March 21, 2014
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I asked him if he was familiar with the book Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, and he said he knew the author and her ex-husband very well. He appeared to lament the fact that being Hasidic was an all-or-nothing scenario. “We are all so scared of abandoning this world of safety,” he said in a moment of surprising eloquence, “that it is very hard to do anything different.”
I noticed he was wearing a sweatshirt and had very few of the ridiculous fashion accessories they usually wear. He told me his brothers embarrass him sometimes with their giant hats and their 1890s clothes. He implied that they enjoy ostracizing themselves, as they have no interest in the modern world. He also told me his wife isn”t bald. What a bizarre world he lives in. If your wife doesn”t shave her head bald and then stick a wig on top that looks like her normal hair, she’s insane.
I asked him about Jewish inbreeding (another thing they have in common with Muslims), and he had never heard of such a thing. I told him that it happens so often that hospitals devote entire departments to “Jewish Genetic Diseases.” He hadn”t heard of that or anything, really. He didn”t even turn on the TV in front of him. “I watch some movies,” he confided, “but this is very rare among my people. They don”t permit watching movies with sex or violence. They don”t really watch movies at all. It’s all about preserving our way of life, and that is becoming very difficult.”
I said that Jared Taylor once told me it’s impressive that a culture could remain so steeped in such an esoteric tradition in the center of one of the world’s most hedonistic cities. My new friend then explained that after WWII, the Hasids went from a strange outlying sect everyone ignored to a force with which to be reckoned. “Before Hitler,” he said, “many of us were trying to spread this culture, this way of dress, even in Williamsburg, but nobody was interested. After the Holocaust, they listened.” He all but admitted that the Holocaust was the best thing that ever happened to the Hasidic movement. There’s nothing wrong with saying this. You don”t have to advocate slavery to admit that modern blacks in America are better off than their relatives in Africa.
He said his long-term goals include a school where those who appear to be losing their faith can live in a more moderate environment instead of abandoning Judaism altogether. I mentioned a school in LA that my friend’s kids attend that is run by atheist rabbis. He hadn”t heard of that, either. It wasn”t hard to blow this guy’s mind.
After the plane landed and we began to disembark, we shook hands and finally introduced ourselves. I told him I enjoyed meeting him and asked for his email address. He wrote it down on his airline ticket and handed it to me. Our meeting had been more than two people getting together. It was two worlds colliding in the sky in an explosion of harmony. Like the staunch orthodoxy he was up against, I was stuck in my old ways, unable to shake the foundations of my beliefs, and he had taught me how wrong I was.
But as he walked off toward baggage claim, I waved goodbye and smiled. It seemed like a perfect moment, but then I heard him mutter something that sounded like “Kol Tuv” under his breath when he thought I was out of earshot. His last-minute insult didn”t change my opinion of the whole exchange, but I threw his email in the garbage, anyway.
