Luke Ford has a report (including audio) of a panel of rabbis responding to challenges to Orthodoxy from Dennis Prager. Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein was one of these rabbis, and Luke has assembled a few choice quotes for us. [I added the numbers for clarity.]:
1. Rabbi Adlerstein: “The real purpose of this gathering is to arm ourselves to be better ambassadors for Torah.”
2. “What the vast majority of people want is assurance. They want to know that they are not being fools.”
3. “At the end of our long galus [dispersion], we don’t always have the tools we had in previous generations. In the nineteenth century, when Biblical Criticism was a threat to the community, we had some of the chief gedolim such as the Malbim who dropped parts of their career and threw themselves into answering the questions of early Biblical Criticism.
4. “We are hard-pressed to find people at the top of the pantheon of Torah leadership today throwing themselves into the arena of exploring some of the challenges, such as science…”
5. “There are some people (mockers, skeptics) you don’t engage with.”…
Let's take these in order:
- Try being ambassadors for truth. Refuse to lie or to stand by when other rabbis lie. Refuse to cover up for your rabbinic friends. Fight for truth and fairness. The Torah doesn't need your ambassadorship. Truth does.
- You've been fools for years now. The Indian hair wig ban, the Rabbi Slifkin ban, the stealing and fraud, the abuse coverups – if rabbis do not want to be viewed as fools, stop acting like fools.
- If the Malbim lived today, your gedolim would ban him just as they banned Rabbi Slifkin.
- Think Slifkin ban. Could that be why? Hello?
- What you really mean is you avoid those of us who refuse to honor you and who issue strong challenges. You do this because you have no answers. You also have no balls.
That clear enough for you, Rabbi A and friends?