Chazal ruled that the snake is pregnant for 7 years.
It's not possible that G-d spoke through them
The secular underground, led by two formerly religious people, break into Charedi yeshivot in the middle of the night. In between the pages of the gemaras they hide pamphlets which claim that Chazal were ignoramuses who erred in understanding reality and so based their rulings on incorrect facts * The Charedi respond with curses, threats, and violence * "May your animalistic spirits be wiped out" "May cancer slowly devour you from head to toe" are some of the hostile messages received by organization members
On dark nights, when the lights go out in the yeshivot and the studious go off to sleep, Y and his people sneak into the empty study halls and hastily plant white pamphlets into gemaras. These are "time bombs" meant to go off in the early morning hours. Then, as the first students arrive at the yeshivot and open the gemaras, the "time bombs" will explode in their faces. "Oh, no," the boys will shout. They'll run outside, panic-stricken, tear up the pamphlets and burn them. Y and his people, in their escape car, will rub their hands in glee.
Nearly every week, in Charedi neighborhoods across the country, an undercover war against Charedim is taking place. A secular underground movement is distributing innocent-looking pamphlets which drive the Charedi crazy. At the top of each pamphlet is the abbreviation BS"D (with Heaven's help) and at the bottom it is written "Please preserve the sanctity of this pamphlet." These pamphlets are misleading. They are crowned with verses, sayings of Chazal, and words of Halacha, and use the language of Halachic discourse. Only once one begins to read does one discover the deceit: the pamphlets are full, according to the Charedi, of heresy and apostasy.
In the Ponevich Yeshiva rabbis hurried to warn their students against the pamphlet. They forbade peeking at the pamphlets and demanded their destruction. The walls of Bnei Brak filled with announcements signed by the city rabbi, Rabbi Moshe Yehuda Landau, calling upon residents to burn the pamphlets. "And who looks at them is transgressing a prohibition, 'You shall not follow your hearts and after your eyes' The public should know to be careful and throw them away without looking at then or letting them near household members."
The Charedim are feeling the pressure. The pamphlets are being sent to home mailboxes, scattered in yeshivot, distributed on the streets, published on the internet. Charedi who have looked at them have begun to ask questions. There are even those who left religion. "What is this which G-d has done to us," Rabbi Kirshenbaum, spiritual supervisor of the Nachalat Leviim Yeshiva in Haifa, wailed to his students. "Strange, strange. There was never anything like this. They infiltrated the yeshivot and tried to hunt boys individually. These are the enemies of the people of Israel…true villains…We hate these people…May their names and memory be literally wiped out."
"It's a pleasure." Y, responsible for the fuss, is thrilled. Y, a man who has left religion and who dons jeans and sandals, kicks out at everything held dear by the Charedi and enjoys every moment of it. "We'll win," he says. "We'll create a revolution. We won't let the Charedi rule our lives."
A year ago Y sat at a roadside diner with R, who left religion. "We have to do something," they said. "The situation is catastrophic, the Charedi are a real existential danger to the nation." "Why are the Charedi allowed to come talk to us and attack our liberal-democratic ideology, but we aren't allowed to go talk in their yeshivot?" Y asked in amazement. "It's time," R said, "that we start attacking their Halachic ideology which puts us in danger." "They want to establish a Halachic state," Y said, "and we have to do everything we can to prevent that." Y and R decided to do something. They founded an organization named Daat Emet, whose goal is "to open the eyes of the Charedi to new things, to remove their ignorance, to awaken their curiosity and facilities of critical thought, so that they can be spoken to and convinced that we must separate state from religion."
Dozens of secular people joined the organization, some Torah scholars who had left religion, most well-educated, hi-tech workers, engineers, scientists, and businessmen. Some were affiliated with Shinui, Meretz, or Am Hofshi.
Their fight is mainly carried on through the pamphlets which they say are meant for scholars, the future generation of Charedi. No, they don't want to make people leave religion, they state. "We want them to start to think, not blindly accept things. As far as we're concerned, they can keep on observing the Torah and the commandments," Y says.
As part of this mission, Daat Emet activists try to prove to the Charedi that the Written Torah and the Oral Torah are not Divine creations given at Mt. Sinai, but are human creations. In their pamphlets they try to show that Chazal were, as they put it, "ignorant" and erred in understanding reality, that they based their rulings on incorrect facts.
For example, there is the matter of the louse, that pesky creature whom Chazal permitted killing on the Sabbath, since it does not sexually reproduce, but rather is created "from dust or man's sweat." "This is not true," Daat Emet members declare. They also catch Rabbi Chezkiyah in his ignorance, in his statement (in Tractate Chulin) that chickens have no lungs, and mocks the words of the Sages who determined that an animal's heart has three chambers instead of two chambers and two atria. They cite Chazal, who determined that the snake's pregnancy lasts for seven yeas, and that the gestation of the bear, tiger, panther, and the monkey each last thee years. "Reality is different." They mock Chazal, who did not know enough to correctly describe the structure of the planet Earth.
"Chazal erred on simple matters," thy write in their pamphlets. "They knew only what was known in their generation. Would anyone, G-d forbid, consider that Chazal got erroneous information from Mt. Sinai? Such a thing should not even be uttered. The Holy Spirit did not assist them at all."
"In any case," Y states, "it is impossible that G-d spoke through them, and if G-d did not speak through them, there is no Divine authority to their Halachic rulings and no reason to obey them. The Sages invented commandments and laws from their own overactive imaginations, and therefore these commandments lack any importance."
"What nonsense," demurs Rabbi Mordechai Neugroshel, one of the most senior outreach professionals in the country. "This person doesn't know his right from his left. His knowledge of Torah is lacking, and his scientific knowledge is out-of-date. He takes questions, some of which have already been thoroughly dealt with by Jewish sages, and asks them all over again while ignoring the answers. He distorts and lies and hold everything up for scorn. I don't know what motivates him, maybe it's fear of the growing influence of the repentance movement, maybe a desire to take revenge on the society from which he has come. He's a pitiful person. His hatred has crazed him. His messengers have already tried to break up some of our lectures in Haifa. We have to ignore him; we have to just leave him alone."
But the Charedi find it hard to keep silent. In the morning, as they go out to prayer, they find this "apostasy" in their mailboxes, and when they get to yeshiva they find it between the pages of their gemaras. The curious will hide the pamphlets in their coats and read them in secret. Other will tear them up, spit, curse, burn the pamphlets, and in the end will send the ashes to P.O. Box 39425, Tel Aviv, accompanied by doodled skulls, threats, and curses.
"Where do you get the nerve?" a yeshiva student wrote, and hoped the pamphlets' authors burn in hell and that their children die. "Your lives are in serious danger." "May your animalistic spirits be wiped out and may your body, stinking from the blood of the leprous animal which bore you, rot," writes another. "May your names and memory be wiped out. May cancer devour you from head to foot!!!"
"Destroyer of Israel." "Cheat." "Crazy." "Sick." "Liar." "Afterbirth of Satan." Rabbi Yakkov Segal, head of the Birkat Yosef yeshiva in Bnei Brak, calls Y "the apostate." He's so angry about the pamphlets that he wrote a 53 page response titled "Remember your shame by a villain," which tries to refute all of Y and friends' questions.
Rabbi Segal calls Y's pamphlets "filthy slime" and he compares Y to Shabbtai Tzvi, accusing him of ignorance, distortions, and forgeries. "They stop at no low trickery or forgery," the rabbi writes, "to justify their disgusting way of envy, desire, pursuit of honor, and naked greed. May faith in the Divine Torah be strengthened and deepened out of the 'questions' the sick one has raised."
"They call me sick," Y smiles with pleasure. "It's amusing. Their answers aren't serious. They make things up and endlessly curse. They aren't capable of dealing with the . The Chazon Ish dealt with the claims of the enlightened on a serious basis, not out of fear. Why aren't they able to? Because they don't have answers."
Y and R are convinced that they have the true answers. They, after all, were there. The know the Charedi world well. No, they have no longings for that world; they are full of pity for it.
R, 55, grew up as part of a small Chassidic sect in Tel Aviv, and at the age of 30, along with his wife and two children, left religion. Y, 38, grew up secular in Rishon LeTzion, but at 17 became religious. He learned in yeshiva, married, had seven children, and became a scholar. At 28 he was appointed head of a kollel.
"It was great, I felt wonderful," he relates. "And suddenly, after 15 years in the Charedi world, just when I was at my peak and everything was going so well, I started to have doubts. At first I started reviewing the Shas with a critical eye, and so I passed two fascinating years. Then I came to the conclusion that all the Torah and Halacha are human inventions, and when I discovered that I wasn't prepared to continue to observe laws created by humans, based on errors and moral considerations of 2,000 years ago."
Five years ago Y shaved off his beard, changed his clothes, cut off his sons' payot, divorced his wife, and began to work as an insurance agent. R founded an investment and consulting agency. To this day they continue to study; they love Gemara. They bring their experience and broad education to Daat Emet. Y comes up with the ideas, write the Halachic outline of the pamphlets, and R adds the spicy bits. Sometimes these outlines are sent to the rabbis mentioned in the pamphlets for comment. The rabbis, of course, don't answer.
Activists go out in the middle of the night to yeshivot with big bundles of material of go to outreach gatherings to create arguments amongst the crowd and embarrass the speakers. "It's frightening," Y says. "You never know how you're going to come back."
At the start they disguised themselves as Charedi. They distributed the pamphlets on the streets, walked around yeshivot, and were so warmly accepted that the Charedim were amazed at the pamphlets and offered to pay for copies. Slowly, when the contents of the true pamphlets was discovered, the lives of group members became hellish. Unknown persons began harassing them by phone, cut their tires, and sent ambulances to them in the night. Y and his friends had to go underground. Since then they have refrained from showing their faces or giving their names and they act like a secret commando unit. The use passwords and communicate mainly by computer. R, who drives them to the yeshivot, always waits in the car with the motor running, doors open and lights off, chewing his fingernails.
Y walks around in his secular clothing, in the dark of the study hall, between the books and the shtenders, and suddenly the sounds and the scents and the scenes of the past come back to him, and he is filled with pity and with pain. I also lived in an ignorant and closed world and couldn't get a general education; I never dared express myself freely. Now when I walk around their yeshivot I break out in a cold sweat and get out as quickly as I can."
More than once they have come back beaten and bruised. Yeshiva students have chased them and beaten them, even pushing one activist off his motorcycle. Sometimes they have been arrested by the police and let off on bail. "Missionaries," "apostates" people yell at them.
"I do understand the Charedi," says D. "I would have reacted the same way when I was a yeshiva student." D, 30, a Gerrer chassid, trained as a rabbi and formerly a yeshiva teacher, recently left religion. He divorced his wife, left her and the children, and went to study in academia and to make money.
One day, with his faith already shaky, he happened upon a Daat Emet pamphlet. The pamphlet, he said, was the final nail in the coffin. "The pamphlets are well-written," D says. "They look like Torah publications and are written in a familiar style, with a minimum of quarrelsomeness. The questions always existed and the rabbis tried to deal with them, but it wasn't something available to everyone. Now, for the first time, the pamphlets take all the questions and bring them down to the common level."
D reports about additional Charedim who have crossed the line in the wake of the pamphlets. Daat Emet likes to describe the situation as "hysteria," but facts on the ground are different: they convert only a few, those who faith is already shaky before they get the pamphlets. Others continue to live in the community like marranos, wanting to live but unable. They collaborate with Daat Emet, reporting on Charedim who, following perusal of the pamphlets have begun to argue on issues of faith, on students who have begun to ask questions which embarrass their teachers. They're the ones who give Daat Emet addresses to which they can send material.
"it won't help them," A student named Shmuel looks up from the pages of his heavy Gemara and smiles. "Most of us aren't shocked by these questions. All Jewish faith is, after all, built upon questions, problems, conflicts, and proofs. What these people do is not meant to examine the truth, but to create provocations and to serve as a convenient excuse for those who leave religion but want to soothe their consciences. In the meantime, they only achieve the opposite: the pamphlets work as a boomerang. My fellow students and I, for example, take the pamphlets and show them to secular people, and they are amazed. "What, after questions like these you stay religious?" Then we pull the answers out, right there in front of them, and they do a quick turn-around and start showing an interest in religion. Daat Emet fears the world of outreach, but in the end they'll find themselves alone and will return, too."
From: Yediot Aharonot Friday Supplement, 10 Kislev 5760 November 19, 1999