Primum Non Nocere explores all subjects of interest to an Orthodox Jewish, rigidly halachic, yet not frum medical student who is vitally and positively squeezing the last drop of delight from living the best life he knows in the best way he can.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch
"It would be most perverse and criminal of us to seek to instill in our children a contempt, based on ignorance and untruth, for everything that is not specifically Jewish, for all other human arts and sciences, in the belief that by inculcating our children with such a negative attitude we could safeguard them from contacts with the scholarly and scientific endeavors of the rest of mankind…You will then see that your simple-minded calculations were just as criminal as they were perverse. Criminal, because they enlisted the help of untruth supposedly in order to protect the truth, and because you have thus departed from the path upon which your own Sages have preceded you and beckoned you to follow them. Perverse, because by so doing you have achieved precisely the opposite of what you wanted to accomplish…Your child will consequently begin to doubt all of Judaism which (so, at least, it must seem to him from your behavior) can exist only in the night and darkness of ignorance and which must close its eyes and the minds of its adherents to the light of all knowledge if it is not to perish." - Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (Collected Writings 7: 415-6).
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