Are We Farsighted?

Farsighted -  "unable to see things clearly, especially if they are relatively close to the eyes"

"כל הנגעים אדם רואה חוץ מנגעי עצמו" - At an individual level, a person does not pick up on his own faults. The same holds true on a communal level. We as a community suffer from farsightedness. We do not see things clearly when they are close to home. While we may detect flaws such as abuse in our community, we do not pick up on issues much closer to who we are. The closer the issue, the less we see it. Take for example the loss of the concept of what it means to really be a talmid chacham and the current approach most yungerleit take to their learning. Definitely flawed to the core, but something we tend to excuse away.

We can get so caught up in what seems to be major important issues when in reality they are small nuances that don't really have an effect on the community. While it may seem that the differences between Eitz and Gimmel or the pro-WZO camp and the anti-WZO camp are day and night, this comes from super farsightedness. It only seems this way to someone on the inside to whom these small deviances generally have to do with "clan-identity" and to whom these small differences are what sets him apart from others who are actually in his life. However, we would do well to learn from the much clearer view of outsiders. Take this quote from JNS as an example:

"It has been painful to watch the infighting inside the Orthodox world over this election (WZO). First, current rabbis started attacking each other, and then rabbis who passed away were brought back from the dead with newfound letters taking sides.

"The rest of the Jewish world is watching and has seen the tremendous chilul Hashem (a “desecration of God’s name”) that the entire process has become. Anti-Haredi agitators reportedly even paid Haredim to create artificial controversies."

The point of this article is to raise the issue. Comments are welcome. (Anonymous comments are anonymous even to us. Even to Google.)