a matter of semantics

I was speaking to the Baal HaMa'aseh of Circus Tent:"WWRYT?" this Friday Night after Davenen, and the discussion, as usual, turned to the weekly happenings at Circus Tent. This is where, rather than the actual writing and moderating, the blog begins to consume so much of your time. You see my friends, he has no internet connection neither at home or at work, and had just been shown what I had written about his story. At first, allow me, he complimented my presentation of the story, and my responses to the incipid comments I got from some of you about him having issues with his mother, and not remembering the story since it happened a quarter of a century ago. He too, echoed my thoughts, that an event like that is never forgottten, no matter how many years have passed, but he did have this Limud Z'chus to say about Reb Yaakov Kamenecki, something that was echoed by our friend Schneur about his uncle in Kurenitz, Belarus, and his shprach with Misnagdim, even Rabbonim.

"It's all about the figures of speech prevalent in each society," he says, it's not to be taken literally. In Lubavitch, if you ask a Mashpiah what you should do about your son who wants to go learn in a Misnagdishe Yeshiva he would respond with Russian curse words, telling you what kind of people he thinks they are there. In Di Lita they used words like Apikeyres, and Shmad, and they're not Jewish, but they didn't mean that literally, at least in case of the latter. Even the great "Kano'yi" Reb Chaim Brisker attended the Levaya of his sworn adversary, the Lida Rov, when according to him his sins were much greater than the biggest "Tayneh" on Lubavitch. This - accrediting semantics and nothing else - to me seems a bit naive, and maybe very idealistic of our Ba'al HaMayseh, taking for granted that all Jews love each other, and that no one group would try and ostracize the other by calling them Apikorsim and the like. This man is by no means naive, which shows me that his main idea is to be Melamed Zechus.

But something happened these last 20-something years, something very terrible and divisive. These "semantics" seemed to take on a life of their own, and they seem to have changed from non-threatening figures of speech to words that change our whole outlook on life and Yiddishkeit. Where it used to be that you were judged by your actions, and by the way you conducted yourself, at least for the last one hundred years previous, these days the thought police judge you by the way you think. They decide that they're the holders to the deed of Torah and get to decide who stays and who goes. This is a phenomenon never before seen amongst the Jewish People, not even in the times of the birth of Chassidus, and not when fighting with the Reformists. In those days you actually needed to show a disrespect towards Torah and Mitzvos, to receive the cold shoulder and be banished. Today the "guardians" have little tolerance it seems, for anything they don't like or choose not to understand. Chaval.