Some girls asked me about bullying--that is what were my experiences [in school]? My answer was that I never experienced anything like that at all. The reason is that when I was in school this was simply a different day and age. That is I was in Newport Beach CA in Mariners elementary school and then later in Hawthorn elemntry school [BH] and then Beverly Hills High School. Clearly something terrible was happening in the world in the 1960's in such a way that a new world appeared in the 1970's in which the world became a crazy place. The 1960's was a transition from the world of the 1950's and the 1970's. The world became a madhouse. But I was mainly guarded from the problems since I was in the Mir in NY [after high school] and then later in Safed in Israel . So I was more or less unaware of how drastically the world had changed. What does it all mean? I am not sure.
[I might add that the reason I was accepted in the Mir in NY was that I already knew some Hebrew since I learned Torah in Temple Israel in Hollywood and after that in Far Rockaway in Shar Yashuv. I have to add that in some ways I think Shar Yasuv was superior to the Mir in terms of their analysis of Tospfot. But the Mir was more into the path of Rav Haim from Brisk.]
Since most of the time in the 1970's and 1980's I was involved in the Torah I did not see what was going on around me. Only when I emerged from my shell I saw the religious world in itself had become a hell hole. The explanation of this I found in Rav Nahman's idea of Torah scholars that are demons.יש תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאיים כמובא בזוהר פרשת פנחס/
That is to say that the Dark Side has penetrated the religious world and taken it over.
The solution to this problem seems to me to be more or less to go to a Litvak Yeshiva that follows the path of the Gra and Rav Shach as far as possible. [I assume there must be places like that even though I do not have the merit to be anywhere near one/ My impression is that I myself would not have had such terrible problems if I had simply stuck with the straight Torah path of the Gra and the Litvak world. It was the fact that I more or less left that path and then my attempts to get back in ended in failure.]
[I might add that the reason I was accepted in the Mir in NY was that I already knew some Hebrew since I learned Torah in Temple Israel in Hollywood and after that in Far Rockaway in Shar Yashuv. I have to add that in some ways I think Shar Yasuv was superior to the Mir in terms of their analysis of Tospfot. But the Mir was more into the path of Rav Haim from Brisk.]
Since most of the time in the 1970's and 1980's I was involved in the Torah I did not see what was going on around me. Only when I emerged from my shell I saw the religious world in itself had become a hell hole. The explanation of this I found in Rav Nahman's idea of Torah scholars that are demons.יש תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאיים כמובא בזוהר פרשת פנחס/
That is to say that the Dark Side has penetrated the religious world and taken it over.
The solution to this problem seems to me to be more or less to go to a Litvak Yeshiva that follows the path of the Gra and Rav Shach as far as possible. [I assume there must be places like that even though I do not have the merit to be anywhere near one/ My impression is that I myself would not have had such terrible problems if I had simply stuck with the straight Torah path of the Gra and the Litvak world. It was the fact that I more or less left that path and then my attempts to get back in ended in failure.]
