Dear Rabbi Ehrentreu שליט״א, with all due respect to you – and I have a great deal of admiration for you – I have a different שיטה with regard to the issues of “recognition” and, hence, Limmud. In my fifty-two years of public life – twenty-five in the pulpit and twenty-seven at Yeshiva as President and now Chancellor and Rosh HaYeshiva – I have struggled with this theme and have listened intently and carefully to the point of view you now expound and to which, indeed, I myself first subscribed. However, I now firmly believe that it is a nostrum that has not in the least improved the religious situation of American Jewry. We too, by some legerdemain and statistical pilpul, acted as if Orthodoxy was the religion of choice by the majority of American Jewry, and we therefore refused to recognize the other groups which we considered not only heretical but minority sects, splinter and deviant groups that have nothing to say and nothing to contribute to כלל ישראל. We have gained nothing from this approach other than a growing estrangement from the masses of Jews who do not know us and now do not want to know us – and a long, fruitless, and damaging polemic within Orthodox circles. I wish to make it clear I do not regard myself as a pluralist, if by that term it is meant that all “denominations” are equally valid. That is nothing but a disguised relativism that can only result in nihilistic chaos. But I do not believe that we gain anything for כלל ישראל by insulating שלומי אמוני ישראל from them. As רבנים our mission is הרבצת התורה to all Israel, most especially to those who have wandered off the דרך הישר. You know as well as or better than I do the Netziv’s interpretation of אוהב את הבריות ומקרבן לתורה. If we speak only to our own group, only to other Orthodox Jews, we are essentially talking to ourselves, and while it is good to reinforce our own people in their אמונה, this must not be our total preoccupation. You say that Limmud turned down the offer of a special session…