Yup sounds like he is a hater with an ax to grind
If you think I’m some anti askanim anti yeshiva HH guy you completely misread my post. I have tremendous respect for our askanim, elected officials, and rabbanim. They do an often thankless task, largely behind the scenes, and give of themselves so much in ways that are often largely unknown. The lengths that they go for yechidim and the klal are unbelievable, and they often get abused and criticized for things that they would be getting accolades for if the inside story was able to be divulged. But the issue raised was the dynamic that Lakewood finds itself in and my post addressed that.
Everyone knows that if you take a snapshot of a society and it’s dynamics, it didn’t develop overnight in a vacuum. For example, the Chareidi society in E”Y and it’s relationship to the government can be traced back to the Zionist movement in Europe, the zionists and the Holocaust, Ben Gurion and the Charon Ish, the Brisker Rav, and many complex factors that led to the situation as it is today.
Another example is the Chassidim and their relationship with secular society and government. One can write a thesis on the evolution of that dynamic and it’s contributory causes.
Lakewood is no different. To take a snapshot of Lakewood today and blame things on covid is to miss the complex evolution of a dynamic that has many root causes so that what you see today is the symptom, not the cause.
Every one of the things I mentioned (and many many more that I did not mention) is a contributing factor. For example, the fact that the leadership was very young when they assumed that role meant that there were other forces in town that considered themselves (and still consider themselves)to be from the previous dor and not seeing the need to shtel tzu to those much younger than them. This allowed for the emergence of political leadership that didn’t necessarily see eye to eye with the Rabbinic-leadership, something that would obviously have been impossible in the days of Rav Aharon.
This lead to a situation where you had widely diverging views on a host of issues. Sometimes people received private guidance from the Rabbinic leadership that was contrary to the public position for this reason. For example you had yungerleit “protesting the yeshiva” developing a mall but there was really private guidance that encouraged said letters and protests.
Perhaps I’ll expand on some of the other points in the post later but if you look at each of them they clearly contributed and shaped the dynamic that is now taking place.