Talk about going off the derech

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Thank G-d that Orthodox crooks, including some prestigious rabbis, are being dragged out into the sunlight more and more often recently. Sunlight is G-d's best disinfectant for our planet, and we seem to be desperately in need of a major “ethical cleansing” at this time.

Over thirty years ago, when a substantial wave of us idealists enthusiastically became baalei teshuva, we never would have imagined that way too many outwardly pious co-religionists were secretly steeped in corruption, and that they would even feel self-righteous about the corruption too. It saddened us to find out that too many believed that being Torah-observant actually entitled them to live corruptly. That made so little sense to us that for years we couldn't even accept that this could be a popular mindset. I guess to all of those who had been following a secretly corrupt way of living for decades, we must have seemed like fools, for taking the Torah seriously and wanting to genuinely follow its guidelines — even behind closed doors.

Many are sad to see new Orthodox crooks being discovered every week. It is so much better, though, than them not being discovered and continuing “successfully” in their ways. When they continue to elude detection, they also lure more and more innocent people into their accepted ways, which is what was happening. They also get more and more entrenched in their crimes as well.

Nobody likes to deal with infestations of any kind, but it's so much better to start dealing with them, then to try to keep the light off, and pretend we're not heavily infested. I still believe that the vast majority of Orthodox people are the wonderful, caring, and spiritual kind of people with whom we eagerly wanted to join to make our world a better place. And even plenty of the crooked ones do lots of publicly kind actions too, but that still doesn't mean that the disgusting crimes they do can be disregarded.

We also have to accept that it's not like there are just a few rotten apples. We've looked the other way for too long, so the rottenness has spread. It seems that most of our leaders have been afraid to rock the rotting pushcart too. And we have become far too fearful of our leaders.

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