Before you read the disturbing article below, it kedai to read Moshe Rabbeinu's warning about today's violent Bnei-Teirah
Translated from Hebrew!
A respected Torah scholar, a teacher of Torah, sits in his car and cannot get out. Dozens surround him, shake the vehicle, and physically beat his talmidim, and shout at him.
For long minutes he is trapped — not in a hostile city, not under attack by enemies of religion. It happens in the heart of a Charedie city, at the hands of dozens of yeshiva bochrim.
And this is no isolated incident.
These are the same Charedie hoodlums that attacked Rabbi David Leibel. Those who thought it would end with attacking Rav Leibel, discovered that since then, Rabbi Uriya Einbal, the Rebbe of Karlin, and now the Roshei Yeshiva Rabbi Feivelson have also been attacked.
Respected rabbis, scholars, and Torah students are assaulted by bochrim. And between one attack and another come road blockages, spitting at soldiers, and riots that have almost become routine. Once we called them "asavim shoitim" “wild weeds.”
But a wild weed doesn’t surround a car with hundreds of people.
Unfortunately, for every illness they have ready answers.
It's always someone else's fault!
It's the Attorney General, it's the High Court, it's the media, always being persecuted.
Every criticism is a decree, every critic is an enemy, and every call for introspection is dismissed with contempt.
Everything with us is fine ; the problem is always outside.
So here — an eighteen-year-old boy raises his hand against a Torah scholar in a Chareredi street.
Who is to blame this time? Did the attorney general, or the high court in Yeushlayim shake the car? This time there’s nowhere to point the finger. This time the responsibility is ours.
The prophet Isaiah, in his prophecy about the time of destruction, gives one chilling sign:
"ירהבו הנער בזקן והנקלה בנכבד"“The youth will behave arrogantly toward the elder, and the base toward the honorable.”
When the young behave as they are greater than those older old, when one who has not yet learned a single daf properly allows himself to strike someone who has been marbitz Torah for fifty years — this is not “youthful zeal.” It is precisely the sign the prophet spoke of. And Chazal said explicitly: Why was Jerusalem destroyed? Because they disgraced Torah scholars.
And in these days of bein ha-metzarim, as we sit and mourn that destruction, it is worth revisiting the words of the Netziv in his introduction to Sefer Bereishit.
He writes about the generation of the Second Temple — words that are hard to bear:
"they were righteous, pious, and diligent in Torah study, but they were not upright. Out of baseless hatred, they suspected anyone who behaved differently in his fear of Heaven of being a Sadducee or heretic, and from that suspicion they reached bloodshed — until the Temple was destroyed. “They were righteous and diligent in Torah.”
He was not speaking of rebels; he is speaking of people who looked just like us.
Because these Bnei-Teirah were not born violent. They grew up in an atmosphere — years in which anyone who suggests a different path is immediately declared outside the camp.
Every rabbi who dares to express a different opinion becomes a target. Every display of zeal is met with silence, and sometimes even with a forgiving smile — “they mean well.”
The boy shaking the car heard that silence clearly. He feels — and in his mind, rightly so — that he has quiet backing. That if he harms someone he sees as “not zealous enough,” no significant public figure will rise and denounce him by name, and his actions will not truly harm him. And Chazal, in the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, taught us that the destruction was not attributed only to the offender, but also to the sages who sat there and did not protest.
Therefore, the remedy is not another statement about a “small fringe.”
The remedy is a clear protest — aloud and by name — from the greatest rabbis and from the most important places. Roshei yeshiva who will tell their students that one who raises a hand against a Jew, all the more so against a Torah scholar, cannot find his place within the walls of the yeshiva.
Teachers and educators who will uproot this inner permission of violence from its very root. And each of us, around the Shabbat table, when someone chuckles and says, “Well, boys will be boys,” should answer simply: No. This is not zeal. This is destruction.
We can keep blaming the Attorney General. It’s convenient, and it absolves us of responsibility. But the days of bein ha-metzarim were not established so we could mourn what others did to us. They were established so we would remember what we did to ourselves — that the house was not destroyed from the outside in, but from the inside out. That car, shaken by hundreds of youths, is a mirror of our condition. The only question is whether we will look at it with courage, or once again turn our gaze toward Jerusalem, searching for some clerk to blame.
Israel Meir Hirsch is the head of the “Achvat Torah” community in Harish.
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