One of my Yemos Ha'Moshiach fantasies is that all incorrect information will disappear out of books. All the stories told about various tzaddikim and gedolim will have only the correct names and the details will be accurate. I assume there will be large swathes of empty white space in many books.
I am reminded of this because of a story I read in Torah Tavlin, a very nice series of books with divrei Torah and stories. The story is one I knew previously and I know it as it is told accurately. In this book however, the author has one main character dying instead of being away on a trip, and another character being the grandson when he was actually the son. This is in addition to embellishing the story with a description that is probably not true and which is certainly not part of the original story. The core point of the story remains though.
It sure does make me wonder about the other stories in the book! It's like when I read descriptions about Jewish life written by non-Jews or Jews who are not knowledgeable and I see inaccuracies and outright errors. I would think they would have fact checkers who would verify things like Jewish law. Makes me wonder about the accuracy of information I read on subjects that I'm not that familiar with. It does not inspire confidence!
Posts
When you read about how charitable some of the gedolim were, I wonder how many children of these Torah giants went hungry. In my own life experience, there is always another side of the story and sometimes there are several complicated aspects of any conflict. When their children left Yiddishkeit, was it simply that they fell in line with what was happening in society, or did they have a bigger yetzer hara having come from such greatness, or were their parents human like everyone else and alienated their own children? Now some would say that to even question such people is kifira but there are others that say that failure to paint gedolim as human and subject to human emotions, reduces the ability of the mature reader to find the story believable and children see them as 2 dimensional and eventually they become skeptical as well.
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to be offensive, at all, but certainly you can come up with better yearnings for the Moshiach times. E.g., wouldn't you enjoy seeing Abraham, Isaac or Jacob? Would you not wish to learn straight from the mouth of Moshiach, or Moishe Rabbeinu? Wouldn't you have questios you'd want answered by Yehoshua, or someone? Wouldn't you just love to see Israel blossom with justice, beautiful tasty fruits, ....
ReplyDeleteJust saying.
I suppose I can't say I yearn to see the Avos or to learn directly from Moshiach or Moshe Rabeinu. Maybe that's because it seems too remote to me. What I posted "speaks" to me. And I think that Emes is rather important. In galus we are used to a world with so much sheker.
ReplyDelete