Friday, April 15, 2016
Thursday, April 7, 2016
God Bless America
from Quora:
I can remember a story of my grandma (she was 22 when the war ended, and had blue eyes and blond hair). During her escape as a refugee from Danzig-area on her way, there was a rumor about closing troops west. The people said they had a star on their vehicles. She asked: "A red one or a white one?" They said: "A white one" Her answer: "Thank god! We are safe!"
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Marriage and the Pleasure Seeker
When your focus in life is pleasure seeking, when your religion is pleasure, then discomfort is not only uncomfortable, it is tragic, your "religion" has been violated, or so it seems to the pleasure seeker.
One of the many problems with pleasure seekers is that they tend to focus only on their own satisfaction as that of other people takes work, takes sacrifice. There's one piece of cake. Who's gonna get it? I can't be without cake. That would be uncomfortable. It would be tragic.
Prior generations, who were more focused on the true purpose of life - God, virtue and spiritual accomplishment - left us an affluent world where we could have focused less on physicality than they had to but instead we focus exclusively on it. We blew the opportunity and have become the most selfish generation in history.
I can't tell you if men or women are more intrinsically pleasure seeking - I would think it depends on free choice - but our generation is more solicitous of women. It indulges them more. Men have the technical burden of supporting a family which today is a brutal task and they have more kinds of mitzvahs. Women have a general duty to the family but feminism has obscured this and ridiculed it.
This is not such an issue in the Chasidic world but it is in the non-Chasidic and it's a huge problem in the Modern Orthodox world which seems to work daily to remove the yoke of religious duty from women. Everything has to be fun and wonderful and inspiring and comfortable. Life is sometimes that way and sometimes not. It's a mix and so Modern Orthodox feminism contradicts the nature of life.
Marriages are the chief casualty of this conflict. The halacha tries to hold the marriages together but the Modern Orthodox rabbinate battles the halacha. Some of their most talented abuse their gifts in the name of justice but actually in the cause of injustice and lust after the women. Remember, the Satan desires Chava and that in the end is what this is all about.
The answer is not prenups, not divorce on demand, not hysteria about imperfect marriages, it's growing up, seeing what life is really about, and using life the right way, not for pleasure seeking but for spiritual accomplishment - and that's not the same as being high with feeling. It has much more to do with duty and self-sacrifice.
People who can't handle that have no business getting married. A marriage is a union and the pleasure seeking person cannot unite with anything. He or she expects everything to join his or her cause of his or her personal pleasure.
One of the many problems with pleasure seekers is that they tend to focus only on their own satisfaction as that of other people takes work, takes sacrifice. There's one piece of cake. Who's gonna get it? I can't be without cake. That would be uncomfortable. It would be tragic.
Prior generations, who were more focused on the true purpose of life - God, virtue and spiritual accomplishment - left us an affluent world where we could have focused less on physicality than they had to but instead we focus exclusively on it. We blew the opportunity and have become the most selfish generation in history.
I can't tell you if men or women are more intrinsically pleasure seeking - I would think it depends on free choice - but our generation is more solicitous of women. It indulges them more. Men have the technical burden of supporting a family which today is a brutal task and they have more kinds of mitzvahs. Women have a general duty to the family but feminism has obscured this and ridiculed it.
This is not such an issue in the Chasidic world but it is in the non-Chasidic and it's a huge problem in the Modern Orthodox world which seems to work daily to remove the yoke of religious duty from women. Everything has to be fun and wonderful and inspiring and comfortable. Life is sometimes that way and sometimes not. It's a mix and so Modern Orthodox feminism contradicts the nature of life.
Marriages are the chief casualty of this conflict. The halacha tries to hold the marriages together but the Modern Orthodox rabbinate battles the halacha. Some of their most talented abuse their gifts in the name of justice but actually in the cause of injustice and lust after the women. Remember, the Satan desires Chava and that in the end is what this is all about.
The answer is not prenups, not divorce on demand, not hysteria about imperfect marriages, it's growing up, seeing what life is really about, and using life the right way, not for pleasure seeking but for spiritual accomplishment - and that's not the same as being high with feeling. It has much more to do with duty and self-sacrifice.
People who can't handle that have no business getting married. A marriage is a union and the pleasure seeking person cannot unite with anything. He or she expects everything to join his or her cause of his or her personal pleasure.
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