Rabbi Reuven Feinstein and Leib Tropper Trope

Often people who proclaim the departure from the Judaic creed display the internalized values and the logic that personifies the most blatant Judaic cultural imbalances, even when the renegades are compared to the openly observant. Witness XGHs riff on Rabbi Reuven Feinstein. There is a text and it must be dissected, regardless of the historical context, motivations or the character of the author, in other words the most pointless geekery and metal gymnastics. So how did Reuven Feinstein appear on the EJF web site? Do you think after Shabbos he booted up his laptop, read all the blogs, and then carefully wrote the responsa? One of the two things happened:

Someone called him on the phone and described to him in general, or likely misleading, terms the release and asked Rabbi Reuven Feinstein if it would be OK to use the endorsement (this is how Rabbi Elya Wachtfogel got ensnared).
Or someone wrote the release and brought it to Reuven Feinstein to approve, perhaps even together with a fat fee.

Now do you think for a moment that after Leib Tropper resigned from the EJF, “the board members” rushed to the bank to unauthorize Tropper from using the EJF funds? So while the blogosphere raged in indignation, Leib Tropper might have spent the precious time delivering money bags to people needed to protect his racket. Luke Ford have been doing a nice job on this tailor made for him story (sex, gerus, jews), he posts:

“Anne emails: You need to look into the role of Menachem Lubinsky in this affair. He is the PR frontman for EJF and Tropper, and he has always stepped in when Tropper has alienated people, which as an aggressive and intemperate pig he has tended to do fairly regularly. Lubinsky is the composer of last Monday’s EJF press release and he wrote all the so called statements by the various protagonists (Wachtfogel has since distanced himself from EJF and denied that he made any statement or accepted the role in EJF). Lubinsky has been working the phones all week trying to get rats to board the sinking ship that EJF has become. And of course the reason EJF can’t fall is because it is the key to obtaining Tom Kaplan’s money.

Who is currently signing EJF checks? If it is still Tropper then the whole resignation is phony – a cosmetic damage limitation exercise, cooked up by Lubinsky while a strategy is prepared – however ridiculous this may seem to you – for Tropper to rejoin the kiruv world, a humbled and repentant figure.”

Which brings us back to Rabbi Reuven Feinstein, it’s not his lack of the moral ground that is appalling, nor the glaring contradictions in the badly written release, not even his family relation to the Tendler kin in Monsey. The words are empty without the financial transparency. Till Reuven Feinstein and the rest of the politburo disclose the favors accrued in the process of pimping the Eternal Jewish Family, the HTML based pashkevilim will not do.