Michtav Mi’Eliyahu, Mesillas Yesharim and many other Torah seforim discuss different spiritual levels.

A ramification of this idea is that different people will be effected by different degrees to various activities such as going to a busy beach, watching TV, or walking through parts of Manhattan. Some people will avoid these activities and some are comfortable with them. In my neighborhood, certain respected Rabbi’s will not enter a mixed gender Kiddush. Many people feel that going to a secular college will be detrimental to their children’s spiritual growth.

What examples have you seen of people on different levels following different practices?

Have you experienced any changes in the things and places you avoid as you’ve grown spiritually?

Have you met or read writings of people who don’t seem to believe that different people are effected spiritually by different situations?

1) Do you have a Rav with whom you can discuss life issues?

2) Does your spouse have someone to talk to?

3) For men – do you have a learning seder of some length every day?

4) Are you still focused on growing in your Yiddishkeit?

5) Are you integrated into your community?

6) Do you participate in communal chesed (which increases your integration)?

7) Are you active, by making calls and networking, in your children’s shidduchim?

8) Are you putting effort into choosing High Schools for your children?

9) Are you thinking about post High School choices for your children?

10) Are you working on improving your Tefillah?

This post is from 11/18/2008. From the comments back then it looks like we’re facing many of the same problems. Which is not so surprising, since 5 years is not really a long time from a Jewish History point of view.

What are the Major Problems Facing the Jewish People?

Choose up to 3 and list your own.

A greater than 50% intermarriage rate in the US.

The threat of nuclear Iran.

A focus on materialism.

The tuition crisis.

Assimilated Jewry.

Inadequate education facilities.

Ignorance about Judaism.

Apathy about Judaism.

Potential curtailing of religious freedoms.

The anti-Israel sentiment on American campuses.

Islamic terrorism.

The division between observant and non observant Jews.

Anti-semitism.

A fractured Orthodoxy.

It seems there’s a bigger cultural war going on between Torah Observant Americans and the Israeli Long Term Learning community, than there is between Non-Observant Israelis and the Israeli Long Term Learners. On the blogs and the comments we’ve been reading, the attacks both ways have been relentless and often vicious.

As BTs we’re often subject to a more subtle type of attack, it’s often not in your face, but it’s there and painful nonetheless.

In a question of the week from 2008 we asked “Are BTs Treated as Second Class Citizens?“. Many of us from BT friendly neighborhoods like Kew Garden Hills, Passaic and out of town communities did not feel particularly mistreated.

But some of the comments revealed a different story. A story of how painful and dehumanizing attacks of any sort can be. Here’s 2 comments combined from that thread, which hopefully will cause us to pause a bit before entering full attack mode, and possibly prevent us from blogging or commenting with vile and contempt against those with whom we disagree.

Here’s the comment from the Second Class Citizen thread:

There are deep-seated attitudes that run against BT’s. First of all, you can never ever breathe a word that the FFB world isn’t perfect – that could be lashon hara – but they write articles about BT’s in Mishpacha all the time that run with the assumption that you can say *anything* you want about BT’s.

Once they ran an article about how BT’s struggle as mothers because they weren’t raised in large families themselves. They interviewed a few (3 or 4) BT’s who spoke about their struggles as mothers. I wrote a letter about how unfair this was – that they should have balanced the letter with storied from BT’s who are great mothers, and FFB’s who struggle. They never printed that letter.

About a year later, they printed an article about divorce. In the article, they mentioned that in Israel 15% of divorces involve at least one partner who is a BT. Then they went on to say, “You would think that divorce is a problem confined to the BT community, but…”

I wrote back a letter – which they did print this time. In my letter I mentioned both articles above. I mentioned how if 15% involve at least one BT, then some of those divorces also involved an FFB – and 85% involved no BT’s at all, so why would we think divorce is confined to the BT world?

Also, if at most 15% of divorces are BT – that doesn’t mean 15% of BT’s get divorced – just as it doesn’t mean 85% of FFB’s get divorced. It means among people who get divorced, these are the proportions. So since some BT’s are married to FFB’s, we could say it’s really 10-15%. Well, if 10-15% of the chareidi world in Israel is BT, then you would *expect* 10-15% of divorces to involve a BT. The statistic is meanless unless we know the proportions of BT’s in the population. So, for example, if 20% of chareidi Israelis are BT’s – then a BT is LESS likely to get divorced than an FFB.
Read more The Pain of Being Attacked ›

In common parlance, a BT is someone who became observant later in life. By that measurement, once a BT, always a BT. This usually means that we have to handle delicate situations with non-frum relatives, have lived a more secular life at some point, and we made a clear choice to become Torah Observant.

Another factor that makes you a BT, is that a some point you were deficient in Torah knowledge. This deficiency can be overcome, and it’s always a marvel to look at Rabbi Akiva and the 24 years he spent learning intensely, on his road to becoming perhaps the great Halachic Authority in the past 2,000 years. Of course we don’t need to learn exclusively for 24 years, but if we want to learn at high levels of Torah understanding, we have to make great efforts and put in a lot of time.

The third BT factor that comes to mind is integration into the community. To some, the ability to make people think you’re not a BT, as long as you don’t talk in learning, is a great worthwhile accomplishment. Others feel that as long as you’re a well functioning member of your community, it doesn’t matter if people know you’re a BT. Whereas others are proud to be a BT with all the accomplishment and positive growth orientation it brings. They’re not looking over their shoulders worrying about what others think.

So, are you still a BT?

Will you be comfortable if you’re known to be a BT your entire life?

Are you working on diminishing any aspects of your BT-ness?

Although dated February 21, 2012, we just recently stumbled upon this article, Modern Times which describes the publication of Herman Wouk’s wildly popular This Is My G-d in 1959.

Rabbi Yitzchak Kirzner zt”l recommended this book for a first exposure to Judaism and after giving it to a friend, he exclaimed that this was the first book you gave me that I could actually get through.

Have you ever read the book?

Have you ever recommended it?

What did you like or not like about it?