The Kvetcher: Big Aish - Passaic "About Who We Aren't"
"Big Aish does everything it can to hide its Charedism ......
After bragging about the celebrities who “endorse” Aish (Big Aish is notorious in their celebrity a**-kissing, and could give Scientology and The Kabbalah Centre a run for their money) Aish blatantly lies about what it is Aish seeks to accomplish, claiming, “Aish's vast network of programs is the vision of American-born Rabbi Noach Weinberg, who founded Aish in 1974 to combat alarming assimilation rates.”......
Big Aish is lying, misleading, and concealing. For a change."
Big Aish. Has a nice ring to it, like Big Tobacco and Big Oil. Evil comes to mind.
Not that I see a problem with their apporoach, and the Kvetcher IS a cross between a Snag and Reform, but it's nice to see the spotlight elsewhere.
I guess for the complainers like Harry M. although "Chabad destroys Communities", It's OK if Aish reaps years of Chabad toil by moving in to well-established cities and Universities, setting up centers, and informing one and all to come see "real Judaism".
This is the world we live in today.
12 comments:
For all your nitpicking about other movements, you can't get away from the fact that the vast majority of chabad followers believe in a hashkofo that is alien to yiddishkeit, and is on a par with the theology and philosophy that created a new religion two thousand years ago.
As long as you refuse to weigh these consequences for your own movement, perhaps you should refrain from trying to find fault with others.
Oh Snag, won't you please shut up already? No matter what the topic is, you keep rehashing the same stupid arguments.
snag
you're a good guy, and a pleasure to converse with, but you need to stop with this Meshugas already. Our Hashkofoh is just fine, and if you wanna knitpick I can find faults with yours like you wouldn't believe. I'm speaking about what you REALLY believe, not just מן השפה לחוץ
We should get this settled once and for all. I contend that it is davka the hashkofo which regards the possibility being misled by a "meshiach sheker" with exaggerated horror and revulsion, that is alien to yiddishkeit. These people's religion is not Judaism, it's "Not-Christianity", just like those Jews whose only manifestation of Judaism is ostentatiously not celebrating Christmas, and making sure everyone around them knows it.
I think you got to the point about Aish right away. Due to Loshan Horah I will not detail anything but i have experiences with them where I can question on their ethics and how they do thier "kiruv"
What's wrong with A”H? Do we have a monopoly on "kiruv"? The goal we should have is that more yidden are brought tachas kanfei HaShchina. So, the more the merrier! I don't see why we shouldn't be happy with aish - we should want & have more "aish's"
Aish in and of itself isn't bad . . . But in my experience Aish does far more to turn it's followers away from Chabad, then Chabad says about Aish . . .
Aish is clearly not a friend of Lubavitch. But so what? If they are mekarev yidden, they have real value. But more than that, I am a free-marketer: competition and more players in the kiruv field should force shuluchim, etc, to do a better job and it should keep 'em from slideing into cruise control.
There is nothing I would like to see more than visible support for Aish and their tactics from the Chabad community, even as they publicly trash Modern Orthodoxy, as is done on this blog incessently. This will help elucidate that Aish is a major problem.
So please...continue.
And btw, the most important American rabbi of the 20th century was YJBS. And Slifkin is right.
Rabosai, turn away from your Charedi literalism and mythology, embrace scientific method, and repent. Their is always a pintele ratonalist in each and every fundamenatlist, no matter how far he strays from common sense.
Slifkin is right? Says who? Just because he's a rebel doesn't make him rught.
Rabbi Soloveitchik was very important, yes, to his community.
Aish was created to destroy Chabad, nothing else.
Milhouse: Perhaps. But do note that there is a difference between those who make "not-Xianity" the be-all and end-all of their Judaism, and those for whom elements of Chabad smack of Xianity, despite his and their parallel committments to Torah.
I have a similar revulsion for Holocaust obsession among those who aren't survivors or their children. I find it out of place in both the history section of West Side Judaica, where it appeals to their non-frum audience, and at the Siyum HaShas, where it totally overwhelmed what should have been a simchadig occasion. Well, that and the fact that most of the speeches were in an untranslated dying langauge, not known to most of the participants.
IOW, revulsion for "not-Xianity" shouldn't cause one to reject whole people who espouse it, any more than their revulsion for the "false messiah cult" of Crown Heights should cause them to reject the whole of Chabad or all of its members.
And I don't see it as alien to yiddishkeit, given how much trouble false-messiah-cults have brought to us over the years. Yoshke, obvious. Shabtai Tzvi, should be obvious, although it's finally going away since WWI. And even Shabtai Tzvi was not an unmixed curse - the reactions to the collapse of Shabtai Tzvi included the development of chassidus, at least according to Scholem.
It is alien to yiddishkeit. We've had many people who've attempted to bring us out of golus, and almost none of them are rememberd harshly. Nobody condemns Bar Kochva or his followers, despite the utter disaster that his failure brought upon us – we recognise that the disaster was caused by his failure, not by his attempt. Ditto for David Reuveni, David Alroi, etc.
See my comments on the other thread. The reasons klal yisroel condemned and rejected the Xians and the Sabbateans had nothing at all to do with their messianic claims about their leaders. Had that been their only deviation from normal vanilla Judaism they would never have been pushed away, and would still to this day be part of the frum community, unless they disappeared altogether.
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