Saturday, September 28, 2013

Does this teaching also bear inherent dangers?

R’ Joseph Breuer (1882-1980), Rav Hirsch’s grandson and leader of the Washington Heights community in New York, explained:
...the question of one’s attitude towards the demands and implications of the Torah im Derech Eretz precept agitates all circles of contemporary Orthodoxy especially in Eretz Yisrael. Western European Torah-true Jewry owes its survival to loyal adherence to this precept. Does this teaching also bear inherent dangers? Unquestionably so. It has cost victims in the past and will also have them in the future. Yet the author poses this pointed question: Is not the way of life which aims at the complete isolation of the youth from the influence of the contemporary world of culture a far more dangerous one? (A Unique Perspective, p. 473)

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