Thursday, December 29, 2005

Yated Stupidity

Check out this editorial about Yeshiva students and army service. Choice paragraphs:

"The common thread is the recommendation to seek economic security or even comfort, at the expense of Torah study. Worried about a "social time bomb" or "economic disaster" that is, according to their calculations, inevitable if things continue along the trend lines that have been established, they opine that fewer people should learn full time and more should work.

We say that this echoes the threat we faced in the time of Mattisyohu: to make us forget the Torah. In our spiritually impoverished days, we need all the learning that anyone is willing to do."

My G-d, do they really believe that? That any initiative to get people out of kollel and into the workforce (and therefore no longer supported by the public coffers) is similar in any way to the threat posed to us by the Greeks? The people who criminalized learning at the threat of execution?

So let's see if I have this straight: Creating incentives to get people off welfare by helping them become self-sufficient echoes imposing capital punishment for Torah study. I've heard of ridiculous analogies, but this tops them all (except for the idiotic Holocaust comparisons).

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