Reply To: Going off the Derech

crisis of the week- You made at least two errors in judgement:

” I would not be suprised if your son follows in his brothers footsteps “. My OTD son went through various circumstances that led to his break with yiddishkeit, to the extent that if even one of those experiences hadn’t occured, he might not have gone OTD. My other son didn’t have any of those experiences, and in fact, had a healthier and more positive experience. Yet you equate the two by saying if A=B, then C=B. There is no logic to your mathematics.

“Her children are witnessing the ugly truth about yiddishkeit and how it deals with independent thinkers and their siblings”. The rejections by the yeshivas do not reveal the ‘ugliness of yiddishkeit’ bc there is no ugliness in yiddishkeit. (Don’t make the same incorrect assumption that OTD kids make!) There are only PEOPLE who err, and PEOPLE who get it right. What my kids see is the reality that NO ONE is perfect, not in the secular world and not in the religious world. And if some religious people are getting it wrong, we can only imagine what’s going on in the secular world. My husband has given every RY who said ‘no’,kaf zchus. On the contrary! My kids are getting to see yiddishkeit at its best via their father!! When a yeshiva says no, it’s “gam zeh l’tova”, and “Hakol ihiyeh b’seder”. And not every yeshiva has said no. The yeshivas that say no bc of an OTD sibling in my opinion, are not acting like Torah-true institutions at the core, but are more like ‘businesses’ being run under the guise of Torah.

zahvasdad-when you say, “This thread unfortunatly exposes flaws in the Charedi society”, what you really mean is that not all the Charedim are acting like they should, right? Why is that a ‘societal’ problem and not an individual one? The Charedim, unfortuately, are not together as a unit, so why are you judging them as such? When you do this, you make it sound like there’s this global problem, a kind of spiritual virus that has invaded the Charedi world, which is not true! We have wonderful friends. We know wonderful people, and the shiurim I go to are packed with women who think like me. I don’t see flaws in the Charedi society. I see that there are some people (everywhere!) who are misguided, and I would hate to think that this thread is causing you or others to think that the ‘Charedi world’ has a problem, chas v’Shalom. I am merely exposing my painful story, but it is certainly not the norm…