Defining yourself by the opposite

nickname commenting to mentalblog.com: Save the Tzig: OK, there are countless blogs and websites almost entirely dedicated to anti-chabad talk, so what's wrong with one blog talking about 'snags'? I don't get it.

Chabakuk Elisha: The truth is, at least IMHO, that chareidi Yiddishkeit is generally all this way: As a rule, they define themselves by what they oppose, instead of by what they are. Had I not lived here, I never would have imagined that the vast majority of these folks are living these caricatured lives of uncertainty, constantly trying to figure out what they aren’t, since they have so long ago given up on being who they are.

Is there any greater tragedy than Torah Yiddishkeit becoming just a vast group of people in the dark, trying to figure out what the right thing is, and then attempting to do it? Yiddishkeit was never this way, and sadly this post-war-generation reality is so pervasive, and so institutionalized, that the end is nowhere in sight. And I really think that this is the underlying cause for all the ills that exist around us. All of them…