One of the surest signs that someone is going off the derech is when they start speaking highly of Martin Luther King. These days with everyone online we’re exposed to liberals and worse; liberal Jews, who still maintain their Jewishness by preparing for Martin Luther King Day shloishim yoim koidim hachag. We start seeing our newsfeeds on Facebook and Twitter flooded with #MLK hashtagged quotes, quotes which are somehow supposed to be inspirational but which, to a real Jew, aren’t.
“I have a dream”, what kind of naarishkeit is that? Yaakov Avinu had a dream, and that’s enough for me.
The idea that people should live together in peace? Who ever thought that was a Jewish ideal? Any self-respecting Jew who went to yeshiva or seminary in Israel or Gateshead knows that since the destruction of the temples Jews lived in ghettos because they didn’t want to have anything to do with their non-Jewish neighbors. They didn’t want to take even a tiny chance of being influenced by them, and the chances of being influenced by their neighbors was tiny because after all – their neighbors were always drunk or pogromming against them. Even so they didn’t want to take a chance and they allowed the goyim to lock them up in ghettos because that’s what Hashem wanted.
And let’s not forget that we only came to the unholy USA because the holy alte heim was overturned by Hashem like Sodom and Gomorrah and when we got here, the better Jews amongst us immediately shuttered ourselves in ghettos in Lakewood, Boro Park, Williamsburg and New Square. It’s only out of towners who like the idea of living together in peace with the goyim because they’re influenced by the goyim around them.
The danger with allowing Martin Luther King’s ideas to penetrate our holy communities is that once you’re willing to live together with non-Jews in peace, next you’ll be willing to live in Riverdale next door to Open Orthodox Jews and that undermines Judaism faster than living in peace with the Reform.
So when you see someone posting MLK quotes today, or not working, you’ll be doing a mitzvah by giving them mussar and helping them avoid going down the slippery slope to OTDland.