the 'game', and it’s deeper than the ga’avah and the religious ‘protectionism’ that exists in the yeshiva system.
Those who take the rule book as absolute will never really question the game itself.
P.S. In chess, if I believe that when I move the Melech that an actual King is effected by it, I would promptly be locked away and heavily medicated.
Kol Tuv
True to the bone!
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