When television came to Israel, it was a very big thing, there was one station, one Israeli program "Hedva and Shmulik" and no one in the country missed even one program, it did not belong at all.
There were big debates in the kibbutz (Hulata) whether to put in a TV, not to put in a TV. Not for the houses, there was no money for it, but for the club. My aunt fought against it and said the TV would break up the family. And it is true that there was only one TV in the club, the whole kibbutz was there, that way there is no family.
By then the TV had already been brought into the house, so the family was back to being a natural family. Sitting around the TV, not eating together, not talking together, watching TV.
But then there was one station, today you press the sign and there are 50 stations, in America 200 stations. A person can not separate. They tell him 'quite late to go to bed' and he is constantly with the sign and can not disconnect from it it revives him.
It's sick, it's the intrusion of foreign culture, today there are even more things on the internet, I do not know exactly, I do not understand it, but there is blocking software that will not be pornographic stations or foreign work stations, is not true what I say? I'm not walking on safe ground but I think I read something like that. The ultra-Orthodox who each have a computer, some are connected to the Internet because there is a Torah lesson there .. so they have this barrier.
It's hard, you go from channel to channel but it's all hard. The mental orientation of where you are. You're in an issue that you can not part with.
There are talented people who only have to study an issue forty times, there are talented people like me who have to repeat an issue four hundred times, but the norm is a hundred times, it is what it takes for an ordinary person to know the issue in depth and memory, beyond memorizing the issue not Will add a new understanding to a person. So why does a person study the issue a hundred times as well? Because he can not not, because it is a theory of life.
It is love and indulgence in the Torah. Today people indulge in other things.
Once I was in a class with Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, we studied the Sanhedrin Tractate, it was something very wonderful. The class had to end at nine-thirty in the evening because women had already arrived for his next class. The rabbi was told that the women had arrived. The rabbi, who was very respectful of the women and adhered to this lesson, replied, "Well, another moment," and went on and on. At ten they said to him, "It's too late, the women are waiting." The rabbi replied, "Yes, yes, we have to finish, a little more." It's been a three-hour class. There are also health instructions from the doctor. You have to finish at eleven ''
At the end the rabbi surrendered and took the Gemara in eleven and five minutes, but he is unable to close it. At the end he sighed and gave a kiss to the Gemara. "The Revival."
It's a romance. Religious erotica. It's love and pleasures. It's health, it's a healthy person. A healthy person can not stop studying Torah, it is so sweet.
Eli Horowitz
