I am so sick and tired of reading and hearing about the post-Judaism, post-orthodoxy and all the “renewal” talk. Heed what Steve Jobs said, notice he didn’t say there that they were going to teach people how to type. He is a rational man and he understands that some habits are so ingrained that they must die out. But imagine we take this progress metaphor and try it out on the Judaism. You have a culture that sees the purpose in indoctrinating an “anti-typewriter”. The new forms of expression must be brought on as a contraband from the back door and the old forms of expression must be declared sacred.
And this brings me to the entire “renewal” caboodle. People are not ready, or hesitant for political reasons, to come clean on the lies (notice the reaction to James Kugel). So they start “reinterpreting” and spinning and it’s this spin that they shamelessly call a “renewal”. You get yourself a Reb Zalman who never comes out to say that the Chassidic revolution was a tragedy perpetrated by the selfish and delusional metamagical demagogues, that the three centuries of the Chassidic rule was the time of the spiritual, financial (and often sexual) abuse. Instead they will preach and spin (just like Buber) to the crowd that knows nothing (or deliberately doesn’t what to know). Renew this!