Rav Avigdor Miller on Torah Responsibility

 

If a Jew is unwittingly the cause of serious harm to somebody else, how should he feel?Now the question is what is meant by ‘unwittingly’? You know, if a man kills somebody b’shogeig, he didn’t want to kill, the law is that if the goel hadam catches him he can kill him; a relative can kill him. Because a shogeig is also blameworthy. If it is an oness, something entirely beyond his ability to prevent,  you can’t blame him; but otherwise there is a very great blood-guilt on a person who even indirectly has a share in somebody’s death. 

There is a teshuvah in one of the teshuvah sefarim. A man sent a boy, a youth, to drive a wagon at night through the forest. Now at night it is not so easy to drive on the road, and the wagon overturned and the boy perished. And therefore the chacham who answered the teshuvah said it’s a very serious matter. He said you have to fast so many days every year, and you have to give away so much money to establish a fund to do mitzvos instead of the the mitzvos he lost. A very great and difficult teshuvah. 

Because anybody who is responsible for somebody’s life even indirectly, unwillingly, has to have it on his conscience always. Very serious matter. So therefore, what people call unwilling and not responsible is not necessarily taught in the language of Torah. Is not necessarily true. 

Rabbi Avigdor Miller, TAPE # 405 (May 1982), 1:33:15-1:34:58.

again, jew without mitzvos

 

Who is the rudest celebrity you have met, and who would be the nicest?

Hands down the rudest celebrity I ever met was Harvey Weinstein. I was working on a production that he was producing. Nearly every sentence out of his mouth was filled with expletives, negativity, and hate. He also created an incredibly toxic environment from the top down, which saw almost every member of the creative team threaten to quit the production at one point.

I’ve also met many incredibly nice celebrities, and it’s hard to say who the nicest was. But here are a few:

1. Paul Sorvino: I was his vocal coach for a movie musical he was going to be filming. He was a true gentleman, a pleasure to work with, and a true artist who loved to create. After the film came out, we stayed in touch over the years and would sometimes grab lunch when I was in Los Angeles. It was truly inspiring being around someone who loved being an artist and being creative as much as Paul Sorvino did.
2. Quincy Jones and Rod Temperton: I met Quincy and Rod one evening when they came backstage following a performance of Cirque du Soleil’s “O” show during my tenure as keyboardist in the band there. Following the show, I was grabbing drinks in the lounge at the Bellagio when Quincy and Rod came in looking for a table. My friends and I reintroduced ourselves and offered them our table, and they responded by offering us a round of drinks. We wound up staying in the lounge hanging out with them until about 3am that night hearing stories about the making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. It was a truly special evening, and it was a incredibly special to interact with Quincy and Rod as two fellow human beings and to get to know them beyond their public personas.

Very sweet

mitzvos

The Chumash says to keep mitzvos. The Shema says to keep mitzvos. The Navi says to keep mitzvos. The Gemara talks all about mitzvos. As we learn in Tehillim, mitzvos are emunah. They bring us to emunah.

 

Thus, the Satan tries to trick us into dropping them. First there was idol worship, a radical departure from Judaism. Some Jews fell for this while holding on to the other mitzvos, but many succumbed entirely. Then came Xianity which resembled Judaism in some ways. That tricked some more, but for many it was too much of a betrayal of their faith. Then came the haskalah. It didn’t appear to be a strange religion, but of course it was. That took many more. Then came Communism. You could still be an idealist. That took some more. Then came Zionism. You can still be with your people, just exchange those mitzvos for the land and the medinah. That took many more. At one point, all of Borough Park was Mizrachi.

 

So what is to be done with the rest, with those who are staying strong? Ah, dress it up even more. Give them one mitzvah to obsess over and tell them that it represents all the others. It is so much better than the others that you can forget about them. That we call contemporary Yeshivism. They call themselves Litvacks, but they are not Litvacks. The Vilna Gaon was a Litvack. He said, “Just as the prime purpose of a tree is its fruit, so is the study of Torah secondary to its fulfillment. Only the fulfillment of mitzvos qualifies a man as one of the righteous upon whom the world depends.” (Vilna Gaon, Even Sheleimah 5:6) That’s a Litvack. Today we have Yeshivists. So many are stumbling in the final days before Moshiach.

 

Replacing the universe

It's a big world. Anybody who has driven across Pennsylvania knows it. Trip takes 6 hours in a car that's racing along at 55 miles an hour. It's 312 miles. Try Texas now. 800 miles. Takes half a day by car. Try it in a horse and buggy or by walking. The latter would take 11 days. So the world is 24,000 miles around. Texas is only .33% of that.

Then there's the solar system and the galaxy, and then billions of galaxies. It's a big universe.

So what the manalists want to say is to forget the universe. What matters is Torah and mitzvos. But forget about the mitzvos, just focus on Torah study. But forget about the Torah. Just study Gemara. But forget about the Gemara. Just learn up yeshivishe mesechtos or rather a few portions of a handful of chapters of them. If you go to Yeshivas Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, it will be a few pages. And forget about the aggadata and practical halacha. Just engage in Brisker lomdus, abstract notions about the derivation of the halacha as found on the few pages that are supposed to replace the entire universe.

And the yeshivist rabbis demand that every male dedicates his life to this and not spend a second doing anything else. But if they must they can miraculously earn lots of money after reluctantly leaving yeshiva without having been allowed to engage in any job training and send that money to the yeshivist rabbis who will replace the universe with the Brisker Lomdus on their behalf. And if you don't buy into all this, you are a heretic. 

I just summed up the manalist mentality. 

I think you'll find saner people in a mental institution. 

When you tell people you had a bad experience in yeshiva

 

Have you ever wondered why most Jews don’t actually speak Hebrew?

 Have you ever wondered why most Jews don’t actually speak Hebrew? - YouTube

This is classic and hilarious but so sad in what it says about yeshiva education.