Is the villainous system, the healthcare industry that should have developed a kinder more efficient way of finding rooms and placement for an obviously distressed patient?
Is the villainous system the psychologists and psychiatrists who take their deeply depressed patients’ money, yet fail, ultimately, to cure them?
Perhaps, the mental health professionals actually did provide the best standard of care.
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Is the villainous system the patient’s circle of friends and relatives who failed to stay with him, who failed to enroll him, earlier, in a more intensive therapeutic setting?
Perhaps, they tried.
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Is the villainous system the people who remain silent about the gaps in healthcare, or is it the people who tweet, write, and demonstrate about the gaps, but who spend less time actually filling in the gaps, prior to their getting plugged?
How do we decide?
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Is the villainous system our G-d, as it were, who allows mental illness to ravage those who carry the diagnosis, to impact the friends and relatives who are oftentimes held hostage by suffering person’s suicidality and/or homicidality?
Let me be clear: As Jews, their/our birthright was and remains Israel. I say this, even as I understand that our Arab neighbors do not buy into the religio-cultural assumptions that have carried us through the millennia.
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Nor do our Arab neighbors assign the same meaning to the extensive archaeological record that demonstrates an early and continued Jewish presence in Israel.
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One of the most telling communications, about the Meron tragedy, comes from a unique source.
Mansour Abbas, Islamist Israeli politician, expresses a deep sense of pain for those he terms the Korbanot - the sacrificial offerings.
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What does the tragic loss of life, in Meron, have to do with Korbanot? Has anyone willingly engaged in human sacrifice?
The answer might surprise you.
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News sources have reported on numerous warnings issued by public officials, in past years, about the safety hazards that were part and parcel of every Lag BaOmer celebration, in Meron.
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We allow ourselves to fall down the rabbit hole, when we try to justify or even condone the violence and vandalism committed by some, back in May.
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We lose the moral high ground, when we start to justify the burning and looting – even the taunting of and the attempts to physically provoke those policemen who were not bullying or intimidating protesters.
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In addition, when we try to label “our” violence and destruction “righteous“, it is nearly as hopeless an intellectual gambit as is the attempt to prove to members of a different belief system that our religion is better than theirs.
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Those who are not “Charedi-dox” are not necessarily less Frum.
@HannahLebovits If there were a primer for those entering the Charedi world, it would highlight the primacy of such Charedi values as Torah learning, insularity, and, above all, Mesorah from a Rebbi/Morah who themselves are considered Charedim.
@HannahLebovits These values inform the Charedi approach to:
Bitachon: more radical than Chazon Ish
Secular studies: none > some; autodidact > formally educated
Broader culture: ranges from suspicious to hostile
Criticism: can never be against its leaders, given that they define Da’as Torah