Monday, July 23, 2007

Secret Connections Revealed

Tzvi Fishman, rabbi and professional anti-masturbation Kabbalist activist, has a post giving people advice on how to deal with their kids using the Internet for porn.

Lay it on, Tzvi:

If you are interested in my humble opinion, I advise throwing all of your home computers out of the house. If this seems too radical, then at least cancel your Internet server, even if it means doing without Arutz Sheva and my informative and entertaining blog.
...
Whatever you do, or don't do, it is time to admit the truth. If you have Internet in your home, then you have a problem in your house. If you are the parents of growing children, then what are you going to do about it?

A Luddite AND modest!

It gets a lot better than Tzi, though. The comments on this one are just pure gold.

Here's one from "Rescue Team," offering suggestions for someone trying to beat Internet sex addiction:
1. Get rid of your computer.
2. cold mikvah or shower 3X a day
3. learn Torah themes with your wife to deepen your inner connection
4. keep the lights off
5. Rabbi Nachman says that a segula for braking the power of lust is to say out loud "Shema Yisrael" 70 times against the impure forces of the 70 nations which embody the sexual urge.
6. Guard your eyes when you go out to the street.
7. a bad spirit has floated into your head. It will pass.
Oh, I just love it when we get into numerology medicine. I wonder what the gematria for "colon cancer" is?

Then we get into a fun back-and-forth. Rafael from Efrat says,
So what if the kids look at pretty women once in a while. That is the age where they become curious about exploring their own sexuality. I looked at Playboy when I was a kid, and still grew up to have a happy marriage and raise a good (Torah observant) family. This is the least of our problems.

Not surprisingly, some people take issue with this less-than-machmir approach:
Perhaps because you read Playboy, your sons like to watch "pretty women." The point is that the Jewishs People are to be a holy people with holy genes, and how can we achieve this with pornography available in our homes for our children to see?- Josh from Beit Shemesh.

Wait, holy genes? When did this become about eugenics? And sorry, Josh, but I don't think porn affects your genes. Just a hunch.

Yosi from Ramot agrees:
No big deal? Look what the Nefesh HaChaim says in Chapter One: "A man of Israel must understand, know, and establish in his mind and heart that every detail of his deeds, speech, and thoughts, at every second and time, all rise up according to their root source to influence the most exalted worlds. Therefore, when a man entertains an impure, licentious thought in his heart, G-d forbid, he in effect brings a prostitute into the most exalted, celestial Holy of Holies, giving strength to the forces of impurity and evil in this transcendently holy place, to a much greater extent than the impurity caused by Nebuchadnezzar and Titus when they brought a prostitute into the Holy of Holies in the Temple sanctuary on earth."

Guarding our eyes and thoughts is the foundation of everything.
For anyone that still might not be convinced, there's this bit of late-breaking news from Ari in Jerusalem:

J from Nazareth liked looking at women too. That's why he was kicked out of yeshiva. While traveling with Rabbi Yehoshua ben Prachia, J of Nazareth complained that the innkeeper's eyes weren't pretty. It is written that Rabbi Yehoshua pushed him away with both hands for his evil preoccupation with looking at women. (Sotah 47a) Raphael - out of this came Christianity - do you still say, "So what?"


Got that, folks? The Internet leads to porn, which leads to masturbation, which cuts off your Kabbalah soul from the Divine Gloriousness that is the L**d, oh, and it will also make your kids Christians.

Wow, no wonder Tzvi wants his readers to toss their computers!

One last one from a guy named Yoshi:

Apparently Mr. Fishman's own addictions to sex cause him to see the internet as nothing but a vehicle for pornography. Perhaps he also sees the car as "a machine that gets us to prostitutes" and a house as a "place where illicit sexual relations can be carried out in secret."

I do love me some newspeak, especially when Kabbalah's involved.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

After Tzvi's thing about the rabbi who diagnosed the young woman with the rat problem at her house as having mothered the (demon) rats through causing men to sin in their thoughts, nothing he says surprises me. Nothing.

If only we worried so much about, say, protecting the dignity of others as we do about sexuality.

Antigonos said...

I have NEVER met a group of people so obsessed with sex as haredi Jews. I know, I work with them daily. It (under the guise of the avoidance of "it") never leaves their thoughts for an instant.

From the standpoint of being largely oblivious (through overkill) to the sexual messages constantly being sent us by the media, etc., secular Jews are really saints.

I sometimes wonder if haredim really ever do anything besides f**k. They don't go to the army, they don't work (only 30% of haredi men in Israel work), they can't have any "normal" hobbies or pastimes since that is "bitul Torah" and look at the size of their families!

Every taxi driver in Israel (my husband's one) can tell you about his "clients" who get onto a bus dressed as the "blackest of the black", go to another city, change clothes in the bus station, and have the driver find them the appropriate form of "non-yeshiva friend", or buy some porn, etc. During the years when I worked the night shift, my husband, who worked nights then too, has often been propositioned for the use of our DVD/VCR player by yeshiva boys wanting to watch a blue film...in another world, I guess this would be called "hypocrisy". The haredi world pretends it doesn't exist, just as there are no haredim who are HIV-positive, or who have STDs. Their children's marriage possibilities might be damaged if such a thing got out...