Alternately I could have titled this post, "Don't judge me on what you don't know about me." This is coming from a bit of a rabbit trail that occurred in the comment thread on a post on Hadassah's blog. Simply put an anonymous blogger decided to judge my actions and my advice by assumptions they made about my past, from nuggets of truth I and my wife dropped.
Now it is a free internet(mostly) and you are free(within certain bounds) to think and say whatever you please. However, if you are going to judgments about me based on what you think happened in my life, you are most probably going to be wrong. That is unless you are one of my handful of intimate friends that actually know the whole story behind the story. In all likelihood you may have sat next to me everyday in minyan and learned with me as Havruta every night while I was preparing for my Semiha examinations and you still would not know the whole story.
Reason being is that I kept the vast majority of the details that caused me to make the radical life changes that occured in my life nearly ten years ago entirely to myself, and exactly four other people. Why? To protect the reputations of the guilty. I chose to uproot myself and what was left of my crumbling life at the time, rather than cause communal splits or embarrassment(no matter how due) to other people.
One excellent example of this is the dissolution of my first marriage. Believe me when I say that no matter how close you think you were to me in the community I was living in at the time, you do not know what went down. Even the Beit Din knew only the bare minimum that my to'ain deemed necessary to achieve the desired outcome(I wasn't willing to pay her ketuba after having signed over my savings and investment portfolio which was already worth four times over). So the next time I visit you need not stare daggers at my back, because really you are clueless.
If I am vague in actual reality I am doubly so in virtual reality. I have no intention or desire to spew my bile all over the ethers of cyberspace. I hope for my posts and comments to be about hizuk and the discussion of Torah ideas. I desire that my blog and comments on other blogs draw people closer to HaShem and Judaism. If I were to talk openly about my past, which for several years of my history would be more about how I was dumped upon(putting it politely) than anything even remotely uplifting, it would achieve just the opposite.
However, I choose not to focus on the negative actions of others. As someone who is a tzadik yesod olam once said to me, "everyone is a Ba'al Teshuva, everyone even Moshe Rabbeinu..." If you truly understand that statement it is impossible to take offense at people for their actions. None of us have achieved perfection in this life, and the best we can say about the best of us is that they do teshuva right away after their sin.
There is a lot more I could say on this topic, but it will suffice to say that if you really want to judge me or my statements by what you think you know about me, or what you assume you know, if that will make you feel better somehow than feel free. You certainly won't be the first, and unfortunately you probably won't be the last... however dollars to doughnuts says that you are wrong.
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