Differences in Our Communities

the question of the community working together on the same page on a collective basis is one of the topics that people complain about constantly that there's not enough unity in the jewish community there's not enough unity even within the orthodox community that we're always competing with each other and criticizing each other first of all i don't think it's that bad i think that the the community is pretty much in sync on the critical issues of the day and i think that that there are differences and i i'm a big proponent of the fact that there should be differences and there are different avenues to being a torah jew and it's important to have different camps to afford people different opportunities to express their their torah judaism in a way that works for them so if we would get to a world in which everybody would be identical and be working truly in a uniform way i think would be a much less rich community for it and a much more stifled opportunity for individual jews the degree of animosity or belligerence among groups today i think is probably the least that it's been certainly in my lifetime perhaps in the history of american orthodoxy in some ways that's beautiful there's a lot of mutual respect there's a lot of mutual cooperation but in some ways it's a little sad because i'm concerned that the degree of complacence we have in criticizing each other may not come out of respect but may come out of indifference either indifference that we don't care what other people are doing we only care about our own our own community and therefore someone does a different what do i care it's not my world anyway that's sad but even more likely it is i don't really feel that strongly about what i believe and maybe you're right maybe you're not right who knows there's a little bit of a trade-off of peace and passion and you'll find in general in societies throughout history and throughout the world today communities where there's passion are much like more likely to have adversarial dynamics with other communities i'm afraid that we don't we're not passionate enough and if we were more passionate maybe we would have a little more confrontation and that might not be so bad [Music]