Shabbos "songs" #4
I often wonder why stupid rumors like Barack Obama's Islamic terrorist connections or dumb email/medical stories last so long within the frum community. The simple answer is that the "mental ghettoization" that the frum world lives in doesn't provide refutations or answers to things that are obvious to those ourside our bekishe'd walls.
I've heard people make emphatic B"H's when they realize that it will be hard to educate their children about aspects of "modern" (read: western) life... and I understand this emphasis to a degree. But I also wonder, in a time when Solevetchik style "modern orthodoxy" has been largely been replaced with laxity under the guise of a principled religious stance, how do we live kodesh lives within a non-kodesh world and still take part it in?
Anyway, more on the echo chamber:
On The Media - The Pleasure Principle
Labels: music
R'Soloveitchik's derech was not replaced with halachic laxitities. There have been lots of people who are lax in halacha yet identify with the halachic/Orthodox lifestyle. Look at the greater Israeli or sephardic communities for a modern-day comparison.
It's just that when American judaism started using MO/yeshivish labels, somehow the "lax" people got attached to the "MO" label.
Anyway look at Woodside, or Olney, or even the yeshiva side of Kemp Mill for an example of how people can wear black hats yet participate 100% in all aspects of secular culture within parameters of halacha, even as some of them will repeat some rhetoric about how secular America is tamei.
The fact is that R'Soloveitchik's model has won the day everywhere except some hardcore charedi enclaves.