Saturday, January 22, 2005

Desecrating God's Name

From an anonymous post on The Beach of Yellow:

Sadly, it is true that a lot of mainstream Orthodox people (including our Rabbinical "Leadership") will go to great lengths to suppress illegal and immoral activity. Their rationale is that there will be great Chillul Hashem [desecration of God's name by making his chosen people look bad in front of the goyim] if the newspapers print stories about Jews doing the wrong things. They also like to claim that each situation is an isolated and rare incident.

Sadly, we are teaching our children to be corrupt and dishonest with this ignorance. The truth is that we cannot police ourselves. We have so many clowns commiting crimes including widespread money-laundering and fraud. We have slum lords who think that it is just fine to rip off (or steal) from a goy. We have sex abusers who think that it is ok to rape. In all of these cases the frum crowd closes ranks and tries to suppress police investigations. We have groups like Hatzolah who openly use their parking permits to block fire hydrants while they go shopping. We have idiots in the shomrim who have illegal red lights and sirens. We must move away from the dishonesty of thinking that we are above the law. We also cannot let these hypocrits steal our religion and attempt to claim that lashon hora (or "informing") somehow forbids us from turning in these criminals. We need a little honesty back in our religion and a whole lot less biased-selfserving thinking.