Not the second coming but the second catastrophe

The ghetto walls were confining. They were different from the boundaries of the Israelite encampment. That encampment defined the border between sacred and profane territory. It was nowhere decreed that members of the tribe were prohibited from leaving the tribe. There was no sense in which leaving the tribe would be punished. Membership was a choice, a free choice, open to all members of the nation. In exile that choice was lost. Membership became mandatory. When the ghetto walls began to come down the Jewish people, in droves, cast off the restrictions of those confines. It was a cultural catastrophe of major proportions. For the Jewish people it was a spiritual calamity.

Orthodoxy is what remained after the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people left the fold of rabbinic rule. Orthodoxy became a political movement to stem the exodus out from under rabbinic authority. The threat to orthodoxy was neither Conservative Judaism nor Reform Judaism; it was secularism in the guise of liberalism, Zionism or communism.

The standard story is that the Jewish people suffered the spiritual catastrophe of the Temple's destruction and that the rabbinic regime replaced the biblical regime so as to shepherd the Jewish people through the diaspora. What that story is not telling is that the Jewish people suffered a second spiritual catastrophe with the collapse of the rabbinic regime and the mass transformation of the Jewish people into secular adherents to modernist ideologies.

The schools that came to teach Jewish children the rules of orthodoxy did not just teach them the ways of rabbinic practice, they also brought them under an indoctrination regime that was as ideologically fraught as any modernist political ideology on the scene. Orthodoxy was taught as fanaticism.

Orthodoxy is constantly promoting itself as the preferred path rather than simply presenting itself as a welcome alternative to the other options available. We had always sensed something was the matter with the way Orthodoxy seemed to believe it needed continually to promote itself but we could never figure out what the problem was. Now we can see Orthodoxy for the ideological scam it had become. Orthodoxy and the rabbinic regime it replaced just lost its steam, its vitality. Under millennia of pressure the rabbinic system simply wore out.

As we move our center of operations to Israel we can now focus our attention on what the nation really needs, having lifted the blinders of a lifetime of propaganda and seen clearly what our people truly require of us, and of themselves.