You Shouldn’t Read Blogs

From a Torah perspective, blogs just don’t seem kosher.

I have an instinctive reaction against women as Orthodox rabbis. It just doesn’t seem right.

Similarly, blogs that talk about other people, it just doesn’t seem right. That’s what the goyim do. They traffic in personal destruction. They rate women’s physical attributes and they beat their wives and they patronize hookers.

This is not behavior for a Jew.

I don’t think I am the only one who believes that we as an Orthodox community have not taken as strong a stand as we must against rogue bloggers.

Shmuel Riskin reads my mind here:

We have totally failed as a community in reigning in what I’ll call “rogue blogs,” meaning blogs run by individuals who do what they want, the way they want to do it, without a care for what is in the best interest of the community they live in or the greater Jewish community. And no, I’m not talking about those who have left the path of Torah and spend their days digging up dirt. I am talking about those who still reside in our communities. They get caught up with the newfound attention their blog or website receives and there is no turning back for them. On a daily basis, they can be uprooting a community from the inside, making life difficult, and often impossible, for the representatives of the tzibbur who work constantly on ensuring that our kehillos are protected and have what they need.

The Torah is eternal and it has profound instruction on how we should deal with those who play with “strange fire.”

Prior to the 1960s, the laws of proper speech used to be taken more seriously in Orthodox life. The ghetto mentality was much stronger in American Orthodox life.

Public gossip was something the goyim did. And you realized that you shouldn’t privately critique the cooking and hospitality in someone’s house.

Since the launch of People magazine in the 1970s, gossip has become more respectable. Social mores have changed and this has affected Orthodox Jews.

A traditional Jewish approach would be to not read blogs that discuss people.

The Orthodox community in New York is more insular. The Los Angeles Orthodox community is more tied in with the non-Orthodox community. In New York, it would be inconceivable that average Orthodox Joes would read any of the 25 or so blogs on a website like the JewishJournal.com.

I am struck by the savagery of many anonymous Orthodox blogs (and many blogs about Orthodox Judaism by those who have left it).

I was about to list some of these blogs but then thought it wasn’t worth the bother. Why get in a fight with a pig? You’ll just get dirty and the pig will like it.

This reminds me of a post I made in February 2009:

I’m reading a terrific 2005 book called "Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels."

It’s by a secular Jewish woman getting her PhD in Sociology — Hella Winston.

On page 104, she quotes an email she got from a guy who had one foot in the Hasidic world:

If you ask them if they regret not ever having been in a loving relationship, most of them would say no.

…In order to survive, their bodies have evolved so that they don’t have those needs; they adapted genetically, they don’t have a physical need for any deep emotional attachments and experiences. Once you separate sex from feelings it’s easy to see how some people become deviant. Sexual gratification becomes an animalistic pursuit, devoid of beauty and passion and meaning.