I Guess Most Yeshivos In Brooklyn Are Like Amalek...

In this week's Yated, Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz, has an article (posted on YeshivaWorldNews) dealing with media bias and Agriprocessors. However, tucked away in the article, he takes a potshot at Yeshiva University. In his article, Rabbi Lipschutz writes:

Amaleik appears in so many different guises. When a Jewish university maintains on its payroll a person who openly lives an immoral lifestyle and the institution’s president tells the New York Post that he is “proud of my university and all my faculty,” is that not an expression of “asher karchah”? Such a person is conferring legitimacy on behavior the Torah considers abhorrent.

What he is referring to is the case of Jay Ladin, a professor of modernist American poetry who left YU two years ago on a leave of absence and who recently returned as Joy Ladin, having undergone hormone treatments (although she has not yet had sexual reassignment surgery).

I don't want to get into whether she was right or wrong. You're free to your own opinion on the matter. Rabbi Moshe Tendler has come out against her, while others have supported her. What I want to get to is Rabbi Lipschutz's gratuitious pot-shot at Yeshiva University.

He maintains that Yeshiva University is comperable (in at least some ways) to Amalek because they maintain this person on their staff. His argument is that by doing so, they are conferring legitimacy on behavior the Torah considers abhorrent.

However, in his little pot-shot, Rabbi Lipschutz has cast most of the yeshivos in Brooklyn as Amalek as well.

I went to a very right-wing yeshiva for high school. I don't think that there is anyone on earth who would mistake it for being "modern" in any possible sense of the word. And yet, when I was in high school, I had teachers (for secular studies) who were not frum. I also had teachers who were Christians. I'm sure that if you asked the principal (a frum Jew), he would have told you that he was proud of his teaching staff as well. And yet, according to Rabbi Lipschutz, my high school conferred legitimacy on a Jewish non-frum lifestyle, or worse, an idolatrous lifestyle! My high school is like Amalek! Not only that, a great many yeshivos in Brooklyn (and certainly in other communities as well) use teachers from the public school system who may not be frum or even Jewish to teach secular studies. I guess all these yeshivos are also like Amalek!

So, thanks Rabbi Lipschutz. I always knew that my high school didn't fit me. Now I know why! They were like Amalek.

The Wolf