This is just a brain dump of thoughts and questions I’ve been thinking about, regarding how to define myself and my standards in different areas where there is a choice in how much of a connection to have to secular culture.
Often it feels like I’m walking a tightrope between the purity of Torah and the offerings of the secular world, and I’m managing to keep my balance to a degree I can live with. But sometimes I experience moments of existential confusion when I realize that I can’t spend my life on a tightrope and certainly can’t raise a family on one. I suppose a lot of us have these conflicts in certain areas of frumkeit and Yiras Shomayim, and in others, we’re clearer on where we stand. Some of these areas that people find themselves slipping and sliding around are social media use, socializing between men and women, secular entertainment, reading material, news sources…
I don’t have answers and some of these areas are not clear to me. There are also the many questions: Is there ever therapeutic value in secular entertainment, that makes it acceptable or even important? How do we define “kosher outlet”? How much or how little do various activities define who you are? How and when do you bring them up during dating? When is improvement in one of these areas a goal and when is it not the time to be devoting energy there?
I talked about this with a couple of friends and they made a few points:
-Behaviors might change based on internal and external demands and capacities, but attitudes are generally consistent. What are your underlying attitudes and what are the attitudes that are important to you?
-Where is your emphasis? What do you consider to be essential to your identity and what is a by-the-way that perhaps you could see yourself living without?
-You can’t prune away parts of yourself but you can develop the parts of yourself you want to be stronger, and by virtue of their growing, they crowd out other, less important, pursuits.
-It’s much easier to slide than to grow. Be conscious of how you are using your time and what you are inviting into your life.
Do you have any thoughts?
