This week I concluded a set of ruminations on the various ways in which the quality of a country’s citizenry often proves more important in the long-run than great events or even traditional measures of power with a boilerplate cheer for making sure that we are maximizing the potential of the individuals comprising our own community.
How ridiculous. How many individuals can ever be said to reach their full potential? And certainly no society in history has ever come close to maximizing the innate potential of most of its members so why judge Torah society by such a standard.
In short that last paragraph as written was virtually meaningless as no reader could possibly have any idea of what I was talking about. At most the paragraph reads like a desperate attempt to give Mishpacha-relevancy to thoughts on another topic.
But to tell the truth I did have something in mind. Because I do have a sense that there are too many people in our community who are being denied the chance to ever succeed in anything by societal norms that may be very different from Torah values. One example is the flurry of “collectors” who pour through every minyan in every halfway solvent community in America. While some of them have been propelled by circumstances beyond their control for many collecting for children’s chasanos was the game plan from the beginning. As a mechutenster from London once pointed out “When did you ever see a national religious person begging? Surely they have some poor people too.” Being a nitzrach min habrios should not be any Torah Jew’s preferred life plan.
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