Anyway, at the beginning of our marriage, my husband and I went to visit a rabbi (with the rabbi’s agreement) and at my husband’s prompting, I asked the rabbi directly, “What nusach should I daven?”

That question was part of the reason why we were there.

I’m Ashkenazi, my husband is Sephardi, and another rabbi told me that some poskim say the wife should take on her husband’s nusach while some say she should stick to her own familiar nusach.

So we went my husband’s rabbi to get a decisive answer.
 
And the rabbi acted like I hadn’t said anything. He just looked away and didn’t say a word -- not even a grunt.
 
I felt very embarrassed and confused. Had I said something wrong? Or was he thinking it over? Perhaps he hadn’t understood me with my heavy American accent?
 
I glanced at my husband, who also seemed taken aback, but after a long and uncomfortable silence, the rabbi started talking to my husband about something else.
 
I was really confused.

​Also, just for knowing, the rabbi would look at me directly (in a modest manner) and address me directly at other times. So it wasn't that he refused to talk to or look me in the face by custom.
 
At a pause in the conversation, I waited a moment and then politely said something like, “Excuse me, kavod harav, um…I was just interested in knowing what nusach I should daven now?”

He looked at me in an odd way, then turned away and made no response.

​So I said, “Um, the thing is I davened Ashkenazi until now, but now I’m supposed to take on Sephardi minhagim…” I faltered because he still made no reply. “So, uh, I heard that some poskim say one way and some say another and, uh, I was just wondering which nusach I should daven?”
 
He frowned and looked away from me.
 
Now, instead of feeling mildly confused or a bit taken aback like a normal person might, I felt devastated—because this is my sore spot. I’m way too oversensitive in this area.
 
At this point, my husband got up the guts to politely re-ask my question and the rav looked at him, frowned, and made this irritated motion with his hands and shoulders.
 
And my husband immediately raised his palms in surrender, “Okay, sorry, sorry! Never mind. Ah…” And my husband changed the subject.
 
When we got home, I burst into tears as I asked why the rabbi treated me so. My husband tried to make a joke out of it and quipped that apparently the rabbi wanted to rely on my husband.
 
“So why didn’t he SAY that?” I cried. "Why did he act like I don't even exist?"
 
My husband shrugged apologetically. He grew up in a traditional immigrant Moroccan neighborhood in Eretz Yisrael, where respect for people who learned Torah was sacrosanct and he couldn’t bring himself to speak about his rabbi any further.
 
To compound things (and I'm revealing this with my husband's consent), my husband’s father died very suddenly when my husband was a teenager, and he always missed the closeness they’d shared. So he instinctively sought a father figure in his rabbi.

​And this rabbi could be very warm and friendly when they learned or spoke together, and such paternal warmth is what my husband understandably craved—but the rabbi could also be irritable and sharp and prone to short bursts of frightening temper. (I saw it once and it froze me speechless—and all because his wife brought the wrong coffee. Cripes.)
 
What I didn’t know at the time was that this rabbi has a lion-like temper (which was why my husband got nervous when the rabbi got irritable and why my husband was hesitant to push the rabbi to answer the innocent—and very simple!—shaila).
 
And as I also saw several times, this rabbi can be very friendly and warm toward people, then treat them with disdain or hostility. (And he did this to me, sometimes acting like I didn’t exist as he did above, or being really nice and then with a paternal smile, plunge his verbal dagger into my nefesh.)
 
Eventually, we drifted off from him and much to his credit, my husband eventually managed to overcome the very understandable desire for some kind of father figure.
 
In other words, despite his hasmadah in learning and the tremendous intellectual knowledge he possessed, this rabbi's Torah learning remained stuck in his head only and never managed to fully flow down to his heart.

You could definitely see the influence of Torah on him, but there was still a lot missing.
 
And some people are like that.

​For whatever the reason, some people learn tremendous amounts of Torah (sort of like academics like to learn their own weighty tomes and philosophies), but such people never manage to actually INTERNALIZE the Torah they learn. (Or they only internalize a very small percentage of the vast amount of Torah they’ve learned.)
 
Of course, we’re all flawed and even someone who learns Torah for years can still exhibit flawed middot at times.

Only Hashem is perfect.
 
But this rabbi's extreme behavior exhibited itself regularly.
 
And we need to use caution when choosing a rav. Just because someone has a lot of Torah-learning in his background doesn’t mean he is a Torah personality.
 
For example, when a regular frum Jew asked Rav Avigdor Miller how to deal with a learned rabbi’s lack of derech eretz, Rav Avigdor DIDN’T say, “Gevald! Why aren’t you giving him the benefit of the doubt? Who are you, a lowly regular Yid, to judge such a big talmid chacham?!”
 
No.
​
Rav Avigdor knew that rabbis can lack derech eretz. So he recommended that the regular Jew write the rabbi a polite anonymous letter.
 
Here’s the original Q&A:

In Going Home…to Yerushalayim, a commenter asks how can we know who to listen to and who not?
 
It’s an excellent and vitally important question.
 
So first of all, it’s important to pray for this.
 
Both Rav Levi Yitzchak Bender (Words of Faith) and Rav Michel Dorfman recommended saying “Utaknenu b’aitzah tovah milfanecha” (said in Maariv and Bedtime Shema) with as much kavanah as you can regarding this issue.

So when I saw the rabbi erupt into bursts of short but very intense anger (over nonsense), I could have realized he wasn’t the real deal.
 
It was confusing at the time because in those days, there was tremendous pressure on baalei teshuvah to find a rav (any rav!) and many stories showcased how blind obedience to a rav reaped a satisfyingly happy ending.

There are also many stories showing rabbis acting oddly and later revealing profound and legitimate reasons for such behavior.

But they were tzaddikim with ruach hakodesh—which is very different than the vast majority of rabbis who most certainly do NOT possess ruach hakodesh or tzidkus. So you needn’t assume your rabbi’s unhalachic behavior is the result of profound holiness.
 
Anyway, I thought the problem was me and that if I only had enough emunat chachamim, everything would be fine.
 
(But things didn’t work out and I learned a big lesson: Intellect is NOT the same as wisdom. And we shouldn’t place our emuna on a “walking encyclopedia,” but only on a real true chacham.)
 
So it’s not easy and it takes some time, but that’s one way to go.

The following pertains specifically ​to gedolei hador, but it's still good general advice.

This is what Rav Avigdor Miller suggests in Recognizing a Gadol Hador:

• See who other gedolim are calling a gadol.
• Do great rabbanim from outside his group consider him a gadol?

​By the way, we can and certainly should respect all people for the good middot and authentic Torah knowledge they DO possess. Some people are experts on the halachos of tevilat keilim or lashon hara, but lack sensitivity or expertise in other areas.
 
We should not start gossiping about a rabbi’s—or any person’s—bad traits unless there is a halachically mandated benefit in doing so.
 
We must always find a good point in every Jew—the more good points, the merrier.
 
However, on the subject of rabbis, you don’t need FOLLOW them if they aren’t up to par.

​If their views conflict with those mentioned in STANDARD halacha and mussar, you DON’T need to follow them.
 
Yes, you treat them with same courtesy and respect as you do any human being.

But you don't need to follow them.
 
Their opinions and hashkafahs aren’t kodesh kedoshim—unless that rabbi truly embodies Torah haskafah.
 
So if they aren’t representing Torah truth (and long gray or white beards with impressive rabbinical attire and rabbinical degrees don’t AUTOMATICALLY determine their level of Torah truth), you don’t need to (and shouldn’t) follow them.

Frum media isn’t perfect either.

​Please see:
Rav Avigdor Miller on the Yeshivah & the Sane Asylum

And this connects to what’s happening in both Eretz Yisrael & Chutz L’Aretz today:
Are the Reshaim Endangering Us?​

P.S. This post started off with mentioning the problem of a sore oversensitive point. I want to continue discussing how to deal with any point of oversensitiveness. When ignored, it interferes with having a good life and good middot. So more on how to deal with that in an upcoming post…

UPDATE: Upon receiving a message from a concerned reader, I realized that for the sake of maris ayin, a few things should be clarified:

• I write this blog anonymously. Even the 2 or 3 people who know me have no clue who are the family members mentioned in this post.
• My family neither reads this blog nor know it exists, so they cannot be hurt by this post in any way. (I wouldn't have written it this way if they read it.)
• My non-Jewish family members (who think they're Jewish) and their non-Jewish spouses (if they're married) for the most part are anti-Israel anti-religion anti-morality Liberals/Leftists who don't treat me with anywhere near the same warmth and courtesy I treat them. (In fact, they do the opposite.) They are mocking or sneering DESPITE the fact that I DON'T DISCUSS Judaism with them at all or impose on them in anyway, and I always treat them nicely.

(This includes the one previously married to the despicable criminal. That cousin was also there when he was "confronting" me about Holocaust survivors not forgiving Nazis, and she remained silently apathetic the whole time. But she was furious with me later for telling another Jewish family member about it because that Jew also found it offensive & didn't want the menuval at the family Seder.)

• A couple of my not-Jewish-but-think-they-are relatives are very nice to me personally and relatively positive toward my frumkeit, but one holds firm anti-Israel pro-Philistinian views (and we all know what that really means).
• I'm very fond of my Jewish family members (except one), even as I'm sad that they don't know the spiritual treasure they have and I did not say anything about them in this post, except that they're intermarried secular Liberals (without names). Oh wait. I did call one "a lump," and I've deleted that.

If you know for a fact (with sources) that anything I wrote here is genuine lashon hara, I definitely want to know so that I can delete it. 

Thank you!

I’d like to make a quick point about intermarriage.

In my family, intermarriage only started with the generation above mine.

Yet in my generation already, non-Jews outnumbered the Jews if you put all the first-cousins together.

And of the Jews, not one married a Jew (except me). Even the cousins who live in New York, where there’s no dearth of Jews. Even the one who married twice married a non-Jewish woman each time. He has 5 kids in all—none of them Jewish (although one of his sons looks like him, with a very handsome Jewish face, and shares his typically Jewish last name).

If you spread out the net wider, I have one Jewish second-cousin who married a Jew (both not frum). I’ve met his mother 3 times in my life, but never him. I don’t even remember his name.

I also have a third-cousin (whom I only discovered a couple of years ago) who became a Chabadnik and is married to a fellow Chabadnik, and they are producing a lovely family.

That’s it as far as I know!

On my side of the family, my children do not have even 1 Jewish first-cousin. They have 3 Jewish second-cousins, 2 of whom are boys. Barring a miracle, it’s unlikely that these children will marry Jews. Meaning that the 1 girl is the only one to have any chance of continuing the Jewish line—IF she decides to have children. (I have several family members in both my generation and the generation above mine who either decided not to have children, or are taking their time about it, maybe until they run out of time.)

Many of the intermarriages don’t consider themselves intermarriage because they did a fake Conservative or Reform “conversion,” in which there was never any intention to keep even the 10 Commandments.

One does keep kosher, however, but doesn’t fast on Yom Kippur and has never kept Shabbat. (In all fairness, she’s not supposed to keep Shabbat because she is not Jewish. However, she does not know that she’s not Jewish and thinks her observance is perfectly fine.)

Another Reform “convert” does nothing except watch her Jewish husband light Chanukah candles (I'm not even sure if they do it every night of Chanukah) and she attends or even hosts a Pesach Seder once a year. Kashrut doesn’t exist in their home, nor does any other Jewish observance as far as I’ve ever seen.
 
And so on. 

Intermarriage decimates Jewish families that fast.

I'm seeing Jewish family lines completely dead within 1-3 generations of that initial intermarriage. 
 
And the above doesn’t even cover the absurdity of a Pesach Seder in which non-Jews outnumber the Jews 12-1. (Even a 50% non-Jewish Seder is silly. I mean, should Jewish men recite Chana's prayer in which she goes through her female reproductive system which men don't have? It's the same type of thing.)

​Or the unwitting confusion that reigns when you have 3 generations of non-Jews who practice no Judaism, save for maybe a Chanukah candle-lighting and a Pesach Seder, yet consider themselves Jewish because a Conservative or Reform rabbi told them they’re Jewish.
 
(This gets even messier when you throw adoption into the mix, with a non-Jewish-mother-who-thinks-she’s-Jewish adopting a non-Jewish child, then raising the child as an assimilated Jew. I’ve known several families like that.)
 
One non-Jewish cousin (the daughter of the Reform “convert” above) married a guy who planned on undergoing a Reform conversion, but they got divorced before he got his certificate.

​I never liked him, particularly after a conversation in which he unexpectedly demanded to know why ORTHODOX Jews don’t forgive the Germans and why ORTHODOX Jews boycott German products.
 
(That one question exhibited so much irrationality, it took me a moment to even know where to start in response.)
 
Then he kept insisting that Holocaust survivors need to forgive the Nazis. He seemed personally offended that Holocaust survivors don’t forgive Nazis.
 
I was flabbergasted by his attitude (and his sheer chutzpah in pounding me with his attitude—did he honestly expect to me to ever agree with him?) until I learned that after he and my cousin got divorced, he was convicted of particularly heinous crimes against children, one as young as six. (He claimed she asked for it -- literally.) Hopefully, he’ll never leave prison and the daughter he and my cousin have together decided several years ago to just tell everyone her father is dead. And that’s exactly what she does.
 
I guess it takes someone with abominable inclinations and no empathy to find Nazi atrocities forgivable and to get all huffy about those who cannot forgive atrocities.

Anyway, despite their enthusiasm to dupe non-Jews into thinking they're Jews, Reform "rabbis" might want to take at least a minute to probe the views and proclivities of their potential "converts," even if they care nothing for the potential "convert's" actual observance and commitment to Torah Judaism.

​So this is just a small sample of what’s going on.
 
And the Reform and Conservative (which is actually extremely Liberal) movements want to bring all this to Eretz Yisrael.

Better start davening.

We're still not long after Pesach (even if it feels like Pesach was ages ago) and now we're heading into Shavuot to receive the Torah and solidify ourselves as a committed Nation of God after the initial Redemption from the spiritual darkness of Mitzrayim.

Pesach brings to fore the core of the Jewish people and Judaism. It's all about birth, rebirth, sea-splitting emuna, and Redemption.

Yet the destructive Erev Rav forces quietly tear at the edges of even this most transformative earth-shattering process.

Authentic Jewish tradition tells us that a mind-boggling 80% of Jews in Egypt didn't survive the Plague of Darkness.

Astoundingly, they didn't want to leave the slavery of Egypt.

Ultimately, only 20% made it to the Exodus.
___________
Recently, I was pondering the movement within non-Torah Judaism that refers to itself as "Conservative." (Boy, is that a misnomer!) I grew up within this movement and this was the community and synagogue to which we belonged.

And I was thinking about how much destruction they've wrought upon the Jewish people, all under the cheerful auspices of "progress" and good intentions.

What's insidious about the leaders within this movement is that they're knowledgeable enough to present their fallacious views in a convincing manner to Jews who aren't knowledgeable at all or only minimally knowledgeable.

Recently, Batya Medad blogged about her experiences with this movement (among other topics), saying:
"The vast majority [of Jewish teachers] were actually strictly practicing and believing Orthodox Jews, but they had to dilute their teaching to suit the Conservative theology and the even less Jewishly committed parents, who would have had them fired or pull their kids out of the school if there were signs of 'brainwashing'."

[Emphasis mine -- MR]

This isn't progressive, but dishonestly restrictive -- exactly what the Conservative movement's adherents accuse Torah-true Judaism of being.

A boy I grew up with became a Conservative rabbi a few years ago. This boy possesses a very nice personality; he's warm and caring, and also enthusiastic about Judaism. He attended the rabbinical school of this movement where the indoctrination is very skillful and convincing, and he's brought his theories and enthusiasm to his own congregation.

This is heartbreaking because such a precious Jew could do so much good within the Torah world, but it's very hard to untangle such indoctrinated Jews from the Conservative movement's finely woven heresies. And I've known several Conservative rabbis with this same kind of personality. They care about their congregants and have genuine affection for a lot that Judaism has to offer.

Why? Because Judaism is genuinely beautifully and the thirst within the Jewish soul is only slaked by Torah spirituality.

(Not to mention the Conservative rabbis who are merely good administrators and enjoy the nice home provided by the congregation in addition to the 6-figure salary common among such communities, particularly the larger communities. And yes, I'm aware that some Orthodox rabbis fit this description too.)

To make things more confusing, Conservative rabbis near major Orthodox areas (like New York) practice Judaism similarly to many Modern Orthodox Jews. In fact, I was shocked when one Conservative rabbi told me that he required his female converts to commit to mikveh and taharat hamishpach (the laws of Family Purity) after marriage, in addition to Shabbat and kashrut. (Taharat hamishpacha isn't generally valued or even know about within the Conservative movement.)

But in many parts of the US, the Conservative rabbi and cantor may be the only people who don't drive on Shabbat. Yet even th rabbi and cantor's Shabbat observance is lacking. With no respect for the millennia of interpretation by Sages possessing the intellectual level of Albert Einstein, the Conservative leaders simply pick and choose according to convenience.

God is a far and distant figure subject to their own imagination. And they deal with the personalities within Torah according to their own grasp, meaning that they bring all the greatest of the greats down to their own level (which is low indeed) instead of striving to lift themselves to follow the example of the Patriarchs, Matriarchs, and Prophets.

The result is that there is nothing to aspire to -- except whatever the lowly rabbi or Conservative teacher determines according to his or her own ego and personality limitations.

I remember one Conservative rabbi who rarely even made it to Shacharit services during the week; he just showed up on Shabbat (a "once-a-week" Jew!). Usually, there wasn't even a minyan (even when including the women) for weekday Shacharit despite its location in a predominantly Jewish area. The elderly guys complained about how "the rabbi doesn't even show up for Shacharis! What kind of a rabbi is that?"

A Conservative rabbi, apparently. With a 6-figure salary.

It's also common within the Conservative movement to pick a scene or person from Tanach, ignore wholesale the millennia of Sagely scholarship (mostly because they lack the skills to study it or understand it), then distort it so that the Conservative Jew ends up more religiously observant than, say, Avraham Avinu. (And yes, this is a real example. They believe that Avraham Avinu did not keep kosher, but the Conservative Jew does, so look who's the frummer Yid!) And that's how they justify their lack of observance.

It's incredibly egocentric.

More evidence of the great Conservative ego is their attitude toward women and women's mitzvot.

Their great hero, Solomon Schechter, initially dismissed the eloquently written bilingual (maybe even trilingual?) journal of Gluckel of Hameln simply because it focused on women's daily tasks (in addition to her Torah knowledge, business acumen, high intergrity, and much more).

Also, it's telling how they dump women's mitzvot to the side while promoting men's mitzvot. Women are encouraged to don tallis and tefillin, yet men aren't encouraged to light Shabbat candles, even though they are halachically obligated to if a female isn't lighting for them. In realtime, you see girls in their youth groups wearing tallis, tefillin, and kippahs, but almost none of the boys light Shabbat candles.

And I already mentioned their attitude toward taharat mishpacha...

Apparently, progressive "enlightened" men can't let inconvenient laws get in the way of their taavos.

I remember a Conservative rabbi who got booted out for having an affair with his secretary. This devastated me as a child because I'd liked her so much and couldn't believe such a warm-hearted nice lady could've done such a terrible thing. I remember impassionedly pleading something to parents like, "Are you sure it was with her and not with someone else? Are SURE it was her?"

Furthermore, go to some Conservative synagogues, and you'll see young woman reading from the Torah surrounded by a group of oh-so "helpful" and attentive middle-aged men who were probably too pathetic and Woody Allen-looking to get anywhere near attractive girls in their younger years. Who knew a girl needed so many gabbais to help her out?

Girls also help lead parts of the service.

But where are the boys? Or the middle-aged women?

Teenage and college-age girls are more fun to watch on the pulpit, I guess. (Although these helpful old guys will insist that girls are simply more interested and "more mature." How convenient.)

By the way, I heard this word all the time among the male congregants to describe teenage girls: mature.

Many Conservative rabbis and their male adherents enthuse over young female participation, and are oh-so encouraging of young females while lauding young female "maturity," all under the auspices of "progression."

It's just a load of weasel words, quite frankly.

They care about women's issues in the way that feminism cares about women's issues, which means that it's all about getting women to emulate negative male traits and valuing traditionally male contributions over traditionally female contributions (i.e. careers are in, but childbearing is out, etc.).

Note: The above may not be the case at every single Conservative synagogue across the entire 50 states. But what I wrote of aren't outliers either, despite what a Conservative adherent will otherwise insist.

While conversing with a Conservative rabbi who required some kind of adherence to the laws of taharat mishpacha for his female converts, he mentioned his experiences in archeology and told of an ancient archeological site indicative of Jewish presence in Eretz Yisrael.

"And there was NO evidence of a mikveh!" he proclaimed.

(See? This is yet again an example of how they try to make themselves out to be frummer than our ancestors. "We do mikveh and they didn't! We're more machmir than the Avos!")

"How do you know?" I said. "Maybe you guys missed it. Maybe you just dug around it without even realizing it was there. Anyway, a woman's mikveh was often located a bit away for reasons of modesty."

He frowned as he thought this over, then declared, "No, we excavated pretty thoroughly!"

Knowing the technical difficulties and limitations of excavation, I was highly skeptical regarding the proclaimed thoroughness of their excavation. But I went with it and said, "Was there a natural body of water nearby, like a river or something?"

"Yes," he said.

"Well, maybe they just used that," I said. "I mean, we're talking about a Middle Eastern climate, not a Russian climate." These women also spent most of their years nursing and pregnant, which meant they mostly only needed a mikveh once every year or two. "Maybe they didn't feel the need to carve out a whole mikveh when they had a river right there," I added.

He fell silent for several moments, then said, "Hm."

And this is the really sad thing: At that time, this Conservative rabbi was a highly educated guy with degrees from university and his "rabbinical" seminary while I was just this twentysomething housewife pregnant with my second child and working in a little store part-time while my husband learned in kollel. Yet in an argument centering on his area of expertise, the little newly frum kollel wife bested him within a couple of sentences. Logically speaking, that shouldn't have happened.

But embarrassingly, he still managed to get me in the end.

How? He simply twisted over to another topic and distorted it in a way so that I couldn't recognize what he was talking about (although I was definitely familiar with it), and left me stammering, much to my embarrassment and frustration.

At the time, I hadn't yet read up on the different kinds of tactics utilized to manipulate arguments (strawman arguments, sloganeering, distractions, ad hominem attacks, cherry-picking, etc.), so I wasn't aware of what he was doing and got caught in it.

(If you'd like, you can see the continuation of that conversation in a previous post: How to Distort the Torah: A Guide for Apikorsim and Their Victims.)

The above doesn't even begin to cover the devastation of intermarriage that these Conservative "rabbis" have wrought on the Jewish people.

With all their pseudo-"conversions" of people who are either pressured into it by well-meaning yet  presumptuous Conservative Jewish in-laws or non-Jews who like aspects of Judaism without feeling compelled to commit wholeheartedly or for people who enjoy having the now-coveted status of being a minority, the Conservative "rabbinate" decimated the Jewish people in America.

(And yes, I realize there are also Orthodox rabbis who do not take conversion as seriously as they should and thus produce converts who are ill-prepared and ignorant of important aspects Judaism, and whose status is also questionable.)

Anyway...this year, I received emails from members of my old Conservative community (and the accompanying Reform community) which enthused about the family get-togethers for the Pesach Seders. Some were 50% Jewish. Then one enthused, "We had 13 people at the Seder!"

But only one participant was actually Jewish.

So you had non-Jews cooking up and conducting a whole Pesach Seder and chanting about how God took them out of Egypt (when He didn't), and opening the door for Eliyahu Hanavi to come in and take a sip of wine.

Now on the positive side, these predominantly non-Jewish Seders are likely Hashem's way of getting the basic message across to the one sickly elderly Jew at the table. That Jew at least heard the Haggadah and ate some matzah, so maybe some soul-healing will spark from that.

Anyway, the Conservative leaders are hard to argue with. They cherry-pick their knowledge from a wide array of sources within authentic Judaism, science, political movements, and philosophy. Then they distort things to their perspective, something which they are previously taught to do in their seminaries and classes.

So it's all very ingrained.

Then you have the natural human ego and the leadership resistance to admitting that they're living a lie and giving up their nice home and their 6-figure salary.

It's all too human, of course. Which is exactly why you need traditional authentically Jewish mussar to have any chance of battling problematic character traits like greed, the need for honor, ego, and all that.

I'm not really different than them in that respect. The only real difference between me and them is that Hashem has allowed me to access these traditional authentic Jewish sources with an open mind, and these leaders and adherents do not do so.

Having said that, even an entrenched Conservative Movement leader can still do teshuvah.

That's all.

As I look this over, I'm aware of how biting it will sound to those who don't see the Conservative Movement in the same way.

But I'm looking over a long wide swathe of destruction.

Furthermore, so many Jews in this movement have warm Jewish hearts and shining souls. Yet where their beaming hearts and souls channeled?

Into a meaningless vacuum.

Many of the good adults I knew as a child are aged and dying now.

Or dead.

It pains me that, depending on their situation and life choices, they're dying without ever knowing the real beauty and depth of Torah. They only ever tasted a watered-down version.

They're dying with disillusions and confusion about why their children and congregations are so apathetic to that which was so important to their parents and grandparents.

Many are dying without ever having been in an authentic Jewish marriage.

Some die leaving self-hating assimilated progeny behind them.

Others die without leaving behind them even one Jewish child or grandchild.

And some of these non-Jewish children and grandchildren are even antisemitic (in a goody-goody politically correct way, of course).

Within their seventy, eighty, or ninety years, these precious Jews never do even a moment of teshuvah.

And whose fault is that?
___________

B'ezrat Hashem, Mashiach will come soon and sort us all out.

He'll gather all the Jewish neshamas out of whatever Galus (Exile) he finds them in and bring us all Home, hopefully enveloped in within Hashem's Great Loving Revealed Compassion.

In the words of Gidon the Judge at his own family's Pesach Seder around 3100 years ago:
"If our forefathers were tzaddikim, then perform a miracle for us in their merit. And if they were reshaim, then just as you performed for them, perform a miracle for us too."

Amen!
__________

Related posts:
Aliyah, Moving To Israel (Batya Medad's blog post)
Sinking in a Deluge of Quicksand while Dancing the Hora
How to Distort the Torah
True Greatness Hides Itself (more about Gidon the Judge)

The first tragic event to occur on the 17th of Tammuz was Moshe Rabbeinu breaking the first set of Tablets when he saw the Jewish Nation worshiping the Golden Calf.

(For a synopsis of the tragedy, please see What was the Golden Calf?)

How did the Jewish people go from the Divinely gifted exalted spiritual level necessary to receive the Torah in all its glory to worshiping an idol only 40 days later?

Moshe Rabbeinu promised to be up on the mountain with Hashem for 40 days, after which he would return. The people miscalculated, so when Moshe Rabbeinu didn't come back on the 16th of Tammuz, they got worried.

Or did they?

It was actually the Erev Rav who got worried...but not for the reasons you might think.

Well aware that Hashem objected to their presence and that it was Moshe Rabbeinu who allowed them to join along, the Erev Rav feared that without Moshe Rabbeinu, they'd be kicked out by Hashem (as if Hashem couldn't just kick them out if He chose to).

This is why the Erev Rav felt they needed to create a new leader, and to do it on the double.

So they sounded an alarm of sorts that affected the emuna of the Jews. In addition, the satan (a prosecuting angel) adjusted nature to provide a gloomy atmosphere. And rather than taking an emuna-driven "Let's wait and see" approach of yishuv hadaat, the true Jews of Yisrael got sucked into the Erev Rav fear.

Important Note:

• The Jews NEVER had anything to fear.
• They were beloved to Hashem.
• So even if something had happened to Moshe Rabbeinu, Hashem would still take care of Yisrael as a mother cares for her newborn baby.
• It was the Erev Rav who stood to lose out if Moshe Rabbeinu didn't return.
• The Jews would have been fine all along NO MATTER WHAT.

In other words, the Jews panicked for NO REASON WHATSOEVER.
And that was their first mistake.

Before he left, Moshe Rabbeinu told the Elders:
"Wait for us here until we return to you, and here Aharon and Chur are with you; whoever has a case, let him go to them."

So at this point, the Jews consulted with Chur, the son of Miriam Haneviah and Kalev ben Yafuneh.
Apparently, Chur told them in no uncertain terms that they didn't need any new leader and were forbidden from doing so.
So they killed him.

Okay, let's look at this for a minute.

Back then, the Erev Rav was obvious. They even looked different to the point that the Moavites could differentiate between Erev Rav and Yisrael.

Also, these Erev Rav people were NOT descended from the Avot and Imahot. And the Jews KNEW this. So why did they listen to the Erev Rav over their own leader (appointed by Moshe Rabbeinu himself), a leader who had proven himself time and again?
(See here for a brief and impressive bio of Chur.)

Picture the scene for a moment:

• You've got these clearly non-Jewish-looking people talking to you in either Egyptian-accented Hebrew or in Egyptian itself,
• people whom you know aren't really a part of you
• and whom you know aren't even wanted by Hashem

...and you decide to listen to them over the daat Torah approved by the greatest prophet who has ever and would ever live?

What on Earth were the Jews thinking?
(For more details please see the Kli Yakar on Parshat Ki Tisa and scroll down past the chelbana.)

Okay, remember:
This whole thing started out as a quest to create a leader.
Not an idol and not a cult, but simply a new leader.

And the Erev Rav probably didn't seem so bad.
They probably just seemed pro-active. Take charge!-types. Self-empowering.
Maybe they even seemed caring and inspirational.
Maybe they conducted promotional self-empowerment seminars.

Yet the Erev Rav, being steeped in Egyptian ways, wanted to be led by the stars, which is why a calf representing the Taurus constellation popped out. In fact, they assumed that Moshe Rabbeinu's power derived from some kind of star-image, and not from his own inner work and holiness.

Of course, the Jewish women resisted handing over the jewelry for the dastardly deed, but the men insisted and the calf was made.

Once the idol was created, the Jews should have immediately realized what they were getting into. After all, bovine-shaped idols were all the rage in that part of the world for millennia. It's sort of like if an "Ephraimite" was leading everyone to what he claimed was a Chanukah party and then suddenly whipped out a cross right before the festivities started.

I mean, you know the guy is not Torah-true, and now he's waving this big cross around at the party. And you know that's not just some random giant "T" because Christians have been using that symbol for the past 2000 years.

But what ensued next was a free-for-all that included debauchery, drugs and alcohol, adultery, and blasphemy.

At this point, viewing the scene from above, could you differentiate between the Erev Rav and the Bnei Yisrael?

Not really; they were all acting the same.

Perhaps if you looked carefully, you might notice that only certain people are orchestrating the whole event, and that those people look different than the participants. But overall, you would not be able to specify who was who according to behavior.

And upon seeing this, Moshe Rabbeinu smashed the Tablets.

And this is one of the reasons we mourn today.

So what do we learn from this?

• The Erev Rav think only about themselves, which also means they are obsessed with aligning themselves to whoever seems most powerful and they are obsessed with materialism.
• For their own self-interests, they will do whatever they can to get an authentic Yisrael WHO HAS NO REASON TO FEAR all riled up with anxiety and fear over an outcome that affects the Erev Rav ONLY.
• Erev Rav motivations are very different than Jewish motivations, although Erev Rav will speak to Jews in a "Jewish" language, if you get my drift.
• This panic discourages authentic Jews from listening to tested-and-true daat Torah.

There are other lessons, but that's all I can think of for now.

So what can we do about it?

• Are you Erev Rav?
• Are you a Yisrael caught up in an Erev Rav fiesta?
• Are you a Yisrael with Erev Rav sparks pricking about your holy Jewish soul?

You can't really know.

But what you CAN do is take a step back from it all, especially at the following times:

• Are you feeling panicked?
• Are you feeling desperate?
• Are you feeling like "Move, move, move!" or "Do, do, do!"?
• Are you willing to latch on to anyone or anything who seems to promise security and leadership?
• Are you listening to the silver-tongued voices of people who obviously aren't the real deal while dismissing authentic daat Torah? (And I mean REAL daat Torah; not every Orthodox rabbi is daat Torah!)
• Are you blindly assuming the other cares about the same things you do, when much of what they say or do actually points to a completely different motive?
• Do you want to contemplate issues and situations before acting, but you have people around you (or even a voice within yourself), pressuring you to just jump into the frenzy without another thought?
• When you want to discuss real issues of emunah and serving Hashem and genuine Torah observance, are you ever waved off, rejected, mocked, or even attacked? (You might even do this to yourself.)
• Are you tempted to follow people who couldn't possibly have the answers because they don't possess your Jewish tradition and yichus?
• Do you see people insisting that you follow them when you clearly see they're holding up a well-known and forbidden idol...but you're caught up in your fear and peer pressure, and anyway, they've got such convincing reasons for what they're doing?

Erev Rav Alert! The above is the effect of Erev Rav on a Yisrael.

And it's a sign to take a step back from it all and inquire of Hashem.

Our times are different and the Erev Rav no longer look they way they once did.

Remember, at the time they were actually worshiping the Golden Calf, the Erev Rav and Bnei Yisrael were behaving exactly the same.

A Reform rabbi holding up a cross at a Chanukah party can still possess a soul of Yisrael.

They only real way to deal with it is via yishuv hadaat - taking a step back and asking:

• "What's really going on here?"
• "Is this the Torah way? If so, where is it written?"
• "Where is Hashem in all this?"
• "What does He think?"
• "What does He want?"
• "Okay, Hashem...tell me what to do!"

Why couldn't Bnei Yisrael have told the Erev Rav, "Wait a minute, Hashem's in charge. Let's give it another day and see"?

Why couldn't they have listened to Chur?

And even at the point that the calf appeared, could they not have said, "Whoa! Wait just one second here! Hmm... I'm going to step out and do some hitbodedut before I do anything else."

They could have taken a step away from everyone and engaged in conversation with Hashem at any point during the ride. Even after they'd killed Chur, they still could've stopped the madness. They still could have turned to Hashem.

And THAT would've saved them.

So don't give up.

Even if you find yourself swept up in a crowd led by Erev Rav after your real leader has been murdered and your other true leader has gone undercover...and even when you're faced with a clear symbol of everything that's wrong with the world and you're all hyped up to worship it with the basest human behaviors...

STEP BACK. And talk to Hashem.

It's not too late. Even if the Erev Rav stuff seems to be a part of you, don't give up.

Just turn to Hashem and don't repeat the mistake of the first Seventeenth of Tammuz.

We mourn it in order to rectify it. And we can!

I was thinking a lot recently about how different people react to different events and circumstances.
 
Two people can have similar personalities and go through the same events and traumas, and one will take the high road while the other will take the low road.
 
It seems that there are differences at the soul level. Obviously, someone like the Arizal was born with a particularly lofty soul while others possess a not-as-lofty soul even though it is still a holy one.
 
Certainly, classic Jewish sources discuss the idea of how the right kavanot pull down holy souls for conception. A Jewish couple who come together in genuine love and respect will pull down a higher soul. There are stories of tzaddikim whose kavanot pulled down very special souls into their children.
 
At the same time, our Sages also discuss how certain states pull down blemished souls. A child conceived while the mother is niddah, with a non-Jewish partner or any other forbidden partner, while either parent is angry or fantasizing about someone else or drunk, or if the woman is coerced…any of these will pull down a blemished soul.
 
And what of cases in which we have several generations of Jews conceived in niddah? What kinds of souls are these? And it doesn’t just affect Jews from secular upbringings. FFBs can make mistakes in taharat hamishpacha, or conceive children in any of the forbidden states mentioned above.
 
In other words, there are no guarantees regardless of yichus.
 
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the soul is condemned to lowliness for life. A blemish can certainly be cleaned and purified.
Such a soul simply has more work to do to get it up to par. Tanach and midrashim contain stories of very great people who were conceived in less than ideal circumstances.

A lot of hard and sincere spiritual work can rectify a soul and bring it to its innate full potential.

(As far as I know, the blemish of the mamzer, a child born of an adulterous union between a married woman and her partner, is one that cannot be rectified within the mamzer's lifetime. The state of mamzerut remains and can be passed on through one's children unless certain measures are taken to prevent this.)

I also wonder about conversion, which pulls down a holy Jewish soul where there was once a non-Jewish soul. How does that work? We see that there are converts with mind-boggling dedication to Torah, far beyond that which most born Jews could withstand, such as written about in The Secret Saga of a Righteous Convert.

Yet there are others who are quite tepid in their observance, seemingly trying to hold on to as much of the non-Jewish stuff as they can, or to revert back to their non-Jewish ways when the going gets rough (though most deal somewhere between these two extremes).
 
Some female converts told me that upon going to the Israeli Rabbanut to sort things out before their upcoming marriage, they are shocked to learn of something possibly amiss in their conversion certificate or experience, and are directed to undergo another immersion in the mikveh just to make sure everything is 100% kosher. As odd as it is to go in for a conversion a week or two before your marriage and after you’ve been fully observant and in a very frum seminary for the past few years, such converts also express a feeling of reassurance.

“Because my child’s Judaism will be defined through me,” say the female converts, “it’s essential that my own status be unquestionable.”

And they also relate that they were able to immerse and say the blessing with even more kavanah now that they had learned and experienced even more about Torah Judaism.

So what’s up with that? Did they receive a whole new soul…again? Or was the Jewish soul they originally received upon the first conversion immersion strengthened or re-purified?

Really, I have no clue and I don’t even know where to start looking. But it is interesting!

To make things even more complex and fascinating, parts of more than one soul can bond together to make a new soul comprised of these different souls. (I think this can explain past-life memories that recall copious past lives or remember two different lives occurring within the same time period.)

Furthermore, there are Erev Rav souls and Erev Rav soul-sparks among us.
 
In the Tanya of Lubavitcher chassidus (Igeret Hakodesh, Chapter/Epistle 26), it explains that after Mashiach comes (but before Techiyat Hametim/Resurrection of the Dead), the Jewish souls will merit to taste from the Tree of Life (i.e. the penimiyut of Torah) and thus will automatically know the revealed mitzvot in the same way that Avraham Avinu intuited the revealed mitzvot long before the Torah was actually given on Har Sinai. And because in this state, they will no longer suffer forgetfulness, they’ll have no need to review as we do now. Instead, Jews will occupy themselves with the deeper hidden aspects of Torah.
 
However, the Erev Rav, who will not taste from the Tree of Life, will need to occupy themselves with Mishnah (all the laws deduced from the Torah) in order to weaken the power of the Sitra Achra (the Dark Side, so to speak). Apparently, even after Mashiach comes, the Erev Rav will still be caught up in their inclinations to sin and will need to hold on tight to Torah learning in order to strengthen themselves against the Yetzer Hara—just as regular Jews do now.
 
Rivka Levy’s book Unlocking the Secret of the Erev Rav: The Mixed Multitude in Jewish Kabbalah, goes into this more, but apparently the Erev Rav souls are Jewish, but they’re a few steps behind the souls of a Yisrael—a Jew. So if I understand the Tanya correctly, after Mashiach comes, the Erev Rav will ascend to the level where regular Jews are holding now, and regular Jews will be on the level of Avraham Avinu.
 
May such a time come soon!
 
(You can also find out more about what traditional Jewish sources like the Kli Yakar say about the Erev Rav by clicking on the “Erev Rav” option in the "Categories" section in the sidebar on the mid-to-upper right.)

Anyway, we clearly have a wide variety of souls bobbing around the world right now. Long ago, our Sages predicted that all the souls would need to come down into the world for their final chance at rectification before Mashiach comes and we’re seeing this now.
 
Sometimes, a person’s soul is so lofty, its light shines through all its owner’s grime. You sometimes see secular Jews who behave with greatness and light. You also see struggling or downtrodden frum Jews who seem to have something special to them, like a great soul that hasn’t yet realized its potential.
 
On the other hand, you may also see highly respected Orthodox Jews in important positions, but when you look them in the eye, it’s opaque as if there’s nothing there inside. Or they are surprisingly superficial or shallow (even if they are academically very intelligent or possess sharp administrative skills) or cynical or quarrelsome or snobby.
 
Because of this, we all need to have a lot of patience both with ourselves and others.
 
We don’t know what kind of soul we have and the long road of rectifications necessary for our soul.

We also don’t know what other people are dealing with and what they are meant to be doing.
 
Of course, we know that, for example, every Jew must keep Shabbat. But we don’t know exactly how that is supposed to be expressed for a particular soul.

For example, does this particular soul need:

• …to take out Shabbat at the regular time or the later Rabbeinu Tam time?
• …Shabbat meals that consist of lots of divrei Torah or lots of singing zemirot? Or both?
• Lots of salads or lots of desserts or lots of kugels?
• Heavy on the meat or heavy or the fish or heavy on Cornish hens?
• A dignified formal meal served on fine china or a lively meal eaten from disposable dinnerware?
• Gefilte fish or spicy fish?
• Going all-out for big melaveh malka bash or taking 10 minutes for a piece of chocolate and a hot freshly made cup of coffee?

 
Furthermore, even if we know where someone is supposed to arrive (at mitzvah observance), we don’t know HOW they’re supposed to get there. For example, I’ve known young women who started off their mitzvah observance with Shabbat and learning the laws of lashon hara while still wearing pants. Others started off with Shabbat and wearing long skirts, but only focused on lashon hara later.

This is why it is so important to forge a relationship with Hashem and really discuss your issues with Him in order to get yourself sorted out, and why it is also vitally important to pray for others to do teshuvah from love and to complete their rectifications in this lifetime.

Because there is so much that we just don’t know.

Praying for others works.

If they have souls of Yisrael, then davening for them is a great act of sisterly or brotherly love and helps them to come closer to their soul's potential, which also sweetens harsh judgements and helps bring Mashiach faster.

If they have Erev Rav souls, then davening still helps. The Komarna Rebbe has said that davening for the Erev Rav to do teshuvah actually nullifies their power because the one holy spark that was holding them up gets sucked out (elevated out of them?) and they are rendered totally powerless.
This is described here and more fully in this book You are What You Hate.
(Disclaimer: While I have read many articles on that site, I have not actually read this book, although I would really like to.)

Yet as Unlocking the Secret of the Erev Rav posits, even that's not so simple because the Erev Rav soul-sparks seem to be mixed up within the souls of Yisrael.

So it's best to just use the most powerful weapon we have: heartfelt prayer.

Over Shabbat Parshat Shoftim, I was getting all nervous and paranoid about something that had happened toward the end of that week. Strangely, going into Shabbat didn't do much to calm my fears. I could tell I was overreacting and that it was just my imagination going into overdrive, but I still had a very hard time letting go of the whole thing.
 
Finally, I forced myself to sit down and read the Haftarah.
 
(I can't manage to get to shul, so I just read it on my own.)
 
The very first verse (Yeshayah 51:12) knocked me between the eyes:

"I, I am He Who comforts you all. Who are you that you should be afraid of mortals who will die and of men who will be given over as grass?"

[Note: The Malbim defines this specific type of grass (chatzir) as a type of grass that withers and dries up before its time.]
 
In part, it was the sudden switch to feminine form (Mi aht?) that hit me so hard, as if Hashem was sending a personal message.
 

Rashi and Metzudat David both interpret it as saying:
"Who are you? A daughter of tzaddikim, full of merits! Why do you fear a mortal whose end is to die?"
 
Why, indeed?

Not only did I find the verse immediately soothing, but the messages implied were also encouraging and can set you straight if you've veered off.
 
First of all, Rashi and Metzudat David teach us that when someone has lost their emuna to a certain extent and is crying out or otherwise behaving in a fearful or desperate manner, the proper reaction is to build them up--remind them who they are.
 

• "Hey, you're not some bum off the street, remember--you're the child of tzaddikim! You're inherently special. You're genetically programmed to be more than whatever you feel you are right now. That's right; you can't really do anything to nullify that specialness, regardless of how low you've sunk. It's just an innate part of who you are, no matter what."

 

• "Also, aside from your lineage and genetics, you yourself are just brimming with zechuyot and all sorts of goodness!"

 
And once you've set things in their proper perspective, then you confront them with pure logic:

• "Those other guys--the Erev Rav, the Esavniks, the missionaries, the jihadi Yishmaelim, and all the rest? They've got nothing over you. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. You've got the whole package. In fact, not only are they going to just drop dead at some point, but they'll also just dry up before their time. Yeah, they look like lush strong grass, but guess what? They're not. It's all an illusion. Just keep up your courage and bide your time, and you'll see."

____________________________________________________________________

Interestingly, the Malbim's definition of chatzir implies a process. The chatzir doesn't just go from its peak lushness to dead grass within a moment. 
 
It dries up. (mityavesh--מתיבש—literally means "becomes dry")
 
It starts off all lush and green, but then it gradually yellows and looses its vitality—and it does so before its time.
 
(Sort of like Hillary Clinton is now.)
 
So courage, all you fabulous brothers and sisters—and don't let the baddies get you down.
 
You have the power—because you have Hashem.

Remember who you really are.

I just found out that Rivka Levy's newest book Unlocking the Secret of the Erev Rav is available for FREE download from Tuesday August 30 through Motzaei Shabbat September 3 (Pacific Time Zone, which lags 10 hours behind Israel time).
 
Even if you (like me) can't stand reading on the computer, this book is definitely worth your while. If you've followed Rivka's podcasts and posts on Emunaroma, you'll know that she has collected fascinating insights into who the Erev Rav are and what to do about it (including if you've discovered Erev Rav traits within yourself).
 
And no, this notice isn't done as a favor to her or anything like that. She has no idea this post is going up. I've just been following her Torah-based exploration of the subject for a while now, and she puts everything together in a way you can't find anywhere else.
 
Well-written, practical, fascinating, inspiring, and professionally designed for maximum readability, this book is one you don't want to miss!
 
Here's the link to the free ebook:
https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Secret-Erev-Rivka-Levy/dp/9657739128/ 
 
You can download a free app to read Kindle books on your mobile or desktop computer.
Click on the image under the image of the book on Amazon to download the app.
_____________
P.S. To convert a Kindle book to PDF, go to this site:
http://www.epubconverter.com/kindle-to-pdf-converter/ 
You press the "Add File" button and then go through your files until you get to the Kindle book you downloaded. This works for 90% of Amazon ebooks (i.e., the ones that don't have DRM).
To locate your downloaded ebook on your computer, look for a folder called My Kindle Content, and then look for a .azw file downloaded that day. (The ebooks aren't listed by title, but by a jumble of letters or numbers, so you can't know exactly which book you're converting. But go by the date you downloaded the book and you should be fine.)
 
Hatzlacha rabbah!

The Kli Yakar notes that the Moavites differentiated between the Erev Rav [the Am] and Bnei Yisrael. Apparently at that time, the Erev Rav had not assimilated enough into the Jewish people, so clear physical differences still existed between the two groups (i.e. the Erev Rav must have still looked obviously Egyptian, but likely dressed as Jews).
 
Why the Moavites Feared the Erev Rav
The Moavites feared the Erev Rav because of their sheer size. Quoting from the Mechilta, the Kli Yakar numbers the Erev Rav population at 1,200,000.
 
We see this kind of fear today in Western countries, who fear the massive influx of people from cultures very different than theirs who won't respect their values.
 
And to digress a bit, it seems both are justified.
While the Erev Rav damages the Jewish people more than any other, they certainly also do great harm to non-Jews--including to themselves, both practically and spiritually.  And just like the Moavites, the Western solution focuses on externals rather than internals, which ultimately will not help them.
 
Why the Moavites Feared Bnei Yisrael

The Moavite fear of Bnei Yisrael was Hashem's backing of Bnei Yisrael. The Hebrew word [v'yakatz] translated as "disgusted" comes from the word kotz [thorn]. The Kli Yakar notes how Bnei Yisrael is likened to the gefen, the grapevine in Tehillim 80:9:
You uprooted a vine from Egypt; You drove out nations and planted it.


The Moavites feared Bnei Yisrael's God-given ability to uproot themselves from Mitzrayim and come to their Homeland and drive out the nations there, casting them (including the Moavites) out by the root.
 
As the Kli Yakar describes:

Exactly.
 
And who is "the Owner of the field"? And why are they messing with Him, especially in Moav's case, when they saw what He did with the Jews and Mitzrayim?
 
This is the mistake that foreign nations make repeatedly throughout history.
 
They see that the Jews have a special koach. And there are many of them who realize that this koach comes from Hashem. So why do they fight it?

How the World is Repeating Moav's Mistake
The following point has been hammered so many times already, but it bears repeating:
 
How was a decimated nation fresh from years in death camps--or weakened by years of poverty, disease, and persecution in their own Land--able to drive out the British Empire?
How was such a people able to revive their ancient language (and even their original currency?!) and bring forth the agricultural potential of a Land that had lain desolate for millennia under every kind of occupation?
How was it that within fifty years, this nation was able to make itself the hub of the world in the spiritual, medical, technological, and environmental arenas?

Throughout history, many of our enemies have believed in God and even held at least partly with the Torah.
 
Both the Christian bible and the Koran acknowledge the Jewish ownership of Eretz Yisrael and especially of Yerushalayim. And even secular non-Jews often proclaim the Torah as "a great history book!"
 
Yet the Christians and Muslims continue to make their assault on Yerushalayim.

And those same "great history book!" chanters choose to ignore the basic text that clearly shows the Land as belonging to us. 
 
The secular world and the Muslims fight us literally.
 
The Christian world tries to undermine us at the spiritual level via missionizing and replacement theology--though both warped ideologies end up uprooting the very attribute which provides us with our blessing and our right to be in this Land in the first place.
 
What the Moavites should have done and what the other groups should do now is:
 
Step aside.
 
Or support us--according to the Torah definition of support.
 
That way, nobody gets hurt--not them and not us.
On the contrary, such yielding and support brings blessing all around.
 
But it's not going down that way.
 
Yet the Kli Yakar reassures with the idea that Torah sources have always reassured us:
 
This field has an Owner.

Eventually, the grapevine will be planted in its Land.
 
And the thorns will be uprooted and cast away.
 
May we all make choices that cast our lot with the grapevine and not with the thorns.

Is this just another oogey-boogey article on the evils of modern society with no real solutions and no actual result other than to scare or depress people? (Nope!)
 
Awareness helps protect you from falling under mind control and can help you get out of it (by connecting directly to Hashem in your own Divinely imbued unique way).
 

• We've all see frum people who connect to a frum lifestyle as a cult and not as the beautiful spiritual system that it is—a system which enables you to fulfill the mission Hashem put you here for in the first place.

       (Maybe you've even done it yourself—I know I did at one point.)

•  The unwavering adherence to obviously irrational, unproven, inconsistent, or just plain wrong beliefs within general Western society can only be the result of mind control.

 

• The attraction to avodah zara systems like yoga by otherwise sincere and intelligent frum people or Buddhism by secular Jews indicates the influence of mind control (i.e., people leaving one mind-control system for another).

 

• Even positive behaviors, like healthy eating, are often done in a mind-control way.

 

• For comparison, the Kli Yakar discusses here about how to give the benefit of the doubt in an authentically Torah way and not the sometimes harmful manner encouraged by frum American idealists.

 

• Hava haAharona gives several examples here of individuals searching for an identity in a way that clearly shows people chafing under mind control, but who merely choose another cult to join instead of liberating their minds completely.

When you realize that someone is under mind control, it is easier to relate to them with the necessary combination of compassion, self-protection, and objectivity.
 
It is also a hopeful outlook because you can see how the real person underneath is good and full of wonderful potential, and able to express their true self if they could just free themselves from "the cult."

This is an alternative to seeing someone as mentally ill or Erev Rav or personality disordered or dysfunctional or addicted or bad, etc.

But now for the main question:
Why do so many people—even frum people—behave as if under mind control? 

|You can’t resist (or heal from) what you don’t see.

• Even among frum communities, you see people getting sucked in by certain aspects of mind control from their surrounding Galut society. Because they are immersed in that society and presented a form of Yiddishkeit based on that society, it's hard to see what's "behind the curtain."

 

• The other issue is that people who grew up in secular Western society are used to mind control; it feels “right.”

Studies show that people who leave a situation of mind control (whether it be a cult or an abusive relationship or a dysfunctional family) are vulnerable toward falling into another situation of mind control (sources at end of post).

For example:

• A person leaving a cult is more likely to end up in an abusive relationship or workplace.

 

• A person from a dysfunctional family or after a recent break-up from an abusive relationship is more susceptible to the advances of a cult.

 

• Due to having spent an entire life under mind control within Western society (and perhaps within a religious cult), baalei teshuvah, converts, and bnai Noach are at risk for choosing an emotionally unhealthy rav or rebbetzin.

      
Most people need to learn to relate to God—and if you're Jewish, also to Judaism—in an authentically Jewish way and not in a way based on Western mind control.

Just as one example:
When Tova Mordechai (To Play with Fire: One Woman's Remarkable Odyssey) describes her move from Raymond Webster's Christian cult to Torah Judaism, this wonderful Jewish woman unconsciously took the cult-instilled habits with her: denying her own needs, pleasing others at all costs, and operating at full-speed all the time.
 
As she herself says:

|It’s much easier to judge others favorably and intelligently when you realize you are basically dealing with a victim of some form mind control.
For a long time, I researched personality disorders, mental illness, spiritual disorders (Erev Rav, etc.) etc. in search of the following things:

• an understanding of what was going around me
• behaviors or hashkafot I myself had gotten sucked into, even though they went against what I knew to be right.
• something in modern English terms that describes what Chazal has already noted.

Personality disorders or mental illness or bad middot or Erev Rav, for example, did not fully explain what I was seeing. For example:

• good, intelligent people making consistently bad decisions
• decent people with sincere intentions deteriorating into dysfunctional states.
• people who were sincerely struggling and desperately seemed to want help, who also who demonstrated "windows of sanity” and compassion and self-awareness, and couldn't be written off as personality disordered, bipolar, schizophrenic, Erev Rav, addicted, etc. 
• my own experience of feeling manipulated or treated as hopeless or worthless by "rabbis" or "rebbetzins"—and seeing others go through the same thing 

The above really don’t line up with personality disorders or mental illness or Erev Rav, even though such people may otherwise fit most of the checklist temporarily while they remain in a state of mind control.
 
Also, personality disorders are mostly impossible to cure. They are people to whom you really can't give the benefit of the doubt as their intentions are always, well, narcissistic (particularly malignant narcissists & covert aggressives who consciously mean to hurt you).
 
Labels like "personality disorder" or "mentally ill" or "Erev rav" or "nebbuch" ("Just feel sorry for them!") or "addict" also didn’t fit as I saw some seemingly personality disordered people come out of it and even develop into special spiritual people—without therapy, I might add.
 
Furthermore, there was definitely a logic to people's dysfunctional reactions—which again, is much more characteristic of how people respond while oppressed in a cult.
 
|You can deal with people (including doing teshuvah on yourself) more effectively when you relate to them as a victim of some form mind control. 

• Following mainstream halacha and classic mussar not only prevents mind control, but actually rescues people from a state of mind control. But only by really following it, and not just doing only whatever your community or group gives lip service to or emphasizes.

 

• Much of the halachic and mussar literature regarding practical action and one's attitude toward people behaving dysfunctionally (ie. committing transgressions) is excellent guidance on how to deal with someone in a cult or under mind control. 

 

• The real person in all their God-given glory is still there underneath the mind control and CAN be accessed, but it takes patience and prayer.

 
|Yes, there ARE Erev Rav, Narcissists, Sociopaths, Mental Illnesses, Addicts, etc. However...
...however, when I really looked into things, I was seeing very little of what could be defined that way; such behavior seemed mostly characteristic of mind control.

Even people who behave in a consistently dysfunctional manner often do so in a way that is similar one under mind control, and not as a classic Narcissist, sociopath, manic-depressive, Erev Rav, addict, etc.

There is no doubt in my mind that Western society has become one big cult.
 
This post focuses on America because:

1. Being an American, I know the more about it than I do about, say, England or Australia.
2. American society and culture is so well-known.
3. Via the entertainment industry in all its forms (books, movies, TV, etc.), America has managed to spread its new cultural mores throughout the world more than any other culture.

And American-style mind control is also evident in all other Western cultures, including Israel (although Israel’s religious population gives some pushback).

Before this post goes into an examination of Western mind control, let’s skip to a glimpse of what it’s like to leave a cult.
________________

Psychotherapist Jim Moyers says:
“Ex-believers may feel doubly misunderstood and isolated. Family and friends who remain in the group, even when not overtly rejecting a former member, are likely to have limited tolerance for the views of someone who has repudiated beliefs that they continue to hold sacred.”
 
This very much describes the situation of many baalei teshuvah, converts, and bnai Noach. In fact, regular people who make only one change after becoming fully informed, such as switching from a pro-abortion position to a pro-life position, experience rejection and limited tolerance from Leftist/Liberal family and friends.

“Authoritarian groups undermine trust in one’s own judgment, and the former member may have a great deal of difficulty in knowing how to regard his/her experience of reality when it is no longer defined and regulated by the group’s teachings. Many feel a sense of despair in being unable to recapture the certainty that came with unquestioning faith in ‘sure and certain’ dogma.”
 
And so, the desperation of many baalei teshuvah to cling to a rav and/or rebbetzin for advice and non-halachic guidance.
(Note: People, especially the newly frum, need basic halachic guidance. But advice-based non-halachic guidance? That is a very tricky and complex minefield.)

“Having been well-trained in meeting demands that s/he conform to group expectations, the former believer may be very adept at unconsciously meeting the perceived expectations of others.”
 
This is where the danger lies.
 
While emuna-based observance of Torah is NOT like that, it is easy to run into people who relate to Judaism in a cult-like fashion and innocently encourage others to do the same.

Remember: Most cult members are recruited by fellow victims who sincerely believe that they are enlightened—and not brainwashed—and that their cult’s doctrine is The Right Way.
 
Unfortunately, well-meaning kiruv programs and chinuch classes can unintentionally adapt some mind control techniques (without actually fulfilling all cult criteria) in the misguided assumption that this is desired or permitted by halacha. It doesn’t make them an actual cult, but it can lead to effects similar to that of cults, especially on vulnerable people.
 
Yet anyone who makes a sincere and continuous effort to connect with Hashem via speaking to Hashem, making a self-accounting via honest self-introspection, and adherence to halacha will not fall prey to mind control tactics AND if already under mind control, such a person will be able to free him or herself from the mind control.

As you read through this post (organized according to the BITE model), you may notice that cultist mind control is also the same dynamic you’ve seen in abusive relationships, dysfunctional families, personality disorders, and toxic work environments.

Yes, it’s all basically the same.

For example, a cult forces sleep deprivation upon its adherents.

And toxic work environments and abusive spouses do the same.
 
The withdrawal and recovery are also basically the same process.
 
So what are facets of mind control used by cults and modern society? 

To at least some degree, cults control what people eat, watch, spend their money on, what they wear, think, and so forth.
 
|Food
It is very hard to keep genetically modified corn products, hormones, sugar, chemicals, fluoride, and food additives out of your diet. VERY hard. It’s almost impossible. This is despite clear evidence that some of the above is actually harmful and indicative evidence that the rest of it might be harmful to both your physical health and your mental health.
 
|TV and Movies
TV programming and movies are always based on secular liberal, Leftist values.

Always.

Even the occasional piece which seems to present a conservative ideal will still be surrounded by lots of secular Leftist propaganda.

For example, the rare anti-abortion theme will still have a pro-same-gender marriage theme and pro-premarital intimacy theme.

Or a pro-belief-in-God piece will be soaked with rampant violence or licentious behavior.
 
I remember a very popular TV show in which not wanting to drink chocolate milk from a straw covered with the saliva of a boy diagnosed with AIDS was presented as the callous act of an ignorant fraidy cat.

Yet what is wrong with wanting to take extra precautions against a disease that is incurable and 100% fatal? No way! the episode implied. That’s mean!
 
|Books, Newspapers, and Magazines
The above is also true of books.
 
And while I have obviously not read every single book published in my lifetime (the Seventies until now), I can say that I have never read a mainstream best seller in any genre that was anti-same-gender marriage or pro-life or anti-premarital intimacy, etc.

Have you?

For example, if atheists are mentioned, it is always in a neutral or positive way. Atheists are never presented the way that say, religious Christians are often presented (i.e. hypocritical buffoons or abusive manipulators AND in a way that connects to their belief system).
_____________
In fact, same-gender relationships are the big thing right now.

Even sites and organizations dedicated to children’s literature discuss the importance of writing characters with same-gender parents, pushing books with titles like Lisa has Two Daddies.

Editors and literary agents actively seek such books and the Wix website-builder has a photo of two twentysomething women for their Wedding site template with the blurb: “Zoe and Amelia are getting married!”

Or on their template for wedding invitations, the header “Keith and Aaron” floats above the heads of two geeky-looking guys in tuxedos.

Twitter’s welcome slideshow features one male soccer player cuddling his head against another male soccer player and kissing his cheek. Because, of course, male sports pros tend to be so cuddly and nurturing. It must be all that testosterone!
 
There is an obvious agenda to make same-gender marriage and families headed by two mommies or two daddies as the norm, even though statistics just don’t support that.
(If under 3.5% of the population is attracted to its own gender, how many families or weddings do you think they produce? And how many children really grow up with two parents of the same gender?)
_________________
On the other hand, statistics show that unwed motherhood is extremely common.

(This is despite the fact that while divorce may not be avoidable, unwed motherhood is usually preventable.)

Really, based on statistical need alone, children’s book publishers should focus on flooding the market with books like, Oliver has One Mommy along with Sporadic Men who Temporarily Come to Live with Mommy or Isabella has One Mommy and Only God Knows Who Her Daddy Is.
 
All joking aside, figuring in the amount of divorced parents and unwed parents, many children are not living with both parents and may even have no father-figure at all. Children's literature only reflects this to a slight extent, and this topic not pursued by publishers nearly as much as same-gender subjects are.

In fact, there are so many other issues that are so much more common for children than 2 parents of the same gender: eating disorders, ADHD, taking meds, family members with mental illness or personality disorders, domestic violence, relationship violence, cyberbullying, bullying in general...
 
So why the huge focus on this 3.5% (or less)?
__________________
Or, on a completely different topic, how about newspaper headlines that describe a terror attack as “Israeli gunman shoots Palestinian driver”—remember that one?

I could go on and on, but you probably have your own examples.

|Fashion
Styles come and go and you know what’s in style just by looking at what the masses are wearing. And even people who rebel against the mainstream styles end up conforming to the set styles of the “rebel” group (like punk and goth and “grunge”).

Depending on your social group, not conforming enough to the latest style can label you as “tacky” “out of it” “a loser” “a throwback” and so on. And that’s not to mention the sarcastic comments and questions thrown your way, either to your face or via Twitter.
 
For around 40 years now, Western fashion has objectified people’s bodies while telling them they are liberating them. Such fashion pressures people—particularly women—to dress in ways which are time-consuming, physically uncomfortable—even painful, emotionally uncomfortable, and demeaning.
 
Some frum communities have been successful in sheltering themselves against the influence of modern styles, but most do imitate the styles to some degree, even if those styles are clearly forbidden by halacha.

|Speech
The accent common to California’s San Fernando Valley in the Eighties (which later became known as “the Valley Girl accent”) has become the de-facto style of speech for most Americans under the age of 50. It is one of the least intelligent-sounding ways of speaking, partly because the voice goes up at the end (including the end of a phrase, and not just the end of a sentence), which makes it sound like the speaker is in a constant state of uncertainty.
 
For example:
“Well, my personal feel-ing? is that a fetus at 8 weeks is just a clump of tis-sue? And you pointing out that, like, it has a heartbeat? And elbows? And a nose that can be seen in an ultrasound? just makes me feel bad? And I just think that you are….like…sooo—well, I don’t know, but that you hold such a crazy opinion? is very disturbing for me personally.”

Its higher pitch also gives it a more feminine inflection, making men sound particularly silly when they speak this way.

|Rewards & Punishments Used to Modify Behavior
Social media has been a powerful tool for this.

I think we all know by now that the label “racist” can end someone’s career, even if they aren’t racist and never said anything racist.

Just disagreeing with any of Obama’s policies is considered racist.
 
Speaking from personal experience, you cannot express (with even the greatest amount of grace and understanding) any opinion that diverges in any way with the standard liberal Western opinion—unless you are willing to suffer scorn, mockery, hostility, and hatred, either passive-aggressively or outright.
 
You must remain silent in the face of all their irrational and immoral comments—or suffer the consequences.
 
And that is just in interpersonal relationships on the individual level, let alone the widespread harassment prominent figures undergo if they dare cross the PC Line.

On the other hand, if you parrot their garbage, you are considered “intelligent” and “open-minded” and “educated.”
_____________________

Until the advent of the Internet, there was no way for the average person to get enough information to cultivate an informed opinion about any given issue.
 
Yet even now, the mainstream media maintains a chokehold on what they want you to know and what they don’t want you to know.
 

• With the Obama candidacy, it was blatantly obvious that every news network and every mainstream newspaper desperately wanted Obama in the White House.

 

• As blatant as their adoration of Obama was, the media's support of Hillary Clinton was even more appalling. She actually has a well-documented, extremely public, and ugly record that shows her to be a sociopath at worst and a malignant narcissist at best. Yet mainstream media consistently portrays her in the best possible light.

 

• Rationally speaking, the fact that either side of the political aisle uncritically supports Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, despite the obvious hypocrisy and lying they all have consistently engaged in, shows how low (and braindead) America has sunk.

 

• Generally, interviews and talk shows cherry-pick their guests, then manipulate their discussions and edit their tapes to show Left-leaning views in the best light and Right-leaning views in the worst light.

 

• The mainstream coverage of Israel is appalling as endless examples show.

|Lies
Cults outright lie.
 
One of the most famous lies in recent history is the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie and the rose-tinted characterization of violent thug Mike Brown, who was thankfully shot to death by a skilled police officer before Mikey could victimize anymore innocent people.
 
The Left directly lies and misrepresent anything about Israel and often do the same regarding frum Jews.
 
Here are more lies:

• “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."
• "If you like your health plan, you’ll be able to keep your health plan.”
• “Obama has been the best American president for Israel.”
• "Land for peace!"

|No Forgiveness or Tikkun

• People’s pasts (or past tweets and emails) are dug up and scrutinized.

 

• You aren’t allowed to change.

 

• The ugly side of yourself that peeped out during a traumatic incident or while caught up in the immaturity of childhood or adolescence is considered the real you, never to be forgotten.

 

• As a white person, you must always be compensating black people for the slavery that ended 151 years ago. Even if no one in your family was ever a slave owner (because maybe your family only arrived after the Civil War). Even if the black person never had ancestors who were slaves or if they did, they were slaves to other black people or owned slaves themselves (as several black Southerners did back then and in Africa today, still do). 

 
You can never be sorry enough and can never stop atoning for your “sin,” no matter how much you’ve actually changed and what you’ve done to rectify things.
_______________

The group’s doctrine is truth.

They advocate their own “sacred science.” One of the most obvious and murderous examples of this was eugenics during the Nazi Era.
 
But pseudo-science flourishes in American culture, too.
 
|Sacred Science
The cult-group’s beliefs are the ultimate unquestionable truth, despite clear scientific evidence to the contrary:
 

• Throughout its first trimester, an unborn baby is “just a clump of tissue,” despite widely available photographs and scientific evidence to the contrary.

 

• Global warming is happening right now, is manmade, is a threat, is stoppable, and is reversible.

 

• Same-gender attraction is genetically predetermined, and never influenced by one’s environment, and it's also completely irreversible.

 

• Mental states like depression, bi-polar disorder, personality disorders, paranoia, and ADD/HD are "just" issues of body chemistry and/or genetic predisposition in which environment, nutrition, upbringing, and traumatic experiences have very little or no influence.

 

• All white males possess something called “privilege,” which they must constantly “check” without fail.

 

• Hamas is just a group of freedom-fighting idealists.

 

• Muslims worldwide either tolerate, support, or actively engage in things like suicide bombings, child “marriage,” genocide, “honor” killings, FGM, domestic violence, the conquering of better nations, hand-amputations for thieves, slavery, Jew-hatred, oppressive fascist regimes, and the like only because they have not received enough compassion, understanding, and education.

 

•  If you give the above Muslims compassion, understanding, and education, they will immediately realize the wrong of their ways and become just like you—whoever “you” are.

 

• Hillary Clinton is “pro-woman” and cares about anyone other than herself.

 

• Donald Trump is pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, and a religious man.

 

• Socialism is a great equalizer and the answer to society’s ills.

 

• Children don’t need fathers.

 

• A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

 

• Women are only good for one thing.

 
|Buzzwords
This is a little bit trickier to define because every society, profession, and culture naturally has its own jargon. But there is a difference between using jargon for convenience (like saying “ICU” instead of “intensive care unit” or “DA” instead of “district attorney”) or because it expresses your thoughts more clearly and accurately than any other term possibly could (like saying “davka” or “stam” or “geshmak” or "gevaldig").

On the other hand, buzzwords whitewash something bad or demonize something good or neutral.

In short, buzzwords are often created with ulterior motives in mind. 

Here are some examples of buzz words:

• Baby-daddy (makes impregnating without marrying sound cute)
• Carbon footprint
• The n-word
• Transgendered male
• Undocumented immigrants
• Micro-aggressions
• Safe spaces
• Diversity
• The war on women
• Islamophobe

 
Just as an example of how buzzwords work:
“Diversity” technically means “diverse.”

But colloquially, it refers to culture or race (and sometimes to gender or orientation), and not political stance or intellectual opinion or anything else. And it doesn’t mean “diverse” at all since any Liberal who demands diversity only intends to expand the non-white population of a particular campus, company, or city.

For example, no one is anxious about the dearth of straight white males majoring in Women’s Studies.

No one is concerned that not enough Canadians or Swedes or Thais are immigrating to America.

|Black-and-White Thinking and One Sacred Version of Reality
Similar to sacred science, here are examples of “sacred reality” and black-and-white thinking:

• Only white people can be racists.

 

• Anyone who dislikes Obama’s policies, values, or taste in ties is a racist.

 

• Claiming that a statistic deemed racist is, in fact, not racist is actually a sign of racism.

 

• Any man who finds it difficult to take seriously or to concentrate around a professional woman dressed like a particularly risqué cocktail waitress when all her male colleagues are dressed in 2-piece suits and neck-strangling ties with shirts buttoned up to their chin (even if their neck is too short to carry it off elegantly, making them look like Mr. Potatohead) is a weak-minded pervert and a misogynist who needs to “just get over it” and “get with the times.”

 

• Any woman who feels the same as the man in the above example is just being “catty” because she is just “so jealous.”

 

• Not believing in evolution is exactly the same as not believing in math. 

|Encouraging only “Proper” Ideas and Positive Thoughts

• Girls are permitted (or even obligated) to profess a desire to be a member of a certified and paid profession like: nannies, neonatal nurses or doctors, preschool teachers, chefs, hotel housekeeping supervisors, or to earn a degree in Early Childhood Education when they grow up. Yet they may NEVER NEVER EVER declare being a wife and mother as their main career goal. NEVER. That is bad. Such a girl is considered to suffer from a warped and poor self-image, and she probably needs therapy. Only official careers are acceptable goals.

 

• From sixth grade and onward, it is okay to engage in physical intimacy of any kind with anyone of any age (even if there is a significant age difference that may indicate exploitation, like a 14-year-old girl with a 22-year-old guy) and with an unlimited number of partners—as long as birth control is used. If either partner is particularly free with themselves or they only just met, then the birth control should be of the kind that lessens the spread of unsavory diseases.

        This is called “being responsible.”

• However, if anyone under the age of 25 indicates a desire to do something that actually signifies and facilitates genuinely responsible and mature behavior, such as the desire to enter into a monogamous lifelong relationship with only one person (i.e. “marriage”), then that desire is considered irresponsible, rash, and a cause for panic. People who actually want to get married before the age of 25 likely have “issues” and need to examine why they are “in such a rush” to do something that has “permanent consequences” and is “so limiting.”

 

• People who seem unhappy or emotionally sensitive (by whose definition?) likely suffer from a chemical imbalance that needs to be medicated.

 

• Energetic children—particularly male children who display normal healthy male qualities and tendencies—likely suffer from a chemical imbalance that needs to be medicated.

 

• On the other hand, people who seem too happy are kind of weird, too, and need to “calm down.” Medication is also good for that.

 

• Positive thinking can enable you to “manifest” whatever you want.

 
|Thought-Stopping Techniques
Such techniques are another way to allow only the “right” kind of thoughts. These techniques include:

• Denial (“The Marmara flotilla held only peace-loving pacifists; why did the Israelis send armed commandos?”)

 

• Rationalization (“She was asking for it.”)

 

• Justification (“It’s okay because he had a bad childhood” or "I had a bad day")

 

• Wishful thinking (“If we relentlessly police people for ‘micro-aggressions,’ we’ll be able to stamp out racism completely!”)

 

• Chanting (“Hope and change!” “Hands up, don’t shoot!” “Just think positive!” “We are the 99%!” “Europe is the cancer, Islam is the answer!” “Just say no!”)

 

• Meditation, singing or humming (I had a friend who did consistently this whenever she felt someone was being too "intense" or "negative"—it was really annoying and disorienting), praying (I disagree with this, obviously. I guess it depends how and to Whom), etc.

 
Other thought-stopping techniques forbid rational analysis, critical thinking, or constructive criticism, and forbid questions critical of their leader, policy, or doctrine (“That’s racist!” "That's insensitive!").
 

• Alternative belief systems are considered evil, illegitimate, or useless.

Think of how people who are pro-capitalism, pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, Republican, want excellent screening & high standards applied to potential immigrants,  insist on a God-based view of science and the Universe, and pro-abstinence until marriage are marginalized, denigrated, and mocked.
_____________________

There is some overlap with the other categories, but again, specific emotions or needs are deemed bad or wrong as cults seek to narrow the range of acceptable feelings.
 
For example:

• The idea that a woman needs a husband, or that fathers are actually just as important as mothers in a child’s emotional and spiritual development is considered denigrating toward women and downright insulting toward single mothers.

 

• Feeling remorse after an abortion is considered merely a normal albeit unnecessary part of the post-abortion phase. Society will insist that a post-abortion woman plagued with remorse or depression needs meds or therapy—NOT to help her to deal with and rectify what she did—but to simply overcome these feelings, which are actually normal reactions to doing an act that harms both yourself and others.

 

• Feeling good about publicly humiliating someone—as long as your comment was truly witty and your target “deserved it”—is perfectly fine.

 

• In many circles, wanting to stay home with your baby long-term and not wanting to leave the baby with a babysitter signifies unhealthy attachment.

 

• Feeling uncomfortable around vulgar language means you are repressed and uptight.

|It’s Your Fault, Never the Group or Leader’s Fault
 
Poor employment, rampant immorality, increased mental illness, increasing violence, poor health, bad habits, addictions, failing schools….?

• It has nothing to do with your surrounding culture.
• It’s just you. (Or the influence of the enemy: the right-wing conservatives.)
• After 8 years of Obama, America’s problems were still the fault of George Bush. That’s how bad Bush was; even a talented wunderkind like Obama still couldn’t fix things. Or stop them from getting worse. So if you voted for Bush...

|Instill Feelings of Guilt or Unworthiness
Cults want you to feel guilty about your identity, history, family, past, affiliations, and your behaviors. This keeps you dependent on them. Cult members and leaders toss out superficial platitudes (in particular, platitudes that may contain a grain of truth within their one-size-fits-all slop) in place of the kind of self-introspection that can lead to genuine self-discovery and self-transformation.

• All white males must “check” their “privilege.”
• You must constantly be on the lookout for racism within yourself.
• You are from a dysfunctional family and were raised by toxic parents.
• You are "manspreading." (Another buzzword!)
• It’s what you’re eating, it’s allergies, it’s chemicals—food is your enemy.
• If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
• You need to feel ashamed of being wealthy or successful; it's not fair to others who aren't as lucky.
• Your opinion is worth innately less than that of a college graduate or an individual with a higher degree or a degree from a more prestigious institution, regardless of your actual knowledge and experience. (Usually implied rather than stated outright.)
• It’s your attitude—you’ve got a bad attitude.

       Or the wrong attitude—whatever that means.

• You just don’t want it enough.
• You unconsciously attract losers and kooks.
• You just need to get over it/him/her/them/yourself.
• You really need meds.
• You're just being close-minded. Or intolerant.
• It's your genetic predisposition.

 
Note: Maybe you are from a dysfunctional family or allergic to certain foods or are close-minded. But is that the only reason why things don't seem right? And can Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump or Prozac or college or socialism really fix those issues?
 
(And just for knowing: Genes can be activated or deactivated, depending on one's behavior.)

|Instill Fear
A very effective way of keeping people trapped in a cult and to keep them from even wanting to leave is to instill fear.

Disapproval, shaming, mocking, and character assassination are all weapons of the Left to maintain control. This is done at a national level through the media, of course, but it is also done at a personal level.

Like some of you, I have been personally mocked or sneered at when "liberal, open-minded" friends or family members discovered appalling things about me like:

• I see that scientific research clearly indicates a Master Designer.
• I didn’t let my kids use the Internet.
• I support Efrat, the Israeli pro-life organization that is genuinely pro-woman and does so much to support families, extending to long after the baby is born.
• I have more than three children.

And in case you're wondering, I never went around on a soapbox proclaiming my views. It just came up nonchalantly in conversation at times when I forgot who I was talking to and that I am not “allowed” to express such views (or act in such a way).
_____________________
A Typical Example of Auto-Pilot Fear Instillation
Once, a successful secular Jewish female doctor asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated from high school.
 
I immediately felt very apprehensive because I knew my answer was not acceptable to people like her. But I felt even more uncomfortable about lying. So I tentatively said, “Um, well, I’m thinking about being a nurse, I guess.”
 
She recoiled as if I had said, “Um, well, I’m thinking about moving to a gingerbread house to become a cannibalistic witch, like the one in Hansel and Gretel.”
 
After she collected herself, she calmly said, “And why would you want to do that?”
 
“Um, well....I’d like to help people....ease suffering....well, actually, I don’t know for sure that I want to be a nurse. I just feel like it’s a caring profession and I’d like to work in a caring profession.”

Even to my own ears, my words—decent values in my own mind—sounded so nurturing, so feminine....which didn’t bother me at all, but I knew that it bothered other people. Like secular female Jewish doctors who grew up in the Fifties.
 
“So why don’t you be a doctor?” she asked with forced nonchalance.
 
Uh-oh. The dread and apprehension welled up within my teenage self once again. “Well,” I said, “the thing is...I’m not so good in math...”
 
Her jaw hardened and her shoulders stiffened. Steam started coming out of her nostrils. (Well, no, that didn’t happen. But it looked like it might.)
 
Yet I forced myself to continue because I really wanted her to understand that it wasn’t that I merely thought I couldn’t become a doctor due to being a brainwashed victim of wonky gender stereotypes, but that I genuinely couldn’t become a doctor.

“Um, I’m not so good at science, either....” I explained. “And I don’t really want to be in college for eight years.”
 
After a cold pause, she said, “I see.”

Can you imagine the same kind of conversation between two men?
 
Picture a successful male high school English teacher talking to a male teenager:

“What do you want to do when you graduate?”
 
“Well, I’d like to be a PE (physical education) teacher.”

“Oh, yeah? Huh. Why do you want to do that?”

“Well, I like to work with kids. And I’d like to foster good sportsmanship and other important values I feel you can teach kids through baseball.”

“So why don’t you become a high school English teacher?” (The implication being that important values can also be taught through analyzing English literature and class discussion. Plus, students hone important writing skills.)
 
Realizing that teaching baseball isn’t nearly as prestigious as teaching English literature, the teen boy answers, “Well, my verbal ability stinks and I’m not so good with language arts. And as a normal healthy boy misdiagnosed with ADHD, I really don’t want to spend my whole day cooped up in a classroom.”
 
“Yeah, I get that. Cool.” (Meaning, “I understand that teaching English is really not for everyone. It’s good that you’re planning for a career that suits your individual needs and plays your strengths.”)

Or maybe, if he’s a snarky fellow, the English teacher will make a snide comment about thick-headed jocks—but not because he feels the teen boy must break out of gender stereotypes, but because the English teacher was once a socially and athletically inept geek and enjoys the opportunity he now has to take potshots at the athletes he used to envy.
 
What's the difference?

With women, there is a gender-based agenda imposed on society.
 
Note: The female doctor above obviously intended to be helpful. She clearly thought that I was under some kind of mind-programming and genuinely wanted to help me out of it--just like cult members who want to "help" others by "enlightening" them and recruiting them to their cult's ideology. She wasn't thinking; she was making knee-jerk assumptions based on her own brainwashed notions. I experienced her response as disempowering and repressive, even though she clearly meant to empower and "liberate" me. But she couldn't respond appropriately due to living on the auto-pilot induced by mind control.
_______________
|Confession
This was really common in the Eighties. You had people all over the place proclaiming they were an alcoholic, a pot addict, bulimic, anorexic, had been abused, etc. And this openness was considered something to aspire to. You were supposed to be completely open about all your faults and anything traumatic that had happened to you.

Then people realized this wasn’t so beneficial as they could not rid themselves of that initial impression of them as a recovering alcoholic and no more than that.

Yet today there are still vestiges of that. You are supposed to be really open about if you have a mental illness (well, not any mental illness—just the socially acceptable ones, like depression or an eating disorder, etc.) or ADD/HD or a learning disability or an addiction.
 
A lot of social media has a confession aspect to it as people post so many details of their lives and moods for everyone to see.
 
There are many, many more examples of the above aspects of mind control as you've likely thought of yourself.

There aren’t any real benefits to mind control cults.

But temporary comforts and assurances do exist, just like they do in any abusive relationship.

For example:

• A cult can sporadically provide a warm, accepting atmosphere.
• A feeling of togetherness and caring also exists in cults.
• The methods they offer may actually work temporarily.
• It can be a relief to know exactly what you need to do to earn approval
• It can be comfortable or reassuring not have to think for yourself.
• Staying feels safer than leaving.

For example, the cult of Communism provided people with fewer choices, which resulted in less stress during a decision-making process. They never suffered from “information-overload” (although they suffered from other things instead).
 
Russian immigrants who came to America initially had to deal with a “choice-overload,” even in very routine situations such as grocery shopping.

Furthermore, people from Communist countries initially miss the freebies to which they were used—like health care and schooling—even if the freebies were inferior in quality or quantity to non-freebies in a democratic country or came at a much higher emotional price.
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Again, it’s important to realize the signs of mind control in order to break its power.

In the above example with the successful female doctor, she was responding to her own upbringing within in America's post-WWII mind control, in which women were supposed to wax their kitchen floor while wearing poofy skirts and pink heels. They were supposed to become nurses, teachers, or secretaries—but never doctors, lawyers, or CEOs.

(Although some women did, anyway, even before the feminist movement came along.)

Forced immersion (via the expanding entertainment media and educational system) in a post-WWII mind control culture made them susceptible to the later cult of feminism (among other forms of mind control), which actually has made things much worse for women (as I’ll explain in a future post), although most women are unable to see this due to the effects of auto-pilot-induced mind control.

In the frum world, many frum women either:

• intone the benefits feminism brought (despite the fact that these benefits started before the official feminist movement and would've happened anyway without the official feminist movement, albeit possibly at a slower--and likely healthier--pace); this response is short-sighted, but does make a lot of sense on the surface. With a certain amount of discomfort, I used to hold this view myself until I became more educated.

OR

• verbally disparage the feminist movement while simultaneously living up to a frum version of the feminist ideal; this hypocritical and bizarre response is obviously the result of poor self-awareness and "auto-pilot" mode.

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Unfortunately, some frum communities unknowingly behave in accordance with mind control. Well-meaning community leaders or school principals can also unintentionally encourage a mind-control dynamic simply because they don’t know better.
 
It just feels right.

Note: In my experience, chinuch courses for parents are particularly susceptible to this. So when you, as a parent, are choosing a chinuch consultant or class, please be extra alert.

That also applies to those chinuch hotlines you can call.

|Signs of Mind Control that Affect the Frum Community
Within the frum community, the best way to avoid living on auto-pilot is to look at the attitude toward halacha and Torah hashkafah, both as evidenced by the community leaders and the community members—then make sure that you are not doing the following:

• Are minhagim emphasized—even subtly—over mainstream halacha? Are Torah-true attitudes dismissed or ignored or even replaced?  (i.e. If the same attitude can be found in most Sagely writings regardless of culture or time period and despite limited exposure to other Sagely works, it is likely a Torah-true attitude.)

 

• Can their opinions and methods be backed up by Torah sources?

 

• If they do base their methods on a minority opinion, do they have solid mainstream opinions for allowing themselves to go according to the minority opinion?

 

• Are they taking texts out of context and twisting things around to support their views?

 

• Is what they do what Chazal actually intended? (i.e., When Chazal said that a kosher wife does the will of her husband, did they really mean that she must wear miniskirts and Vegas showgirl sheitels if that’s what her dear husband desires? Or that she most enslave herself to his whims if that's what he wants?) 

 

• Are halachically forbidden social mores, behaviors, clothing styles, etc., rationalized to make them seem "okay"?

 
It doesn’t mean you go on the warpath against such individuals or groups (unless they are overtly and severely harmful) because such people are rarely acting with evil intentions (as is true of most cult adherents). In fact, they usually mean well.

People often misunderstand a clear halachic directive due to their emotional blocks, and not out of a desire to manipulate or cause harm.

But even if they don't have good intentions, battling them directly usually awakens sympathy in others due to the Flying Monkey syndrome (again, see the Kli Yakar), which is also the result of mind control. 

And anyway, it is nearly impossible to wake them up until they start waking up themselves.
 
Davening is the best solution to helping others.
 
This is more of a clean-up-your-own-backyard-first issue.

You can't really know someone else's mission and their journey to get there.

Just as one example, there are Tribal tendencies and we do not know what Tribe we descend from. We know that Asher is occupied with the olive industry, Yissachar with Torah-learning, Levi with musical service to Hashem, Zevulun with sea-based mercantilism and supporting Yissachar, and so on.

Should, for example, Yissachar be imposing his Tribal tendency onto Asher?
Or vice-versa?

No, of course that's wrong.
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You are happily encouraged to do your own research.

Here are some sources to start off with:
http://www.carolgiambalvo.com/what-is-a-cult.html
This site is particularly valuable as she cites the differences between a healthy religious value system and a cult.
 
http://www.exitsupportnetwork.com/recovery/leave.htm
This describes the different reasons people a cult and the 10 stages of the withdrawal process. Based on my own experience and conversations with others, this process describes a lot of what baalei teshuvah, converts, and bnai Noach undergo when adapting a Torah-true outlook and lifestyle. This seems particularly true of gerim and bnai Noach who withdraw from Christianity.

Unfortunately, this list refers to Christian-based cults and considers Christianity as the ideal non-cult state. (Ha!) But I couldn’t find an unbiased list of stages. So as you read through the stages, you can just mentally replace “scripture” with “CNN” or “college class” or “Liberal.” And you can replace “church” with “political party.” And replace any reference to Christianity with “God” or “monotheism” or “Torah,” and you have something that describes the process of leaving Esav or Yishmael and embracing Torah Judaism.  
 
https://freedomofmind.com/Info/BITE/bitemodel.php
This post relied heavily on the structure of the BITE model, but didn’t include everything. So this is the BITE model in its entirety.
 
http://www.cultwatch.com/howcultswork.html
https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/secul/landmark/forum.html
These are helpful because they also focus on secular cults (like a self-help cult), while most cult awareness articles focus on religious cults.
 
My disclaimer on the above sources is that anything they say that conflicts with halacha, I obviously do not support.  

This Week's Topics:

• Torah as Your Dictionary
• How to Shorten the Galut (Hint: It is has to do with the Erev Rav.)
  

• Why Did Moshe Rabbeinu Address Hashem as a Female? 

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First of all, here is a little bit of Torah vocabulary from the Kli Yakar in 10:29:
What is the difference between the words halicha/הליכה and nesiah/נסיעה ?

הליכה 
You journey forth in body only, but your mind is left behind.
As the Kli Yakar explains: "The term halicha falls upon the movement of the legs alone that transfer a person from place to place, but it's possible that even as he goes to another place, nonetheless, his mind is still connected to the place he went from."

נסיעה 
You transfer both your mind and your body from one place to another.
The Kli Yakar goes on to say: "But [regarding] the term nesiah, the transfer includes one's body and one's thought in every way."
 
So this is good to keep in mind when reading the Torah and understanding what is meant when each term is being used.
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Next, the Kli Yakar comments on how we sometimes turn our back on Hashem, giving Him the back of our stiff neck as we turn our face toward the adulation and approval we receive from "the Nation/ha'Am" - which is the code word for Erev Rav. Referring to the nun in this verse, he explains:

Here, we have the famous verse in which Moshe Rabbeinu addresses Hashem in feminine form - meaning as if Hashem is female.
As is well-known, Rashi says this is because Moshe Rabbeinu's strength weakened when he heard what Hashem intended to do to His people, just like women are physically weaker than men.
But the Kli Yakar disagrees.
After all, he notes, it is Hashem being referred to as feminine, not Moshe Rabbeinu.

Basically, the Kli Yakar explains that Moshe Rabbeinu addresses Hashem as a Mother who possesses the innate capability to supply her children with unending nourishment, as is the general idea of nursing:
The supply goes according to the demands of the baby.

May we always merit to have both our bodies and our minds in the right place.
May we always merit to please Hashem over anyone else.
And may we always merit that Hashem supplies us with unending nourishment.