Monday, February 26, 2007

It was Inevitable (Part II)


That this book is up for sale on e-bay for over 250 euro. (Then again, check out the cover)

5 comments:

Ben Bayit said...

if you really think about it - everything that is wrong with contemporary Modern Orthodoxy - especially the institutional/academic/rabbinical wings of it - is captured succintly in this episode.

As we get further and further from Rav Y.D. Soloveitchik and his contemporaries, we should expect more of this type of stuff to happen.

Jeffrey R. Woolf said...

I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about. This has absolutely nothing to do with Modern Orthodoxy or anything else, other than itself.

Ben Bayit said...

Rabbi Ariel Toaff is a product of academic modern orthodoxy. He may not be American but it's basically the same.

Even the Satmar anti-zionists denounced the neturei karta kooks that went to Tehran, but I'll eat my old fedora hat the day that Rav Aron Lichtenstein publicly denounces Har Etzion alumnus Prof. Menachem Klein for going to anti-Zionist conferences and for denying Israel's right to exist in front of European bodies. It will never happen so don't bother passing the salt.
Until he crossed a big red line (the blood libels), Toaff was just another "lefty" Rabbi (The "Red Rabbi" I believe they called him on your campus). Perhaps some saw him as eccentric with his extreme left-wing views - but he was always considered to be within the "bounds" of "legitimate" discourse. Maybe it's time for Modern Orthodoxy to move those boundaries so that we don't have to wait until folks like Toaff and Klein take even more extreme positions before we state unequivocaly that they are not part of us, that they are against us, that they have sided with those who want to destroy us.

Jeffrey R. Woolf said...

This all has nothing to do with Modern Orthodoxy. Are you going to say the same about David Landau and say that his Sinat Yisrael is a function of having been a student in Ponivezh.

Sorry. You're obsessed.

Rafael V. Rabinovich said...

Kooks are kooks, and lefty kooks are particularly so. Modern Orthodoxy, Older Orthodoxy, or whatever the Torah-thought movement one may follow (or lead), the problem here is that in an age of renewed antisemitic fever, an wako like Toaf comes up with CRAP like this.
Next thing you know, he'll be asking for "renewal of the old ritual". Either start him on an electro-shock therapy, or do like the Samtar did and have the rabbanim pronounce a Cherem against him in Jewish communities all over the world!