Last week, there was a ban published in Hamodia that declared an upcoming charity concert by Shloime Gertner and Lipa Schmeltzer to be forbidden (link). Frankly, I have no patience for bans and don’t understand why rabbis keep chipping away at their own authority by signing them. They may have won the battle but they are badly losing the war.
I watched one of the videos posted on the concert’s website (link) and it seems to me to just be a lighthearted event of good, clean fun (with separate seating — I, II). Fun, that is, and not the kind of concert that is all about singing songs in praise of God. There could very well be an halakhic problem with such a concert, perhaps on multiple levels. I certainly do not approve of this kind of concert. But a ban… ? It just alienates the people who are attracted to this kind of event and are already feeling alienated. In other words, it exacerbates the "at risk" problem and serves to undermine rabbinic authority in a large segment of the Charedi community.
Maybe it would be more effective — on many levels — to teach why this concert is inappropriate rather than APPEARING to bully the singers and charity into losing a huge amount of money and spoiling everyone’s fun.
Joe emails me: "If you do add your name to the kol koreh you are co-signing with the infamous Lipa Margulies, enabler of Kolko. His presence on this ban has really created a great deal of sarcastic humor on the frum blogs."
just heard from a reliable source that there is another ban coming out by Rabbi Yisroel Belsky against going to the zoo on Chol Hamoed Pesach. He insists that the zoo it is full of shreiklicha pritzus, with mixed crowds of chassidishe men and women standing together with minor children watching pedophile monkeys and apes dancing and swinging together without any clothing, or, watching walruses and seals skinny-dipping without any mechitza. Rabbi Belsky admits that the last time he went to the zoo he found himself very aroused by all the pritzus and feels that future visits there must be stopped. He is now in the process of drafting a new Kol Koreh on the subject called LO ZOO AF ZOO.
