The New Normal

I recall an encounter that took place between my father, the Faltishener Rav, zt"l, and David Ben Gurion, prime minister of Israel. During the course of a flight to Israel, as my father was putting on tallis and tefillin, Ben Gurion walked by and muttered, "These antiqued Jews who insist on hanging on to archaic practices of the past..." My father responded instantly by saying, "Quite the contrary, Mr. Prime Minister. Between the the two of us, you are far more old-fashioned than I am: Terach, the idolatrous predecessor of the Patriarch Avraham, came long before the Torah and Mitzvos..." Following ones own base desires ("anything goes") is simply an expression of one of the oldest human failings - the rejection of authority. It is not a new idea; it is the very philosophy that Judaism exists to defeat. In a sense, we are back where we started. The entire moral and ethical structure of contemporary society is barely recognizable when compared to that of only a few decades ago. The wa