Thursday, November 22, 2018


Torah im Derech Eretz requires self-discipline and its no surprise that it developed in Germany as Germans are known for their self-discipline. With TIDE we can get the best of secular materials as long as we are very discerning and leave out the problematic stuff.

With Torah u'Maddah, the philosophy is once we go with the secular, we study it all. We don't differentiate. 

Hirsch and TIDE have been honored by gadolim for a century and a half. And results go along with it. Hirsch was enormously successful at keeping people in the fold and attracting people. TUM  has successes. There are people who can handle it. But arguably the masses cannot. It has resulted in  departure from the fold plus traife offshoots like Open Orthodoxy.

Some authors are known for their decadence. D.H. Lawrence is famous for writing novels that lowered moral standards. We are not talking only about his private life here but the essence of his novels. One of his most famous novels is called "Sons and Lovers." Another is called "Lady Chatterley's Lover." There is no excuse for putting Lawrence in a collection that alleges to hold a higher moral standard.

Isaac Asimov was famous for his atheism. Moreover, his parents were Torah observant. He wrote, "I am an atheist, out and out....Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time." To give children an attachment to an atheistic Jew who left religion is very problematic.

Yet, one sees these authors in books by at least one frum publisher of children's collections. At Stern College of Yeshiva University, they study Lawrence:

3351 Modernism 3 credits
Modernist texts in English focusing on fiction and poetry from 1900-1930. An introduction to the intellectual and technological backgrounds of modernism and their relationship to modernist themes in the visual arts. Writers may include Conrad, Stein, Joyce, Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hurston.
3733 The Development of the British Novel III 3 creditsTreats twentieth-¬century experiments in fiction. Authors may include Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Lessing, Byatt, Coetzee, and Rushdie.

The frum publisher features Lawrence:

And reads Asimov:

Now the material included in the books is neither illicit nor atheist. So to a large extent this comes down to a disagreement as to whether it is appropriate to include acceptable material from authors who are otherwise unacceptable. There are some people to whom all goyim are the same and as long as the material itself is acceptable it doesn't matter what else the author has done in his writing or life because really they are all traife. But I think that we  can make more precise distinctions. Some authors are far worse than others and kids develop an attachment to writers.

There are plenty of authors who don't have these glaring problems, particularly if you stick to the 19th century and earlier. Dickens, Stevenson, Hawthorne, Irving, Twain. But even if you go with the 20th you have John Steinbeck who was married 3x but his novels strive for morality. Pearl S. Buck, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.B. White, Joseph Conrad, Tolkien, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce. You have plenty of people to choose from who are less problematic than Lawrence and Asimov.

The further back you go, the better it gets. 17th century is better than 18th which is better than 19th which is far better than the 20th. As for the 21st, stay away entirely.


  1. Well said!

    But is it clear that TUM has lost more people than other groups within Orthodoxy? Also, is it fair to blame Open Orthodoxy on TUM? Seems like the Open Orthodoxy phenomenon is more of the same of Conservative Judaism, Reform, Haskalah, Sadducees, Observant Jews who synthesized Torah and Greek philosophy, Observant Jews who added Baal-worship to their spiritual practices, etc. Their will always be groups of Jews who want to adjust the Torah to what's current in the mainstream; OO is just doing the same with what's current now I.e. Leftism.

    I would also add that I think R' Hirsch would want us to help the kids develop filters, with which they can readily discern which sentences and paragraphs contain anti-Torah thoughts and sentiments.

    1. It's the same process as conservative developing from people who abandoned orthodoxy in the 1950s. The OO leaders mostly are YU guys like Avi W, the inventor of the whole thing. or people who went to SAR -like one of the famous lady leaders who i won't mention in the spirit of being a gentleman, or linzer who grew in a MO part of silver spring and who had all kinds of YU type teachers, it's all this undisciplined TUM, they are all products of that world. R' Solov grew up in Brisk and was a Talmudic genius so he could study anything and stay on a basically proper intellectual path, see his comments on Zionism how barely Zionistic he was, but all these people who have regular brains and grew in modern orth tum neighborhoods get totally sucked in by liberalism or new ageism or feminism and all kinds of OO foolishness. There are other people who can handle tum, R Lichtenstein for example, but usually average people can't handle it. It shouldn't be for the masses.