DEUT1223 Don't point to an institution's imperfections as reasons for not acknowledging the good it has done you. The Talmud teaches, "Cast no mud into the well from which you have drunk" (Bava Kamma 92b). Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik taught that if you study at a school, even if you come to disagree with the school's approach later, don't "throw mud at it" and condemn it because of those aspects of the institution with which you now disagree (Rabbi Soloveitchik's teaching is cited in Weiss, Insights, vol. 1, 66). This dictum is relevant as well for those who have changed their religious orientation. For example, some Jews who grow up Orthodox later leave it for other denominations, while others who grow up Reform, Conservative, or unaffiliated later become Orthodox. Such people often speak with bitterness of the movements in which they were raised, but they should also acknowledge whatever good they gained from their earlier experiences. And those who claim that their experience was entirely negative should reflect on what is perhaps the most unusual of the Torah's 613 commandments: "You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land" [this verse]. Although the experience of Egyptian slavery included oppression and the drowning of Israelite newborns, the Israelites were commanded not to hate Egyptians; rather, they were to remember--along with the recollections of slavery--how Egypt originally admitted them (at the time of Joseph), saved them from famine, and treated them with generosity. If we are commanded to remember the good even when mingled with such evil, then we are certainly obligated to recall the good done for us by institutions and denominations with which we later come to disagree.
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