Sunday, February 04, 2007

religious or something

According to Walla news (sorry it's in Hebrew, I haven't seen the story in English yet), Rav Elyashiv has instructed the heads of girl schools and seminaries to ban entrance to any girl whose parents use a "non-kosher" cell phone. The idea of "kosher" cell phone is to remove the Internet/tv/(camera??) features of the cell phone so that it cannot be used for viewing inappropriate material.

They have not gotten to the level where the phone automatically disconnects if a boys voice is heard on a girl's phone, but don't think that is far behind. And no, it doesn't matter if it is the father calling his daughter. It is bitul torah to talk to your daughter in any case.

Why is it that every time I hear news from the Chareidi world, I thank God that I moved to a dati leumi community?

On the other side of the spectrum a non-religious yeshiva opened up in Tel Aviv. No it is not for people who want to become religious, it is for people who want to stay secular. It aims to give over Jewish culture without Jewish religion. Sounds Greek to me. They have not formulated a policy on cell phones yet, but I imagine that they will only allow people in who use their cell phones in inappropriate ways to counter to negative publicity of inappropriate cell phones.

On my way to work this morning I listened to a Rabbi Mordechai Alon shiur on parshas Yisro (I haven't fallen so far off the derech to say Yitro yet, but one more chareidi news story...) So far I've listened to 45 minutes of it and he has talked entirely about the haftorah of last weeks parsha. The connection is there as the girl who kills the bad general (sisro) was married to one of Yisro's children or grandchildren. It will be interesting to hear how he brings it all together. I guess when you give a parsha shiur for so many years it becomes hard to find some connection that you haven't already used.

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