By Rabbi Dovid Sapirman, Dean, Ani Maamin Foundation
With gratitude to Hashem, I am happy to announce the publication of my new book, Separated to be Mine. This book’s central message is one that explores our history and where we have gone wrong.
The Torah warns us in no uncertain terms that we must be separated from the nations of the world. The more we mingle in their society, the more corruption we absorb. Historically, on almost every occasion that am Yisrael slid down the slope of defection from Torah, it was due to the imitation of our gentile neighbors.
In more recent times, too, there was a rejection of Torah among the Jewish masses, but one which exceeded all those that preceded it. Around 250 years ago, it would have been difficult to find a Jewish person willing to be mechallel Shabbos even in private—certainly never in public. Today, 80% of the Jewish population has intermarried, or at least assimilated to the degree that they have no connection whatsoever to their heritage. Most of them couldn’t care less about Shabbos, if they even know what it is.
How did this happen? Most frum people, when asked, have no more than a vague, general idea of how this decline played out. Many still picture the great yeshivos and gedolim that were found in Europe, the faithful and observant shtetl of so many stories. That perception was once accurate, but over a century before the Holocaust, things began to change.
The Torah commands us, “Remember the days of old, understand the years of each generation.” If we do not know about our past, similar events could easily happen to us, chas v’shalom. So I set out to write a book that help us understand what happened, and how world Jewry came to find itself in the state it is today.
This book has not yet been released to bookstores, but is available on Amazon. Feedback has been outstanding; I hope that readers of this newsletter will seize the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson from our nation’s past.
