note, that as different as they are, both of them are compelled to preach in a setting with seforim background.
faruq | 07.16.08 - 5:47 pm | #

Can someone explain to me how and why this woman is so popular as a popularizer of Torah? My first g'morah and chassidus teacher was less than fluent in English but there was more ta'am to his lessons than this woman seems able to muster. By the way did anyone venture to look at the clip of Hanoch Teller. Any thoughts? Mine? I thought you'd never ask! It produced one of those blessed moments when I can pick my face out of the gutter and exclaim "thank the One Above that, despite everything, I am a Lubavitcher."
Truman | 07.17.08 - 2:18 am | #

The key to Rebbetzin Heller's success is that as she herself admits that as an aspirant intellectual from Boston with an academic degree or two she then was won over to frumkeit, and in turn she was chosen to be a teacher and "spokesperson" for the BT girls and women from Neve and any Haredi women who can tolerate such an asexual woman, she talks NOT in the style and words of the frum world, but she uses the language and logic of the secular world to beguile and argue the frum cause. Now this is not a crime, since many rabbis do this, like Rabbi Berel Wein and others, but Tzipora Heller uses it to ensnare young women who have a spiritual yearning in their hearts into an unforgiving Haredi world that will subjugate the women who join it, if they do, to a life very unlike the high falutin and high minded picture she paints for them.

This is a difficult subject.
Zeitgeist | 07.18.08 - 4:17 am | #