More stupidity from Lakewood

An interesting article appears in the Chronicles of Crisis column in this week's Jewish Press. In short, several families with young children were visiting their grandparents in Lakewood. The basement of the house was rented out to a kollel family, also with young children. The fire in the basement stove went out on Shabbat and the "man" of the house refused to turn off the gas. Soon enough the people upstairs started smelling gas and becoming sick. After finding nothing upstairs, one of the visitors, child in tow, came downstairs to investigate. It didn't take long to find the problem, and the visitor instructed his child to turn off the stove, which was not burning, under the disdainful eyes of the kollel "man."

The people who run Lakewood outdo themselves in stupidity and rish'ut every day. It doesn't matter how many blatt they memorized; they're still a bunch of imbeciles. Are they so busy banning books that they don't teach their talmidim the basics of survival? That man was worse than a hasid shoteh! The people in that house, according to the article, were becoming nauseous and getting headaches. Classic symptoms of gas poisoning. Continuously streaming gas displaces oxygen, dumbass! And any source of ignition might well have ignited a conflagration in which any or all of the occupants of that house, including young children, could have died, not to mention the firefighters who would have responded. They don't work hard enough, you see, they need extra business from yeshiva people who are supposed to have brains. Haven't the Kotlers and Salomons, with all their "learning," stumbled on an obscure concept called "pikuah nefesh?" It would serve that "man" right to be arrested for child endangerment and to have his children taken away.

Finally, why did the visitor instruct his child to turn off the stove? I learned that in cases of pikuah nefesh one does not ask a child or a Gentile to do the work, but does it himself. Even the gadol ha-dor, if present, must do the job himself to impress on the community the importance of setting Shabbat restrictions aside when human life is in danger. I would have brought my child downstairs, turned off the stove myself, opened the windows and told my child in a loud voice, making sure the "man" of the house hears, that when life is in danger you correct the situation first and ask questions later.