 |
| generation gap |
How does a culture unwittingly sow the seeds of inter-generational mistrust? When does youth begin to suspect that adult camaraderie may be deeply flawed? Revolutions begin in the younger generation, rather than the seasoned adults. Something in the cultural soil goes bad.
One variety of these seeds of mistrust and reveals that they usually begin to sprout informally, even playfully, in arenas like the Beit Midrash or Synagogue where young men mixed as freely with adult men. The young are always watching and wondering what makes adults tick. Their natural inclination to imitate the ways of adults is a deep source of cultural stability because it tends to ensure that what an adult does today will be emulated by a youth tomorrow.
I have had people ask me questions in Halacha because they knew they could not get an honest answer anywhere else. Everyone seems to have an agenda. Halacha means what they want it to mean.
The hard thing about halacha is that one needs to know the source before he can understand it at all. But in essence that simply means to sit and learn Gemara like Lithuanian Yeshivas do anyway.
The issue is not adults verses teens. It is young married adults that still need guidance for older people. They need to know whom they can trust.
This is hard to know. Usually you need to know a subject really well to be able to tell who else knows it really well.
I any case for the sake of the record there were people I knew that really did know Torah well. mainly they were in NY. Some are today Roshei Yeshiva in the Mir and Chaim Berlin. Rav Nelkenbaum in the Mir. Shelomo Haliua in Chaim Berlin. Shimon Buso in Netivot in Israel. Clearly Rav Elezar Menachem Shach was the greatest Torah scholar of the last generation.
