Rabbi Aharon Feldman, the rosh yeshiva of Ner Israel in Baltimore, attacked MK Rabbi Dov Lipman last week. Feldman called Lipman "wicked" and compared him to Amalek. He also condemned efforts to compel haredi schools in Israel to teach secular subjects.
Rabbi Aharon Feldman
The rosh yeshiva (dean) of Ner Israel Yeshiva in Baltimore, Rabbi Aharon Feldman, is notorious for endorsing books on the interface of Torah and science written by Rabbi Natan Slifkin, and then selling out Slifkin shortly after Israeli haredi leaders banned those books sight unseen (and without even speaking to Slifkin) as "heresy."
Now in a talk delivered to his students, Feldman has lied about history and used those lies to attack a former Ner Israel student, Member of Knesset Rabbi Dov Lipman. Much worse than that, Feldman compared Lipman and his associates to Amalek (the biblical arch enemy of the Jewish people that Jews are commanded to kill) and to the villain from the story of Purim, Haman, who rabbinic Judaism considers to be a descendant of Amalek:
"…In a few years they'll be gone there will be nothing left of them, no history left of them. No enemy of Torah ever had a kiyum [a fixed existence, permanence], from Amalek to Haman to these enemies they have no kiyum. They'll be gone; they might make us a lot of tzarus [trouble, pain] but they'll be gone and forgotten.
But we have stayed around for 3500 years because our forefathers said na'aseh v'nishma [we will do what God has commanded and we will ask questions about those commands only afterward] and that na'aseh v'nishma is in ourselves that we have to be mosair nefesh [show self-sacrifice] for learning Torah; that's the kiyum of Am Yisrael [the Jewish people].…"
The same comparisons were made between Yitzchak Rabin and Amalek and Haman in the months before his assassination.
Feldman has a college education and he knows that what he is saying about the Greeks and Romans is patently false. Aristotle and Plato are still very well known as are the names of Roman emperors. (This is less true for our older enemies from the time of the First Temple which tend to get lost in the shadows of antiquity, but archeology and related sciences have recovered a lot of previously lost information about those ancient civilizations over the past 120 years.) But just as Feldman lied during the Slifkin affair, he is lying now – and he's lying to a group of people who are ill equipped to know they are being deceived.
Here is an audio excerpt of the section of Feldman's talk dealing with Lipman. It runs just over four minutes long:
Rabbi Aharon Feldman attacks MK Rabbi Dov Lipman 5-2013
Baltimore Jewish Life has a complete transcript of this excerpt, as well.
[Hat Tip: hsin.]