A Tale of Two Conversations

I had two conversations last week with two people I know from my yeshivah days. Both have brains and both use them. One of them is more courageous in where he allows his brain to take him. Although I had considered both of them friends, since last weeks’s conversation I have demoted my relationship with one of them to a mere acquaintance.

Anyway here is a report of the conversations and I will let you decide with whom I had to alter my level of friendship.

One of them is training to be a Rov. As I said he is clever and uses his time well. He understands what he learns and has already begun taking on a rabbinic role. We were speaking about the tsunami. He said to me that he doesn’t begin to understand why some people ask how Hashem could allow this. It is obvious he says, almost all goyim deserve to be killed anyway. Any goy, he assured me, who doesn’t keep the seven Nohadic laws is punishable by death, and since few goyim keep the seven Nohadic laws they all deserve to die. So I asked him if he thought that the goyim of our neighbourhood deserve to die and he said yes. So I asked him if he would support the killing of all people that don’t keep the above mentioned laws and he said yes but he couldn’t see how it would be practical at present. So I asked him in what way was he different to Osamah-Bin-Laden, the Taleban and suicide bombers. He answered me that there was a massive difference; they were wrong – they only had to think logically and they would realise that they were wrong. So I asked him how he knew he was right. At that point he got upset. Of course he was right. Anybody who thought that he was wrong was a heretic. End of conversation number one.

In the second conversation with a second colleague, the tsunami came up again. My second friend made what I think was a very pertinent comment. He said that if people in the chareidi community would have televisions and would actually see bloated bodies on the beaches, would actually see the mass graves, would actually see the crying fathers, would actually see the wailing mothers, would actually see the orphaned children, would actually see the enormity of the collective suffering and pain, would actually the see the great destruction – having seen this they would no longer be able to continue claiming that Hashem allowed this to happen due to the peoples deviancy and idol worship. As it is so many of these fundamentalists don’t even listen to the radio. Many get their current affairs updated in the mikvah changing room. And that brings me to the end of conversation number two.