In almost all of the battles described in this book, the Hasidim won. Its amazing what you can do when you combine high IQ, ethnic solidarity and high motivation.
Chaim Amalek: “They won. But they won against a national culture that also let the Mexicans win, and the gays, and the South Asians, and everyone else whose central argument was “we are different, and therefore you must give way.” Had they been up against a more self confident culture, aware and protective of its prerogatives, likely some of these outcomes would have gone the other way.”
“When Moshiach comes, the goyim will trip over one another to sell us their land, and at low prices, too.”
“When Moshiach comes, the goyim will pay us just to sit and learn all day. Instead of paying money to go to yankee stadium and watch the spanish play with their balls, Gedolei Yisroel will be on the field learning, and the goyim will pay big money to sit in the stands and watch what their goyishe minds can never understand.”
The Reform and Conservative rabbis spoke in trite hollow generalities about the sanctity… of marriage but danced around specifics, while the Orthodox rabbi, Moshe D. Tendler, professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University and chairman of its biology department, waded in with prescriptions and proscriptions for masturbation, oral sex and other quite specific sex acts. The Bible forbids a man from willfully and fruitlessly “spilling his seed,” but Rabbi Tendler pointed out it does not prohibit women from masturbating, although it would be regarded as “an anti-social life style.”
“A marriage without sexuality is a weak marriage,” Rabbi Tendler told the audience. Every sex act should give maximum pleasure to both parties, and even eroticism has its place “if it does not violate modesty”. Under Jewish law, the rules of modesty forbid a man from engaging in acts that violate the woman’s sense of privacy and are associated with prostitution — but Tendler did not specifically rule out all forms of oral sex during a procreative sex act. The audience, most of whom were Orthodox…never blushed.
