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Monday, April 30, 2012

Asifa letter #1

Schools, I see, are hopping on board the asifa bandwagon. In what follows a school in Brooklyn strongly encourages all male parents to attend. (Women, of course, aren't welcome.)

If your school has sent home a letter such as this, please submit it to DovBear.

Things to note:
  • "The grave danger posed by contemporary technological capabilities" is a hell of a long-winded euphemism for pornography. As Orwell said about something else in the best essay about lousy writing ever produced "The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not"
  • Citi Field, is only technically, an arena. A sports writer would never refer to it as such. However, the word does hearken back to the Roman amphitheaters and gladiatorial combat. I wonder if the writer knows this, of if his lack of skill produced something amusing by mistake
  • Of course, the venue is described as "massive." Orthodox Jewish English has no other word for super-large
  • How in the world can the inanimate Torah expect anything of us? And its a little creepy to learn that the Wise Men of Israel are worrying about my choice of filter. 
  • Can schools stop claiming to be "equal partners?" Its lip service. They see themselves as senior partners, when they see themselves as partners at all, and frequently abuse their authority and trample on our prerogatives. 
  • We cannot stress enough the importance of your capitalizing on this opportunity which will b'ezras Hashem help us make immeasurable progress in our chinuch goal to raise pure, ehrliche children. Yup, folks: A career educator wrote that sentence.
  • Also creepy is the promise to "submit the attendance list from our mossad to the event organizers." Perhaps the effect is unintentional, but this is even more Big-brothery, and unfairly manipulative, than the claim that the Gedolim are expecting something from us.
  • Why am I required to affirm the importance of the event in order to turn down the invitation? 
 Search for more information about creepy and incompetent school letters at 4torah.com

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