AJ, I’m not sure what it is you think I believe that you no longer do. I agree with you that nothing but an honest effort is being made in Passaic. I am only saying that there is something about the media triangulation here that makes me uncomfortable.

I believed as you did until about a year ago. It was then that I became more aware of the scope of the problem when a switch from “anecdotal awareness” became a “hitting close to home” situation where people I know and care about were affected (and in more than one separate instance.) I’m not sure how giving the Rav and the community, who are making an honest effort, a pat on the back is a bad thing. It is a mostly innocuous way of pushing the other communities a bit. And I am not unaware of the problems of the secular press demonizing the frum world, it is just that we cannot sacrifice our children for the sake of good PR.

I certainly hope children here are as safe as they can be. We have many people, institutions and cultural tendencies here that would trend in that direction.

But, to put this in a way that will be most palatable to those most motivated by this issue, we should always be suspicious of how truly effective are what I will call “demonstrations” which at once (1) make us “feel good” about what a good job we are doing casting out our devils (especially compared to our benighted fellows elsewhere), and (2) happen to play very well with elements — notably the typically antagonistic secular press — that will also applaud us for doing so.

My personal inclination to be particularly suspicious when being applauded by the latter types is, perhaps, unduly cynical, but for me it does raise at least a yellow flag. After all, what has made them so pleased and positive? Our “admission” that we are, as a community, particular stricken by the most wicked of moral failings — “the frum community’s 9/11″ — and that, at the relatively small cost of elevating Passaic to the ranks of “honest about its failings,” they are able, by contradistinction, to condemn just about every other Jewish community that supposedly is “not doing enough.”

So: Ok, good. Perhaps we are doing the right thing here in Passaic. I sure hope so. But that’s no excuse for communal self-aggrandizement, much less for demonization of other, typically larger and far more established and complex frum communities whose challenges may be very different from our own (a topic I discussed here earlier this year).