The Shaigetz - Doing it maai vey

Call Me Desperate

2009-07-21T20:45:00.002+01:00

“Look, the father has no money.”
“How do you know?”
“The shadchan said ‘A poshiter yid.”
“That just means a normal person.”
“No. That’s the same as saying, ‘Somebody insignificant, I can think of nothing he is noteworthy of.”
“Then how do you know it is only money he doesn’t have? Maybe he has no brains either?”
“You’re learning!”
“Or yichus or personality or looks?”
“Right.”
“So what else did he say?”
“He said the girl is sweet.” This is uttered with a smirk of distaste.
“Ah? And that’s not good?”
“Motty, I thought you were listening? What is sweet? Sweet is pretty? No. Pretty is pretty. So Miss Sweet is not pretty.”
Motty is used to the logic of the Talmud and he recognises a straight line when he sees one.
“Ok, so she’s not pretty. Vus noch?”
“She’s got ‘a good heart.” Again her words hang starkly in their inverted commas.
“OK a ‘good heart’ I know this one!” Motty shouts jubilantly. “A good heart is a laidigayer and a Shaigetz whom you can find nothing at all nice to say about.”
“No,” she says wearily, “that’s for a boy. When you say a girl has a good heart it means she has no personality. It is usually joined up with, ‘She always makes peace among all the other girls.’
She is the one nobody wants to be friends with and she has a good heart for not fighting back.”
“So what else do we know about her and her family?”
“They don’t have any friends.”
“Nu, how do you know that?”
“He described them as quiet people living simple lives and not showing off.”
“Ok. So that’s it? That’s all you know?”
“She is average height, she has brown hair and brown eyes and she is eighteen and a half.”
“Wow! How did you figure all that out?”
“The shadchan told me.”
“Oh. So then we should tell him, why should we take a girl with no family no money and no looks and who everybody bullies for our son?”
She stops him with a stern look and holds the silence for a moment.
“He will ask you, ‘You are selling any better?”
“Nu, I will say, ‘Yes. Maybe I am not Rothschild but I make a living.”
“If the shadchen knew what you are earning, he would tell them about you what he told us about them.”
“My father is an important man.”
“Important to whom? To your mother? To his tenants? To the people he owes money to?
Leave me alone with important. If they are as important as your father I will be happy.”
“Shoin. So I will say, ‘I want a girl mit a bissel character. More a leader.”
“Ovay! You know what you are saying? They will start bringing you all the chutzpah girls . The loud ones. A leader? What's a leader? A leader is the one who gets all the others in trouble. A troublemaker they call a leader. Azah leader, I would lead her to the prison.”
“You are so clever my neshamele. So what should I say to the man?”
“Tell him he should make a time and we will meet these people and see what they got.”
“You sure?” he asks earnestly, uncertainty evident in his voice.
“Yes, Motty dear. And do me a favour; the kids are running around upstairs, go up there and show them who the man is in this house.”

JFS Between Ourselves

2009-07-06T17:41:00.008+01:00

Britain's United Synagogue has determinedly struggled to portray Judaism as an alternative version of Christianity for as long as I can remember. The clergy look the same as the same as their Christian counterparts and usually sound roughly the same. Most are equally apologetic for any inconvenience their beliefs and customs might cause and equally eager to bend over backwards to accommodate any difference of opinion even at the expense of watering down their own quasi-beliefs.

True, our star does not look quite like the cross, and the crucifixion and resurrection are only remotely mirrored in secular Judaism's holocaust and independence worship, still to the week-end adherent the two religions are differentiated only by superficial minutiae.

I attended a lavish Bat-Mitzva party recently. It was in a popular, very upmarket venue and the menu was kosher style. I, the lone kosher guest was honoured with a specially ordered, enthusiastically cling wrapped and doubly sealed kosher meal. The theme was High School Musical and a talented troupe of 'high school' dancers entertained the guests between the elegant courses.

I had just remarked to my wife how 'normal' it must seem to the goyim who had probably come with a little trepidation to a Jewish religious party, when one of them leaned across the table to me. “I love your Jewish parties,” he screamed above the blaring rendition of Start of Something New. “They are so much more meaningful than ours.”

Israel's Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is unapologetic in his views. His declaration last week that the innocent victims of the holocaust were probably reincarnates who had sinned in previous lives raised a ruckus when it was reported in the media. This apparently is what he believes, based on his vast, intimate and probably unique perception of His workings. The great unlearned in the media, who in their utter ignorance chose to portray it as criticism of the departed are just as entitled to make their point as he was. Rabbi Yosef remains unperturbed and unrepentant.

Unfortunately, our Great British leaders have none of this decisive finality.We can only choose between the U.S. politically correct approach, which teaches us to think we are probably right but also to accept that the others might be right too; So we are the chosen people but if that offends anyone we can negotiate it away. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, the local Charedi leadership, teaching that we are the chosen people and if anybody says different they are fascists and antisemites.

It has not always been so. England's former Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jacobowitz was never one to mince his words. Among other controversial remarks, he risked the ire of his own community to publicly opine that eventually Israel would have to make peace with the Arabs. In a time when that view was considered almost blasphemous in his community, he suffered for his frankness but refused to qualify it. As one paper wrote when he passed away, “He is the one prelate whose preaching did not, in the views of Mrs Thatcher, give God a bad name.”

London's late Rav Padwa was not one to be pushed around either. He once spectacularly agreed to remove his rabbinate's revered stamp of approval from a kosher hotel in Bournmouth, after some pious wankers in his rabbinate complained there were TVs (gasp!) in the bedrooms. After promptly giving in to them he went on to declare that henceforth his hechsher would apply only to the food served there. As his supervision had always been limited to the kitchen and dining room anyway (to the best of my knowledge there were never any hidden video cameras under the eiderdowns) nothing actually changed.

The JFS policy of enrolling only orthodox certified Jews is a cynical attempt at maintaining as Orthodox a Jewish school where most children's exposure to yiddishkeit is practically limited to the school's 'Love of Israel' program and the occasional Bat Mitva bash.

The school will not maintain a Jewish character by refusing admittance to those it does not consider Jewish enough. Empirical evidence has shown that Jewish values are nurtured in the home, not school, and they are rarely eroded by exposure to non-Jews. Conversely the school Purim and Tu Bishvat celebrations so beloved by the secular parents for being universal, normal and inoffensive will not on their own nurture a new generation of committed Jews however goyrein the class.

The Age of Experience

2009-06-07T17:06:00.015+01:00

With age comes experience, they say.

I don't know whether the reason my views change is to do with experience gained or simply because we change as we age. What is certain is that much of the anger that boiled within me when I first started blogging has largely subsided or muted. I have come to accept that the lifestyle I promote is no more necessarily correct for everyone than the one I like to bash.

Indeed the Torah im Derech Ertetz model that worked so well in Germany before the war, and that I see as a model for chassidic neo-orthodoxy, actually relies on the societal norms to curb the worst of the most base of our urges. That does not necessarily work in today's world. We have mostly therefore chosen to shelter our children from most of the excesses of the permissive society. Exposure to the internet however is still supplying our youth with the same information that the precocious local youth is getting.

To illustrate: A young newly-wed I met, was briefly briefed on the facts of life a few weeks before he was wed. He had known before of course, and he had seen some porn once or twice on the web, but it was still quite an experience for him to be suddenly thrown into bed with a quivering virgin. He rose to the cause though, and they set off on life's journey together.

There was just one little thing bothering our man of the hour. She compared slightly unfavourably, in provocative prowess, with the Liliths in those movies. As time progressed and he assiduously studied 'her problem' on the net, the way boys today do, he naturally came to the conclusion she was frigid and needed help. Of course, when they heard, both families came up in arms and it was only with some very professional help and lots of diplomacy that friction was removed from two shattered families and restored to a truly messy conjugal bed.

You cannot just nibble at the apple of knowledge. All the little 'bits' interlink in a million possible ways and there is no way you can control the flow of information once it begins its path. I used to counter-argue that the Internet does have the function of providing the only loudspeaker inside the community. Like this blog gets away with saying what no one dares sign their name to.

I lied.

There is one man who dares to say what no one else dares to say. He lives in New York and his name is Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg. He is a man with a mission. An international mikve expert, he has a telephone hotline in Yiddish in which he regularly rails against sexual abuse of boys in the community. And he does not just rant. He spits into the blind eye of the community authorities. When he gets wind of anything untoward he warns the Rabbis in charge and if it is not dealt with immediately he informs the relevant authorities.

To be fair, I must add that I have spoken to many of these men of dark cloth myself and despite their dangerous and damaging silence, it seems to me that most are truly well-meaning. Most Charedi rabbis display almost pathetically naïve ignorance both of the gravity of the damage sexual abuse causes and the frequency at which it occurs. There is also a strong sense of defending the community by denying they do any wrong much like parents would if you accused their son of stealing.

I again stress that I disagree with those who state it is more widespread than most other places, or even that it is particularly widespread or generally condoned. But it does happen and the fact that touching does not involve a biblical prohibition should not diminish the gravity of the deed.

Rabbi Nuchem says all this and more. He publicly shamed the Jerusalem Rabbinical authorities, who had allowed a Mikve in their own back yard to turn into a den of iniquity right in their blind spot, into placing guards there who would protect the children from preying lechers. He has named many Schools and Yeshivas in the States who harbour molesters on their staff. He is listened to by thousands of Chassidim all over the world and he has suffered much abuse for it.

He has been assaulted and had his life threatened, he has had to call on the local police for protection. He has been called all the names in the book by sect after sect - each as one of theirs was targeted. (Before that each had smugly revelled in the other's discomfort.) But he persevered. He has been labelled a publicity seeker, but I have learned he declined to be interviewed by the British Guardian newspaper because their anti-Israeli image suggested that it would provoke negative publicity rather than momentum for change.

Reb Nuchem has made a very personal sacrifice for the sake of the pure little victims who would have their innocent lives shattered to relieve the fleeting urges of the sick and egotistical parasites who roam the education system like greedy diabetics in a candy store. He humbles me, who would not sacrifice my personal well being and that of my family for the cause. But I am still a good sight younger than him.

I sincerely hope that by the time I reach the age of his wisdom the problem will no longer exist.

terse verse

2009-01-05T22:04:00.009Z

Do not be blinded by their lies
Hatreds as old as the hills are a playing here,
Rage, rage against appeasement of the beast.

Though wise men know sometimes dark is right
Our liberals strike but fork their lightning.
Do not get blinded by their lies.

Good men wave goodbye with heavy hearts.
Have the deadly deeds over, let’s live in peace.
Rage, rage against appeasement of the beast.

Wise men who truly know no race nor creed
Having learned too late they were used by It,
Do not get blinded by their lies.

Sad men, near death, who still focus with deadly sights
Blind eyes, could blaze with meteors and still be gay?
Rage, rage against appeasement of the beast.

And you, my Father, there on sad height,
Bless us instead with your fierce tears, I pray we
Do not get blinded by their lies.
Rage, rage against appeasement of the beast.

The Gladiators

2008-12-04T01:26:00.010Z

They were two Lubavitchers, a Bobover and a Satmerer, a woman about to make Aliya and a backpacker. A group of Jews united by chance in a place far from chassivilisation, now frozen together in time, forever seared into our collective memories as the victims in Chabad House, Mumbai.

I cannot begin to imagine the horror of their last hours. A police doctor who examined the dead remarked that the Israeli corpses evinced signs of having been exceptionally savagely tortured before being executed, to the extent that he could not bring himself to speak of the depravities he had remarked. The terrorists were probably aware that Chabad House did not represent the state of Israel and that, like all Chabad Houses in the world, it would house Jews of all denominations and persuasions. That on any given day it could contain anybody from a peacenik who had travelled to be a human shield in Saddam's Iraq, to a Golani on holiday and from a street musician junkie to a shy Chassidic mashgiach. The instructions they had received, to kill whites and westerners and especially Israelis, was sadly not an expression of blind hatred for Jews, it is likely that they had never met any Jews before. But from a cold strategic point of view the amount of media coverage dead Jews get is completely out of proportion to their number. And in this gruesome war, deaths on TV are a means as well as an end

It is a cruel irony that the main grievance of those who had directed and ordered this butchery -objection to the crusade like export of the miniskirt and fruit flavoured condoms under the guise of democracy- is one they share with the Chassidim. It is in the methods they use to combat it that the Jews and Muslims differ. Indeed, if you talk of a clash of civilisations then the finest warriors of both sides clashed in Chabad House, Mumbai.

Our side's weaponry is well known to me. Like any religious Jew who travels I have basked in Chabad's hospitality and kindness. I admit, to my shame, that like many of my Central European Chassidic friends I used to treat them with a little disdain; their wide fedora hats symbolising for us slightly wacky cousins who sometimes embarrass us a little with their exuberant religiosity. They often acknowledge it good-naturedly. However, after spending some time with them in their cultural oases I have been humbled by the true asceticism of these young families and more by their utter assurance that spreading God's love to lost Jews and making a kiddush Hashem is the real answer to all the problems of the world, from decaying society to Islamic terrorists.

It is a chilling irony that the network of Chabadpoints around the world is perceived by international terrorists as equal to an Israeli embassy. Ironic because I too, as a British Chassid, would probably prefer to be represented in a time of crisis by the apolitical local Chabad chapter than the Israeli embassy. Chabad has turned itself into a well oiled machine. While the other Chassidim, fearful that the permissive society would catch their young, enclosed themselves inside a greasy cocoon and banned anything that might open a window out, Chabad set up their training camps and sent scouts out into enemy territory. Instead of oppressing the strangers and misfits among them, Chabad nurtured the professionals and intellectuals that were joining and set to utilising their strengths. Their exemplary handling of the Mumbai crisis speaks for itself. Their media presence was uniquely professional and reliable. In the midst of the confusion and carnage they were cool and collected and even when the tragic loss of life became apparent, true to their crusade, their spokesman nobly called for an end to hate and extra prayer.

The equally well oiled machine they faced came armed too. With the very latest in high tech weaponry, an extreme indoctrination into the justness of their cause and, allegedly, a large amount of halal cocaine. They set to practicing their murderous craft with a vengeance. The kindest of hearts, the most endearing smile, the most attentive ear even the most helping of hands, stand no chance when up against the cutting edge of fanatical evil. It cannot be easy to torture, kill and mutilate a pregnant woman and a grandmother, scholars and rabbis, kind and gentle people who had dedicated their lives to spreading goodness and love to everyone they met, but they soldiered on the brave warriors of Allah the Merciful, and from their point of view they were victorious.

It is a scary irony that the Judaism that secular Jews in Israel, the USA and Britain hijacked to make it synonymous with the modern permissiveness that the fundamentalist Muslims so detest, is most easily recognised on my community. So it is we, the Chassidim, who not only are exposed to the petty hate on the trains and buses, while the secular Jews politely disregard our discomfort behind their copies of the Guardian, but are now also so handily easy to pick out in the crowd by any sniper or suicidal maniac who happens to be operational.

It is amusingly ironic to me that despite this, and despite having in the past many times slipped out of the garb when it was practical for me, I now wear it with even more pride than ever. I belong to The Army of God, and if it is my fate that one day I die for it, I will do so gladly rather than give in to a force that is evil to its very core. So base that it forces us to side with the USA, Britain and Israel in order to help defeat it.

Who is John Gelt?

2008-03-14T04:09:00.006Z

I don't think writing a blog can do much more for my cause than this one has. I had joy and some fun and my season in the sun, and with close to half a million hits, an achievement of sorts for the voice of the lone Chassid. I have managed to avoid being lynched and that is a victory of thoughts too.

I have come to the stage where what I have already written more or less covers what I have to say and challenging myself to find a new angle is not satisfying. I could put the points of what could have been the next four blogs in four paragraphs. It makes a far less enjoyable read but what difference does that make?

1) Growing consumerism is changing the face of Chassidus. When a young man can announce in shul that he left Kollel to afford a new kitchen to nary the bat of an eyelid, it is plain that our friend Lucre will eventually convert the bulk of Chassidim into (slim) curly locked MOs. It is the ascetics in kippot srugot, who forgo worldly pleasures for a gemara and stop under sniper fire to daven mincha that will be the Chassidim of tomorrow, even above the brave young Lubavitchers who do such fantastic work, practicing true chassidus with blind faith. Indeed the visit of the Belzer Rebbe to the victims in hospital of the heinous butchery in Merkaz Harav and the heartfelt bemoaning of it by the Satmar Rebbe seem to nod in that direction.

2) If we chassidim, the outsiders, wish to survive and prosper in a world that will polarise into them and us, we should make ourselves useful to society. An interesting idea that should be considered is to broaden the scope of the Hatzola into a Charedi civil emergency reserve for times of disaster. Zaka and Ezra L’marpeh have very successfully promoted the image of caring Chassidim as neutral emergency staff.

3) We are tired and sinking as we wait for moral or practical guidance from the tzaddikate. The Rabbinate is like an oracle. It can answer all your questions except the real one; What should I ask you? If we are to function as a society we must have government. Leaders who know how to lead and Rabbis -clearly briefed on the situation, the options and possible repercussions - they can turn to for guidance. These leaders need to be representative of the actual kehilla and not only those who pay a membership fee!
In the battle of civilisations, despite being ideologically closer to true religious Islam than Christianity, our laxity in promoting our own image to the outside world has allowed the secular and armchair yids to drag us with them into the Christian or humanist camps. We must not allow the non-religious establishment to represent us or to imply that their policy of grovelling and obsequious cameraderie with the establishment is the way of the Book to these people of It.

4) We must learn to admit our shame. Sex molestation is still going on in the community and we all know it. The names of people who prey on little boys must be handed over to the authorities to be dealt with. It is a disease that can sometimes be controlled but often not and it destroys lives! Oh, and Rabbi, please memorise this catchy little truism; Playing with a little yingele’s thingele, if you are not that yingele, is always sexual abuse!

However, this blog is not just my about my thoughts being read by other people. The Shaigetz living inside me has become part of who I am. The authority I gain by knowing how many people will read what I say colours not only the way I write but also the way I think and speak. I have become more assertive at work and have gained much in stature; such is the power of a blog.

I have become much prouder of being a Chassid, especially among goyim, since getting to know the Shaigetz, and much quicker to interact with them. The more I do the more I notice how many others are prepared to be as nice to you as you are to them, despite our inculcated notion that most goyim really don’t like us. (Funny to think they think we don’t like them.)

Lastly, I think to generate change might be easier than most would suppose. People welcome self-assured authority and true leadership. I am sure eventually someone with the necessary stature will emerge and effect some real and necessary change. But he will be flesh and blood not an ethereal presence. Maybe then someone will ask, “Do you think he was the Shaigetz?” and a (slim) Chassid will reply, “Who is John Gelt?”

The World According to Carp

2007-12-26T16:02:00.000Z

The morning dip in the mikve symbolises the washing away of impurities and a fresh start with a clean slate for the new day and although I have lapsed in the last few years and rarely still indulge, with the season of goodwill and cheer upon us and work on hold I thought what better time than now…

Like most mens mikves it is below ground and has a pretentious, six foot high turnstile gate to stop unwelcome guests from entering. I descend the stairs and the once familiar smell of shampoo, bleach and sweat assaults my nostrils. I take a neatly folded towel from the pile on a chair and push the changing room door open. I am hit by a blast of Vosene scented steam, the noise of running showers and the carefree chatter Chassidim only seem capable of in the mikve. My glasses cloud up immediately and I have to remove them to see where I am.

Astonishingly, nothing seems to have changed in the years since I last visited. The banal sickly green coloured floor to ceiling ceramic wall tiles that must have fallen off a local council building-site lorry, still lend an air of the public lavatory to the place. The rough wooden benches round the communal changing room and the metal hooks for the clothes above them are standard fixtures in every mikve. I used to be rather self conscious about this set up when I compared it to the luxury of the swimming baths where we all get our own cubicle. Seeing it now I realise it is no different to most sport club facilities I have visited. I smile to myself at one more indication we are not as different as we like to suppose.

The condensation was plainly not enough to cover my condescension and I am greeted with a gruff “Vus lachst di?” from a middle-aged heavyweight struggling to reach past his ample girth and pull his stretchy, off-white long-johns over his whiter shade of pale legs. “I am not laughing,” I reply as soon as I have collected myself but he is already busy untangling his trouser legs and ignores me.

I observe that the massive plastic bin for used towels is overflowing, evidence that a growing number of people take their ablutions here. With a dozen or more places like this in Stamford Hill alone, daily purity seems to be an in thing in chassidistan. I look around for a free spot to undress in and park myself next to a man I recognise. He considerately moves his shoes and clears a wider spot on the bench. He too can see I am no regular. As I fold my clothes and prepare my toiletries I listen to the men opposite discussing the new chastity laws.

I gather from their conversation that the Kedassia 9 have found a new way of marking their territory and are insisting that women buy only clothes that have been okayed by a group of checkers. I am encouraged to hear that the black-bearded guy with a very hairy chest and enormous pectorals does not like the idea of the hounds sniffing around his wife’s clothing and told his wife to ‘buy votever de hel she vonts’. Only one of the two others in the conversation thought maybe those exposed flesh seekers mean well, but even he did not sound too convinced.

As I head for the shower room armed only with a flannel and soap, Mr T. is expounding on how tzniusdik (chastely) yet beautifully his lovely wife dresses, to the delight of a young boy listening in with a voyeur’s intensity. The shower room contains five showers in a row, four of them in working order, making this one of the better maintained mikves in town. With the impressive row of shower gels and shampoos on display the old canard about Chassidim using only (kosher) margarine won’t wash anymore.

The hot water flows for about a minute each time you press the shower tap. With a good ten men in the room, each time a shower stops its inhabitant makes way for the next one to enter, in a bizarre sudsy musical showers. Our Chief Rabbi is getting a real washdown – That is a metaphor of course, I don’t mean the popular intellectual who wants to curb multiculturalism and has much to learn about the dignity of deference to traditional Torah values, but our own ineffectual scholarly leader who commands all the dignitaries who do defer, and is against any kinds of cultural awareness.

The issue is the latest fad for investment in Eastern European property. Apparently it has become popular in our circles to buy properties in these emerging economies, and a whole new class of bankrupts have lined the pockets of these emerging capitalists with the last of the savings of many a sorry opportunist. All the soapy limbed oracles are in agreement that for many of the uneducated newly weds we so avidly breed, such deals are their only chance of actually feeding their families.

A man with a face shaped like a ponderous fish with a very big mouth, sinewy thin limbs and a long pink loofah is adamant that the problem is that Chassidim do not want to work. If they did the goyim would employ them. "After all we are cleverer than them and better in every way." "This is reeeely the truth." another one pipes up helpfully. Big mouth waves him dismissively down with his loofah.

“The real truth is we are too clever to work a whole day in an office for a measly paycheck. Ven you vont to live kosher you need real money and dis you don’t make by vorking vid your hands.” At this I notice a few irritated expressions from the other shower users and I realise that this orifice has spoken before.

The rabbi who had been studiously scrubbing himself departs hastily for the pool, and as that theme is further expounded and blame heaped upon the rabbinate, tzaddikate and sundry, I retire there too. The waters of the mikve itself are warm and murky and I'm grateful for the strong chlorine smell. Two more people are already relaxing in there and had obviously been listening to the speech from the showers. As the Rabbi ritually bobs under the water and comes up each five seconds gasping like a whale, a red bearded head observes that he was right to escape from there before someone asked him what he is doing to remedy the situation.

“Nothing, they do, except find new ways to make our life even more expensive. But it’s no use, nothing will change. Frummer and the Shaigetz have even given up complaining about it.” I leave the mikve into the freezing cold London morning knowing at least one of their problems can be remedied.

Falling Apples of My Eye

2007-10-21T19:31:00.000+01:00

Children, even the best brought-up of all, like mine, have a nasty tendency to grow up. I should not have been surprised therefore when my son announced that he is considering going abroad to study next year. As the perspective merits of different yeshivas were bandied around and I glibly and lightly helped them weigh the merits of the brash but proud Jewishness of the American model against the arrogant but more spiritual intensity of the Jerusalem one, inside my heart sank down into my nether regions.

If there is one question that I have always avoided answering readers of this blog with any clarity it is about how I bring up my children, torn as I am between the intellectual freedom I have chosen and the closed insularity of the community I reside within.

The years I spent in yeshiva in Israel were among the most miserable of my life. Separated from my books, radio and indeed any contact with the outside world, I felt lost and trapped. The study of Talmud, although in fact difficult enough to be a satisfying challenge, was carried out under such duress and with such dogmatic simplicity that I spent every waking moment dreaming of what I would do when I was old enough to assert my independence and live in the way I saw fit.

The lack of physical comforts were easier to bear for one like me, brought up in the poverty inherent to families where learning is the only respected profession. As my father tarried in the evening with his true love in the hallowed halls of learning, we regularly sat alone to our meagre supper and my mother would remind us that to those who valued learning above those prized above rubies, greater rewards await in the kingdom come. That argument sometimes lacked conviction for me and I often swore to myself that my children would have a loving and warm family and as many creature comforts as I could possibly provide.

As soon as I was old enough to shake off the heavy hand of parental and rabbinical authority, I left, and celebrated my new-found freedom with gusto. The liberty to do as I pleased was a revelation, and I revelled in it. Yet the happiness and peace of mind I had envisaged and yearned for eluded me, and following each euphoric high I found myself tumbling into the inevitable and interminable nights of gnawing guilt, doubts, and the sure and certain knowledge that His vengeance would be visited upon me unless I repented and returned to the yiddishkeit I was brought up in.

I do not regret either the break with my past that forced me to examine and justify my lifestyle nor the decision to return and marry within the fold. The first, because I can today honestly say that any hardships I endure for my religion are of my own choosing, the latter, for the blessing of a perfect and loving soulmate and equally perfect children.

I know in my heart however, that although I have managed to subject my independence of spirit and effectively hide much of the rebellion that rules within my mind it is only because I went through all I did that I am able to thus straddle the fence. Those born outside our closed world and who chose to enter it, inevitably find themselves either unable to exercise their own freedom of thought or else unable to enjoy the serenity and utter conviction they so sought, and envy in the mindless sheep around them. It is for this reason that if I wish to offer my children a choice of membership or not they have to fully belong first.

And although I could sow the seeds of rebellion, and I dearly am tempted to with the more naturally rebellious of my offspring, I choose not to. Because revolution is painful and its outcome uncertain and the prospect of pain, and risks, should only be taken on by each individual for their self. Because we are all victims of circumstance, and I cannot force these upon them if I am not to be like my father, forcing my own choices upon my children.

The Gospel According To Me

2007-09-11T00:53:00.000+01:00

Once again Rosh Hashana aproaches. Once again I have to endure the familiar exhortations from the pulpit, for critical self-judgement. So once again I arise from my Shabbos afternoon nap, early, and off to listen to the yearly rant on how I should better myself.

I do not like listening to my Rabbi speak. Having gotten used to listening to speeches with a recognisable structure, a beginning a middle and an end, I find myself irritatedly editing what he is saying in my head, and deleting segments, at the same time as arguing with the points he is making. I wish I had a Rabbi who actually bothered enough to make it interesting for me and my kind.

Boredom begins to set in after a while and I start observing the shabby shul I daven in. Despite its recent makeover, it has the air of a dilapidated refugee camp. The walls are painted in the cheapest shade of brilliant white. The windows, curtainless and finger marked, have an opaque film on the inside, whether to stop people looking in or out I am never quite sure. Beyond them, metal grills protect us from the vandalism and terrorism we have been raised to expect.

The furniture, unlike in the formal churchstyle shuls, is light in colour and weight. The tables are Formica topped, metal framed and past their prime, The almost matching benches, with flip-up seats that can cause a painful pinch if a stray bit of flesh gets caught between them, are uncomfortable and remind me of those the litigants sit on while waiting to be called to the real bench. Up front the ambo faces the wall. Beneath four sorry looking candlesticks, the traditional Shivisi drawing, drawn by a 'local artist', and designed to inspire loftiness into him leading the prayer, has some of the naivete of Haitian art when observed from afar. Close up it is hideous! Another example of how, in our desire for insularity, we have deluded ourselves into ridiculous grandeur.

Happily, the room has nothing else that could be termed decoration, unless you count the various plaques at a million strategic spots commemorating all those acts of (often forced) kindness that made everything possible. Nothing that is, except for all the kinky, plastic covered velvetwork cloths on the bima (dais) and Amud (lectern). The plastic, of course only there to protect the exquisite needlework embroidery that commemorates yet another donation. The lighting, from bare flourescent tubes, is harsh and bright and a faint whiff of sweat and garlic bears testimony to the heavy, customary shabbos meal and many an afternoon nap.

The speech has come to the part where we all must remember to take a good look at how we behave. I wonder whether he does? I mean, I know he does look at how we behave. But does he look at how he does? Does he ever wonder if he might not be driving his big bus, with darkened windows and no stops, straight towards an abyss? Does he ever wonder whether his credentials as a Torah scholar qualify him to lead a generation of kids often dealing with challenges he cannot even fathom? Does he ever wonder whether he is preaching a gospel that cannot be for everyone?

Then again, do I? I too stand on on pulpit and rant but have I changed anything for the better? The obvious difference is that I have only a pulpit whereas the Rabbinic one stands for so much more. They claim to have the right to rule our lives, so they should have to prove they are doing it, well. If most people are happy and well adjusted. If the community is providing for itself, fiscally and emotionally, if the prospects are good and the future is looking rosy, then they obviously know what they are doing and we can all sleep tight. If not it might be time to look for a new bus driver in the new year.

Wishing all my fair readers a Shana Tova!

Studied Indifference

2007-08-28T14:07:00.000+01:00

I haven't written anything on the blog for a few weeks and it is high time I did. I take an evening off to sit on a deckchair over the sea and decide what to say. As always, I have a list of the subjects that have caught my attention and could possibly be used. I scan it to see if anything has developed more body since being cryptically jotted down in my little notebook.

An article in the Jewish Chronicle recently, suggests that within a few years the majority of Jews in Britain will be Ultra Orthodox. Proof, yet again, that the most important and vibrant part of the Jewish community in the UK is systematically ignored by the bodies who claim to represent Judaism and Jews. Even more so by the government agencies who ought to be registering our needs and concerns, if only to avoid clashes down the line with a group of highly intelligent and motivated malcontents railing against a society they believe hates them.

People in the community I talk to about this don't seem to grasp my argument, that more people from within should be opening channels of communication with the UK leadership. We need our voice to be heard, and needs considered, unhampered by the opposing (if no less legitimate) desires and concerns of the culturally-Jewish network who see us as embarrassing, antiquated relics of the shtetl they are trying to escape from.

I have been accused of unfairly 'having it in' for the Board of Deputies, and it is true that our own Union of Orthodox Hebrews is often no more interested in being represented by them, than they are in doing it. The Jewry that dominated the United Synagogue, and is led by the honourable Chief Rabbi, has as its goal, to become an accepted and integral part of British society. They do their utmost to emphasise that 'normalcy'. We, consider ourselves a sub-culture and...
No good. I have been through all this before.

The tide is in and the beach is deserted. Down on the waterfront two young Chassidim in their flowing yellow tztitzis and city shoes are strolling along the shore and skimming stones across the water. Seeing them reminds me I had the germ of something profound to say about the new generation of proud peyos wearers. Nu? I was thinking about it yesterday over the barbecue? Oh yes, I suddenly remember. That young man I saw yesterday.

He was in a deckchair on the promenade, happily oiling his hairy torso. Then, he put on his Ray-Bans (why are the shgatzim and laidigayers so brand obsessive?) and carefully recurled his long peyos before reaching down under his chair, taking out a Woman's Own magazine and settling down to read. I was, funnily enough, quite proud that what I had predicted was coming to pass. That the Peyos and coat are becoming a uniform, worn as self-identification rather than necessarily for religious conviction, much like the Muslim headscarf.

Incidentally, the goyim I speak to have never been able to understand what I mean when I say that our youth does not perceive our distinctive attire as a cultural or religious statement. We are taught it is a religious requirement. There is no doubt in most chassisim's minds that they (we all, actually) will eventually be punished for violating the dress code.

That the poor young man has not yet developed beyond reading his wife's vapid lifestyle magazines, is the fault of the parents who never prepared him for life beyond yeshiva... bla bla bla.

...I had a nice sentence that came to me during the davening on shabbes;
“Bright young minds, honed to perfection on complicated logic and convoluted reasoning are shlepping boxes in supermarkets, driving school buses, or skirting that shady area between dealing in properties and dealing on properties.”
...Nice, but I have said this all before.

I could talk about the new Rap song that the kids are gleefully telling each other is 'pinkt vi Fifty Cents' . It comes off an album called Rap In Yiddish which is basically cover versions of popular pop songs to yiddish words. It has been banned by the Rabbis in Israel and so is selling like hot cakes in the underground there. It puts me in mind me of the book reviewer who wrote “This book is both original and good, but what is good is not original and what is original is not good.

You need to admire the balls of any bloke brave enough to sing a yiddish cover of Maddonna's La Isla Bonita. Unfortunately, that is about all one can admire him for. From an album called Rap In Yiddish I was hoping for some anger and derision. A little bit of attitude at least. Instead this is a shoddy collection of boring pastiches and self-righteous lyrics, clumsily latched onto popular elecronic karoake tracks with some 'yiddish verds' to make it haimish.

I have an idea. Maybe i could combine the music and the peyos? Emphasise how my reaction to each is the opposite of what one might expect. Start with the peyos story;
Once such a blatant display would irritate me, today I view it as a sign of progress. The radical Chassidic ethos of worldly disconnect and 'All work and we'll pray', slowly and inexorably being replaced by a proud, pragmatic and sustainable Torah im Derech Eretz approach. The rap, which I would be expected to embrace as a symbol of revolution, I see instead as yet another example of chassidic mediocrity hailed as a heroic just for being banned.

Possible titles? Banned Band and the Way of the Land - Hairspray and Rap – Empty Vassals

I could use some of the Chronicle piece to flesh out the peyos part and there is a link someone posted in the last post to an article about OJ's in London and their work ethic...
I still need to find some interesting high note to end on...

On second thoughts, I'm lazy, and there is nothing here really worth saying, so lets just leave it it at that. I'm off for a cold beer.

The Yellow Brick Road

2007-07-16T18:44:00.000+01:00

Car pooling might be gaining ground for the wider community, but for Chassidim, giving lifts is so widespread that I have seen people angry for being passed by drivers they barely know, who did not offer a ride. Rabbis and Tzaddikim (holymen) rarely drive cars in our community, nor can they afford their own driver. Thus it came about that, as a twelve year old boy returning home from a funeral in Enfield, I found myself crammed in the back of a Volvo with half the local rabbinate.

Being men who do not waste time, business was being discussed. A call had come through from Hackney council’s planning department seeking clarification for the Jewish God’s preference for yellow clay. It transpired that an application had been handed in for a private, Jewish girl’s school building, in yellow brick. The council had turned the application down because the rest of the street was entirely in red brick. The application was re-submitted with the explanation that it had to be yellow, for religious reasons.

To broad smiles and indulgent grunts, we then learned that a well known and heeled family had agreed to donate the building. This was not the first school they had built for the community, and the other was in yellow brick. Humbly wishing to maximise the bang for their cash, the benefactors insisted on matching facades. I don’t remember exactly what they discussed further but the structure stands there today, in all its jaundiced glory.

Ben Locker is a writer and blogger living in Stamford Hill. He, more recently, attended a meeting of the Hackney Planning Watch in Stamford Hill library. In discussion was the proposal by the council, due to the high concentration in Stamford hill of Orthodox Jews with large families, to allow certain home-extensions that would probably not pass muster in surrounding areas. He reports that many of the local residents are angered by the perception that the Chassidim are being given preferential treatment.

Some have more personal grievances, like the fact that the light to their property is being blocked by an enormous loft conversion or an 18 foot long kitchen extension that towers over their garden fence. To be fair, these are legitimate complaints and it is obviously up to the council to make the final decision, taking the interests of all parties and the wider community into account.

In his blog he writes: ‘… I was astonished by the argument one [orthodox] person put forward that Stamford Hill has a miniscule crime rate, thanks to the Orthodox Jewish community: even going so far as to say,“when did you last hear of someone mugged by an Orthodox Jew?”

I, sadly, am less astonished. I have been hearing that justification, in its various forms, since I was twelve. Our superior children do not take drugs, wear ripped jeans or sport nose piercings, therefore we should be allowed to …[fill in the blank].

The late Gerrer rebbe once advised one of his newly proselytised disciples to adopt the knickerbocker style of short trousers with long socks. The youngster expressed his doubts about his father allowing it and mentioned the biblical commandment to honour his parents. The Rebbe dismissed the argument, saying, “It is a Mitzva to honour him, not to give him what he thinks he wants.”

A Democratic society has no problem when those with a different set of priorities express their opinions. The shtetl mentality, that teaches being noticed is bad, is wrong. Not because we have inherent rightness on our side, as some of our fundamentalists will have us believe, but because diversity is enshrined in British law. Thus if a brand new home in which to propagate God’s word to the fairer sex is more important to you than the colour coordination of the street it stands upon, you may say so unabashedly. Why, if your house's style and its aesthetic value are less important to you than the number of rooms and its real value, you have the right to express that opinion - even to lobby to have the council approve your monstrous extensions. But it is deceitful, mean and immoral to deny the same right to those that disagree with you. Yes, even if that means you will be overruled.

Unless you are the late Gerrer Rebbe talking to a bochur, it is not enough to know you are fundamentally right, you also need to have the right to impose your will by whatever means necessary. For the rest of us, rights and rightness form a very slippery slope; if only because the Mullahs are of the same opinion and mindset and far more determined.

May I wish all my readers a good holiday and may I take the liberty of reminding all, as we sally forth for our annual exposure to the outside world, that the hardships we choose to suffer for our beliefs must not be passed on to those whose lot it is to cross our path.

British Jew Bugs

2007-06-01T02:17:00.000+01:00

Although I do not have any official figures, it is common knowledge that the divorce rate in the Chassidic community is relatively low but rising slowly as individuals living in this country are exposed to more and more of the local colour and culture. A young Chassidic woman today is quite comfortable complaining to her Rav that her man does not give her enough attention or spend quality time with her and the family.

Twenty years ago she would have been laughed out of the Rabbi’s office. With an admonition on the way out, to stop reading the goyish literature that is introducing such notions, to one whose proudest achievement should be a row of smiling babies and crusty, golden-brown Challas every Friday.

Today she is more likely to be directed to one of the semi-official counsellors who will have had some rudimentary training in a sort of marriage guidance counselling, with an emphasis on avoiding divorce at all cost. I must admit to usually being quite dismissive of these do-gooders, generally proofs of the adage that a little learning is a dangerous thing, precisely because I don’t believe relationship counsellors should have their own agenda.

The overwhelming, pious drive to avoid divorce at all cost, sometimes leads to counsellors actively assisting the stronger partner in cowing the weaker one. It is easy to fall into the trap of putting pressure on the party most likely to bend, rather than the one who has the most changing to do.

In a fair society the stronger protect the weak. To sacrifice the weak for the smooth running of the machine, is too horrible a notion to entertain, although we all know it happens.

Of course our Universities and College Union, the UCU, voted overwhelmingly in favour of seeking “a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli institutions”. They represent the students, the loony left, the ones who are going to right the world's wrongs – with, of course, special focus on those perpetrated by societies or groups perceived to be more consistently successful than their own.

What really bugs me is the muted reaction by everybody else. Is it just because we don’t blow up trains that nobody cares very much that blatant anti-Semitism has become the hallmark of the British left? Is it just because nobody is scared of us that nobody minds that British academia has been turned into a hostile environment for anyone Jewish? Not for being Jewish, of course. But, because as Jews, they represent the State of Israel.

In an ironic twist of fate the wandering people now carry a state as their cross as they traverse Europe.

I am a British Jew and I am not prepared to carry the torch for anyone. But neither am I prepared to use a different yardstick for my people than for anybody else. I therefore never ask brown people for their views on Africa, slant-eyed ones about Tiananmen Square or short, fat, white ones with loud shirts their position on the war in Iraq. I likewise do not wish to express my views on the occupation except to declare, that if I were to feel under siege, unwelcome and unwanted in the UK, I could hardly be blamed if I recalled the justifications for fighting occupation, I heard on the BBC.

Mendy in Ich

2007-04-11T20:21:00.000+01:00

Just before Yomtov I got my hands onto a DVD of a film called Mendy; the story of the eponymous Chassidic orphan who is caught messing with a girl in the community and is thrown out. He moves in with a friend, Yanky, who had left years before and is now a tattooed, occasional tefillin wearing, whoring, drug pusher. The film follows Mendy through the first few weeks of his life with Yanky and his attractive, black, Brazilian roommate, and watches him painfully adjust to a world where morals and ethics must be decided for one’s self and where solutions as well as love can be just as hard to find as within the gefilte-fish cradle.

The film is surprisingly authentic. It is let down, for me, only by the appallingly poorly articulated Yiddish, which half the film is spoken in. For me it would have been far more genuine, not to mention comfortable to watch, had it been played entirely in English, with the classic yiddishisms left in. To me, a native speaker, the stilted Yiddish was a major irritation although those relying on the subtitling might see in it a charm of its own.

With at least one Satmar dropout on the credits the film is sometimes refreshingly and hauntingly real. When Shabbes arrives a group of ex-orthos, some bare-headed and holding cigarettes and others still wearing the traditional garb, pool together the kugel, gefilte fish and cholent they received from their families - ever hopeful of their return – then join hands to lustily welcome the Shabbes Queen, in song, to their mixed and half drunk gathering. So eerily authentic that it brought a lump to my throat.

I cannot recommend this charming film to the religiously faint of heart. There is occasional nudity and Yanky puts his tefillin on his shikse while making love to her as he whispers the brocho (blessing) into her ear, in a shockingly provocative scene that left even me unsure if I could continue to watch. I sincerely hope they were props and not the real thing! Still, I do believe that the film does tell the story rather well from the point of view of the tortured soul who leaves, and anybody who has dealings with youngsters who have left, or might, can learn much from seeing it.

For me it awakened memories that had been pushed back into the far recesses of my skeleton cabinet. In the years since I took a conscious decision to return to the fold and traded in my rebellion and individuality for a Solzhenitsyn style compromise, I have slowly grown accustomed to the comfort and security that being a paid up member affords. This film jolted me back to the time when I would have given anything ‘just to be accepted for what I am’.

Now, sitting in shul on Yomtov, I look around me at what I traded that in for. I observe the man across the table, his eyes tightly shut in concentration, his roughly woven, yellowing tallis pulled tightly round his torso and head. In his loud raspy voice the, essentially upbeat, Hallel texts he moans sound more like an audition for King Lear.

The teenager next to him is also chanting lustily, anticipating the Chazzan (cantor) in a reedy solo. Unmarried, he cannot cover his face with the Tallis so he self-consciously looks around every few minutes to see if anyone is watching him. Every so often, when his neighbour’s cacophony becomes too loud, he stops his lone performance to glare balefully at the shrouded figure’s formless back and then resolutely returns to his singular devotion. I wonder to myself whether he considers the fact that they are both ostensibly talking to the same being and if so why he thinks his own libretto is more worthy than his neighbour’s? Maybe he is really just having his personal cantorial rehearsal interrupted by the git, and the issue is more about personal space than religious fervour?

The congregation is settling down now, each having finished gurgling, whispering, singing, shouting, moaning, snarling or, like me, grudgingly and mechanically reciting the passage of Hallel. Next the Chazzan will try to wow us with his pretentious operatic variation on the traditional holiday melody. My mind drifts nostalgically back to a time years ago when I too could sway in delicious ecstasy to these primeval texts even as Supertramp’s Breakfast in America blared in the background of the squat we were hanging out in.

Although my reasons for choosing a lifestyle markedly different from the one I was brought up in, are ideological, they were not the ones that made me leave nor what brought me back, on my own terms, a couple of years later. Unlike Mendy and Yanky it was not lust and sex that drove me into the arms of the Shgatzim; only too happy to hurt my family by encouraging me. Consciously, it was my love of music and, subliminally I now believe, the search for unconditional love that were stronger than the threat of eternal damnation.

In the Shaigetz milieu I experienced genuine love. Not necessarily of a physical kind but the love that arises out of the bond between people sharing pain, adversity and the hope for a better future. A future I could not then envisage as it now is but which I would not today trade in for the happy-go-lucky existence the others in our group still alive today determinedly cling to. But I was privileged and lucky. Not everybody is, as the film Mendy eloquently shows.

We didn't Fight the Liars

2007-02-14T18:42:00.000Z

This should be read with the original by Billy Joel keeping the rythm true.

Occupation, He hurt me,
Reasons of security,
Disengagement, Disappointment,
Dis is unity.

Kosher meat, Mobile phones,
Hats, snoods and no-fly zones,
Knickerbockers, White sockers,
Frummers follow me.

Chassidic Tish, Funny food,
Beisdin with the fangs removed,
Contraception, contradiction,
Twice a week is still a lot.

The Tzaddik’s son, The other one,
Courts deciding which one won,
The Besht is dead, The Rebbe’s not,
How much longer have we got?

We didn’t fight the liars
We saw them praise each other
As they destroyed our brothers

We didn’t fight the liars
as the fat cats bought them
We just helped support them

Na nach nachman nuts,
Separate seating on the bus
Chauvinism, Feminism,
Cheque Agunot cry.

Denier numbers, Thigh high seams,
Pederast protection schemes,
Orange ribbons, Gay parades,
Good boys don’t ask why.

Sadya Grama’s Romemut,
Slifkin’s book is staying put.
Artscroll, Steinzalz,
Kahati’s work in Russia banned

Viznitz, Satmar, Bobov twice,
Holy city, Rabbi Veiss,
Shtreimels with kaffiyeh shawls,
Carers of our promised land.

We didn’t fight the liars
We saw them praise each other
As they destroyed our brothers

We didn’t fight the liars
As the fat cats bought them
We just helped support them

Hip Hop, Chassidic bands,
Holies eating with their hands,
Manichewitz, Tam Tams,
Gatchkes in the pool

Tzedaka scams, family trees,
Dor yesharim booking fees,
Blood-sucking with a tube,
TV kids expelled from school.

Nasty rabbis in Iran,
Contact with the Taliban
Kehilla grants, not a chance,
Though the numbers seem so clear

All in all it’s pretty sad
but let me tell you something glad,
Many more will learn to fear,
the Shgatzim on the blogosphere.

We didn’t fight the liars
We saw them praise each other
while they destroyed our brothers

We didn’t fight the liars
as the fat cats bought them
We just helped support them

on and on and on and on...

The Oyvey Office

2007-01-03T14:26:00.000Z

Most who leave the Chassidic fold, fail miserably in their new lives. Aliens from a parallel universe, they are poorly equipped to deal with the harsh realities of western culture; the shallowness and the self-preservation. Coming from a world where a familiar face is a trusted friend, they confuse flirtation with sincere friendship and think ‘How do you do?’ is a question. Divided from their newfound family by a common language, they are not attuned to what is being clearly stated between the lines, even when it looks like they understand. While their companions happily watch their project tentatively taste his new freedom, they naively mistake their amiability for true concern. Sooner or later they end up, scared, lonely, let down and depressed, with no one left to turn to and nowhere to go.

Menachem Lang of Bne Beraq did not fall by the wayside completely. He was a budding cantor when he left at twenty and he is putting his experiences to good use in his new acting job in a theatre in Herzeliya, playing a part based on his own life. One part of him that does not come out in the show is the bit where he was sexually abused by some young adults in the community. Armed with the indignation that exposure to western culture accords such deeds, and a hidden camera crew from Israel’s Channel 10 he set out to confront his molesters. ( Text video -Hebrew)

Menachem comes across to me as a walking advert for staying put. He obviously does not realise how shallow he comes across, his outbursts sometimes seem rehearsed and when he adlibs, his positions become closer to his accused. He even seems a little unsure at times what is actually bothering him. All these are classic to victims of abuse and I am sure he needs help but my feeling is that he needs someone to advise him to return to a culture he knows and understands.

The three bearded men he identifies and interviews in the TV documentary were never charged although they all seem to admit the basic facts on camera. The reason, in a nutshell, is because "in the Charedi community such issues are dealt with internally" says the narrator.

I am aware that the situation in Israel is different than here. The Batei Din in Israel (rabbinical courts) are quasi legal bodies and in cities like Bne Beraq they represent a real force on the ground and enjoy widespread approval ratings despite the scepticism of those like me who prefer transparency and structure. Yet even there some prominent Rabbis have recently started advising people to report all forms of sexual abuse directly to the police.

It is laughable to expect our local Batei Din in London or Manchester to take on the function of society’s policemen. They simply lack the power or the influence, not to mention the expertise. Yet our Rabbis, in their infinite wisdom, insist on sticking to the rules and principles they were taught in a different age. Still dutifully fulfilling, to the letter, the orders they were given by their long dead generals in a battle that moved on decades ago. Still industriously firing their salvos at targets that have long ceased to exist, while the enemy has moved on and is busy pillaging the villages.

On the other side of the spectrum sit a group of Jews who also live somewhere in cloudcuckooland. The Neturei Karta movement has never been a savoury one although I have no argument with their founding principle, that the Zionists have no monopoly over the Jewish people. But my initial unease at posters on the lampposts on the Hill in the 80s stating “The Zionist state is a misfortune for the Jewish people”, has steadily developed into alarm and disgust as their disassociation turned to denouncement and blind hatred of all Jews but themselves. Indeed their actions illustrate better than any of their arguments the one undeniable truth; No one has the right to speak for a people without a clear mandate.

The pitiful morons’ latest escapade, strutting their stuff for all the world in Iran at a holocaust deniers conference was condemned by virtually all religious bodies in Israel, the US and the UK (except those deeper in bed with them than we all had suspected), albeit often in terms sometimes ambiguous at best. It is patently obvious that this rush of virtuous indignation and horror, that even a prayer vigil under the window of the dying Arch-terrorist Arafat in Paris and numerous highly publicised appearances in Shabbes clothes, black-silk-and-beaver-fur-fig-leaves for murderers and terrorists, failed to provoke, was not spontaneous. Rather, it was only the insistent prodding of secular Jewry, livid that their sacred cow, the holocaust, had been touched, that decided our seers that now it was important to make it known to the world that the NK do not speak for all Jews.

Our religious leadership has at last done the right thing, and expressed their disgust that a few individuals should try to hijack the garb we wear and the way we look to express views that are abhorrent, not only to practically all Jews but possibly almost everybody bar the Iranians and a few of their loony supporters. Still it is a scandal that even with an issue as clear to everybody as this, it is only when the wider world gets involved that suddenly (most of) our leadership springs valiantly into action. Our leaders are being led by circumstance, sometimes reacting, acting all the time but never taking a positive step to tackle problems from the core.

I believe that a good percentage of our leaders are good men. They are learned and pious and often well-meaning. They can not however, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as streetwise. They often do not know the distinction between opinion and fact, politics and law, wants and needs. They are out of touch with their communities and trying to apply rules and methods that might have been effective once but do not apply to the world I grew up in, far less the one my kids did. Worse, lacking any form of central leadership and hopelessly divided by personal interests, they and the orthodox media are forcing the mindset and rulings coming out from Bne Beraq and Jerusalem upon us, for lack of any original solutions to problems unique to us here in the UK and Europe.

There needs to be a central Orthodox Rabbinical Council for Europe, to deal with European problems from a European perspective. This council has to contain members from all orthodox groupings and must be professionally advised on law, health and politics, just as any governing body must. Until then in my opinion many of our learned Rabbis must be considered as sweet and wholesome but not much more. As innocent as smoothies and just as relevant.

My Clothes and I

2006-12-11T01:46:00.000Z

Writing this blog has made feel much more comfortable in my skin as a Chassid. It has helped clarify to me what is positive within and about our community and lifestyle, at the same time as making me realise that I need not always feel responsible for the collective. Just as they should not for me.

Through the discussions I have had with some powerful people, strangely prepared, even eager, to reason with The Shaigetz, I have learned to temper some criticisms which were based on faulty assumptions. That they treat my alter ego as an equal despite resolutely ignoring me, tells me to stop seeing myself thorough the other’s perspective and get on with my own life. To one brought up in the understanding that everything the individual does reflects upon 'the community' and God, and under the menacing shadow of Chillul-Hashem (desecration of His name), and the causing of any negative portrayal of Him or them, this was a big lesson.

Today I can prepare to for an important meeting without checking in the mirror to see if my peyos aren't showing from behind my ears, where I carefully used to tuck them away, almost invisibly, when I wanted to make a good impression. I also no longer worry about where I will leave my hat when I go somewhere where no Chassid has ever trodden. I bear it with me, only respectfully removing it when I enter a room.

Despite looking more the Chassid than ever, I no longer avoid contact with my fellow man and even fraternise with the locals shamelessly. I have discovered that most are, at best, mildly intrigued by the reason for my ‘funny’ attire while many of the rest are convinced that the Chassidic garb is our equivalent of the Catholic vestments. Very few realise that somebody like me was never given the choice to wear anything else and could only do so by tearing himself away completely from family and friends. Nor could they possibly imagine how embarrassing it is, how uncomfortable it feels, to have someone look at you and smile to themself when you are wearing funny clothes you don’t want to be seen wearing at all.

Once past the initial surprise, I find most British people to be remarkably apathetic about my appearance and if I have found people disturbed by it, it was either Muslims who use us as easy targets for venting their hatred of Israel and the Israelites, or fellow Jews embarrassed by my ‘spectacle’.

So when I strolled through my supermarket pushing my trolley I was relaxed and enjoying myself. Before me, blocking the gangway, was a store packer pushing a pallet of goods on a forklift. I was in no special hurry so I waited a few minutes until she had ended. After she had turned the corner and cleared the path I moved forward pushing aside a wooden pallet that had been left lying, so my wagon could pass. The employee who was now returning to collect the pallet started hurling personal insults at me adding that I, one of ‘those what does’nt has to work’ had disturbed her in doing hers. It seems from her ranting that ‘they’ do that.

I must admit to being more disturbed than I would have expected. After all I was no stranger to such incidences in my youth and to be honest it is only in the recent few years that we have come to expect it in a different accent only.

I have no doubt that if I call the store I will learn that she had had a hard day and was going through a difficult period. I will be assured that the company takes such incidences very seriously (it will be made clear that this applies not only for anti-Semitism but for racism of any sort – just in case we get cocky about our special privileges) and that the culprit will be duly disciplined. I will furthermore be urged to remember that the manager of the branch has always had a very good relationship with my people. That the list of kosher products on offer has indeed been steadily rising in recent years testifies to the value they place on that custom.

I didn’t contact the management. Not because, from long experience, I already know the contents of that letter but because of the reactions of the people around me when it happened. I was shocked that nobody reacted as an employee shouted remarks denigrating an entire community at a customer, regardless of whether or not he had disturbed her work. I was more shocked that some other customers banded around her as I wandered off, listening to her story and agreeing with her, unified in their condemnation. But for the first time in a long time I realised that my dress really does set me apart. Not because it actually disturbs anyone but because it is so easy to identify the culprit when one party looks different. And the saddest truth of all is, I am not sure I would be any different.

Society Of Members

2006-11-09T00:20:00.000Z

Few of my Chassidic friends approve when I am seen socializing with friends who are not religious. The goyim I am seen with pose fewer problems because the possibility of considering one a friend is so remote to a Chassidic Hiller. Eric is a very non-observant Jew. A highly extrovert and deliberately provocative man, he is the one that challenged me most on my journey to here. More than the philosophers and the Rabbis, the societies of thinkers and the earnest helpers, he is the one who asked the awkward questions that I always avoided asking myself. Would you? Why wouldn’t you? Do you? How do you know you do? Strangely enough his skepticism has reinforced my beliefs more than much earnest discourse.

His lifestyle was much more shocking to me than I ever admitted. I have had my morals doing flip-flops in their bathrobes as I, for instance, debated behind a fascinated gaze whether to soon to say ‘bon appetite’ to a yid I was watching frying his treife quail thighs in butter? I have learned along the way that there are rules that have to be adhered to in society and when religion is taken out of the equation what we are left with is respect. I do not have to approve of what he eats and I may believe he will suffer eternal damnation for doing it but I do not actively stop him from doing as he pleases. That is his right I have to respect just as he must understand that I won’t taste. I further believe that once my disapproval has been noted it is neither polite nor helpful to keep mentioning it again.

So when he dropped into my kitchen on barbecue-night with a bundle wrapped in newspaper I was faintly amused and expected some large salmon he would propose we bung on the barbeque or a dead snake for me to use as a doorstop. Instead the damp paper proved to contain a raspy mound of fresh whelks. Eric knows I don’t eat seafood and a colony of live sea snails in my kitchen really was not welcome. Of course I enjoy a joke as much as the next man and I am well aware that my irreligious friends do eat all the creepy crawlies they can lay their hands on. But I have to draw the line somewhere and with fruits-de-mer in my sink you needed a binoculars to look back for it, despite assurances as to how delicious they taste in garlic butter and his gleeful anticipation of what some of the more religious guests might say when they were produced.

To be fair, as soon as he realised that I really was bothered by his gastropod snack surprise he beat a hasty retreat with them and apologised profusely. After my wife had stopped hyperventilating (and poured a few gallons of bleach down the plughole) normality returned and this little episode was duly forgotten until this week’s hullabaloo in Jerusalem with the Pride Parade reminded me of it. I was trying to explain to a colleague that although I do believe the act is a sin, I am not anti-gay. Still, I do not feel that a Pride Parade should be held in Jerusalem. As I had said to Eric, “What you do in your own space is your business but it is disrespectful to me when you wave your perwinkle around in my kitchen.”

I have never quite figured out why a group of people who complain they are discriminated against find it helpful in gaining respect to flaunt their sexuality around in public. Indeed if the gay community wanted to prove they are just another part of society they would do better to march neatly attired through the town and let everybody see how normal they are. Instead they prance along semi-naked, flashing references to every kind of depravity they can think of in a demonstration that tries to force their hedonistic lifestyle down the throats of everybody watching, only to go all bitchy when the Rabbis don’t get aroused. Or are they hoping that seeing them semi-naked all oiled up in black leather thongs we will be reminded of our tefillin and take a sudden liking to them?

The Pride Parade is not about gaining acceptance for homosexuals to live their lives as they see fit. It is a celebration of homosexuality and as such its place is not in Jerusalem. The promoters would know that if they weren’t so intent on becoming identified with their organs. Indeed I suppose they can hardly disagree with me when I suggest that instead of getting themselves accepted as members of society they have turned themselves into a society of members; what you’d call in simpler English a bunch of pricks!

The Package Deal

2006-10-16T09:47:00.000+01:00

The sukkah is intended to remind us of when we were taken out of Egypt. The children of Israel were grandiosely rescued from a despotic, tyrannical Pharaoh who had greedily enslaved them for generations before finally, in fits of paranoid fear, murdering all their male offspring. Chased by the Pahaoh's troops they were led triumphantly from the country through a path in a sea miraculously split before them. Once they had passed, the waters tumbled back in over the Egyptian army, eliminating it in its entirety in one glorious, fell swoop. The soldier's spoils, financed entirely by the labours of those they had been chasing, moreover, did not sink into the deep with them but were washed up on the shores for the refugees to gather.

To celebrate these awe-inspiring miracles we gather once a year in a temporary structure, symbolic of the supernatural protection and care we received then and over the years following that awesome rescue and a testament to the pillars of cloud and fire that surrounded the Israelites as they trod the desert toward their Promised Land. That the Israelites, even despite these obvious displays of raw, divine might, hardly behaved like the best of Catholics and His eternal patience with them, must be an integral part of that story.

There is nothing glorious about the sukkahs I saw this year on the Hill and nothing that even remotely evokes the dazzling magnificence of that divine deliverance. A ‘temporary structure’ as basically defined by the law has ‘to have three or more walls and get protective shading from an unconverted vegetable source. We have laws stating how high or law the walls must be but only the roof of the structure has to be temporary. A kosher sukkah must be under the open sky and then be covered by raw vegetable matter.

Like much in our society, Sukkot has become an occasion that has little to do with its original purpose. Proud sukkah owners today proudly show off how discreetly their sukkah blends in to the house as their comfortably centrally heated and air-conditioned sukkah-cum-morning room’s glass dome slides noiselessly away to reveal the open sky masked by the commercially available, perfectly stitched bamboo mat that once a year is rolled over the waiting beams to fulfil the letter, if not the spirit, of the laws.

In a grotesque parade of bad taste, most sukkot are furthermore decorated with gaudy and tacky christmas decorations, from paper apples, shiny stars and baubles to paper chains, tinsel and flashing fairy lights. Like the society around us, we seem to be intent on proving that we too can sell the soul of our traditions to Hong Kong.

The Rosh Hashana-Yom Kippur period is designed to be a time for stocktaking, learning the lessons from the year past and accepting resolutions for the one upcoming. Over Sukkot we are reminded that though we can be a stiff-necked people God still loves us and He is capable of protecting us from any threat. We learn that although we as a people can be prone to bouts of self-assured rightness these can also be suspect. We learn that we have a tendency to be argumentative and sometimes just plain obnoxious and that we have to learn to fight these urges. In short we have to remember that being religious is about more than the external trappings.

When the length of someone’s beard or his wife’s skirt becomes more important than his piety or deeds, when the shape of a Chassid's hat becomes more important than his upbringing and knowledge, when in shul you can be witness to infantile jealous bickering for the privilege of shushing people during the davening and those whose job it is to represent us seem to be more intent on furthering their own agenda, when eating kosher becomes about whose supervision you support rather than what's inside the package (or should be) one starts to wonder how much more of our religion has become just a tackily decorated temporary structure.

Stand Up or Shut Up

2006-09-08T13:40:00.000+01:00

Heaven, the saying goes, helps the man who helps himself. The Yiddish equivalent translates as ‘Blessed are the hands that do it alone’. Despite the giggles I could raise just by pausing for a moment here with the appropriate expression on my face, I do accept the validity of the sentiment expressed.

In Yeshiva one of the things that was drummed into us was the issue of Emuna and Bitochon. Literally translated the first is faith and the latter trust and that is how they are used in our school of thought. We are taught that it is incumbent upon us to believe He makes everything happen according to a very tightly controlled plan in which every single thought, every single heartbeat from the king’s down to that of the louse on his head is divinely controlled and meshes into its very specific place in the universal tapestry. The obvious question that arises as to how free will can exist within a framework of preordination is generally considered to be out of bounds for our puny little brains. Likewise, how it is possible that anything has been around forever?

Naturally these are questions you cannot shake off once they have arisen. My Rebbes were not prepared to discuss them with me; telling me instead that I am a Shaigetz for thinking about them. I did of course and in developing my own answers to the theological dilemmas I also came to the realisation that I am proud to be a Shaigetz.

The question of divine intervention and how it works is not only an abstract one. There are two well-documented schools of thought within Judaism, the one Chassidim subscribe to maintains that even inanimates have their lifespan and every movement within it planned from the outset and the other believes that the laws of nature are only interfered with for humans who deserve it. Neither gives very clear instructions on how to decide when it is acceptable to sit back and let Him be in control and when it is necessary to make an effort yourself although all agree that sometimes one must.

Chassidim take Emuna to stand for unwavering faith in the Lord and the knowledge that He is in control over everything. Bitachon is translated into the assurance that ultimately whatever happens to you is for the good. If you have enough Emuna and Bitachon life can only be plain sailing. The alarming rise of social anti-Semitism in Britain, the tough economic situation of the illiterate school-leavers, the growing worldwide threat of Muslim terrorism and Great Britain’s increasing kowtowing to a growingly sophisticated Muslim PR machine that must be gleefully penning Tony Blair’s name to a growing list of European leaders they have helped topple, all this does not keep you awake at night if you have enough faith in He who sees the big picture.

I once asked my mentor whether having Emuna and Bitachon allows me to sit back and observe life. More specifically whether a sum of money I had lying around should be invested for the future or could be used to make my life more comfortable now. I feared that investing in the future displayed a lack of faith in His ability to supply me with all I need at any given time. His reply was that I can only sit doing nothing allowing God to run my life if I honestly and truly rely on Him alone. To use the cyclists Prayer formula and ask for help only when the hill is steep while relying on gravity to take me back down does not go down well in the heavenly applications department apparently.

Many Chassidim might therefore be forgiven for watching passively from the sidelines as what I believe is a growing threat to our security and wellbeing on this continent develops. They have their Emuna and Bitachon that will get them through with smiling faces to whatever awaits them and thus need and ask for nobody’s help. Those however who have built their entire Jewish identity, not to mention their positions of importance and comfort in this land on the promise of ‘never again’ will probably be punished for lying as well as their lack of Emuna not to mention Bitachon.

Hippocracy

2006-07-18T21:13:00.000+01:00

My people are at war with an enemy who proudly boasts of killing civilians yet screams blue murder when the innocent Lebanese civilians they cowardly hide behind are, tragically, caught in the retaliatory fire. An enemy whose brave heroes shamelessly cheer on the street, fire weapons in the air and gleefully share out sweets when our babies are butchered. An enemy whose barbaric civilians dance for the local TV cameras holding aloft the limbs of our fallen. I do not therefore think now is the time for me to lob my peculiar brand of critique at the petty foibles of my own community. Instead I will take a departure from form and direct my ire at my other family and the democratic society that claims to represent my interests because I am part of it.

It was Israel’s best friend, the USA, along with best friend Britain that pressured her, against her much better judgement, to allow Hamas, who they themselves branded a terrorist group, to run in the Palestinian democratic election. Once the people had spoken and the duly elected government of our partners-in-peace had shown its true face (albeit behind a balaclava mask) our good friends suddenly recalled pressing engagements elsewhere and we were left to deal with repressing the rewards for our disengagement, alone.

In Lebanon the democratic parliament, enjoying the full support of all Israel’s best friends in red white and blue, has a minister and almost a third of its body coming from Hezbolla, for whom (Jewish) infanticide is part of the manifesto. Just so as to keep this farce fresh and exciting Israel is urged by the colourful black and white coalition of the Talking Heads Club to spare this ‘legitimate’ government, even as it may (grudgingly) wage a defensive war on its proxy who enjoys full control over Lebanon's border with the only real democracy in that part of the world.

Democracy, the doctrine that claims to allow the masses to determine the general direction of their governance, has replaced religion for many as the panacea for all the world’s ills. A peek at the Middle East today should be enough to shake even the dimmest of brains out of that reverie. Maybe an intrinsically good people would automatically fare better under democratic rule than the yoke of selfish and cruel opportunists but a democratic election alone will not serve to turn swordsmen into ploughhands. Clearly not all peoples are ready for rule by whatever majority, as much of the population in Gaza would admit if they dared.

Democracy, like socialism and theocracy, is an ideal that only works if those wielding it are responsible and worthy. A group of bloodthirsty savages, believers in the Ashariyya doctrine - that because all that happens is caused by God anyway it is legitimate to kill innocents, will not suddenly turn into cuddly lambs just because they were empowered through a ballot box. To think they might is as naïve as to believe that the US and its cohorts have suddenly seen the justness of Israel’s cause.

The sad truth is that the democratic experiment in the Middle East has failed miserably. The undemocratic governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are unusually mute in their criticism of Israel’s legitimate self defence this time because they themselves fear the democratic ambitions of these Islamist groups. Parties that have the support of the streets in their countries. Meanwhile the true democracies of the US and the UK, whose own forces are now within plucking distance of these same terrorists, are cynically pleased to have Israel act as their virtual warning bell.

Still, I am a Jew and I was taught that God rebuked the Israelites for celebrating when the Egyptians, who had enslaved and massacred them for centuries, were drowned in the Red Sea. I therefore feel the pain of the innocent in Lebanon, now cowering in their shattered cities praying that the next explosion does not finally, if accidentally, put them out of their misery. This despite the arguments I hear from those in my community who correctly remind me Hezbolla is an integral part of their freely and democratically elected government and it is only right that the entire people should enjoy the fruits of their chosen leaders' purposeful actions against their equally innocent neighbours across the border.

Democracy does not work any more than socialism or theocracy did. Thirty years of Israeli experience in the hallowed halls of the that uber-democracy the UN and hundreds of blatantly biased resolutions against her, can testify to that. So sometimes it is necessary for the David to resort to force to dictate justice and if the oppressed in other places learn from that to rise up against their repressors... we will just have to put it down as collateral damage.

Another Chip In The Wall

2006-07-04T17:37:00.000+01:00

II must admit to being disappointed when Roger Waters, waxer lyrical in masterpieces of the rock symphony like The Wall, and the exquisite sarcasm in Amused to Death, whipped out his paint canister and celebrated his historic visit to Israel’s Separation Wall by spraying on in bright red capital letters the legend: WE DON’T NEED NO THOUGHT CONTROL.

We all know he can do better than that. Quoting the lines of one of his only songs recognisable to the great unwashed diluted the occasion and did much more to reclaim authorship to the lyrics than anything to influence (without control) the minds of all those who admire him so. With all the subtlety of an elephant with a sprained ankle he makes a crude associational reference to tearing down a walls by shrieking a criticism of postwar educational methods on the very wall portrayed as blocking children’s access to their school.

He did gain my avid approval though for his answer to the Press when asked whether that was his message to the Israeli people. (The reporter obviously had gotten that elusive message.) “No, Of course not.” He simply explained to the camera. “It’s got nothing to do with them. It’s a message to the Israeli government.”

Not many care enough to bother to make that distinction and I am glad but not surprised he did. It is a sad truth though that rock and film stars have more influence on the public than any leaders do and sadder still that most have hardly an opinion worth sharing between them. Without minimising the wonderful examples stars like Geldof, Bono and indeed Waters do set, they are in such a pitifully small minority that I think they must be what they are in spite of their fame not because of it.

It would be nice if I could go on and remind everyone how at least our Chassidic youth can look to their spiritual guides and teachers for instruction but that is unfortunately not true. Instead I believe most of us are still looking for their spiritual guides and teachers. Which is why Mobile phones are not allowed but everybody has them, the Internet is banned and Hyde Park’s Charedi Forums are the busiest in Israel. Our leaders, the cream of our society and the infallible who uniquely can transmit the word of God, find themselves stuck in the traffic behind the great technology juggernaught that is redefining our lives far quicker than they seem to be able to react and divine has become an adjective to describe that latest mobile phone.

For our leadership and community ever to amount to anything they are going to have to become relevant and learn to act instead of reacting. Learn to actually keep a finger on the pulse of both the Shtetl and the street. To stick their stiff necks out and earn their stripes, not to mention their keep. Because for the moment, in the stride between technology and Torah, the chip is in the lead, unlike within the leadership where it sits firmly on the shoulder.

Left, Right, Wrong

2006-06-06T21:26:00.000+01:00

Comedian Jackie Mason once said he has no problem laughing at Jews to either a Jewish or a gentile audience . It is the mixed ones that are problematic because the Gentiles are uncomfortable sitting next to Jews while laughing at them. I feel a similar constraint in my colleagues at work when the Arab Israeli conflict comes up. An uncomfortable silence usually ensues when I drop in on such a discussion. I therefore tend to keep my opinions largely to myself on this issue, at work at least.

The recent demise of the Satmar Rebbe and a newspaper article about it in which the Satmar viewpoint was described as anti-Zionist caught the eye of a co-worker of mine who had the bright idea of producing the clipping during a lunch break. She unfolded it with a shy flourish and proceeded to explain that she wished to publicly apologise for supposing that all Jews were Zionists.

Caught unawares and unprepared I had no ready answer and explained simply that Satmar’s is just one of the myriad positions that Jews hold and reminded everyone of the age old saying ‘Two Jews, three opinions’. Everyone dutifully smiled and returned to their spam and sports pages. The episode got me thinking however. On the one hand I am an avid proponent of clearly making the distinction between being Israeli and being Jewish. In that respect I believe Satmar has got it right. On the other hand I am squeamish about getting into bed with a group that is happy to curry favour at the expense of their own brethren.

The Satmar viewpoint, developed by the first Rebbe and uncle to the one that just recently passed away, was uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. He was a pragmatist however and it has been suggested by many that his message was designed to temper the euphoria within the decimated religious community that the birth of the State and the emergence of a Nation of Jews created at the time. To him and his Eastern European colleagues it was obvious that Zionism and religious Judaism did not mix, this despite the fact that a few of them were personally saved from the Nazis by the Zionist organisations active at the time. His message that the Zionist State was no God given birthright was accepted by the mainstream in ultra-O-Jism until fairly recently. It is the media and their insistence that religious settlers and Chassidim are the same, that taught younger Chassidim to identify with the State. Made it for us more than a Jew- (but not always charedi) friendly place that has falafel balls on sale everywhere and Hebrew writing - for us previously reserved for school, synagogue or dreary kosher shops - on provocative billboards and vending machines too.

Still today the concept of the powerful vanquishing Jewish soldier is an image that many Charedim identify with uneasily. The twisted blend of religious fanaticism and right-wing extremism the media paints us with is in fact no more accurate than that which the rabidly anti-Israeli and pro-palestinian Neturei Karta, often misrepresented as Satmar, tries to portray. Indeed it is only the repulsiveness of NK’s uncle-tomesque parades of blind pro-Arabism that stops me agreeing with their posters proclaiming ‘Zionism is not Judaism’. It is the images like those on worldwide TV of their heroes in shining bekishes and shabby shtreimels wearing Kaffiyes like bastardised prayer-shawls while praying for the good health of the dying Yassir Arafat that prove to me they are no more honest to true Judaism than those that proclaim the greatness of Israel from behind the barbed wire of their fortified camps where once stood a proud Palestinian’s olive grove and livelihood.

The religious Zionist settler movement espoused the belief that the land was returned to the children of Israel by God. That was the justification in their eyes for the moral wrongs that were committed, for the hardships that the locals had to endure to make way for their rebuilding of the Land of Israel. Whenever a twinge of conscience did break through there was always the steadfast security argument to paper over the gaps. And to be fair the Palestinians have done their best throughout the last decades since the creation of the State to justify these arguments. Indeed I am probably not the only one who for whom it is more the need for us to stop occupying them that needles my conscience than their need for independence.

True Religious Zionism died the day the Israel disengaged from Gaza. On that day it became clear that what the Satmar and the thinking Haredim (ultra-orthodox) had been saying from the sound ‘go’ was true. The current State of Israel is not the historic redemption we have spent two thousand years praying for. “If Jesus was the Messiah we should be living in a messianic time.” we used to glibly point out to the Christians. It is by the same token that I refuse to accept that widespread poverty, strife and discrimination coupled with a dehumanizing occupation and perpetual bloodshed are our national destiny. God, when He allowed Sharon to return Gaza to the Palestinians, was officially informing His people that the State of Israel is not The Promised Land although it certainly is on it. It therefore becomes a political entity conceived by the League of Nations and one that needs the legitimacy of the family of nations to hope to survive. This brings the real Charedi viewpoint more in line with the extreme-left in Israel and firmly back towards Satmar.

Where I have to disagree with Satmar is with their insistence on delegitimising the State altogether by insisting it is a sin to vote or take active interest in the politics of the land. Jews living in a sovereign country should be entitled to participate in the running of it, just as Satmar so blatantly and shoddily tries to in New York. The sordid money-politics of the orthodox political parties in Israel and their blatant flirtation with the right-wing might be justifiable for them, as the legitimate struggle of a minority living in a country, to create a better life for themselves. The fact that it creates the illusion abroad that all religious Jews are right-wing fanatics is unfortunate but our fault not theirs.

Yet I am glad I did not say all this to my masticating colleagues. A friend of mine told his granddad that the goyim hate us because of what happens in Israel. The old man who had spent time in Bergen Belsen shook his head. “Forty years ago when I came to this country the yobs on the street used to shout out to me that I should go back to Palestine. Now they shout we should get out of Palestine. Nothing changes.”

Feh Tish

2006-05-14T00:29:00.000+01:00

There is no word for Fetishism in the Yiddish we Chassidim use. The Yiddish of Sholom Aleichem and Singer might, nay must have had a word for it but it does not seem to have survived the move to America and Western Europe and in our climate of puritan coyness there is no need to create one. Not really surprising then that there is no word for lipstick or bra either. These are all concepts or objects that young men will never come across in their lessons in school or their study afterwards and the newspapers cannot use them anyway so there is no need for a word.

I did need it though this week when my toddler brought home a picture book from cheder. The book is a poorly executed knock-off of the picture comic book format that was popular for a while. An excruciatingly staged family home is pictured with a smarmily smiling pigtailed (not to mention faced) infant girl solemnly announcing in a stilted Yiddish that she is doing a mitzvah by helping her mummy as she clumsily holds a too large and brand-new broom in an artfully contrived tableau of Chassidic domestic bliss.

Less than inspired design coupled with poorly conceived visuals is not the exclusive domain of our community to be fair. Hello magazine is printed every week. Yet, still this still life is so eerily true to life of so many Chassidic homes that I had to comment on it. The table is laid for the Shabbes meal. The inevitable blindingly white tablecloth covers a large table which dominaties the room. The heavy formal carved and upholstered chairs look like something stolen from a French museum and the table groans with ostentatious silverware and a garish dinner service that would look comfortably at home at a Liberace concert.

The tablecloth is covered with the de rigueur transparent, disposable, plastic cover that most frum dining tables feature. The room in this picture takes the absurdity of covering tasteful fabric with disgusting plastic to new heights. Here the brocade chairs too have tailored see-through plastic coverings, turning an expensive if flamboyant piece of furniture into a farcical monstrosity of slippery PVC. On the table itself an embroidered velvet Challa cover is contained within another plastic casing. Over in the background and under a mediocre picture that looks suspiciously like a framed 3000 piece jigsaw puzzle the padded sofa too has been given the same treatment.

In the commenting on my last piece one commenter noted that the danger of blogs like mine is that they establish norms that eventually influence the reader subconsciously to take on their point of view (though he did not put it quite like that). I must admit that I take his point on the mechanism although not that it is a problem. The passion for plastic is universal to Chassidim. The front cover of the Hella Winston’s remarkably perceptive and charming book The Unchosen features a Chassid on the front cover typically carrying his possessions, not in sports bag or a suitcase but in a black plastic refuse bag - a peculiarity nobody who has ever travelled with Chassidim could have failed to notice.

The passion for plastic coverings on all and sundry that can be touched in the home is thus far, thankfully, still unique to the United States where the picture comes from. Their regrettable penchant for eating on disposable tableware has already taken the pleasure out of most parties and simchas in Stamford Hill not to mention far too many family meals, as the steadily rising sales of these disgusting articles on the Hill can testify. I can only hope our children are not detrimentally influenced by these squalid examples of the American Chassidic home pride too.

Unreasonabled Out

2006-05-01T12:50:00.000+01:00

I was not a model child. My parents claim that of all my siblings I was the one that caused the most trouble. My father used to pull the ends of his long grey beard forward and examine them minutely as I watched. Unspoken condemnation of the errant son who had caused the pigmentation to abandon his follicles and leave him middle-aged. It was years before I discovered that greying is genetic and even longer before I came to terms with the fact that my life’s choices were not really his business and that it was unfair and cruel of him to suggest otherwise.

It is not as if I spent my evenings joyriding in stolen cars and mugging elderly ladies for their loose change and Polo mints. My misdemeanors were more of the nature of forgoing to learn a few mishnas by heart for the Annual Siyum, going out in the afternoon with no hat on or, horror of horrors, watching some TV at my great-aunt’s house.

I could cope with the mute rebuke and the silent reproach. What angered me and still gets my goat even today were the discussions about me I could overhear as my parents had their last coffee before turning in at night. From downstairs I could hear my mother voicing her concerns about what would become of me and how my sorry behaviour would adversely affect the futures of the rest of the family. She would make it sound like my leaving the house to go shopping hatless was a deliberate act of defiance designed to sabotage any chance of my brothers and sisters ever making a decent match.

Upstairs I was exploding in anger at the injustice of her remarks. How did she know what I was doing and thinking? Why did she not ask me why I did whatever it was? My father would murmur his running agreement and only interrupt her little monologue every few minutes to reinforce one of her rabid remarks with a juicy observation of his own. “It is our fault. We are too soft on him. That is the trouble. What he really needs is two gitte petch (Hard slaps).”

This mounting frustration and the helplessness that so infuriated me then sometimes comes back to me as I listen in on conversations in Shul. The intolerance and even prejudice that I come across is in essence no more widespread or pervasive than that which I encounter in other communities I socialise with. It is the utter self-righteousness and ignorant assurance that makes it so annoying. Like the cretin at my table who knows for a fact Goyim don’t have a family life and therefore they cannot appreciate what we go through bringing up ours. That babies can’t get infected from a Bris even if the mohel does not take all the necessary precautions because it’s a Mitzva and that the lack of basic hygiene in the mikve is still no more likely to spread disease than the swimming pool where people with aids are having sex all the time.

Bigotism, prejudice and idiocy are not exclusive to Chassidism. We have our fair share of raving lunatics too but probably no more than that. That they sometimes manage to be promoted to exalted positions in the community is just another sign that we, who do know the difference between opinions and facts, should be standing up and making our voices heard. Even if it won’t make any difference to those chattering in the kitchen, it might calm down the boiling anger in those who find themselves trapped within. Listening on in justified horror but not daring to make a sound. Those who might already be anticipating letting the fat lady sing for them instead.

Call Me Cassandra

2006-04-10T20:21:00.000+01:00

Last week an elderly Jewish man was pulled over by the police in New York. I am not entirely clear exactly what happened but it seems clear he had committed some minor misdemeanor. Enraged Chassidim claim he is deaf and could not follow police instructions so the police beat him before arresting him. More reliable sources are less dramatic and say he might have been treated a little forcefully as he was cuffed and led to the patrol car after belligerently refusing to hand over his papers. I know very few actual details and those come from notoriously biased and unreliable sources so I am not going to offer my opinion on the rights or wrongs of the police action.

What followed however was a scandalously irresponsible riot by the Torah warriors of Borough Park. Fires were lit on the streets and police cars were attacked. At least one police car is said to have had a Molotov cocktail thrown through its window. It took riot police hours to quiet the streets according to press reports. Local Chassidim while worried about the Chillul Hashem (desecration of His name) the riot caused are adamant that the police had it coming to them because of their aggressive enforcement of traffic laws in their area.

Last week a twenty-year-old ultra-orthodox man admitted his three-month old baby boy to hospital with internal bleeding in the head and bite marks on the neck. The baby subsequently died and the father has been charged with manslaughter after allegedly admitting beating it. Apparently the infant, who the father suspected was malformed, had not allowed him to sleep and had had his head bashed against a wall. Again I do not know any facts other than those the media is releasing and thus I have no opinion on the rights or wrongs of the case. Not surprisingly though, the Rabbinate in Jerusalem do know for certain he is completely innocent and have threatened riots if he is not released immediately. The police have taken the threat seriously and are bracing to contain them.

I know the Rabbi of Jerusalem and he is a well-meaning man. That however does not excuse such abhorrent naïveté. It is unpardonable that a community should try and use its brute force to squash vital investigations into reprehensible crimes. I believe most just people would agree to be locked up for a few days, even when innocent, if that would help keep actual child killers behind bars.

To offer a blanket amnesty to anyone wearing the garb is racist for implying that non-frum people kill babies and Chassidim don’t. Worse than that it is shortsighted because it is very likely that the father will eventually be found to be guilty and we will have shot ourselves in the leg again. It also proves that, on our list of priorities, protecting the good name of the community comes before protection of the members of the community and that is even worse.

On the other hand the very language of riot and Molotov cocktails used to be alien to the Chassidic movement and it is worrying that in the space of a week it has flared up in two completely isolated incidents. The causes are different it is true. The debacle in Jerusalem is a testament to our system of appointing leaders on the basis of their scholarly achievements while little to no attention is given to their actual leadership qualities and sound judgment. It is patently obvious that both are sadly lacking in this case.

The American riots stem more from a lack of any sort of leadership and are for me far more worrying. There is no doubt in my mind that a generation of Chassidim is growing up and learning to flex its muscles. It is a tight-knit and homogenous group with a very fast if less than reliable grapevine. The youth feels alienated from a society that thinks the official Jewish groups who claim to speak for all Jewry represent them too, while their real voices are in reality seldom even noticed. Needless to say it would be wise to bend an ear.

Oh My Goy

2006-03-26T13:27:00.001+01:00

The word goy, in our community, has none of the connotations some of my readers suppose it to have. For the native Yiddish speakers on our Hill the word masks none of the hidden longing and jealous admiration that the secular Jews are accused of. The definition of goy, for us, is non-Jewish. The definition of Jewish is less simply defined on the other hand. Far too many Hillers define Jewish as anybody with a level of judaic religious observance above whatever standard they arbitrarily decide, but that is another matter.

Goy means gentile like boy means male human child. So when someone says to you “Listen here boy,” it means, listen to me male infant. If you happen to be overweight, fifty-seven years old, black and lesbian you might take umbrage but that does not make boy a rude word.

When a Chassidic property dealer with a messy beard and an accent thicker than his waist says, “My goy vill deal viz it.” with utter finality he is not denigrating his ‘man’ rather he is asserting his manhood. His ‘having manhood’ that is. You see everybody on the Hill can deal a few properties here and there but it is having your own goy that really makes you the man. ‘I’ll tell my goy to take care of it’ is a sentence you practice before the mirror before skipping to brush your teeth.

Each industry has it own set of goyim. When I was younger each of the property-dealing families used to have an Irish man. A Paddy or an O’Riley they could call upon any time of the night or day to deal with whatever needed to be dealt with, from a dripping tap in a bathroom, to a front room to chassidified with three fluorescent tubes or a grandmother that has to be picked up from the airport. It was an Afro-Caribbean in the eighties and Columbian in the nineties. Today it is most often a Polish guy with lots of drive, a big toolbox (with tools in) and the mistaken idea that hitching his star to a Jew will shoot him off into the stratosphere- moneywise.

The car salesmen all have a mechanic they like to call My Goy and even my washing machine repairman proudly proclaims his goy’s virtues above rubies. These batmen are invariably very well treated by their Chassidic benefactors who are more often than not completely baffled by the mentality of the gentiles they are dealing with. It is these goyim whose task it is to serve as interpreter and cultural attaché, translating English for their bosses and their bosses to the English. They understand fully well that while their bosses might dress like the Jewish version of a priest that is a sartorial mirage and in fact, behind the exotic exterior often lies a Londoner (pun intended). Forewarned and forearmed by the information provided by his goy the Chassidic businessmen’s associates can come to table with no unreasonable expectations and thus can business commence.

Come Pesach, the Rabbis too have to produce their very own uncircumcised member. Like the businessmen whose lives they covet all year and who lead and advise them in all matters, when it comes to Pesach each Rabbi worth his salt has to have his own goy. Originally the idea of selling Chametz (leavened foods forbidden over Passover) was instituted to allow businesses, that would suffer financial hardship if they had to liquidate all their stock every year, to circumvent this law. The ceremony involves a symbolic selling of the goods, which are stored in a carefully marked place, to a certified goy for the duration of the week after which the goods are returned to their original owners automatically.

Today in our ever growing frummity we all dutifully traipse down to our local Rav and sell him a whole pile of stuff that is not chometz anyway, like headache pills and washing-up liquid, but which we earnestly put aside as questionable because they don’t have the kosher stamp. The Rav does so out of genuine concern and also because each of us leaves him a generous gratuity. The Rabbi then performs the same transaction with the goy in a ceremony I am dying to see; Especially the part where the Rabbi verifies the credentials of the goy.

Happily, the goy is an awfully understanding and generous chap so he does not mind at all that half the town borrows from his stuff without asking, like when suddenly someone falls ill and remembers the Aspirin are in his box. As I said we might look like Rabbis but that is a deception and far from being goy haters, this particular Yomtov we positively love ‘em.

Protocols of the Meeting

2006-03-10T16:44:00.000Z

I am sure many of my reader have suspected for a while that there is more to this blog than meets the eye. That there is a calculated mission hidden inside the innocuous ramblings of "an anonymous, thirty-something Stamford Hiller claiming to be a Chassid and regularly churning out his personal take on whatever he likes." That it has become so widely read despite the many who do not like positions taken serves only to reinforce that suspicion.

My use of the word elders to describe my leaders should have been a clue and They are right that it was careless of me but, as we have been taught all the time, most people are like sheep and created to have wool over their eyes. Did nobody ever wonder how comes a blog from nowhere gets so many visitors? Did they not wonder how comes someone sitting on the Hill and spouting what he sees for the entire world to see, has managed to stay anonymous? Did nobody notice that all those displaying too much interest were eliminated?

On the other hand the Elders are losing Their touch too. As a group who have managed to remain hidden for so long despite Their manifesto having been published over a hundred years ago and still available on sale in the few countries where Their control is not yet absolute, They were surprisingly negligent in allowing me to have this amount exposure without a minder. Did They not suspect that I would squeal if they tried to clip my wings?

It is not only my carelessness They are unhappy with either. It seems I have overstepped the line too. I have been using sarcasm, my Board of Control unanimously agreed, and that is against the rules. They make a valid point. It is difficult to pin down exactly what is being said in satire and the Elders, like most of our Rabbis, don’t really go for the whole humour thing. The position I was supposed to hold on the cartoons for instance was one of moral outrage followed by smug self-righteousness. When I asked for practical guidance I was told to watch the Board of Deputies and how they handled the Ken Livingstone story.

In truth I had been watching that and the Prince Harry one. I had questioned to myself whether it really was in our best interest to react like stuck pigs whenever anyone mentions the holocaust and our constituents don’t get a cashback. I had been asking myself for while if my mission of bringing the Hillers firmly into the hold of the Elders, like all the other Jews of Britain, was as good a deed as I had been led to believe. I had also, as the Control Board speaker pointed out, mocked the appointed religious leader’s style and that when They had worked so hard to get one of Their choosing after the previous one had turned out to have something of a mind of his own. The Michael Howard remark I was duly absolved of after I pointed out that I wasn’t to know he was Theirs.

But it was exactly the Red Ken story that caused me to rebel. I cannot for the life of me see why it is in the Elder’s interest to antagonize the man for a silly remark he made that is not even offensive. I pointed out to the Board that with the growing antisemtism in London (the Elders had promised it would be eliminated worldwide by 1950 - antisemitsm not London), not to mention the regrettable incident in France They forgot to promote in this country till a week after the event, it might be wise to at least attack him for his views we actually oppose rather than this pathetic media circus act. After all he is known to be a fair man alongside his odious anti-Israelism. They reminded me that I had been developed to write their opinions not to develop my own. They further reminded me that criticizing Them was forbidden and I was lucky not be severely disciplined.

I was ordered to stop writing but I shall continue as independent and if I am doomed I am doomed. By doing so I will prove that the Elders are not as powerful as some people think. Of course I will take extra precautions and if anybody pricks me with an umbrella I will have it checked immediately but I doubt They will feel forced to eliminate me. Most people will put this down as some Purim joke after all. Isn’t it wonderful to be Jewish?

I Wore New

2006-02-19T16:43:00.000Z

This has been niggling in the back of my mind for a while already and I have alluded to the thought before here. Aren't we Jews just too nice to be taken seriously? The Muslims stridently screech for what they want, as unreasonable as it might look. By none too subtly, regularly reminding us of what they are prepared to do if they don’t get their way, they are shamelessly pandered to by, frankly, everybody with a healthy respect for their own hide, not least Jack Straw.

We Chassidim do not follow the Olympics closely. Most, I dare say, are not aware the winter games are in full swing. Certainly there is little enthusiasm for the Hellenistic ideal. There is indeed little trace of the Adonis in the fellow who shared the showers with me this weekend in my local mikve. As he massaged soap over his generous limbs he wondered aloud to the equally gross Neanderthal studiously shampooing his forehairs in the next shower what the point of the Olympic games is. There was a kind of triumphant superiority to his repeated mantra; “What difference does it make to mankind that some skier from Austria can go faster than anybody else down a mountain?”

“Yes. Does he deliver emergency medicines at the bottom of a mountain?” That spark from chimp number two proved he had understood the profundity of the argument.

It was a scrawny little Gollum who earned my respect though. He had been washing himself quietly and doing his best to melt into the background as some people do when those with more lung than processing power take the floor. I couldn’t help noticing wryly that only in a Chassidic mikve could a forty year old man wash his hair with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and leave with his manhood intact.

“It is not about winning” he said and I smugly awaited the old canard about taking part. “It’s about losing.” He had everyone’s attention.
“Think about it. Let’s say each sport has a hundred competitors and you have fifty sports, that means by the end of the games you have fifty winners and four-thousand-nine-hundred-and-fifty losers. And look how well behaved and civilized that whole thing is.”

I think even the moulting bears understood. As I looked at that man his gnome’s forehead had turned into the dome of a learned man and his nondescript face had taken on the allure of a diminutive scholar.

There is, it is true, a certain dignity to being sporting and I do not feel our situation is dire enough here to warrant actively promoting a more active and forceful method of getting noticed. I am however worriedly watching the situation in Israel now with the new Hamas government being sworn in. Regardless of my positions on specific governments or policies in Israel I will not be able stand by and be silent as I see governments, who refuse to deal with terrorist organisations in their own countries, open negotiations with and support for a group who openly refers to the Protocols in its constitution.

In sport there is indeed dignity in losing but in war dignity is in victory or death in its pursuit.

Drawing Muhammad Out

2006-02-09T11:41:00.000Z

I have a dream. Not quite a nightmare but still one that wakes me and leaves a feeling of angst and unease behind it. I am in a situation of potential danger. Say I’m in the path of a car and unable to move or something like that. The situation is dangerous but not intrinsically critical. As soon as someone sees me a simple action will remove the danger but suddenly I find I have lost my voice. I scream but no sound comes out. My rage and frustration come not from the idea of dying, I think I could cope with that but from the bitterness at being let down by a simple primal act like screaming.

The Internet has made it possible for the quiet voice from the back of the hall to become audible to anybody interested enough to go listening for it. People of a similar mind will soon pick up on it while those who disagree will soon pick on it and before you know it another voice has entered the fray. So where is the Muslim Shaigetz? Where is The Haramzada asking his community where the hell they think they are going with this cartoon business? Is there no dissenting voice, even anonymously? Are red beards better than black and white ones at keeping their subjects in check?

I don’t believe most orthodox Muslims or Jews really understand the concept of freedom of expression and speech at all. The idea you can hate what another says but defend to the death their right to say it does not exist in either of our cultures. There is no doubt in my mind that this crisis (even before it was hijacked by those diligently waiting in the wings for such an opportunity) has little to do with the actual cartoons just as I know that many normal and law-abiding Muslims are genuinely offended by them and that that does not change anything.

It is quite obvious if you hear the Islamic demonstrators speak that they have no idea how unreasonable their arguments come across to a western audience. “One and a half billion Muslims are offended because we do not allow pictures of the prophets already hundreds of years!” is the standard rationale or “How would you like to see baby Jesus with a bomb in his loincloth?” Then there are the others who come back with “Look how offended you are when we make a cartoon of Hitler in bed with Anna Frank.” If our society has not been able to bring home to these people why these arguments are correct but not valid for burnt out buildings and dead bodies then I personally think we should be out there braying for the head of the education minister on a plate.

Our lack of understanding is very possibly part of the reason we are unable to deal with their frustration. I notice that on the talk shows and other places where Muslims are represented the established media tends to choose the unthreatening and ‘normal’ looking spokespeople to represent the Muslim view. As an orthodox Jew I know how ridiculous it must look to the religious Muslim to see a bareheaded, comely woman and a suited, shaved and comfortably sanitised kufr sitting in a studio explaining that the radicals don’t represent the true Islam. So the atheist in a crumpled grey suit, a crew cut and glasses represents Islam by dint of being Arab and having stopped practicing? Gimmeabreak!

It reminds me of how laughable it is to us when our Chief Rabbi in his western suit and carefully nurtured Episcopal appearance goes on the record saying what an inspiration John Lennon was to us all. Not particularly offensive to me personally, I happen to like Lennon, but for many Chassidim “Imagine there’s no heaven …and no religion too” seem to have been far too much of an inspiration to him. So our comfortably assimilated landsmen smile and nod their heads appreciatively of how cultured and normal all we Jews are while my community looks on in bewilderment.

I remember too having my teeth set on edge by President G. W. lecturing the Muslims after 9/11 as to what real Islam is about. With his especially stern but earnest face carefully practiced he patronisingly explained that the fundamentalists do not represent Islam. Who was he trying to convince? Them? Are we westerners so arrogant that we don’t see how ridiculous it looks to a scholar who has been studying his religion for fifteen solid years to have an ex-oil executive who runs a ranch tell him what the nature of Islam is?

To be really honest we should admit that there is no logic to religion, much as the western kufr wishes to convince us there is. To a believer in the absolute truth of his cause the values of free speech and pluralism are pure rubbish and we might as well admit that. Two and two are four and I don’t accommodate the opinion of those who think it might be 177. If there is one God and He said, “See there should be no graven images of me” then what the Danish minister of culture thinks is largely irrelevant and the west would do well to understand that. The only question is how the believer should juggle his conviction with the threat of the legal system’s.

Until the understanding of our western values system and its inherent advantages develops within their community, and it will because it is in human nature to want to be free, western governments should take into account that it is impossible to force-teach abstract concepts and should stick to firm and fair enforcement of the law. Peaceful demonstration is legal so it has to be allowed but calls for violence should be dealt with harshly and decisively. Freedom of speech is not just designed to allow bloggers to cock their hoops at their establishment; it is a cornerstone of the western civilisation that has never before been questioned in the UK in two centuries. I, for one, do not want to go back to thought control under the Imams, the Rabbis, the Archbishop or the Prime Minister and I am utterly convinced Haramzada does not either.

Meanwhile the Danes have promised to print cartoons of the Holocaust that the Iranians are promoting in retaliation. While it kowtows to terrorist pressure it does also fall under the category of freedom of expression and in my opinion prostitutes have to agree to serve any client who wants to come (or doesn’t) and screaming can be part of the show.

And just for the record I personally find four of the cartoons absolutely hilarious.

Pavlov’s smile

2006-02-02T17:40:00.000Z

My hands are freezing in the biting cold and the wind blows sharply and painfully against my ears, so ridiculously exposed beneath my big black hat. My obligatory navy-blue suit trousers do not offer half the protection of thick denim or corduroy so my legs beg for some added padding while my torso, under an overcoat, a long jacket, tsitsit (a fringed woollen shawl worn under the garments), a shirt and a cotton t-shirt vest, simmers gently. A group of my friends, all dressed identically, are walking a little ahead and I watch as they walk four abreast, laughingly oblivious to the other users on the street.

I observe a young lady out walking her dog step off the pavement into the road, all too aware of the startled jumps and scared avoidment she can expect if she tries to pass the group. She is wearing sneakers and pants and a simple winter jacket and she does not look at all cold. My friends say pork keeps you warmer than beef does. I wonder to myself whether they can pick out the vegetarians from the crowd by their shivering but do not bother to make the point. I acknowledge her as she rejoins the footpath and passes me. I smile to her. She looks surprised. She self-consciously shakes the lead of her dog and walks on looking back at least once I suspect although I do not check.

A tall Pole, new to the country judging by his typical haircut and brandless sneakers, warm as toast in his down-filled jacket and long woollen scarf, edges slightly away so as not to pass me too closely. His head and eyes, however, follow the orbit of our arc, watching me as we pass. I wonder to myself what would happen if I were to smile to him but do not bother as his eyes are by now fixed firmly on the retreating figure behind me. Maybe he thinks she is looking back at him?

A young couple walk past holding hands and laughing. I know them. I see him every morning rushing to catch the bus as I make my way to shul. He works for London Transport he told me and she is a trainee nurse. This morning they are walking unhurriedly together as if on cloud nine, completely impervious to the sub-zero temperatures. I smile to them and they smile back.

His nose is reddened by the cold and his big black hat sits high on top of his head leaving his ears exposed to the elements. He rubs them every two minutes in a futile attempt to warm them. I have often wondered why the Jews on the Hill wear their distinctive clothes as if the function of identification with the group were more important than protection from the elements. His long overcoat and dark pants and shoes actually look right for the time of the year if not the century.

He is walking behind a group of Chassidim who only acknowledge my existence to ensure that Rover does not come close to them. Do they really think I live with a vicious canine threat in the house? I have tried to explain so many times that he won’t hurt them, to no avail. I step off the pavement as I pass them neither expecting nor receiving thanks. He is dawdling slightly behind the other group and leers at me as we pass. I ignore him and continue.

I do sense someone staring at me as I walk on and I am sure he is turning back. Did Rover frighten him? He did not seem scared. Maybe he was interested in me or he wanted something. I turn back and catch the eye of a tall blonde hunk. He smiles to me and I smile back. It feels like a good day. Then a mixed-race teenage couple stroll into view and block him out. Damn them.

Bless His Ass

2006-01-22T03:16:00.000Z

My youngest brother was born when I was about eight. In a time when mothers were still held in hospital for about a week after they gave birth and a gentleman of the cloth visited every second day. When nurses still called my mother Madam and my father was firmly invited to a compulsory chat with the family-planning advisor. I remember my parents finding that discussion a source of enormous mirth although my own experiences did not cause me to agree that children are the kind of blessing where quantity always counts more than quality and that only a typically delusional goy from a typically dysfunctional family could ever think otherwise. Indeed, if they had invited the blessings already produced by the union instead of my father, my youngest few siblings would most likely not be facing any of their current difficulties (or much else for that matter).

In a large ward, in the next bed to my mother, lay a black woman who had just suffered a miscarriage. Her husband, a big gentle Jamaican of the finest kind was considerately rubbing her back, holding her hand and comforting her in ways I had never seen my parents connect. My surreptitious but enthralled staring must have caught his attention because he interrupted his petting session to call me over and offer me a sweet. My father, ever alert when the possibility of straying arose, hastily jumped up to tell the man I didn’t want what he knew to be a non-kosher candy. The point of coyly hiding the fact that I would not eat it because it was not kosher I still do not know, especially since my peyos and enormous kappel made it quite plain anyway. My children proudly explain they only eat kosher and do not seem to suffer unduly for it.

The man beamingly welcomed us both and in his wonderful islands singsong asked me if I know my Bible. My father’s self-satisfied smile precluded me voicing my well-earned hesitations.
“So tell me dis, boy. Who kill a lion widde jawbone of an ass?”
He could have been speaking Island Arawak for all I understood. I stared at him blankly.
“Go on boy, you tell me. Who was it kill a lion widde jawbone of ass?”
I don’t remember exactly how the conversation ended although I do know that I had the urge to go to the nearest empty bed, climb in and pull the covers over my head.

What stops this story being my party piece is the sobering knowledge that even if I had been able to decipher his question I would have been unable to answer because I no idea what he was on about. In the school I went to and in the family I lived, the Bible was no story. It was most certainly not read for enjoyment. Moreover the story of the Bible is not told in narrative form except to toddlers. Certainly any tales with Dalilahs in are resolutely squashed; as incidentally are any references to pregnancy and intimacy of any sort.

I won’t forget the day a boy in my class asked the Rebbe why we only have to perform a bris on boys and not on girls. This was no call for FGC, rather a proof of biological naïveté. The Rebbe struggled to imply something that would not count as him teaching the boy shmutz but would still serve to jog his memory. He could not because the kid was obviously obviously genitally clueless. The reasonable thing to do would have been for the Rebbe to tell him to wait after the lesson and have a couple of quiet words, but perish the thought. The entire class was a titter and I have no doubt the place behind the toilets in the playground was busy the next playtime.

I know there were boys in my class to whom learning and being good came naturally. For them it was a pleasure to know at what age Yocheved begat Miram and how many times the word 'if' occurs in any given parsha. They were proud to be able to inform Daddy, over the Shabbat dinner table, how the Abrahamic bris was the catalyst for all the holy abstinence of future generations. The fact they had no idea what they were spouting deterred them not an iota. Me? I was staring out of the window dreaming of belonging to a religion where guys killed lions widde jawbone of an ass.

T.S.

The Epicurious

2006-01-03T18:02:00.000Z

I do sometimes enjoy the holiday season. I find myself swept along by the, acknowledgedly phoney but still comforting, piped cheer that I, as one unfettered by the present-buying mania, can uniquely and wholeheartedly enjoy. Still every now and then I am rudely reminded that, as within our little bubbleworld, I am sometimes more like a tourist than a citizen in this temporarily cheerful landscape.

We orthodox Jews do not celebrate start of the new year in January. There are those that claim that we don’t really celebrate anything at all, in the sense that our friends and neighbours from outside the community do. I think even the most fervent chassid will agree that, spirituality aside, our festivals are marginally less colourful and miles less fun than the secular variety. Although it is true, spirits, albeit of vastly differing sorts, do feature highly in both universes. The other thing the two holidays have in common, in our consumer societies at least, is the obsession with food. Indeed for the New Years lunch I attended with my goyish colleagues I had the specially briefed chef prepare, under the beady eye of a highly unsanitary looking mashgiach (kosher supervisor), the very same festive salad my wife served with the meat on our New Years eve:

In a dry pan over a low flame toast a big handful of pine nuts, shaking continually until they are evenly and lightly browned then stand them aside to cool. Add some light frying oil to the pan and fry off some cubed crusts of bread or challah to get some really crispy croutons. Leave aside to cool as well. Next, deseed half of a large and very red pomegranate into a salad bowl filled with baby spinach leaves - well washed and shaken dry. In a vinaigrette shaker or small container with a lid pour 5 tablespoons each of light cider vinegar and sunflower oil, 1 tablespoon of runny honey, a pinch of mustard powder and some roughly ground black pepper then shake hard. Mix together the croutons, nuts and salad. Pour the vinaigrette over just before serving and you have my wife’s perfect Rosh Hashana salad.

Almost perfect I should say. My younger boy refused to eat any of it because his well-meaning teacher had taught him that if he ate vinegar at all, from Rosh Hashana until after Yom Kippur, he would have a sour year. Cretin! Although I might be tempting fate here, I do have to point out that I did eat it then and it does not seem to have had any adverse effect on my year, although a purist might argue that this might have been the year my star finally shot out into orbit had I only declined those greens. Indeed it would not be the first time my religion crashed with my career and the fact I have managed to carve myself a niche and earn my way only serves to make me wonder sometimes, as I lie in my single bed at night, what I might have become had I gone to university at sixteen as I wanted, instead of the Yeshiva I passionately disliked but my father chose for me.

The mashgiach, sporting his festive melancholy, came over to me as I ate. He must have seen in me a kindred spirit and having finished preparing for me an utterly unappetizing looking plate of cold-cuts he had come to see how his raison d’etre there that night was doing. My company took one look at him and hastily vacated the area leaving me to finish my salad in the company of a fellow heeb.
"Is that all you are eating?" He leered at my plate through smudged spectacles.
"Yes," I replied stoically and prepared to explain why. He did not wait.
"Can I have your meat then?"
"Yes," I replied, "why not? You’ve already got my goat."

War Crimes

2005-12-13T14:22:00.000Z

The western news media, having been made to realise that their anti-Israeli slant in the last years has led to a raised anti-Semitism, are suddenly carefully ensuring that their pro-Jewish content quota are filled. The BBC, in a clumsy though welcome change, again aired an extremely good Auschwitz TV series which sensitively but factually takes the viewer through the rise and fall of the Nazi regime and shows, in simple words and images, more of the horror than the all grandiose cinematic understatement of Schindler’s List ever could. In the last film in the series I saw some very real and serious issues raised and was made aware of some very disturbing truths about injustices to some victims and the privileges of some perpetrators that are still currently being tolerated or ignored by all - including us.

I chose the word clumsy before some of the other words that jostled to fill that space because I am giving the Beeb the benefit of my doubt. I feel they are impetuously rushing in, with knee-jerk, quick fix solutions to a perceived negative image of Jews in Britain, caused partly by their anti-Israeli propaganda, to play their trump, the Holocaust card, with the stated aim to show the youth how dangerous racism and anti-Semitism can be. The intended mechanism is to try and rekindle some of the sympathy the world used to have for the Jews as they watched them recovering from the horrors of WWII.

It might be partly our own fault that the goyim feel the need to dance around us as if on eggshells. Our brethren across the pond seem to have managed to find a equal, even proud, place in what is fast becoming the new Terra Sancta. Meanwhile we, the Jews of Western Europe have for so long milked the holocaust for all it is worth that it is small wonder that in the eyes of the gentile, victimhood has become our defining characteristic. The British are so afraid of offending our touchy community that even a hard-hitting and in-your-face, obnoxious comedy show like Little Britain, famous for its outrageously offensive caricatures, declines to poke fun at Jews. A glaring omission when you remember that one of the writers of the show and main actors is Jewish.

The problem is two-fold and we ourselves are partly to blame for both. The first is our insistence that being anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish are the same. In a special BBC program from a mosque in London a certain Sheikh Mansour, asked whether Jews and Muslims can get on, is quoted as answering: "I believe that the two can live in peace - but at present not in a natural state. If the weak people, the Palestinians, are forced to do something they oppose, it may work, but it cannot last if it is unnatural." An outrageous answer coming from the Sheik of a mosque in London talking about London’s Jews, yet the editor, tellingly, saw no reason not to choose that particular quote to publish.

The second is the fault of all the Jewish personalities and celebrities who hide or downplay their Jewishness in a tacit acceptance that a foreshortened member is not something one makes a big song and dance about. I cannot think of many current Jewish personalities or stars in Gt. Britain who do not either negate their roots or bend-over backwards to prove how Goyish they can be, only to spring up when the holocaust is mentioned to claim their part of that sympathy vote.

We British Jews are citizens of the UK, conceived and born here. We have our businesses, our jobs, our families and homes here. We should not have our positions or our fate automatically determined by either a state run by people who happen to be of the same race as us or an event in not too distant past - whatever its magnitude. While we might fervently support the State of Israel (or not) that too is but a mere opinion and the right to the holding of these is today the inalienable right of every man (or woman), is it not?

If the state-sponsored broadcaster wanted to create a more positive image of the practicing Jews in London they could be coming to ask us what we think we would like to show. Maybe a film showing how scared a 13 year chassid can be to ride the tube alone or walk home from school in his distinctive garb might be more to the point? Maybe a program showing something of the contribution made to Britain over the last few decades by Jews despite their mistaken wish to downplay their Semitism?

In any event forcing me to buy my equal and fully deserved rights with guilt makes me a lesser human being and that is the true anti-Semitism.

Iron, Lion, Zion: Black Hatted Rebbegae

2005-12-04T13:33:00.000Z

Reggae is not the music of choice for the standard orthofunction, or, it wasn't...
In my father’s eyes it is not music at all. When he found a Bob Marley cassette in the music stash hidden in my sock drawer my old man, before throwing it out, asked me with tears in his eyes how his own son could listen to a shvartze making animal noises. A rhetorical question I had no inclination to explore at that time and he patently expected no answer to as he proceeded to dispose of my albums of grunt.

As I proceeded to replace them, I am sure I pondered, as I often do today, how comes I am indeed so comfortable in my own little place right on the edge of the gefilte-fish cradle. With the shimmering jellified comfort of soulless shtetility just within reach and the soothing, pounding reggae sound beating its own version of sanity in through the background. In an ironic twist, now it is my own daughter who wants me to order her a Reggae album from the Sonymusic website. To further the irony it is a religious young man’s sweet sound and cherubic good looks that have taken her. The rebberap sound we already have gotten used to from Lipa Shmelzer is now being surpassed in the adoration of a budding generation of orthofannettes by Matisyahu’s rebbegae.

This young man, religious enough to go onstage without his glasses because he does not want to see the girls, should pose no harm to my daughter, though pose he certainly does. Yet as I indulge her unconscious pheremonal desires I am aware, as he is probably not, that I am observing a very slippery slope. His being featured on MTV helps him to overcome the very real hurdle in these girl’s eyes, of being a Lubavitcher and provide a legitimate, fully kosher menu of gyrating, middle-clutching, shadow playing, finger pointing, hip hopping, back bopping, black sounding music. No wonder they love him and I am convinced the happily married young man who has just had a baby hopes they will all learn from him to love his religion and his God.

Alex Strom, with whom I do not always agree, rues in his column this week the lack of entertainment opportunities for the Haredi young male. He makes a valid point, if we overlook the fact that he seems consider the excruciatingly infantile entertainment, that The Aguda he used to lead produced, worthy of promotion. However unlike the weddingsinger stars and very amateur dramatics, the Cheapendale Chevres' overdubbed electronopop to illfitting lyrics and the soulless choirs of overproduced yingelech that we excused as Heimishe entertainment, finally God seems to have blessed us with a Matisyahu.

Matisyahu could be the answer to my dreams. A role model to the artists within the haredi community who have until now felt you have to either suppress it or chase it outside. He can, if he plays his hands right (pun intended), prove to us that it is indeed possible to serve God in many ways and that Lubavitch might in fact have gotten that right.

And wat could be more ironical den dat man?

Adressing Hair

2005-11-16T16:45:00.000Z

Non-Chassidim tend to be miserably misinformed as to what actually goes on inside our community yet for some reason many seem fascinated by our lifestyle and customs. With my perspective clouded by my own hang-ups I tend to cover up much of what would seem interesting or special to the outsider for fear of having it, and by extension me, labeled quaint. So when Terence, one of my goyishe colleagues, asked to see a bar mitzvah I waited until one of my more secularised friends made one and wrangled him an invite to that.

It was a fairly nice affair and the food was about as good as can be expected with a Kedassia Hechsher (certificate of extreme kosherity). The men, of course, sat separately from the women but the potted separation wall was not watertight so the newly liberated Chassidim could join the closet and repressed homosexuals in discreetly proving their manhood by determinedly peering through the palm fronds at the fairer sex in mastication.

There are very few modern-chassidic families on the Hill. It tends to be individuals who have personally chosen to relax the arbitrary rules somewhat who form the bulk of this grouping. The ultra-traditional uncles, aunts, grandparents and siblings of this proud father were thus decidedly less so although they clumsily hid it behind loud, jovial Mazeltovs and convivial expressions of satisfaction that everybody could make it. The speeches pointedly ignored his parents and determinedly impressed upon the child how important tradition is, what wonderful and holy people his great-grandparents had been and how much he too can achieve if he only opens his heart to experience the sweetness of the true Torah way.

The patronising undercurrents were indetectable to non-yiddish-speaking Terry and he and his friend came away full of how nice and close everybody is, what interesting customs and food we have and what fun it must be to be a Chassid and have parties like this all the time. Terence presented his ‘fail-proof’ gift of a CD voucher from HMV and I chose not to mention that it would most likely be rescued from oblivion by the father of the Bar Mitzva; the boy himself in all probability never having stepped inside a ‘goyishe music shop’.

His companion, a clinical psychologist, who I later learned had been miffed when the waiter informed her that wine was available only for the men, declined to be drawn on her impressions of the gaggle of yachnes who shared her table and her only remark, as my wife and I walked them to the tube, was that the ladies there all seemed to have the same hairdresser. The discussion about Chassidic women and wigs that ensued put paid to talk of any other subject. She, it transpired, had never realised that my wife wears one although she has met her often enough.

“So why does she wear a wig then?” she asked.
I explained that, as her hair is one of the sensual and most beautiful features of a woman, a married one does not flaunt it in public but reserves it for her husband. I added, as we are trained to do, that to the uninitiated it might seem that wearing a wig defeats that objective by giving her a head of even nicer hair but that as psychologist she of all people must understand that paste jewellery might look real but does not straighten the spine and bring a gleam into the eye the way 15 carats of polished diamonds would. Terry, who has dealings with other Chassidim too, was not that easily convinced. He observed that many Chassidic women take their wig off when they come home and replace it with a cloth head cover or snood that is similar to the one Muslim women wear and far from attractive. "Indeed", he pointed out, "I find they are far more attractive when they come to see me than when they are home." My wife then continued to scupper my entire argument by adding that many Chassidic women shaved their heads altogether and the snood must be a far sight prettier than a bald pate even to the most forgiving of husbands.

I could see this discussion going everywhere I did not want it to and hastily nudged my dear wife to inform her of that. With the panache I have come to expect as much as respect she immediately put paid to it by launching into the telling of an old English joke of two women on a bus.
One leans over to the other and says, “I hope you don’t mind my asking but is that a wig you are wearing?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Oh. Are you sure? I won’t tell anyone.”
“Well it is not!”
“Are you absolutely positive, because..?”
“Oh, Ok then. Yes it is.” She snaps angrily.
After a slight pause the other one murmurs, “Really? It does not look it!”

Hi Jinx

2005-11-02T16:00:00.000Z

One of the Jewish buildings I visit on occasion is is by unfortunate necessity fairly heavily fortified. This yomtov I was practically unmasked by a security officer, warned to look out for a misfit, who almost took me out. I had to pick up something from inside and, passing by in the evening, decided to make an unscheduled stop to get it. As I approached the door a guard stepped out of the shadows and stood looking at me. I greeted him with a ‘Hi’ and walked on. He followed me up the path and stood a few steps before the door slightly hesitantly, then, as I fumbled with the number lock in the dark, he called me over.
“Good evening Sir. Where are you going?”
“In.”
“Do you belong here?”

In any other circumstances his question could have been the subject of an entire blog. I was more concentrated on the message though than his poor choice of words and I did not take him up on it. And by the way I do strongly suggest the local constabulary have a brainstorm one evening on what the appropriate terminology is in establishing how any particular Chassid fits into the kinetic kaleidoscope of black they happen to be monitoring because the way they put their questions can sometimes be cringeworthy.

“Yes. Why?”
“Do you know the number for the door?”
“Yes.”
“Can you open it for me please?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I do not have the authority to let you in.”
“I just want to see if you know it.”
“If you would have just stayed where you were you would have seen if I got in?”
My glib logicism did not impress him and he insisted on being shown that I knew the number. I did that and went inside.

He was still there when I came back out, chatting to a colleague on the street who was sitting in a car. He got out as I approached and more or less accosted me, in a friendly sort of way, as I made to pass him.
“Hi.” I said.
“Good evening Sir. Can I speak with you a moment?”
My supper was going to be of the late variety I could see and resigned myself. After the preliminary few minutes of giving my name and address and speaking Hebrew, to show I could, and silently thanking whoever convinced the Muslims to circumcise their males and thus spare me the ignominy of having to differentiate myself, we established that I was not an Arab terrorist dressed up as a Chassid but a bona fide, true-blue man-in-black.

In return for my teaching him a few insider ways of recognising one of us I got me some information of my own. It turns out the guard had had his alarm bells switched on by my atypical behaviour. “Chassidim,” he told me “do not look strangers in the eye, they avoid eye contact with me. They also don’t greet me like an equal but like a child greets a policeman. Your laid-back ‘Hi’ does not fit the profile.”

I had a very long talk with him and I do not know at what stage it stopped being his interrogation of me (if it ever did) and became my interrogation of his of me. I learned a lot from it though and I now know why I always get such special treatment in the airport and why the Israelis take so long in letting me through. I don’t fit the accepted profile for a Hiller and I now know why.

Good Bye.

Chewing the Cud with Cloven Tongues

2005-10-27T02:22:00.000+01:00

A guy whom I knew well when he was younger has developed into something of a personality. If I am not always proud of him I try at least to be proud for him because he did once really mean well. Now of course he has power and that does corrupt a man hard and fast. He has many powers vested in his hands, a heavy burden indeed for one who has little experience in the dealings with other men. He must make decisions on the spot, I reason, and sometimes overlooks the potential pitfalls of any seemingly minor mistake. If it is true that there is divine guidance, I ask him in my thoughts, and our Rabbi's decisions are therefore infallible that should make it even easier to have an appeals system because then what can there be to hide?

I believe that honesty and openness are the foundation and the cornerstones of justice and that no truly God fearing society can operate in secret and maintain its honour. In Stamford Hill there is a tendency towards ayatollaism that has to be stopped. None of us want Iran-style councils of bearded religiousists arbitrarily dictating standards by the reactions of their netherregional antennae.

In a modern society and having absorbed all the good of the culture surrounding us, we know we cannot have women persecuted and their children ejected from our school system just for having appealing shapes. We have watched our middle-eastern cousins as they chased each other to see who can glorify God the best. If we don’t want to wake up one morning and found ourselves the proud parents of our own criers ‘havoc’ we have to act now to maintain the balance.

Extremism is dangerous in all its forms and while everybody is free to be as holy as they wish it is incumbent upon a society to maintain the centre ground. Public funds that were not earmarked for special groups should be spent on the moderate and time-honoured true traditionalists and all groups should be encouraged to acknowledge that the centre ground is a legitimate Jewish area. All forms of segregation are dangerous and the tendency of individual groups to draw within and close ranks is unhealthy at best.

Stamford Hill does not need the imported boerism and insularism that that is becoming popular. Responsible leadership must encourage a healthy worldview and a positive attitude towards other religious streams. The positive parts of the Stamford Hill of yore were manifest. We spoke English and we got on with our neighbours. Some were more religious than us and some were far less but we still treated them as neighbours. In the YHS we had children of all different types; Gerrers Yekkes and Belzers and Sephardis and we got on with all of them too. We went to camp and we went to siyums and we met the other kids and we came out enrichened by the experience.

The climate being what it is I think anybody with half a brain must realise that the authorities will not tolerate religious councils of any sort that are completely outside their control. If we are to survive we will have to do what we Jews have been so adept at for so many generations and adapt. I don't beileve anybody is against having a responsible rabbinic council working in a transparent and justified manner. I think most of us would be happy having certain rules and regulations built in to the sytem. Nobody wants to see Stamford Hill losing what makes it special. I am however soundly against a system of trials-and-errors leadership where only the frummest one wins and where individuals are arbitrarily imposing their own irrational standards upon an unwilling public.

Now here is the odd part: He has agreed with me on every single one of these points when speaking to me (if maybe not in these specific words) yet I don't believe I have ever heard such sentiments uttered by any of our personalities. What am I to think?

Us Limeys

2005-10-14T02:54:00.000+01:00

We did what was expected, we smiled and begged forgiveness. Of course none of us asked for forgiveness from our enemies; what could be more crass than putting someone on the spot like that? But we did politely beg all our best friends’ pardon and added at least one ‘surprising’ choice just to prove how very good we're being. So when we stepped up to Kol Nidre, feeling almost proud of our humility, we shed our genuine tears with saintly servility.

No matter that some family of sods sitting further back near the door happen to be watching their lives go down the toilet. “Who knew better than me how they had it coming to them? After all if they had listened to me in the first place they would never have been in this ‘shtuch’. If they would have asked my advice they would have done the right thing in the beginning and none of all this would have happened. But they had to be clever. They have to do things their own way. Nu! They did it their own way, so now we ordinary folks can shrug our shoulder and say “Sorry Mate, yer own bleedin fault!” and then turn back to our humble haughteur.

“Oh and just look at those Plimsolls on that child. If my children went out in shoes like that I’d… Something really should be done about that father. He seems to have a child every year and he doesn’t earn enough to buy shoes for them. Actually I should speak to Whatshisname about that. We should be thinking about paying him more. He will leave him Ch”V and it will cost us a whole lot more. Anyway, the kids need to have shoes.
Hey, what am I doing? Thinking business again, I am supposed to be thinking of tshuve”. The mind shifts back into its puritan pride.

It’s true that we don’t all have management positions or the power enough to hurt others directly. Those of us who don’t, often don’t have the ability to help those who got hurt either. But we, all of us, know we are ignoring something. We all know there is a little something that really should be done… Kol Nidre does not absolve us of that. You cannot be sitting in the same building as another whom you know to be crying out for help and ignore their call while you beg for yourself.
“Still, I do believe I did rather a lot of good this year and though I will, of course, show just the right amount of genuine remorse over the course of the coming day I don’t really feel He has any reason to show anything more than a token resistance before awarding me the full set of social benefits as befits a person of my rank.” You consider to yourself in your reasonable righteousness.

“Anyway, it’s good that that I managed to avoid ‘him there’ when he was doing the rounds of his forgiveness. Imagine if we had suddenly met face to face? Actually I am a bit surprised he feels happy going to Kol Nidre without having my forgiveness. Some people have a nerve! In his place I would never contemplate going towards Yom Kippur without having even tried to get my forgiveness. I wouldn’t give it of course. How could I? It would be like saying he was right all along. I couldn’t even! It would be like stabbing my own family in the back. I don’t even think He would want such forgiveness. But he should have asked. Shoyn, we can’t all be menschen. I have to continue with my complacent complaint."

And to think they say we have to learn to integrate!

No More Mr Nice Guy

2005-09-25T19:52:00.000+01:00

So British academia has decided to try again to arrange a boycott of Israeli universities. Tony Blair is being advised to scrap Holocaust day and Red Ken gets away with comparing the Israeli army to Hamas. Meanwhile the government is advised that their foreign policy is to blame for the ‘growing resentment and rising radicalism within the Muslim community. You might quite fairly ask how these affect a Chassid living on the Hill, our yeshivas are not recognised anyway, we do not rely on the holocaust to define our Jewishness and Ken has never been our favourite politician anyway? The combination of all these is however sending a very clear message to British Jewry despite the fact that in their typically ingratiating manner Established British Jewry refuses to enunciate it in public.

The reason our wishes, feelings and sensibilities are being ignored is because everybody, from the Foreign Minister down to the mugger on the street, knows that the Jews will not fight back but bend over backwards to prove what model citizens they can be even as the BBC regularly slams our country as some bastard-state. Even as the British government sends officers to the airport to arrest the generals who risked their lives protecting us from the terrorists who have sworn to annihilate us, while terrorist clerics like Yusuf al-Qaradawi are invited to London and given the red-carpet treatment. Like our parents and grandparents in Europe we will determinedly remain silent and good while our rights and lives are stripped away, salami-style, slice by slice. Meanwhile the Muslim community, with none of our snivelling desire to please, will soundly prove that if they do not get their way they will bomb us, together with our hosts the crusaders (the new muslim in-word for Christians or westerners), to hades.

We will stand around smiling as the BBC invites 'Abd Al-Bari 'Atwan, of the Al Quds newspaper based in London, onto Dateline London, a weekly talkshow, to explain that Hamas is entitled to bomb civilians in Israel because it is called resistance. I actually did write to complain, seeing as Tony Blair had announced that all calls to terrorism anywhere were illegal and would be punished. It seems however that I had misunderstood; it was calls to kill WASPs that are illegal. Jews have to understand that they are different. A glib reply from the BBC informed me that they do not take responsibility for what interviewees say.

I am not sure what it will take for the EBJ organisations to actually realise that the water landing on their faces really is gooey spittle and admit it. How long it will take before they realise that all the years of ‘contributing to the community’ and proving to all sundry how ‘normal’ we are were a waste of time. That if we had had been a little more strident and unapologetic we might not have been such a walkover. What they can do about it now is another question. It would be illegal and foolish to argue for a more violent approach for our cause, just as foolish indeed as not to acknowledge it would help. What is realistic however is to take a page out of the American book and stop being so nice.

The real reason I say this is because I am watching the same thing happening in a microcosm called Stamford Hill. Some machers with more power than sense have started a campaign of denying admittance to the religious schools of girls whose mothers commit cardinal sins like wearing denim or looking too pretty. Sadly, because the very act of fighting back is likely to result in permanent pariah status for their entire family, nobody is prepared to fight back openly and the result is that a group of sad innocent little girls cry themselves to sleep each night dreaming of the dubious honour of going to the YHS or Beis Yaakov. The Rabbinate claims it is powerless to help although face to face they admit they disagree with this policy. How more British could they get?

Next week is Rosh Hashana. As we go to shul and contemplate the past year and the possibilities for the coming one I hope we all take a moment to consider what the result of our silence and inaction is and resolve to use the power we do have, whether it is persuasion or influence or just the power of the formerly silent masses, to help us all. British Jewry and Stamford Hill deserves better.

Sixth Sense

2005-09-09T15:38:00.000+01:00

As an exercise in objectivity I was once given a newspaper report to read about the political situation in the UK. Its headline read “41% of Britons express confidence in the government’s handling of negotiation with Sinn Fein” (the political wing of the Irish Republican Army), or words to that effect. We were asked to write alternative headlines with the same information. Surprisingly enough, in our group of five only one came up with the obvious variation the coach was looking for. “59% of Britains express no confidence in the government’s handling of negotiations with Sinn Fein.”

A naïvely provocative email I received through the kosher grapevine gloatingly declares: “On August 15, 10,000 patriotic Jews were expelled from their homes and made refugees in their own country to fulfil the dictates of the US sponsored Road Map to Peace. There are approximately 6 million people in Israel .10,000 divided by 6,000,000 equals 0.00167.

“Two weeks later, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in the southern U.S. and laid waste and complete desolation to the City with a population of 500,000. US News agencies are openly calling those displaced by the hurricane "refugees. There are approximately 300 million people in the United States. 500,000 divided by 300,000,000 equals 0.00167!

“Coincidence?
"Fire and hail, snow and vapour, stormy wind, fulfil His word!" -Psalms 148:8”

It does not take a rocket scientist to pick holes in the mathematics. There were no 10.000 evacuations nor were the evacuees made refugees. The disengagement was as much a surprise to the Americans as it was to us and the entire population of New Orleans was not made homeless just for starters. Still devotees of the gematria (kabbalistic numerology) in Chassidistan willingly accept such drivel as the gospel’s word and divine proof of the ‘rightness’ of their cause.

Unfortunately we the ultra-orthodox, for all the time we spend studying those, often mind-numbing tracts and developing our ability to rebuild the complicated, logical reasonings of the Talmud, have no real training in demolishing an argument or picking it apart. Doing that to Talmudic logic is a one-way ticket to purgatory. Which is why I have to say, with all due respect of course, that to manipulate the learned elders of our community and get them to accept anything you like is child’s play, providing you choose your words right. Believe me, I have done it!

I was therefore only mildly surprised when the supreme leader for life of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations of Britain and the Commonwealth (a.k.a. the local Chassidic Rav) issued a decree a week before the disengagement forbidding the tying of orange ribbons to car aerials in Stamford Hill. Did our own street-savvy Rabbis feel it was too provocative for Londoners to see such open displays of disobedience to the democratically elected Sharon? Unlikely.

The four books of the Shulchan Aruch that function as the basis for all Halachik law are famously joined by the fifth: Common sense! Mine tells me that this was either an ingratiating sop to themselves to the marginal anti-zionists or a pathetic misjudgement of the sentiment on the street, that would prefer to see real issues addressed instead of children’s horseplay with ribbons. Still there is hope. Recent unofficial polls show a strong 20%* of members has faith in the Rabbinate and their ability to effectively manage and represent our community.

*Poll carried out on 5 subjects. Please take a possible sampling error of around 3% into account

The Disenchantment

2005-08-15T19:44:00.000+01:00

As a vocal supporter of the disengagement the first pictures coming out of there have moved me more than I would have imagined. Contrary to many of my Chassidic friends, though by all means not all, I have always felt the presence of settlers in Gaza to be a mistake. It has been the death of far too many Jews, both the settlers themselves with their innocent little children who could not choose to be there and the soldiers forced to protect them. It was thus faintly disturbing to me, struggling to maintain the objectivity I yearn to properly develop and is vital to my survival among my British friends, to find myself intensely moved by the sight of those deeply religious people so desperately and earnestly clinging to the hope that God will come to their rescue in the last minute. My heart goes out even more to those who resigned themselves early and left, crushed. I have felt their pain.

I have to express my admiration for the devotion and the true commitment to an ideal that many of these religious settlers have displayed, although my innate scepticism does make me wonder how much of it is an American characteristic in its Jewish manifestation. It is hard to escape the fact that most of them seem to speak English better than Hebrew. Still they have put their lives on the line for something they passionately believed in and it heartbreaking to see them contemplating the notion that God really is not going to give them what they so believe He wants. The fact that they are so impervious to the plight of their neighbours living in squalor nearby is explained away by many of us as being a result of the atrocities carried out by the Intifadists. Maybe true, but explanations are no solution to the dehumanisation in our society this occupation must take the blame for. This is also sad testimony to the fact that religion can be a dangerous tool in irresponsible hands.

The world tends to see Chassidim (except for the Satmarers who claim to be anti-Zionist yet this evident only when things go sour) as radically right wing. The truth is a bit more complicated than that. While practically all Chassidim will probably agree with Satmar that the Zionist State is not a God-given present signifying a Historic return or Redemption, most, including much of Satmar, will admit to feeling an extremely close and deep-rooted connection to their historic homeland. It is not the soil-based farmer's love of land that the Pioneers developed and the Jewish Agency has nurtured though. We are not exposed to that in our schools so I doubt one will see the grief here on the hill that is surely being experienced by Jews all over the world. We also tend to see things more from the Halachic perspective and home in on the requirement to sacrifice all to protect lives. The disengagement when it argues ‘more security’ has a willing audience among us that was not apparent in the devious games the representatives we elected played with our voice.

For us the question boils down to whether the dismantlement of the settlements and withdrawal from those territories, originally designed as a punishment measure when Arafat was alive and what now looks suspiciously like a reward for terror, will actually bring about an end to the tragic loss of life that we were almost getting used to. I know that the promise of a return to violence announced by Hamas today is given in true faith, literally and figuratively, and the question really is will they be allowed to. I have to note that the grudging, petulant reaction of all the Palestinian spokesmen today does not bode well. I have not been blessed with the blind faith the settlers seem to have in abundance so I can only hope and pray that this is one of the times He chooses to listen to us and gives us all a little break.

Talking of which I am now signing out for a few weeks.

The Dress Code

2005-08-03T19:11:00.000+01:00

The holidays are once again approaching. The one time of the year when it is acceptable to throw off the stifling yoke of our Chassidus delectus and officially put time and effort into having a good time. A holiday village is chosen from the list of places where it is known a minyan (ten men who get together for prayers) will be available locally. Ostensibly this is because one is supposed to pray with the required forum every morning and evening but my suspicious mind keeps noticing that the ones so extremely careful to have a minyan nearby are often the same ones who, when in town, prefer to chat with their friends outside while the ten get their job done inside.

The next thing to arrange is the wardrobe. Those who know Chassidim well will know that sartorially we are still somewhere in the darkest regions of sub-civilised Europe; our trademark long, dark suits now, ironically, being produced by the Hungarians as they break all records in dragging themselves forcefully into the very centre of the developed world. Those who know Chassidim intimately will know that our fashion statement carries on through all the way to the North Pole, by way of knee length white knickerbockers. Still, come August, and with the fumes of the Hill replaced by the bracing sea air, they put their hair up under a baseball cap, remove their topcoats and tread out incognito in their baggy suit pants, white shirts, pale yellow tzitzis and tailored waistcoats, often with a pair of clip-on sunglasses to make them look real cool.

Actually, although I do scoff a little, I do owe much to my garb. The Chassidic dress code by being so distinctive and quaint does look, to the lay person, like it conceals a Rabbi within. In the years that I was studying outside London I used to ride the train a lot. On the long inter-city rides I used to enjoy striking up conversation with fellow passengers. The atmosphere and the very fact that we knew we would never see or hear from one another again was conducive to some very frank and open conversations with people who must have felt they were talking to a Rabbi.

I spent hours counseling people for a multitude of sins I know nothing about. I once spoke to an Irish man who wanted me to agree with him that even when he used contraceptives against the wishes of his ‘Holy Father’ it was not wrong if he did not feel it was wrong. He called them French letters and I of course had no idea what he was on about. I agreed with him wholeheartedly that God would not mind him using his letters at all as long as he felt it was right - although as a Brit I secretly felt He would much prefer a letter from any other nation!

I was also recently surprised to learn that because we are seen as gentlemen of the cloth we are also privileged to be treated as such by many goyim. Just as it is not cricket to hit a woman but it is cricket to hit on her the same is true for a Rabbi. Indeed I must now begin to suppose that it is not only due to my winning ways that I have managed to sail unscathed through the storms my reckless tongue has sometimes unleashed.

I hope that my fellow Chassidim, as they hit the coast this year, will have the good sense to realize the impression they are making and appreciate and return any favour wherever they meet it. I pray even more fervently that they don’t abuse it, Heaven forbid, in a time when in the eyes of many the difference between one religious fanatic and another is only kappel-thin. My final prayer is that whatever they do they should please, please do it in a different village to the one I’ll be in.

Purple Hearts

2005-07-20T18:01:00.000+01:00

Watching the meeting between the Muslim leaders and Tony Blair with the other government leaders really got me thinking. I was imagining in my minds eye how it would have looked had their current problem been ours. Suppose, instead of just producing the occasional isolated nut like Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir, the settlers had started an organized campaign of killing or suicide bombing. We would all, naturally, be quick to point out that there is no justification in the Torah for this and indeed the Torah categorically forbids it! I suspect after the tenth incident nobody would believe us and all our protestations would fall on dead ears, just as the statements coming from the Muslim Leadership do now.

Of course the Chief Rabbi and his board would be joined by some others like, maybe Rabbi Gloria Nuerberger and the Editor of the JC, in a BBC studio to explain in our name that we profoundly abhor what was happening in the name of our religion. Then the Chief Rabbi would explain learnedly why it could not possibly be the Torah that was justifying such acts. Meanwhile in our home we would be laughing up our sleeves (ever so discreetly while the cleaning lady is around) at how all of a sudden he represents our religion for us while we do not consider the foods he eats to be kosher and we would not allow him to officiate at one of our weddings.

Let us get real. The people we saw nervously avoiding looking at the multitude of international TV cameras as they rang the bell at Number Ten do not represent the religious Muslim youth either. Whom they might represent, however, are the normal people of Arab origin who live in the capital and I believe it is important that we do extend our hand in friendship to them. Nobody knows better than we do what it feels like to be in a country where you don’t feel welcome. Furthermore our interests and theirs are much closer to each other than most people would imagine.

It is true they have duly earned our skepticism. The fact that their condemnation, of all the atrocities perpetrated in the name of Islam up till now, had to be drawn from them like pulling teeth speaks for itself. Still I believe that many if not most UK Arabs (it is impossible for me sitting next to one on the train to know if he is a Muslim or not) are against suicide bombings in principle. I was indeed very gratified to hear the one woman delegate at that meeting declare to the cameras that she roundly condems any suicide killing whether they occur in Iraq, Palestine or London. I dare say they don’t actually lose much sleep over what they might see as the occasional suicide bomb in Israel, but then, how many of us lie awake at night for the innocent citizens of Bagdhad? The fact does remain that the Muslim population of London is here to stay and so are we. We could bear a grudge and live under increased pressure for the next few years or we could extend a hand in friendship to those that are brave enough to take it.

The anti pullout movement in Israel came up with a scheme, actually borrowed from the architects of the Orange Revolution, for using the colour orange to symbolise their resistance to the disengagement plan. Far too late, supporters of the plan replied with blue ribbons to publicly counterbalance the enormous mass of orange-everything that seemed to spread like fire across the land. Indeed fashion outlets are complaining that it is becoming difficult to sell any orange clothes as people see the wearing of it as a political statement. What a delicious irony that the ones standing for withdrawal are the ones using zionist blue. I am a staunch supporter of such symbols because they tell me where I stand. When I am next to a group of teenagers wearing orange headbands I would of course not mention my personal opinion that disengaging is probably the smartest thing Israel has done since engaging, while I would be happy to say it to someone with a blue ribbon on his car aerial.

It is a shame that Londoners have not come up with a symbol to signify friendship. Something like an Our Nation England campaign, dedicated to creating better understanding between all the different ethnic groups in London. Their logo could be a purple smiley face to show that sex, colour and religion don’t matter. Anybody wearing that symbol would have singled him/herself out as someone who was willing to be friendly to anybody else who was interested too while the monies collected by selling the articles could be used to further the cause by organizing events where getting to know the other could happen. I believe giving people the opportunity to break out of the mold and come forward as a moderate might bring surprising results. It would certainly be more helpful for London and Londoners than all those inflammatory and divisive statements our Mayor Ken Livingstone is so intent on making.

Divided we Stand

2005-07-11T15:08:00.000+01:00

Yes there are times when I am proud to be a Londoner! I proudly express my admiration for the London emergency and security services for their low-key but highly efficient major-crisis plan that swung into action following the atrocities on our underground and bus network. Of course London has had the benefit of time, since watching 9/11, Madrid and all the other terrorism it has been our misfortune to have to learn to deal with. Still the plan was innovative, radical and obviously well thought out and I raise my black hat to whoever devised it.

Requisitioning all the buses from the area and turning them into makeshift ambulances for the walking wounded freed up the paramedics and the specialised teams to deal with more of the critically injured on the spot and must be recognized as a stroke of genius. Careful control of how and when the bad news leaked out spared the mass panic that the other cities had to contend with and probably helped the intelligence services monitor the terrorist’s reaction to the lack of one. Londoners showed their typical grit by displaying their stoicism to the world’s cameras instead of the cowed and hysterical pictures we had gotten used to after New York, Bali and Madrid. Maybe the difference was only in which pictures were chosen for broadcast but the calm and restrained image that was created did much to save the capital from potential chaos.

I think Tony Blair deserves our praise. He managed well in a time of extreme difficulty and his quiet determination probably helped set the tone that did London so proud. Once the sheer horror of what has happened passes on into history I am sure he will learn to derive some comfort from video reruns of his G8 statement and the glower on French President Chirac’s face as he was forced to stand aside to allow Blair, the upstart who had just swept the Olympic rug from under his feet, to again address the world while his gallic hands clutched his crown jewels for comfort. I wonder whether one could not detect just a tad of jealousy that once again Paris had been passed over in favour of another in the Pax Americana.

The BBC did itself proud too. After years of struggling with the English language and devising a whole lexicon of new words for describing people who kill civilians for political ends without taking sides they have found a new one for the London bombing. They are called terrorists! A polite letter I posted on their website asking for clarification of the difference was removed “because it contains content that other readers may find offensive.”

The Haaretz newspaper reported that Ariel Sharon had asked ministers not to equate the bombing in London with those in Israel. Of course, not everybody listened to him but at least we were spared the gloating of Raanan Gissim that so jarred after September 11. And if the Sun newspaper decides to mention all the cities that were hit by terror and did not see fit to mention Jerusalem we are not really surprised even though covering up titillating details is not what that particular paper is famous for.

Cherie Blair, her friends in the left-wing establishment and their newspapers I would not allow off so lightly. The PM’s wife opened her big mouth a couple of years back to say about Israel, "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress." She was implying that it was Israeli policies that encouraged and nurtured the hopelessness that allowed suicide bombings to occur. While she apologised for her remarks (or for the fact they were published), they and her cause were taken up by papers like the Guardian and others who considered she had fallen foul of the Jewish American lobby but what she had said was in fact common knowledge and the opinion of most British people. Her words also did profound damage to Israel’s image even in the eyes of some British Jews. I do not know whether it actually was suicide bombers that caused the carnage here last week but I certainly did not see Jack Straw stand up and say it cannot have been because the Arab youth in the UK enjoy freedom and good living conditions. As Rowan Atkinson says, in his part as the devil welcoming a group of atheists to Hell, "You must be feeling a right bunch of wallies now."

Terrorism, activism, militantism, call it what you like, it is a scourge and it is here to stay. We can probably contain it, we can certainly learn to live with it but we will not eradicate it. The clash of civilisations will not be ended by the arrest of some sorry-arsed residents of Bradford or even the elusive and charismatic arch-activist. When we all realize that it is a common problem to all non-muslims; French, British, Israeli, German and American, and that truths like this may be said whether they are considered PC by today's standards or not, then we will have started to win the war.

My True Love

2005-07-04T18:01:00.000+01:00

Love is not a word I can comfortably and unselfconciously use . In the school I went to it was a kind of swear-word that you scratched into the horrid pale brown wall of the freezing cold toilet cubicle in the playground. This does not make it easier for me now, married for well over a decade and having to weigh the options in so stark a fashion, but there it is. I am in a predicament. I need help and the only one I have to turn to expects from me in return something I am not sure I can give.

He is prepared to give me everything I want. He promises me material wealth and comfort with everything I need to ensure my success and wants only one thing in return; my love. He will not tolerate that anyone else should come first in my attentions, not even my wife. To be perfectly frank, that kind of love is not only something I cannot imagine experiencing, I have to wonder whether I would be comfortable feeling it, let alone displaying it publicly. His implied threat, of course, is that I will lose it all if I cannot convincingly demonstrate that I can. Tempted as I am by the offer of all the luxury and the promise of a quiet worry-free life I am not sure I can in good faith promise to deliver the goods.

Childhood memory does not start abruptly. Most people cannot put a date on their first memory but there are things that you remember you always knew. He was like that for me. He has always been there in the background, the benevolent uncle and bringer of gifts, for as long as I can remember. He pissed me off enough in my childhood, mostly for not always giving me everything I wanted, but then again I was not always the easiest of children. He has always been close to me though and held in a measure of esteem and warm friendship. Still it is difficult for me to change the perceptions that have built up in my mind over time. He was always a kind of symbol for me, of the world that existed before me, the elders and Rebbes, parents, grandparents and uncles. His transformation into the object of my affections was never going to be a breeze anyway.

I have to be honest with myself too. I can do it and I can do it convincingly enough. My real concern would be then living with the people around me. I have only to imagine walking down the street, once word has gotten out about my new lifestyle choices, and I feel my cheeks start to warm already. It just isn’t me. I can’t imagine being the person people whisper about furtively. I cringe even more in anticipation of those who will be effusively supportive and broad-minded. So I think I will politely and regretfully decline the kind offer and blame my continued lack of fulfillment and tranquility on those who taught to me allow all these obstacles to get in the way of me doing as I see fit

If only I had been more at ease with the concept of love and had been trained to recognise it when it is offered and to accept it graciously, I might now feel more comfortable accepting the deal being offered to me. I was not. I was taught to fear Him and anticipate His anger rather than to bask in His warmth. So, together with all my friends I will continue to pray by rote and ignore the true meaning of the words of the Krias Shema (Deuteronomy 11:13-21).

Why do I blog?

2005-06-22T13:07:00.000+01:00

I do not expect ever to make any money from this blog nor can I realistically expect any recognition without disclosing my identity. Much as I love my readers I do not crave their admiration enough to risk hurting my wife and children nor even my own precious hide. I am not under any illusions that a massive tide swell of positive and long overdue change will come about as a result of my writing. So why, you ask, do I blog?

In every community or group of people you have the natural born leaders. They are the ones that seem to become the center of every conversation they join, spontaneously consulted by everybody whenever changes are to be made. They will be stuck up for when they get into trouble and they will win most of their arguments. Some people hate them for this but in fact they cannot help being leaders any more than their followers can help following. They tend to come in various flavours and there can be no doubt that, just as a charismatic Rebbe guides an entire flock of lambs, a leader who harbours laidigayer tendencies is very likely to spawn a slew of laidicrawlers behind him or her. This is why the teachers who argue for the expelling of such laidigayers from our institutions always seem to bristle with such righteous indignation.

The followers are the great mass of mindless sheep who obey orders instinctively. Whose life’s goal, it seems, is to fit into any society they happened to fall in. They can often be recognized by their beatific expressions and manifestations of religious devotion to their Rebbe’s God if their Rebbe happens to be their own leader or their leader’s. Of course you will also have those who will blindly and religiously follow a nutcase or persuasive laidigayer with strong leadership qualities. The followers too can only partly be blamed for the wrongs (and rights) they do in this context. Indeed I believe some zealot rams are going to be sorely disappointed by the meagerness of their reward in the kingdom come.

These two groups account for most people in our society. Within a community like Chassidus which frowns deeply upon any form of non-conformism and roundly condemns eccentricity and self-expression there is little room for leaders except those that want to act as shepherds for the gentleman farmers who prefer to sit on their thrones and keep their hands clean. The few who cannot contain their burning desire to lead and are unimpressed by the promised sojourn in the warm embrace of hell do indeed surround themselves by the pathetic cohorts who either are similarly unimpressed by punishment to come or find they prefer a bird on their hand and two in the bush.

The Shaigetz does not belong in either. He is a real individualist. He is too clever to be a sheep and much too clever to be shepherd. He skirts the field, sticking close to the fence. He knows there are wolves outside and possibly has met them and reached a personal understanding with them. The members of his family are sheep though and he prefers to keep them safe among the flock. He has to keep his knowledge to himself because the shepherds know he could run rings round them if he wanted to. So he is a lonely creature at times. With his wide-angle lens he sees truths others cannot see and his dedication to the religion is no less than that of the sheep. Indeed it is stronger, because instead of being led by the love for his shepherd or the farmer he swears allegiance to the King Himself.

So next time you come across someone who is little different than the others; One who occasionally lets slip an idea that might not mesh completely with the accepted viewpoint, listen and take note. He is a Shaigetz and his knowledge carries weight. Indeed he might be me.

Fighting Spirits

2005-06-05T14:06:00.000+01:00

I got into a fight with a goy on the underground last week. He was a shortish, white, cockney guy and his head was shaven clean; an adjective that could not be said to apply to his language. He was standing in the doorway of the fairly crowded train and reading his paper. Whenever anyone tried to pass or disturbed him in any way, a stream of highly colourful invective would flow under his breath. I was standing right next to him and the top corner of his paper kept on brushing against my face.

As I am not confrontational by nature I ignored it the first few times. It was at the end of a long day however and I was tired and hungry. At a certain point it became too much for even mine, so sweet a disposition. With all my bottled up irritation I pushed the paper away angrily. The guy looked round his paper equally angrily to see who had done it and said something inexcusable about my lineage. I took umbrage and suggested he do something anatomically impossible. The slanging match that ensued taxed my vocabulary to it very limits and continued for a few minutes, much the amusement, I suspect, of the prim crowd filling the carriage.

It ended when the train pulled into the station and he got off, whether because he was going to anyway, or to escape a volatile situation, I do not know. I was relieved of course and very gratified for the sympathetic glances bestowed upon me by my fellow travellers who were probably almost as relieved as I was. My Jewishness, when he mentioned it to describe me, was preceded by the usual participle verb. That was the only reference to it, despite my Chassidic dress making it an obvious fact.

When my heartbeat returned to normal and the adrenalin left my system I suddenly realised that what had just occurred was simply a clash of personalities. I had taken a dislike to a person standing next to me, for reasons known best to me, and he had responded in kind. More importantly, I realised that he had called me the procreating Jew because that is what he saw, not because he harbours any specific hatred towards Jews and I am almost embarrassed to admit that I went home feeling slightly elated and calmer than I have in a long time.

If we Chassidim are to be believed the world is headed for imminent disaster. Unlike us, the goyim in whose midst we live, have no family life. They throw out of the house, the measly one-point-five kids they do have, as soon as they are sixteen or pregnant. They have no real interests or responsibilities, a fact that can be proved by the fact they go on holidays for a week taking only a small bag of underwear and some jeans and t-shirts (apart from all those little goyishe things like toothbrushes and condoms, of course). They eat whatever they want whenever they want and sleep with whomever they want whenever they want. In short, their lives are sheer hell, and probably just as well, as that is where they are all headed, fast.

Ours, on the other hand, is a richly rewarding and perpetually buoyant travail twixt birth and earth. We have the privilege of being brought up by the wisdom, and within the stifling embrace, of not only our immediate and intermediate families, but also anybody else in the community who has an opinion. We are free to pursue our pastime of perusing the holy word whenever we like, unlike the goyim who have to keep breaking off what they are doing to drink beer, play football or watch TV.

Before spending the whole shabbes morning in shul we can soak in the warm, soapy (I hope that’s what it is) waters of the mikve, while the poor goyim, if they do decide to wash at all, have to do it all alone in their sterile home showers. We have lives full of purpose and meaning, so we can spend a whole week discussing what colour Bekishe our Rebbe wore to melave malka and what significance that has, while they have their heads and wardrobes filled with stupid fashions decided by some drunk goy in Paris (the capital city of fornication). We have a direct line to God, which is why when someone does us a favour we don’t have to stoop to the base “I owe you one” as the goyim do but offer a resolute Got zol dich batzulen (God will repay you) instead.

Biggest of all is the truism that they hate us for no reason. All these facts are relentlessly driven into us by those for whom doctors, taxi drivers and plumbers (in that order) are the only goyish contact. I am sure they would be shocked to learn that happy, fulfilled and worthy lives are not the strictest purview of Haredism, just as I am sure there would be hundred different interpretations for 'Halacha esav soneh leyaakov' (it is a law Esau hates Yaakov) if there were any Torranic desire for an alternative.

My goy and I could not click. We argued, just as I might have with some Bok in shul. He said whatever his hyped up brain suggested and I replied in kind. Two humans blowing steam. If the Halacha suggests he ought to hate me for being Jewish he seemed as impervious to it as I was, and that is the way it has to be.

Feather Light

2005-05-29T22:40:00.000+01:00

The Torah tells us to do many things that may seem illogical to us. The Mitzva of Shiluch Hakan (Dueteronomy 22:6.7.) could be a prime example. If you come across a nest containing fledglings or eggs, don’t take them while the mother is there, the Torah says, scare the mother off and then take them. The promised reward of longevity that finishes it off seems to indicate that this whole is a commandment rather than the first being a prohibition and the second a suggestion. It is a great reward though and it is easy to see why our warriors can be so eager to fulfil this divine exhortation.

The last time I saw this mitzvah actually carried out was when I was in Yeshiva. An excited young man came rushing down from the dorms where he had been observing a pair of pigeons who had planted their nest on a drainpipe right next to his second-floor window. He had eagerly kept his secret until the hen had laid her eggs and now he was beamingly inviting the Rosh Yeshiva to take the mitzvah. A noble deed on his part indeed, if he truly believed he was giving the old sod long life.

The circus that followed was priceless. The whole Yeshiva was mobilized and a ladder appeared from nowhere. The, suddenly sprightly, old man climbed bravely up the ladder, wobblingly stabilized by a hundred shoving hands. From every window in the place shouting, black-hatted and bepeyosed heads screamed excited instructions interspersed with louder shouts of “Be quiet, you’ll scare them!!”

The pigeon, with all the commotion, flew off as soon as the Rabbi was half way up the ladder and took up a perch on a tree a few yards on. All this information was relayed to everybody within a square mile by the mass of, by now, hysterical youth hanging out of every aperture. A crowd had also begun to gather on the street below and a team of shgatzim was immediately dispatched to act as spokesmen.

The red-faced elder, within plucking position of the nest, was hanging on to his quivering ladder for dear life and wondering how on earth he could scare the mother away from the nest if she wasn’t on it. A long shouted debate ensued between those parties who could hear each other and a consensus was reached that what was now needed was silence. If everybody would be quiet for five minutes the bird would return and the procedure could commence. You might as well have ordered them to stop breathing. The cacophony of silence that ensued could have put a frozen chicken to flight. A million shushes and screams of “Be quiet you!” kept on for a good ten minutes while another few helpful sparks went off on their own initiative to chase the mother off her tree and so drive her back to the nest. For good measure meanwhile, some others brought breadcrumbs and crisps and started throwing them into the nest to entice the mother back.

The poor creature was never seen to return to her nest although it was closely watched for days after that. I was not privileged to see my spiritual leader grope his way haltingly back down the ladder, his adrenaline spent and his instinct of self-preservation kicking back in, just in time to save his sorry arse but too late to save his ever reddening face, and I regret that.

There are many that would understand exactly what the motivation is to focus on this particular Mitzvah. The Torah does command us (Duet. 4:15) to take good care of our bodies. This is read, by the same who consider it God’s will that the eggs should be taken away from any bird unlucky enough to build a nest next to some frummers, to mean that we are obliged to look after our health. I agree that to ensure one’s demise at a ripe old age amounts almost to that. Still I believe that if we were to be really honest with ourselves we would have to admit that to that particular end it might be advisable to also lose some weight, brush our teeth regularly and partake of aerobic sports at least once a week. Anyone who has studied the Chassidic physique for more than 3 nanoseconds will testify that there is little evidence of good health practices in the Chassidic male community and in the female only marginally more.

Ironically it is the hyperreligious who have forbidden sports. They teach us it is goyish to watch our weight and indeed insist it is God’s very will that we eat all those foods the doctor begs us not to. They stroke their fat bellies lovingly as they solemnly invoke the holy spirit to forbid the very things God himself so blatantly begs and then they call us shgatzim for not being convinced that what He really wants is for us to chase His birds.

Two Birds

2005-05-17T21:20:00.000+01:00

When the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel returns home from his spread-the-friendliness-to-Tsunami-victims trip to Thailand he will face questioning by the police about the physical abuse (read torture) of a Bnei Berak teenager who was becoming too friendly with his unmarried daughter. The attack was allegedly carried out in the Rabbi’s house with the help of a couple of Palestinians, friends of the Rabbi’s older son Meir who apparently has something of a reputation for being somewhat different, and with the full knowledge of the rest of the family. The Rabbi, who is supposed to have been at home while the incident occurred, of course heard or saw nothing. Indeed he was said to be surprised to hear the story and ‘very disturbed’ that it happened (although not disturbed enough to break off his vital business in Thailand).

We Ultra-Orthodox Jews do not go for blood the way our Muslim counterparts do. For that I am thankful. You can be sure this blog, like those of my fellow anonoshgatzim, would probably never have been created if being found out had equaled being found dead. The Palestinian chief-prosecutor for Gaza once said that up to 70% of all murders in Gaza are honour killings. Yet while we are all prepared to dutifully tut-tut that, we are all at the same time aware that the knocking around of those who do not toe the line in our society is relatively frequent and not only acceptable but even seen as appropriate by most of us.

It is called a ‘mashkante’ and it amounts to people’s justice. I personally came across it first in Yeshiva (college) when a friend of mine was given a message that he should report to the library. He was met there by three masked students. They threw a pillowcase over his head and then proceeded to soundly beat the shit out of him. Although no one actually said it aloud it was clear to all that this attack had been sanctioned by, if not actually coordinated with, at least some of the Yeshiva staff. His sin, I later discovered, had been to go to the cinema with a friend. He is no longer religious today although he still wears all the costume and his children go to the same yeshiva he did, and none of this surprises me. I am sure the family of the Chief Rabbi’s young friend agree that he deserved it, just as the Palestinians who meted it out do.

It is not the gravity of the sin that makes its perpetrator eligible for a Mashkante, it is the style. The Mashkante is used for punishing crimes that society does not recognize. I believe that most Chassidim reading this would agree that I would be a perfect candidate for this treatment if my real name were ever to leak out. But it is boys who date girls against their parent’s wishes who are the classic recipients. In Israel it has been organized by one of the local Tzaddikate into an organization called Mishmeret Hatzniut (Modesty Patrols). They will Mashkant people up, for anything from going into bars to pre-marital sex, at nobody-knows-whose behest. I personally have heard it called for on more than one occasion and I am actually grateful that I never had prior knowledge of such a crime because I don’t know how my conscience would deal with it.

I am fully aware that democratic justice has its limitations. I know that there are many to whom, I too passionately believe, it should be done. Pederasts who prey on mikvegoers spring to mind, men who refuse to give their unloved a divorce until they receive large sums of money and Tzaddikim who utilise their piety to achieve material comfort for themselves.

The first two are crimes that all agree are wrong, with the question only whether it actually was committed, the last is not punishable because touching a hair on these untouchables’ heads, their colleagues assure us, could lead to eternal damnation. I also know, however, that there is a slippery slope between honour bashing for the community and bashing for the honour of the community leaders and history has already shown where it could go from there.

A time to play

2005-05-11T16:21:00.000+01:00

I love my car. It has become for me the equivalent of what the loo used to be in Yeshiva (college). The one place I can really be alone and think undisturbed. True the mobile phone has disturbed the peace in both these recluse spots, but still the car is where I can listen to my CDs and even sing along if I want. My daily drive to work is the time when I simply let my mind go and see where it takes me. Some of my best ideas were beamed in to me, in my car, in between Tears for Fears and Nick Ferrari.

I really enjoyed washing it a few weeks ago. Soapy bucket of water. Lather it up well rubbing all over the entire surface gently, with a soft fresh cloth change every few minutes to stop the built-up grime scratching the polish. I go in with a brush around the wheels and a strong spray across the grills and lights. I hose down with warm water and then dry off with more fresh cloths, paying special attention to those intimate places inside the fold of the door and around the air vents. Next comes a thorough vacuuming of the carpets, the mats and all the ashtrays and such. Upholstery cleaner on the seats (leather feels horrible in a car) furniture polish on the dashboard, Windowlene on all the windows and chrome polish on all the chrome. A nice, creamy, wax coating is polished off the entire bodywork with a special cotton-wool-like cloth and, in a spot-test, a single globule of H2O literally rolls across the entire bonnet like water off a duck’s back. Finally, I change the air-freshener to a kosher for Pesach one and we are done for this year.

I would love to do it every week, foolish romantic that I am, but I know that cannot be and bitterness is a sin of course. I am allowed to wash my car for Pesach because that is a mitzvah. My wife can thus happily tell her parents, “Sorry Shaig’s mobile is in here, he is outside washing the car.” Washing your car in the middle of the year, however, is to our community what dancing, when you are only one on the dance floor, would be everywhere else; Allowed, but oh my Rebbe! So the same rule that decides that if I play football with my son on holidays I am a good father but if I do on Sunday in the park I am a failure to the community, applies here too.

What we have forgotten, in our rush to circle the wagons, is that enjoyment is not really a waste of time better spent learning, as we incorrectly try to impress upon our school kids, but an integral part of the human life experience. When we were told as kids to enjoy ourselves less it was because our enjoyment and playtime were already programmed into our day and what was required was concentration during the lessons. What our current beards seem to have done is to take those instructions literally and build a lifestyle round it.

The Jews in the desert were blessed for having the doors of their individual tents strategically placed so as to allow no peeping in. The same wise men that are careful to remind us this wonderful aversion to gossip the Midbarians displayed are those that have allowed our society to be ruled by a system of punishment-by-gossip for anything that does not seem holy enough. As Brian’s mum would say, ‘They don’t seem very wise to me’.

God For Bid

2005-04-28T09:33:00.000+01:00

Roger Waters introduced me to sarcasm as an art form. A fellow Shaigetz was arguing that we Chassidim, masters of the catty sarcasm that comes with the territory through the speaking of Yiddish, are unable to appreciate the angry variety as a valid form of expression. He advised listening to a CD called Amused to Death. An entire album that for me is summed up by one single phrase; “What God wants God gets, God help us all.”

Rashian in its scope, this sentence is the perfect expression of all that is wrong in our society. It is God that wants families torn apart over who is Rebbe, it is saying.
God who wants kids on the street rather that wearing a different style hat.
It is He wants opinions squashed.
He wants the couple not to meet till the wedding.
He wants the water to need a ‘Kosher for Pesach’.
He wants no ‘love’.
He wants my love.

With all I have learned and in all the years that I have been minutely studying texts, it is sadly the words of a rock songwriter and singer that best sum up my current gloom. The two edged sword of a permissive society with next to no religious persecution and bigotry - the luxury of a too easy life - has given our leading classes far too much free time. The intense contemplation of their navels has resulted in a plethora of specious Chumres (over-strict interpretations of the law) and a stiflingly puritan atmosphere.

Because God wills it so, it is fine to allow the new generation to hit the workforce with no qualifications, no ambition and no money. It is better your son should sleep under London Bridge than he should bring his goyishe music in the house...

An incongruous sight indeed greeted me when I came to perform my annual dodge and sell my non-existent chometz to an undefined goy for an imaginary sum and for a strictly limited period, in a deal that is sealed by me picking up a slightly sorry looking black silk gartel and leaving a tip for the earnest agent. The hallway was blocked by the worst end of a lady of Polish origin, in tight blue jeans, who was polishing the floor. The label above her back pocket read ‘Superior Posterior’.

I do not begrudge the Rabbi’s lady help with her work in the house. I do wonder what the reaction would have been had it been the Rabbi's lot for his glance to happen upon an, even inferior, posterior in my humble hallway. The leadership class however, lives in a world its own. A world of speedy divorces and leisurely family planning, all God’s will of course.

There is still that bitchiness that comes with the territory, similar to the one that comes with Yiddish only much more vicious and deadly. The one that has every new acquisition of a Rabbi or Rav in the Chassidic world (and even beyond sometimes) witness to the dirtiest, smelliest, most treacherous battle it is our misfortune to know. So while we have to allow them to meddle clumsily in our problems, Rabbis go to the courts to settle their own petty differences, and those we are taught to respect either stoop so low that we gasp or get treated so shabbily it leaves one wondering whether they are fit lead at all. God help us all!

The Ring of Truth

2005-04-12T00:10:00.000+01:00

The Charles and Camilla wedding was postponed by a day, ostensibly to allow Charlie attend the Pope's funeral but in fact because it was clear that nobody would even have noticed his sordid ceremony had the two collided. It was celebrated therefor upon the Shabbes day and the poor C.R. was forced to give it a miss.

Ingratiation has always been percieved as one of the Chassidic leadership’s specialties. I have, truth be known, on occasion been irritated by the way they go all smiley and friendly whenever there are outsiders looking and we do all know they will sign anything if there is but a chance to earn a buck. It was therefore for me bittersweet vindication to see the Chief Rabbi, representing objective moral guidance from a Torah perspective I thought, so cavalierly betray everything he purports to believe in and bless the Royal adulterer’s union. I wonder indeed what possessed him to rush forward, unbidden, to bless a marriage he would not allow in his own congregation. There is after all no way in Jewish law that a man can wed a woman he bagged while she was married to another... Or is there?

We do find in Talmudic law the concept of marriage dissolvment. The way it works is dead simple. The Beth Din (Rabbinic court) decrees the woman’s wedding ring to be worthless with retroactive effect. As in Jewish law the ring has to have a specific value for the ceremony to be valid this marriage becomes effectively annulled. Not much help in this case; Camilla did not marry her first man under Jewish law, but it’s still a thought for some others maybe.

Ironically the Pope, whose expiry was timed so inconveniently for Charles, could have annulled Camilla's first wedding to the cuckold, had the Prince’s great-grandfather Henry VIII not founded the Anglican Church, with the king as its supreme leader, to save himself having to kill another one of his wives after the pope of the day refused to do just that. Meanwhile, in a triumph for love over adversity, the two sinners have been joined in unholy matrimony with a blessing from someone purporting to represent us who never even got the chance in the end to don that smart top hat. All to the good I say, now lets move on and forget their whole regrettable existence.

The idea of annulment holds its attraction for me for a different reason altogether. I don’t know for how long this has been going on (I hear stories going back to shtetl times at least) but a divorce has become an expensive luxury. I cannot remember hearing about a single instance where the stronger party (i.e. the one with the least to lose) did not force a monetary concession out of the other. And this in a community in which the marriages of children are arranged in fifteen-minute meetings in stuffy front rooms with only the suspicious courtesy among the adults outside any indication that something momentous is afoot.

I propose a prenup. agreement that should be made mandatory for all couples. It should contain a clause stating that should any party receive monetary gain for giving or taking a divorce the marriage is annulled retroactively. Breaking such a clause (if it’s well written) would throw the couple into such a legal quagmire that they will have the scholars quivering in their peyos and I guarantee neither will ever marry in a Beth Din again.

Unlike the Prince we cannot all afford fifteen million pounds in a divorce settlement, even if we know we are wrong, and I bet there are many who will wish they had a safeguard like that.

I swear

2005-03-30T21:50:00.000+01:00

For a community that prides itself on being accepting, classless and purely achievement driven there is a surprising amount of prejudice in Chassidusville. In addition to the obvious and well-documented division between the Sephardim (Jews of oriental origin) and the Ashkenazim (Europeans), Chassidim, who belong to the latter, have been divided within by their origins too.

In former times it was those of Polish and Russian descent who despised the Hungarians who in turn turned their big noses down on the Rumanian ganuvim (crooks) who joined them all in agreeing that the yekkes (of German stock) were the pits. As the Germans considered themselves superior to anything emanating from any of those cultural black holes and the Hungarians considered their superior cooking to be more than adequate to cover for any gaps in their culture or learning they all took a fair share of the biscuit.

These distinctions are diminishing now. Most Chassidim today are of mixed blood and even the Rebbes of some of the Chassidic Houses are of alien bloodlines. New divisions are emerging, however. Thus we, the Chassidim of fair England, look down on our American counterparts as shallow and conceited. We are honestly are not interested in their crummy ‘danishes’ that we keep on having to hear are so much better than anything available in the UK and, having seen what balabustes they are, we are not surprised they have breakfast in Pizza stores. We do not especially like the Chassidic clothes they so insist on flooding our market with or their uncanny knack for making them to look like they don’t fit properly. We are not impressed by their inability to learn to speak either English or Yiddish properly and to be honest we are not always sure which one it is they are speaking.

It is not an anti-American thing though. We also see the Israelis as callous, opinionated and uncouth. From Dibs (Dear Israeli Brothers) when I was a kid through Dibs (Damn Israeli Bastards) when I was a teenager we have now progressed to Fish, an acronym you can figure out for yourselves. We don’t expect them to have any manners or to return anything they borrow. We know they are going to drop into our mikves without showering first and theirs are the fingers perpetually in our serving plates.

The Antwerpians are the Nouveau Yekkes of the Chassidic world. Pompous and arrogant with no saving graces. The one country that exports nothing to the Jewish marketplace or culture bar some second rate chocolate and watery yoghurt is also the home to the most critical of all Chassidim. They smugly and incessantly sing their own virtues, often in the same breath as complaining that their lives are the most expensive anywhere, forgetting we are aware that showing-off is not cheap. I don’t know of any other place in the world where Chassidim speak French and clean-shaven specimens can be seen walking home of a shabbes in their bekishes doing it. We don’t like them, although we can tolerate their children marrying ours, at a pinch, if the only alternative is from across the pond (and they promise not to speak frog when our friends can hear).

Everybody knows the Swiss are pedantic fascists by nature and the Canadian Chassidim have taken over the sense and sensibilities of pre-war Hungary to proudly wallow in their backward obscurity.

It is only the shgatzim who do not have these notions. They recognise a kindred spirit as soon as they hear the first expletive and can immediately bond. In their own circle they know no yichus, although their numbers are swelled with many who have it in abundance, and in the universal tongue of the street they are joined as one. Maybe they do utter a profanity here and there but at least they are united in their common language.

Dis' Guys

2005-03-23T12:54:00.000Z

It is a well-known fact among Chassidim that a person only dresses up as something that he has a desire to be. I don’t know where this truism comes from but I do know for sure it is so. I know because my teacher told me about it when, as a nine year old boy, I told him I was going to dress up as Mordechai the Tzaddik. I suppose the bumbling fool could not have known I would spend the rest of the week trying to remember who had suggested I dress up as Queen Esther the year before.

An emerging chassidishe adolescent, I already knew that girls are talked about, not to, and a girl is a terrible thing to want to be. In fact even girls should not really want to be girls, hence their gracious Sheasani Kirzono (He fashioned us at his whim) as opposed to the proud Shelo Asani Isha (He did not make us a woman) that men say every morning in their prayers.

At that tender age I was naturally unaware of how soundly my sexuality had just been questioned but it did set me wondering. How was it possible that a year earlier I had wanted to be a queen and now a tzaddik? The solution I came up with (at that young age!) was that if you have a few things you want to dress-up as, it is a combination of them all that you want to be. In the years since, I have worked upon and developed this theory and now have what could possibly be classified as some of the very best, and is certainly the most extensive, knowledge and understanding on this critical subject.

It is impractical to list all the possible costumes and disguises and analyse each one for a final diagnosis in this blog. However, as a service to the community, I will excerpt a few entries from my, soon to be published book, Faeces Unmasked. The book contains all the popular disguises and their interpretations as well as a long chapter disclosing what all our favourite leaders dressed up as when they were small and how their choices can be linked to their current flaws.

Arab Terrorist:
While the actual disguise might be somewhat tasteless in the current circumstances the sentiment is perfect and that is what this is all about. Utter and selfless determination combined with blind obedience and a tendency to go out with a bang. Way to go.

Haman:
A very worrying disguise. Haman represents all that is evil in the Purim story. He was also made famous in the Book of Esther for having had ten awful children, a shrewish wife and chronic over confidence. You have to be seriously disturbed to want to be all that.
I suggest urgent counselling for the parents and vigorous screening of all the children in the family. If it is your neighbour’s child write his name down and make sure he does not marry any of your friends’ daughters.

King Ahasuarus:
This man is greed personified. After all if we were to go around choosing a bride the way he did…
That said, he certainly came out the big winner in this story. This is an enigmatic choice and can only be classified in combination with a previous or later disguise.

The Rebbe:
This is one of the most popular costumes for boys in the eight-to-eighty age group. In fact it is one of the few disguises that can be quite convincing. It has been whispered by some malicious gossipmongers that there are versions of this disguise that have been around for years with none the wiser. A contention by its very nature difficult to discount. It is relatively harmless to the wearer.

Mordechai:
This is generally a very positive disguise. Mordechai was a powerful leader who got the better of Haman and got to ride around town on a white horse. Very regal and messianic and exactly what we want to see from our youth. The ideal Mordechai will be wearing colourful robes and have a handsome moustache and pointed beard pencilled in.
If combined with a bekishe and long white beard see also Rebbe.

Queen Esther:
Every well brought up chassidishe girl should want to be Queen Esther. She had a crown. She had lots of servants and no children. She had a husband who loved her and another who couldn’t. She saved her entire people and best of all she told Mordechai what to do.
Sounds like the epitome of all we stand for. Be proud!

If your son wants to dress-up as her; we all have our share of troubles. I suggest you will want to ask your GP for referral to someone good and understanding.
It might be worth considering banning those Chevre CDs from the house and to rethink the Friday mikve visits when Zeese Yingele is around.

Sharon:
Not a very encouraging choice. Not religious and perceived as a
bit of a bully. I would not be surprised to find a Haman in one of the preceding years.
See also washerwoman.

Dressing-up, unlike dressing down, has always been popular with the chassidishe mothers. I love walking the streets of the Hill on purim watching the families pouring out of their mini-cabs in their home-sewn costumes; make-up smeared and sagging packages filled with home-made arbess and oddangular hamantashen, leaving the bemused Iranian driver to find a parking. If only the mothers knew the signs they would not be beaming so proudly as their little time-bombs drop their packages off and stand waiting awkwardly for their purim-gelt.

Runaway Pride

2005-03-16T20:16:00.000Z

Some years ago a nice Chassidic young man disappeared hours before he was supposed to get married. The frantic parents were convinced the boy was dead or worse. In our society worse than dead is possible. With surprising verve and flair for a Chassid he turned up, alive and well and in fine fettle, in Barcelona, immortalizing that fair city in Chassidim’s eyes as the city of the escapee.

From the lovely proclamations, that were an outsider’s standard fare before the blogosphere, one could be forgiven for wondering what he was escaping from. In fact that incident highlighted a problem that had been festering for a long time, that of parents abusing the arranged shidduch system to arrange for their children to marry partners, often chosen with the family’s standing in mind rather than the child’s horizontal activities.

I say this with conviction. I myself was introduced to and indeed married a young lady who at the time was decidedly not my first choice but simply the closest I could get to different. The fact that it all worked out rather well and the combination of my bad influence and her good sense and looks have allowed her to blossom into someone I love passionately, respect and admire, are beside the point.

Having a young man run away on the day of his wedding suddenly brought to the wider attention of the community what the younger generation had been thinking for a while already. The times when a father announces to his Tzeitel that she is engaged are over. And just like the few individuals who happen to become rich while remaining proud of being unable to sign their own names are no proof that education is unnecessary, the fact that some matches made in heaven work in bed does not mean we can rely on divine inspiration and Rebbishe blessings alone when choosing mates for our kids.

Any avid follower of the gossip doing the rounds on the Hill in the last year will have gathered that the old style of operating (like the old guard of operatives) simply will not wash. Parents can no longer hope that marrying their daughter off quickly to the first available member will make all their problems disappear. The youth of today have either tasted the forbidden fruit or have heard from others who have. In the Garden of Eden it was a bite from an apple now it is a byte on an Apple but knowledge is knowledge and it cannot be unlearned.

If the Rabbinate had any sense they would be working with us the Shgatzim to limit the damage and try and find some way to acknowledge the new reality. Instead they display more dayanism than dynamism and they spend most of their time blocking any progress and ensuring their own immortality as the last of the Moshicans. Indeed, looking around it seems to me that good sense is more of a hindrance than an asset in that industry.

The sounds from the street have permeated through the shtetl’s walls. The youth of today want a partner who will share not only their beds but also their interests and even more importantly their time. The girls, growingly expected to share the burdens of making a living, want more and more to become a part of their husband’s lives. The men, as they move out from behind the jeweller’s benches and the close confines of that industry and real estate, are more and more being confronted with self-assured and poised women who have opinions and viewpoints. Many are encouraging their spouses to join them in their own little bars alona. Many of those who do not care to join can throw some of the blame for their partner’s infidelities (real or quasi) on their parent’s poor choices if that is any comfort to them.

I can say for sure that unless all this is taken into account during the setting up of shidduchim it is hard to blame the couple themselves and harder still not to blame the powers that be, who so stubbornly refuse to see this.

Aptly Said

2005-03-07T16:27:00.000Z

Sipurei Tzaddikim they are called; Chassidic Tales. During Melave Malka, Saturday-night, a meal Chassidim believe is almost as holy as a Shabbos one, it is customary to tell inspirational tales of past Chassidic Rebbes. Lore has it that the fires of Hell, extinguished during the shabbos, are only rekindled when the last Jew finishes Melave Malka so it is actually a good deed to make it last as long as possible.

To some Chassidim these stories take on the status of Torah almost, while those like me, of a more questioning nature, prefer to take them with a pinch of salt. It is acceptable to doubt the veracity of the actual stories providing you accept that the Rebbe was capable of doing whatever the story says he did. In the language of Chassidim “You don’t have to believe it is true but you do have to believe it could have been true.”

Reb Avraham Yehoshua Hershel was a great tzaddik. He lived in Poland between 1755 and 1825. For a while he was Rabbi in a small town called Apt and has entered the Chassidic annals as the Apter Rav. This story about him, that I recently heard at a Melave Malka, both inspired and disturbed me.

A Chassid once came to him for advice. His daughter needed a dowry to get married and he had no money.
“How much money do you need for a dowry, and how much do you already have?” the Rebbe asked
“A thousand Rubles I need.” He replied. “And I have one!”
“Go out my son,” the Rebbe said, “and accept the first deal you are offered.”
The Chassid left his Rebbe to return home. On the way he stopped off at an inn. (Chassidim in those days were allowed to do that. Indeed it seems almost all Chassidic tales happened in inns. My Rosh Yeshiva wanted to have me expelled from the yeshiva for visiting one, but that is a different story.)

This fine Chassid was drinking his beer and at the next table a group of Jewish merchants were drinking theirs. They had had a few and were looking to have some fun at someone else’s expense. Our Reb Chassid seemed a perfect candidate.
“Nu Reb Yid,” one shouted across at him, “What are you dealing?”
“Anything you want.”
“Azoy, anything?” It was obvious that a fish had dropped into their net. “How much money do you have for this ‘anything’?”
“Eh.. One Ruble.”
The merchant burst into drunken laughter.
“One Ruble eh? For one Ruble, my friend, I will sell you my Olam Haba.” (portion in the Kingdom Come)
The hapless Chassid probably realised they were making fun of him. He had his instructions however and if the Rebbe told him to accept the first gescheft that arose then this was it.
“OK I accept.”

The group of merchants must have been in stitches as the paperwork was drawn up and the Chassid became poorer by his one Ruble and richer by one (hardly used) Olam Haba. They were still laughing drunkenly when the wife of the merchant walked in to fetch her mate. Seeing the merriment all round she asked for the reason and was told her husband had just sold his Olam Haba for a Ruble. She was not at all amused.

“I am not going to be married to a man with no Olam Haba. When you come home it had better be with your Olam Haba because without it you ain’t going to be seeing any Olam Hazeh (pleasure in this life) with me.”

This was a powerful argument to any man, even in his state, and it sobered him up immediately. He went sheepishly over to the Chassid and asked him for the document back.
“One thousand Rubles and you can have it back.”
“A thousand Rubles?” he screamed. “Are you mad?!”
The Chassid remained adamant.
“My Rebbe told me to accept the first deal I was offered and I would make a thousand Rubles, I did and I will.”
He did.

The wife was understandably bitter when her husband told her how much he had paid to get his Olam Haba (and Olam Hazeh) back and, being the powerful woman she obviously was, insisted on going back to the pub, to have this out with the man, herself. He simply referred her to his Rebbe and scarpered off home to marry his daughter off. Mrs Merchant was no quitter and she flounced off to the Rebbe to object the massive injustice that had been done.

The Rebbe listened to her argument and answered her thus.
“You are right. It does seem wrong that something bought for a Ruble should be sold back minutes later for a thousand. However if the truth were known it is fairer than you can imagine. For at the moment your husband sold his Olam Haba it was not even worth the Ruble he got for it. But the moment he paid a thousand to get it back it was worth many times that sum.”

Tops and Tales

2005-02-13T12:50:00.000Z

Motty had his first sexual experience at the age of nine. A boy from a higher class took him on the back of his bike to a secluded spot where he proceeded to “show him the ropes.” By Motty’s account he actually only showed him one rope because, as Motty declares in a delicious mix of metaphors “I refused to play ball.”

This was recounted to me by Motty (not his real name of course) in a mail following a post I wrote a while back. Other members of his class, all currently approaching middle age, confirm that this was by no means an isolated incident. To be perfectly frank, my own experiences would certainly support that. The fact that it happened comes therefore as no surprise to me. What does surprise me is the fact that so many years later he still feels the need to insist that he did not willingly participate.

In the course of writing this piece I spoke to almost a dozen Chassidic men who all claim to have been victims in their very early teens. One had a teacher who forced himself upon him and another had ongoing relationships with some young newlyweds since the age of thirteen. All were initially unwilling to discuss details and all once they started could not tell me enough. I am not prepared to publish all the actual events that occurred. In a small incestuous community like ours it would not take long before victims were identified and that is not my purpose. What I do want to talk about is the worrying lack of awareness within our community.

The first thing that struck me was that most had not seen themselves as victims at all. They spoke of guilt and remorse or else they regarded it as an unfortunate result of childish immaturity. At the time I spoke to them not one was concerned that the perpetrator, mostly adults at the time of their crime, had re-offended or would. Furthermore, while a third of the incidents I heard happened in or around the mikve, only one of the fathers had insisted on having his own sons supervised when going. Not one of them was angry.

I vividly remember going to my Rosh Yeshiva (principle) when I was around sixteen to discuss with him a problem I was having with someone who was too attentive and who seemed to be always accidentally brushing against my nether regions. It is not an easy discussion to have with anybody. With a perpetually angry white-bearded maniac who considers you a pain in a similar area it is even harder. He masterfully got rid of my embarrassment by suggesting that I should explore within myself what I was doing wrong to encourage such behaviour. The anger at that injustice was probably one of the triggers that made me leave the Yeshiva and the community for a long while.

I have never regained my faith in the learning-class. It is this lack of sensitivity to anything but what says in the Heilige Torah that causes me to question the validity of not only their teaching but even their piety. When Rabbis cover for child molesters, because they don’t want to cause a Chillul Hashem (desecration of God’s name), they are committing the ultimate injustice and the ultimate Chillul Hashem.

In all fairness it has to be said that they do not realise they are useless. In a system where Rabbanim are appointed by other Rabbanim, where there is no test for competence and no lessons in practice, it is hardly surprising that we are blessed with Rabbis who cannot speak in public and cannot stop speaking in private. Rabbis who were appointed for their political affiliation (or lack of one) rather than their prowess in rabbinity and who are far more interested in ensuring our teachers do not get the wrong training than in ensuring our kids do not.

Child molestation is not a problem unique to little boys or our community. The fact it occurs should not be cause for embarrassment; it happens everywhere. We should be hanging our heads in shame however for so adamantly refusing to deal with the perpetrators or the victims.

Shiva in My Bones

2005-02-10T16:02:00.000Z

I remember a cartoon I once saw of a posh French restaurant. The Maitre d’ was saying to a haughty waiter, on his way to serve a family that had obviously saved-up to come there, “Give them a couple of tries at pronouncing it and then tell them it’s not on today.”

You are not supposed to enjoy a shiva. At least as a visitor you shouldn’t. I don’t remember having sat it myself so I cannot say this for certain but I have a suspicion that some families are only waiting for all us spot-grievers to go, before lolling back to gleefully relive in minute detail each and every uncomfortable moment they watched us endure. I am nothing if not a learner though and, as I have no choice but to attend my share of these flaggellatory-bonding sessions, I have developed a system of watching the other visitors and entertaining myself.

Frum shivas can be excruciatingly funny. Just as most people have a special low and grave voice they use for their doctor, even if they are only discussing a mole on their arm, most people seem to think shivas are the intensive-care unit or the library. As they enter the hall and pass the first shrouded mirror you notice them begin a Pink-Panther-like tiptoe routine. This exaggerated quietness remains on for the duration of the visit and manifests itself in a thousand shifting chairs and cleared throats. In fact a casual passer-by could often be forgiven for thinking he was looking at a doctor’s waiting room.

The guests can be split into two groups: the pushers and the flitters. The pushers scan the room and immediately identify the line of vision of the most important sitters. That is where they will soon be seated, sagely commiserating with the bereaved repeatedly as each painful detail of the deceased’s final hours is expertly extracted and dissected like a nerve during a root canal treatment. In fact the gleam in my dentist’s eye, while sadistic enough, pales into insignificance next to the relish some of these professional shiva visitors have to conceal. Meanwhile the nebbechs (nerds) look for a place on the periphery which they will try to flit into and blend into the surroundings. I have never figured out why the hell these people bother to come if they don’t consider themselves close enough to the bereaved to want to catch their eye.

The halacha suggests that it is the bereaved who have to start the conversation. It will often happen that a mourner is lost in his thoughts, or has a catch in his throat and does not want to talk. We are supposed to respect that. For some busybodies however this is easier said than done. They are the ones who, having bagged that prime seat in centre stage will, after a minute of silence at most, start hunching their backs and sighing meaningfully, all the time staring the bereaved straight in the eye as if daring him not to say something.

Shivas are designed to allow the mourners to grieve in peace and get the pain out of their system. Not everybody is lucky enough to have one. It is very much in the fashion among my parents’ generation to decide their own parents are not strong enough to handle the news that their loved one has died. It is part of this delicious importance when you can tell all your friends not to talk about it too much “because Mummy does not know yet. We don’t think it is good for her.” It is strange that children who have spent the first fifty years arguing that they are big enough to lead their own lives without their parents’ interference, will jump up to take control of their parents’ lives the moment they are no longer strong enough to fend these meddlers off.

The tactless buffoon, who fervently assures the bereft husband that soon he will find someone new and forget her, is another pitfall the designers of the shiva experience could not factor in. I remember a shiva for a woman who had died from a haemorrhage after discharging herself from hospital following miscarriage. A woman sitting at her shiva was heard to pipe up, “I hate these balabustes who think they can take the whole world upon themselves.”

It is time we started using our brains to figure out the logic of those things we do. Shiva visits are not supposed to enhance the ego of some of these professional sympathisers, who make it their business to stand out at every popular shiva. Not the time for Rabbanim, whose only contact with their flock is when they block any projects that might improve our collective lot (but was not thought of by them), to prove they are involved by arriving in a flurry of activity and stealing the show from the family who just lost their breadwinner. It is the time when the closest friends of those who have suffered a loss come and share their grief with them, sometimes in silence and sometimes with a well-chosen word. And if both these concepts are alien to you, take my advice and join the flitters or take my example and don’t go.

Good Better Bestial

2005-02-08T10:21:00.000Z

I remember the menu at my wedding was great. I don’t actually remember the menu; just that it was great, and I bet that is the best compliment you could give some ‘wedding planners’. I get sad when I think back to the times when I got married. When a mother was excited for half a year before her child got married, arguing with the caterer about how much paprika she would put in the goulash. When the Town Hall was decorated with flowers, and professional waiters had the glasses gleaming when the first well-dressed guest arrived. When going to a wedding was a treat and much looked-forward-to evening out.

The Chassidim have had their way with our weddings. We, the epitomes of monogamous faithfulness and the only group I know who truly still believe, as they get married, that it is for better or for worse, have certainly brought the latter to the fore for that night.

The last few weddings I went to have broken my heart. I am a true lover of good food. I hope my maker does not judge me too harshly for having chosen that, most earthly of his creations, to become so enamoured with, but I am hopelessly besotted. In a truly well made dish, where all the notes are balanced and texture and flavour are perfectly married, I see divinity. I see none of the above at the weddings I go to lately.

The young Chassidim, who call themselves caterers, are not themselves to blame. They are not the disease, just a symptom. We have become a society that does not appreciate excellence. As we teach our children it is ‘holy’ to eat fish with our hands, show them it is ‘ehrlich’ to have filthy tzitzis, as we teach them by rote to accept without question we also train them to scorn any knowledge that does not come from a handful of sources. It is possible this stems from a sort of warped asceticism but I do know scruffiness and nonchalance do nothing to enhance spirituality.

To see a grown man picking up a piece of overcooked fish in his fingers, dipping it into some mayonnaise then chrayne, then shoving it into his mouth while his other hand prepares the next, can be pretty sickening to the faint of heart. To learn he thinks he is doing it for God makes it all the worse. When waiters holding tureens full of Osem-flavoured dishwater, see the guests they should be serving, behaving like that, you can understand why they no longer bother to polish the glasses but do polish away your plate as soon as you turn your head.

I suppose at the end of the day it is the parents of a bride I should blame for greeting the guests coming for the dancing of the puffa-train, with a bare trestle table piled high with cardboard boxes containing the leftovers of the wedding reception. And if the caterer has so little breeding that he does not realise this look might be right for an avante-garde vernissage but is completely wrong for a wedding, at least we can comfort ourselves the stuff will be excruciatingly kosher. For me it is indicative of all that is wrong with our mindless upward thrusting. We have lost touch with our humanity and the truly spiritual, and the closer we come to perfecting this neo-betterness the more it becomes clear, to all but those already on four, that what we have really done is to get back in touch with the animal.

Him, Me and I

2005-01-30T13:19:00.000Z

The Tish is for me an opportunity to surreptitiously observe my fellow Chassidim with their guard down. Designed as a confirmation of the Chassidic dogma that God can be served in the mundane and minutiae of everyday life, the Tish is essentially when a crowd of people stand around and watch their Rebbe eat. The meal, it seems, was deemed to be the one Friday-night activity where the individual was most likely to get so carried away by the earthly sensations that he could forget that he was really doing it for God. Watching the Rebbe glide through the process so effortlessly would no doubt inspire our divine souls to convince our debased bodies to follow suit, so we watch him eat. Times were different then I suppose and we should be grateful for that.

I used to think I suffered from a split personality because, in some way, I was able to switch off from being part of the Tish and become an outside observer. I used to refer to it in my head as looking in from inside. It worried me until, in a chat with a fellow shaigetz, I discovered this feeling is not unique to me.

There is a kind of bonding that usually occurs when you are packed into the bleachers at a Tish. It is a feeling very difficult to describe to one who has never felt it. I am told it is similar to the feeling you could have when, say, Spurs play the Gunners and the supporters get really fired up. In fact, I don’t think the feeling can be quite the same because sports is about winning and losing whereas the Tish is just a joining of hearts and minds. Whatever the psychology, I well remember the sensation of losing my individuality and becoming one with the crowd.

Leaning forward to stare rapturously at the Rebbe as he swallowed a morsel of fish. Hardly breathing as he mouthed off his lechaim blessings. Though I was far too far away down the hall to possibly hear a word he was saying, still I leaned forward every week to better hear every holy word not feeling even a tad ridiculous. I sang my heart out lustily and jumped when the Rebbe looked lebbedik, and went all intense and emotional whenever he did too.

Today I no longer get that feeling. Today after slipping into that place I find myself a tourist looking on in fascination. I notice the one behind me who is flying away, completely oblivious to all around him. The one across from me with the shifty concentration is worried about coming home late but cannot drag himself away. The one over on the right is, like me, looking around and taking-in the scene. I might wink to him, either get a wink back or his face will redden and he will shift position and I will know I have found one still in denial.

I can tell the different personalities within this state. The good-hearted ones who want to share what they are feeling. They look around for someone to give a thumbs-up to when there is a great ‘vort’ in the Torah. They want the stranger, there for the first time, to see all the great bits and feel the sweetness. They will move over and help someone new find a good place to see from before beamingly arranging for a scrap of much fingered gefilte-fish to head his way.

Then you have the exclusionists who have a one to one relationship at the Tish. They are always saying shshhhh, because their transmission with the Rebbe is interrupted. They consider all other people at the tish as superfluous anyway so they are certainly not going to find a place for someone who shaves his beard. As far as they are concerned the beardless should don tichelech (snoods) and toddle off to the Vaibershul!

I miss in some way the feeling I used to have of being totally in the warm embrace of something good. But the thinking part of my personality is in charge today, my emotional still at the Tish and I do not think I am willing to allow them to change roles. I believe I understand in a certain way what the problem was in eating from the tree of knowledge. To be a true Chassid, and enjoy the real benefits of a Chassid, you have to suspend free thought and allow him to think for you.

People like me could be dangerous to the force because looking in from inside you see with more clarity. But we can also be used to provide information they could never get otherwise. I believe the Shgatzim and the Chassidim are using each other blatantly. The Chassidim use the shgatzim as a buffer zone between the world outside, with its vital information, and the rose-coloured world inside the bubble where the truth is what the Rebbe says it is and tomorrow Mashich will come - hopefully before the bailiffs. The Shgatzim meanwhile from inside propogate their agenda of education and cultural awareness.
Who will win? I don’t know. But if the Chassidim do we will all die happily and if the Shgatzim do we will all live and worry so I am not sure yet myself which I prefer.

2005-01-20T16:29:00.000Z

Jewish Guilthall

In February of 1984 the Jewish Welfare Board welcomed HRH Prince Charles and his then wife Diana as guests of honour at their annual fundraising gala-dinner in Guildhall. Diana was at that time pregnant with her second son Prince Henry Charles Albert David, currently better known in our tabloid press as Dirty Harry. I believe Charles, never a big fan of our race, accepted this dubious honour as a sop to the establishment irritated by his refusal to invite the Chief Rabbi to his wedding. I was a young boy at the time and I remember finding it hilariously funny when it was reported in the press that, of the almost two thousand guests attendant at this Jewish Banquet only one wore a kappel; none other than Charles himself.

Diana, for her part, took her sister-in-law-to-be Fergie, a week before her ill-fated wedding, to Annabel’s where they had some champers while disguised as policewomen. The royal family does seem to have a knack for getting it wrong when they dress up and Harry’s nazi costume is not for me any more sinister. The Board of Deputies disagrees. In fact it seems every organisation in the country with Jewish in its title has had something to say.

I do not think a twenty year old prince, basically a student with a lot of money and a life to enjoy, should have to carry the cross for a group of old men in privileged positions who feel obliged to affirm their Jewishness somehow. As I have said before, the Nazis were but one chapter in a long and bloody history, and it is perfectly acceptable to dress up as Pharaoh, Haman or a Greek soldier. True the Nazis were particularly bad and particularly recent which makes dressing up as them count as pretty bad taste but that is about it as far as I’m concerned.

For British Jewry, that relies on perpetual victimhood for their unifying feature, that worries that people’s involvement in the community will drop off as the security situation in Israel improves, the royal gaffe is indeed a BFD. This is the occasion they have all been put here for. As a man they all stood up and affirmed their Jewishness. From the secretary of the Jewish Ealing-North Triathlon Elites to the Honourary vice-president of the Jewish Elementary Rowing and Kayaking School, all proved their commitment to the World Jewish Community by suggesting appropriate punishments for the offending prince. The national gutter press stood up for the memory of the six million and before long, around the world, the pictures were being displayed alongside the equally tragic pictures from Indonesia and Thailand. I do not think I would let my son dress up as Nazi but I doubt I would have thrown a fit if he had, before this story broke.

I know we should feel really proud the leader of the opposition is Jewish, that so many lords and MPs are. In fact however I also know that the BOD does not really represent me at all, any more than the Jewish Welfare Board does or the leader of the opposition. Now, before the whole establishment jumps down my throat, I am not saying OJs do not get their fair share of help from the Jewish Welfare Board. Nor am I claiming that Michael Howard is not Jewish. What I am saying is there is more than one type of Jew in Great Britain. And those with a whole pile of Mitzvas to keep, find they live in world with completely different set of problems than those faced by Jews with a more liberal interpretation of “thou shalt not…”. I don’t know if Mr Howard suffers for being Jewish but even if he does I’ll bet its nothing to do with having the dustmen take away his chametz before 10:27 erev Pesach.

In the JWB’s world education comes free, matzas come from the 'specials' aisle at Sainbury’s and Yomtov comes round twice a year; Yom Kippur and Tu Bishvat. We, on the other hand, have to pay for our own schooling and bake our own matzes, and our fundraising dinners are not held anywhere near the Guildhall. Also unlike them our lives do not come with a sticker that says Holocaust Survivor Inside.

On the other hand, only last week we were hearing complaints that 70% of people in England had not heard of Auschwitz. The younger Prince, God bless him, has done more to correct that among young people than anybody since the black rap group from Staten Island - the Wu Tang Clan. A conspiracy theorist could easily make the case that the Prince in fact was carrying out a publicity stunt designed to correct that. I think the Collective of All Charitable Kehillas of England should put a statue up to him, with their acronym on the plinth.

2005-01-09T18:08:00.000Z

Silent Nights

Chaim Potok, in The Chosen, describes the child of a Rebbe being brought up in silence.The boy suffers for years as he grows up with the only words exchanged between father and son concerning their learning. A very beautiful and poignant story that is, to best of my knowledge, pure claptrap. I am sorry Mr Potok, if you ever come across this, but I have never met anybody who has ever heard of this method. There is however a certain distance that is normal within the real Chassidic family (and here I mean the real true blue ones) that I suppose is where the idea comes from. You will never see a true Chassid embracing, even his teenage son. You will never see them playing together except maybe chess on nittel.

Nittel is what we call Christmas Eve. The night when it was normal for the villagers of the Shtetl to go for midnight mass and on return to get drunk in the inn, was no time for us to be on the streets. A law was decreed that, on that night, the learning of torah was forbidden. What do good yeshiva boys do on a night when Torah is forbidden? They go to sleep. Problem solved.

The anomaly here has tradition to blame. We, the archconservatives, are not going to allow a mere local church to reorganize ours. In Eastern Europe, where our dynasties were founded, the land lay in the grip of the Orthodox Church. They never recognized the Gregorian calendar and celebrate Christmas on the 6th of January. Chassidim originating in regions under that Church do learn on Christmas Eve bit don’t in January… Except we are not quite sure ourselves whether it is the fifth or the sixth, so some keep one and some the other.

The irony is that, since we have left the Sthtetl and landed in the western world, Nittel has also become the night when the Chassidishe Bucherim, the good boys, rent videos. There are many young men I know who would only ever admit to having seen a video if it was secretly watched on nittel. So the dark forces have their revenge.

Chess and videos diametrically oppose each other as forms of entertainment. One exercises the mind the other numbs it. What they have in common is they do not require any overt dedication. You don’t have to change your clothes or really prepare to play chess. It can almost seem as if you just passed by and stopped. That nonchalance proves you are really a learner at heart. The same goes for watching a video. You sit in a couch with your friends to watch for three hours and then go home. A great guys night out! The one day in the year you don’t have to feel guilty for not learning!

If you ever watch a Chassidic singer you will observe that they are careful not to move too much nor show too much facial expression. I don’t know if it is just shyness or repression or they are afraid lest they be accused of enjoying it too much. There are no real Chassidic entertainers because our overriding sense of propriety makes us watch, bemused, the few fools who actually ever drop their front for a moment. Any guy who dances too enthusiastically at a wedding will be surrounded by a two deep ring of fascinated observers who will forever smile at him indulgently whenever they meet. It is this reserve too that dictates I may pass a plate to my sister or even bandage her finger but I won’t shake her hand, heaven forbid, or even my mother’s.

I admit I have no wish to hug my brothers or sisters anyway. Or my parents for that matter. But I sometimes wonder, if things had been different when we were young, whether I then would have.

2005-01-03T15:10:00.000Z

Current Affairs

Father L. Lovasic, a catholic priest, is immortalized through his legacy of brightly coloured books for children, selling the catholic message to them by way of simple language and imagery. There was a series of Jewish inspirational stories that also did some pretty impressive work for a time. I vividly remember one called Yossef Moker Shabbos that was published about twenty years ago. A beautifully illustrated ten-paged book with shiny faced, starry-eyed tzaddikim and pot-bellied, ruddy-cheeked villains. Today of course we chassidim have the privilege of some sem-girl who knocks out badly proportioned pictures with no perspective points that are even more kosher. My baby brings home these excruciating images on scribbled-on photocopy paper, to prove his Rebbe has tuned in to the twenty-first century and is big on arts and crafts.

Lovasik is eminently quotable. ‘Only the ignorant and narrow-minded gossip, for they speak of people instead of things.’ After this last week on the Hill that is what should be hanging on the notice boards, before all those badly written admonishments to buy Heimish. One ‘thing’ we should be discussing is how comes we expect God to be so forgiving yet we are so unforgiving ourselves.

We all know that there is a large group of disenfranchised youth that is kicking and screaming for some attention. We gleefully recount the stories of ‘his daughter’ and whathisname’s son. Of meetings in the park and in the parking during the meet. Of divorces that will happen and should happen and must happen and why. We all know exactly what the problem is in everybody’s family and exactly where they went wrong to place them in their current predicament.

The closed community we have, admirable as some of its advantages are, shares a fault with our educational system and chassidic underwear. It only comes in a medium. If you do not fit into the average measurements you are either painfully squeezed somewhere intimate or swimming around helplessly.

Our most efficient organ (or second most) is our rumour mill. Every day someone or other is taken under the loupe and painstakingly dissected. The laidigayers, with their superior knowledge of these things, will be intensely interrogated for all the sordid details of an alleged crime. The Frummers will then gleefully pass the information round, accompanying each titbit with the appropriate shake of the head to indicate it is purely for educational purposes that it is being discussed. The poor individual under discussion will never get the chance to make his or her case because the truth is irrelevant to the moral of the story. Another one bites the dust.

There is no appeal and no retrial. No mitigating circumstances and no temporary insanity. No name has ever been removed from the list of offenders. Because these cautionary tales were never officially told, they can never be retracted. This, in a kehilla called Chassidim, based on a concept designed to allow that simple souls become closer to God.

So when you gossipers gather round the coffee dispensers in shul to tell those who have no internet access that ‘der Shaigetz hot gequoted a gallech’ remember this one from him too, "Only a kind person is able to judge another justly and to make allowances for his weaknesses. A kind eye, while recognizing defects, sees beyond them."

2004-12-27T15:26:00.000Z

Manning the Tables

I once read somewhere that George Orwell’s Animal Farm (a parable belittling communism, in case you have never read it) was smuggled into the Soviet Union under the heading Agricultural Manuals. To paraphrase him; All Chassidim are equal but the boys are more equal than the girls. Let us leave aside for a moment the questions of a Bar Mitzva that boys do have and girls don’t. I suppose one could argue that not only Chassidim discriminate there. I do find it ironic that the likelihood for a girl to have a Bat Mitzva party is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of her keeping any mitzvoth.

Chassidim do not usually invite each other for meals unless it can be considered a Chessed (good deed). It simply is not done to unnecessarily put yourself into the position of sharing the table with a strange woman. My personal problem is slightly more immediate. I just don’t like the food.

Chassidim always eat the same foods Shabbos and Yomtov. On the Hill every lunch will start with salmon. I do like poached salmon. I do not like the overcooked cardboard variety in heavy syrup Chassidim inevitably cook. The gefilte fish that usually accompanies it has become far more edible since the young generation made it acceptable to buy the mixture done. I just wish they would add a line to the cooking instructions saying “If you are going to cook salmon in the same liquor add it for the last ten minutes only.”

Ei mit Zwiebel invariably follows the fish and is one of the most horrible tasting Jewish traditions ever. In essence it is an egg salad with onion. The onion in remembrance of the Manna that fell in the desert and for some inexplicable reason, we are told, could taste like anything in the whole wide world except onion. (Someone has a sense of humour.) Because we are not allowed to eat an onion that was left tailed overnight, the onion cannot be kept chopped in the fridge but has to be hand-chopped shabbos morning. This, coupled with the idea that fat in enormous quantities makes it better, does not usually for a refined salad make.

The next round is cholent. I am a cholent eater. I eat it Friday afternoon to check it is good. I try it before going to bed to check it is still good and then just a sniff before davening in the morning to numb the olfactory nerves before the mikve. One has to be a seriously bad cook to completely ruin a cholent. Unfortunately Cholent happens to be the nutritional equivalent of an atom bomb.

It is in the meat course however where the real pitfalls lie. This is the course where the rules are less fast. Some go for cold cuts and salads in the summer. Some plump for cold roasted chicken with kugel and some eat decomposed meat from the cholent. The worst of all are the ones that try out something new especially for the guests. For some reason the Chassidic cooks I have met all seem to think adding sugar to food makes it gourmet. I have had to stoically eat chicken boiled in pineapple syrup, lettuce salad with strawberries and cranberries and countless other failed experiments, never forgetting to compliment the blushing Chef

Food at the Chassidic table is rarely put on serving plates and handed round. In our households Mummy puts food on your plate and you eat it. I was a little surprised, last time I ate out, to notice that the boys were served first and only then the girls - including my wife. As I am polite I waited for my wife to get her portion before I started to eat. I then noticed that my daughters were given children portions while the boys had had the same plates as I. This was too much for me. I took my plate and deliberately gave half my portion to my biggest daughter. The looks that passed between the host and his wife were a picture. I will probably never be invited again. Who cares?

I am considering publishing a manual on table etiquette, maybe called the Shulchan Aruch.

2004-12-19T13:00:00.000Z

Strangers in our Midst

As Chassidim we have for years looked upon our Sephardim as second-class citizens. We don’t admit it of course, even to ourselves. We patronize them to their faces and pat ourselves on the backs in smug satisfaction every time we throw an expansive Shabbat Shalom at anyone looking suspiciously brown. Us racist? Some of our favourite mashgichim are brown.

Forget Dor Yesharim, the real skeletons in any real chassidish family line have wog written on them. Because that is where it really shows. As any BT will tell you, it is easy to gain acceptance into the Chassidishe crowd. To be invited to the weddings and danced with in Shul. To be learned with and shnorrered from and have kids in our schools. But to take part in a wedding is a different story. It’s OK if they marry each other but we prefer not to have them in our own family. It has nothing to do with colour of course; we hardly notice such things. It’s all to do with minhagim and dinim of course. The fact that the hapless individual has obviously been totally stripped of his culture and immersed himself in ours seems to count for little. Maybe, like cultivated roses, they have a habit of reverting after time.

This week Shas did the Sephardi community proud! They voted against the withdrawal and stayed true to their opinion, (mistaken as it is IMHO). By declining to join the coalition they forgo what must have been a lucrative bribe. Let UTJ and the other Frummer parties please take note. After thirty years of Haredi politics someone voted for their conscience not their pocket. Maybe one day we will be able to do that too.

The other thing Chassidim have a tendency towards is overprotection of our own. It is admirable that we do stick together and help each other out. There are times however when this can be taken too far. I am against protecting sex offenders from the arm of the law. I am against shielding any perpetrators of violent crime be it an abusive husband or angry landlord.

In Antwerp resides a Rebbe whom I happen to admire. He has been careful not to offend anybody since he came upon his throne. In the Chassidic world that is not easy and his position was not made easier by having a part of the town hostile to him from the start. He therefore pleasantly surprised me this Shabbes by ejecting a known Chassidic Arafat apologist from his Shul. Most Chassidim were angered by the pictures of those miserable idiots in their shtreimels and kaffiyes outside the high court in the Hague or singing tehillim outside the French hospital. None did anything about it though and my Rebbe did.

2004-12-09T21:20:00.000Z

Ode to the Shaigetz

I call myself The Shaigetz because that is what they would call me if they knew who I am. I wear the name with pride because I would hate to be anything else.

The new generation of shgatzim is going to go places. There can be no doubt in my mind that Chassidism in its current state will implode. A generation of young people, brought up in third world conditions in the middle of an urban jungle, is going to need the tools to survive. When they realise the establishment has denied them these they will learn to question. Sadly it is only the more intelligent or the lucky that will still learn to adapt. I don’t want to think what will come of the rest but I believe the shgatzim will survive.

A true shaigetz is, in my definition, a believer in God and His mitzvos, who also sports a healthy dose of cynicism towards those who use Him for their business objectives. For me the appeal of the shaigetz is that he has been brought up in the repressive society of the Men in Black and yet has persevered. The true shaigetz is pragmatic enough to accept that he can never leave but astute enough to realize their way, in its current form, can never be his or His.

It encourages me when I notice there is a burgeoning community of shgatzim out there. It is impossible for me to get the details of all visitors to the blog but I know the vast majority comes from within the Chassidic communities of New York, London and Antwerp. I am not under the illusion that all that visit are shgatzim but I have no doubt many are and in any event, the fact that they visit and are interested to hear puts them in class above the mindless zombies who make and enforce the rules.

So welcome to The Shaigetzphere. Here few of us care (or is that dare?) to use our names yet somehow that just makes it truer. Here you either accept my opinion or reject it on its own merits. Would you be able to do that if I signed my name and you had to?

Here we are happy to read The Hassid and even get into a discussion with him about his butter sandwich with chicken soup. We might secretly be glad he ain’t our son but we nonetheless see no reason to deny him the opportunity to make his point, and take the time to politely disagree.

Here too we can meet Dasi, sadly, as yet without a blog of her own, yet her wisdom sparkles here and there on other comments rooms in the shaigetzphere. Would we guys be able to appreciate her exquisite wit and wisdom in some front-room in Heimishtown? Would I dare to give her this compliment in public if we knew each other’s name? Same goes for Hoezentragerin who obviously sees herself as the power holding up the throne in her household.

Tamara lives in the capital of the shaigetzphere where the digit system starts at 4. She was the first to welcome me when I dropped in. She has a slightly different idea as to what a shaigetz is. But she’ll learn. I could go on forever listing the interesting personalities I have come across here from the kind and learned Yessir (whom I suspect to be part of the establishment) to the knowledgeable Doc who I wish was.

I am proud to have had a hand in forming this space and I hope it will further develop, as the new generation of shgatzim join and become active. I believe the day of reckoning that we all face in the great shteeble in the sky is an awesome occasion for the best of men. I am not among them. Still I suspect, as the Rebbishe prosecutor pompously reads out the long litany of my transgressions against Chassidus and its appointed henchmen, He will covertly lower one deific eyelid at me in conspiratorial wink.

2004-12-03T11:17:00.000Z

Call Me Stupid

They banned TV and we all understood. They banned video and we went along. They banned the Internet and it is difficult not to accept that they have a point. Now it’s the mobile phone they have in their sights and it is time to say no.

For as long as any of us can remember there was kosher business and the business of kosher. Sadly it has been obvious for almost as long that the latter is no more a part of the first than vice versa. It is no longer even worthy of note in our community when the Rabbinate ‘discovers’ some product we have been using for years is no longer kosher, days before a kosher equivalent emerges. We acquiesce without a murmur as products are pushed in and out of our plates at the whim of the Hechsher givers, blessed be they.

As the store shelves swell with the welcome additions that really do make life easier we tend to keep mum as all our favourite brands are replaced by low quality, higher priced kosher versions. I do not need a hechsher (kosher certificate) on my sweet corn or my candles. I was happy drinking Ribena and using black pepper from goyishe sources.

All these however are relatively minor irritations. I can still drop into my local supermarket and buy what I want. Provided of course, if I am not bothered by those besnooded, busybody, yachnes who stare at every product I bought as it sails past the checkout and exchange knowing glances with their equally dowdy counterparts further behind in the line.

Bank Leumi in Israel is about to launch a Shomer Shabbes credit card. Two of the eminent Rabbis behind it have already proved their worth – literally – in the kosher market before. Now they have come up with a credit card that only works in the weekdays and can only be used in stores that keep shabbes. The Haredi community in Israel does not use credit cards for whatever reason. The Rabbis are hoping with this new product to introduce the 21st century’s spending models into our community. If this scheme is successful I have no doubt it can be expanded, not only to encompass the Diaspora with its vastly superior spending habits, but also the snooping can be widened to include having spot checks on all our spending to make sure it is in accordance with the latest rules. It is certainly reassuring to know that their concern does not end on our plates.

The Chachamim seem to have discovered their economic muscle and they have to be stopped before it is too late. The mobile phone might have inherent dangers to those who seek to control lives and I did not argue when the school insisted the children were not allowed to use them, even though I would have been happier if my daughter had one when she walks home in the dark. The Israeli Rabbis have recently banned all mobile phone adverts in religious publications. The rumour mill talks of the big companies scrambling to get Rabbinic approval for a phone service with a hechsher. The new service will be stripped of all those filthy pornographic services like text messaging and service info. Wap GPRS and all other services will of course be blocked and –so as not encourage young people to use it too much - it will also be somewhat more expensive that the others. A minor detail really seeing as the bills are to be paid by credit card and Orange is open Shabbes…

2004-11-18T18:17:00.000Z

Find me a Catch

Whenever I get into a discussion with a goy about being a Chassid they ask me about our arranged marriages. Years ago the picture they had in their heads was the Fiddler on the Roof style Shadchente, selling her ‘jewels’ over sweet Russian tea, with no consultation with the future bride. Today, with the western media’s obsession with everything Muslim, the image is more of beautiful maidens married off at a young age to a man they do not know, while they are in love with somebody else. Neither could be further from the truth. Our matches are indeed arranged in the sense that we do not choose our own partners off the street. There is a big difference however between a forced marriage and an arranged one.

Our way is certainly no worse than any of the alternatives. I have seen no evidence to suggest that all the effort daters put into finding Miss Right result in happier families than those of who just went with the flow and married the FAV (first available virgin). I will be the first to acknowledge however that our matchmaking system is far from perfect.

There are two things fundamentally wrong with our shidduchim.
The first is the obsession that Chassidim have with gitte informatsiye (positive information)’. Of course everyone expects their best friends to say nice things about them. When it comes to shidduchim this goes much deeper. I feel that there is pressure on people to say what the prospective parent-in-law wants to hear, regardless of whether it is true or not. It ought not even be necessary to explain how damaging this can be, yet it is common knowledge that giving correct information about a prospective match, especially if that results in the shidduch not happening, is not looked upon kindly. The result is that many young people find themselves married to totally unsuitable partners. In our society, where divorce is not really an option, that can mean spending the best (or worst) part of your life married to someone you got under false pretences.

The second is a flaw that runs through most of our institutions; there is no built-in mechanism to protect the week and less privileged. If your parents are divorced, your brother is sick, your grandfather was in prison or your father did not repay a loan - ask not for whom the belle calls; she calls not for you. In any other society, where people are left to choose their own mates, the family and its skeletons are of secondary importance. I will not pretend that the concept of the unsuitable match does not exist outside of Chassidgrad. I do believe it to be true though that a boy or girl of average looks and intellect should not have to worry from the age of fifteen and up whether anybody normal will ever want to marry them. And I cannot believe it is right that a child who has already suffered the trauma of losing a parent should have to agonise over whether that fact also means the loss of any prospect of a good match.

The bloodsuckers at Dor Yesharim are already blocking matches for a growing list of potentially devastating genetic imperfections. A disturbing text I found on a site called ‘How to be fruitful and mulitply’ says “An estimated one in seven Jews is a carrier of a genetic disorder prevalent among Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Oriental Jewish populations. In addition to Tay-Sachs, Canavan and Gaucher disease, the trust [Dor Yeshorim] hopes to test for cystic fibrosis, Fanconi anemia, Niemann-Pick disease, familial dysautonomia, mucolipidosis IV, glycogen storage disease and familial hyperinsulinism. The trust is also interested in expanding the test "panel" to include dominant diseases, such as Huntington disease, for which only one copy of a gene can cause the disease to be expressed, (my emphasis).” At the rate they are going there soon won’t be any FAVs left.

The least we can do for those who have not yet been excluded is to ensure they are not punished for the sins of their fathers - or their lack of one. And let us remember the phrase the puritans coined 'There but for the grace of God go I.'

2004-11-07T13:40:00.000Z

The no's to the right

There is no tradition of democracy among Chassidim. The idea that a leader should be chosen by the led is alien to us, who have had their leaders chosen by God himself since time immemorial. With a deity on high running the day-to-day show, voting is seen as a time for settling scores and paying debts. The recent presidential election in the states can be better understood with that background. The Jewish community voted largely for Kerry in the belief that their future would be rosier under the Democrats and that Israel would not unduly suffer from an embrace somewhat less close. The Chassidic community, their future safe in competent hands, voted for Bush in gratitude for what he did for Israel in the last term.

In Israel itself last week a similar attitude could be observed. The Charedi block in the Knesset, the only constituency that consistently refuses to shoulder any responsibility for the engagement in Gaza, voted unanimously against the disengagement. This despite it being common knowledge that at least one of the leaders has been vocal in his opposition to the continued occupation where lives are put at risk. Rumour has it that on the eve of the vote one of the older Rabbis called and cajoled or coerced him into line. I do not dare to presume what was promised or threatened in that phone-call but I do know that any last vestige of integrity the Charedi block had was scuppered by that vote despite a two page spread in a newspaper explaining why the no really meant yes.

How the Tzaddikate decided that it was in the interest of Charedism that the troops remain in Gaza is beyond me. The only excuse that I can get from anybody is that it was a punishment for Sharon for allowing the family allowance to large families to be cut (a reduction that was especially painful to the large charedi family). Like many over the hill personalities, the block try with grand gestures, to make up for their total lack of influence where it really matters. As it happens the vote was won by a wide enough margin to make the Charedi ‘no’ a minor irritation. Nobody who knows anything about Charedi politics doubts for one moment however, that if the vote had been close and the God-fearing vote had counted, it would not have been ageing rabbis threatening and cajoling but ageing politicians with even bigger budgets and even bigger sticks.

The result would have been the same because the actual issue of whether the Torah would be for or against staying in Gaza has never been discussed. The question discussed was, do we punish Sharon by abstaining or by voting no? The fact that one of the team actually had an opinion on the core question was not allowed to interfere with the real issues at hand.

Charedim do not participate in the running of the state. Or so we are told. There are no right and left wing charedi parties because we are supposed to be voting for single-issue parties. The mandate these parties have is to ensure that our rights are vigorously defended in the face of a society that sees us as parasites and leeches. The latter proves that they have not done their job at all well, at least from a PR point of view, while the mandate does not cover voting on issues as fundamental as the disengagement plan at all, much less doing so with the cavalier disrespect of a students union on pot.

These people are supposed to be representing Charedi Judaism, which includes me. I have no option of voting them out of office any more than I have an option of changing the American president. But I can make my voice heard and that I am doing.

2004-10-27T13:58:00.000+01:00

Tie a pair of teffilin (round the old oak tree)

I am not much of a shiur (lesson) listener. I do not enjoy sitting and listening to someone expounding on a theme that sometimes has one minute of inspiration and has been padded out with another thirty or so minutes of brag. It seems a shame that if there was one thing we had to learn from our Lithuanian brethren it had to be the showbiz aspect of Torah.

What I hate even more is when some spark or other from one of the Baal Tshuva organisations comes and starts talking Hashkafa. I have spent excruciating hours sitting there listening to some or other pseudo-intellectual expounding on The Meaning of life According to Karpenkop (fish-head). Next to me some of my friends who consider themselves aufgeklärt will be nodding their heads in agreement with every laboured point; turning to me beaming their hope that I am impressed with the point made, but more importantly still their appreciation of it. Meanwhile my mind and soul silently scream out for Monty Python.

In fact some of the ‘proofs’ I have heard would not be out of place in Life of Brian. One famous ex-snooker player Maggid tries to convince us that there is a God because if not how comes the world works so perfectly? Art and culture can be conveniently belittled by referring the media as smellivision and all art as infantile scribblings. An ex underwear model assures us he has seen the world and we can take it from him that ours is the true path. If the world he saw is in any way similar to the way the world saw him I have no illusions as to why he should think so, but I am not convinced that is in any way relevant to most of us.

If I were a non-believer the last thing that would convince me is arguments as feeble as the ones I have heard so far. My worry is that if these are the guys that are bringing the lost sons home the wrong sons are being attracted. Are we really in need of trainloads of society’s misfits and dropouts, to swell the ranks of the depressed and hopeless we already have? After all, how long does it take before a new returnee discovers that his life is still all bent out of shape and all that’s really changed is the society he’s misfitting in?

In all honesty I sometimes look at the before and after pictures that these organisations like to print, and truly wonder whether it was a good idea to take some of those regular-looking guys and turn them into the bewildered, bearded and belittled individuals depicted being patronisingly ‘learned with’ by some fat ‘Rebbe’ who has proved his preparedness to accommodate the modern world by removing his jacket and exposing his enormous tzitzis.

As I have said before there are plenty of people, born into this gefilte-fish-cradle, who need help adjusting to it but who can be counted on to settle in and settle down. Let us spend our efforts on dealing with them instead of devising pathetic arguments to counter questions most have not even understood.

2004-10-17T11:39:00.000+01:00

Ai du

The Torah is all for the marriage unit. The classical English translation of one of the first mentions of man reads; “…therefore a man shall leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife and they shall be as one flesh”. Apart from the fact that ‘cleave’ is hardly the word I would have chosen as the translation for ‘Vedubak’, there is no word in Hebrew for spouse so the question as to whether that works both ways remains open.

Chassidim will argue that the Torah has no need to tell a woman to leave her father and mother; she has to do that anyway. Indeed it is true that the laws regarding obedience to one’s parents do not apply to a married woman. She is supposed to give precedence to her husband at all times. In practice these are moot points in my opinion. The theories of dominance by right or subservience by law anyway are overridden by the plain family dynamic. I know families where the wife rules with a high hand and families where the husband is a true despot. Personality types and the atmosphere in the parental home seem to define the interpersonal relationships far more than what is taught in school.

What interests me more is the cleaving part. It seems that the Torah expects the couple to love and cherish each other in a way that is hardly possible within the rules and regulations we put out as law. The male of the species typically sits in kollel or goes to work for most of the day while the other half either works or looks after the king-size brood. In the evenings, most males will go back to shul after supper for Mincha Maariv (evening services) and are encouraged to learn some Torah then. When you remember that maariv in the summer can be as late as 11pm. it is clear that there is not much time left for cleaving.

With Yomtovs at the Rebbe taking a further bite out of any quality time and the separation of the sexes at weddings and functions now starting at the car park I sometimes wonder whether some of these couples would recognize their ‘other’ in a crowd.

The late Rabbi Shlomo Baumgarten was the Rav of a yekkishe shul on the Hill and a great man. He would greet the ladies of the congregation, waiting to walk home with their cloven, with a polite Good Shabbes as he left the shul. With the Chassidisation of the Hill today, no Rav would risk being drummed out of town for that. In fact one the commenters on the previous post brought to my attention a paper urging women to leave the shul as soon as the davening ends so as not to be seen by the men when they leave.

In my opinion it is some of the elders’ obsession with visual temptation that is stifling the cleaving of many young families. I do not believe that the generations before us, where couples walked home from shul together, went together to sheva brachot and barmitzvas, that were celebrated at home and in rooms with no mechitza (partition wall between men and women), were more likely to cleave with the wrong mate than we who are so well insulated from any potential pitfalls. Nor do I believe that the reason five year old girls are no longer allowed to enter the men’s shul even on Simchat Torah is because there is a real problem of anyone being led astray by their good looks. I have never noticed any risk of cleavage with a five-year-old girl and if the strict segregation we practice leads to impure thoughts about kids then it might be high time we abolished either the rules or the kids

2004-09-29T15:27:00.000+01:00

One Set to Love

It is not quite true to say Chassidim do not engage in sports. It is true that the nature of the sports differs somewhat to that of the wider world and that contributes much towards the confusion surrounding this issue.

There are two sports popular with Chassidim. While the older generation tends to disapprove, many of the younger chassidim go swimming on a fairly regular basis. I have often observed a childish playfulness, in and around the swimming pool, that is usually so lacking in Chassidic males past the age of thirteen - when we become grown-up and all frivolity becomes a contemptible waste of time better spent learning. It seems that the repressed human behind the façade does dare to show its face when the body transient is almost naked and bareheaded. I am not going to elaborate on this, lest some bright spark on the Hill takes me up on it and starts campaigning to ban swimming altogether.

The other sport that is popular has just past its zenith for this year. It is in fact the only popular sport played by both Chassidim and Litvaks (OJ’s following the puritan form of Judaism originating in Lithuania). Its growing popularity as a spectator sport can be evidenced by the huge amount of photographic documentation in the press as well as in fan posters hanging in Sukkahs at this time of the year.

I am talking of course about Esrog and Lulav searching. Every year as we, the proletariat, go out to spend some of our hard earned cash on a lulav and esrog, the dream team kicks into action. In their established uniform of sagging, baggy black trousers with big billowing tzitzis and armed with magnifying glasses, toothpicks and Q-Tips, they set to work probing and looking for errant black dots on esrogim and split middle leaves on lulavs. As with any sport, proponents of the game actually believe that it has some value and watching them play you could almost imagine that it was being done for God’s sake.

To see a match all you have to do is go to your local esrog seller. Of course the top stars have their own surgery where eager fans will bring what they think is a great esrog and then queue for hours sometimes to play with the star. Most will have theirs disdainfully dismissed or cavalierly okayed as the case might be. It is all worth it however because once or twice a day the player will peer over his glasses at some lucky groupie and say “A Hiddur” (a beauty) allowing him to go home on cloud nine and remain there until the last person in shul has heard of it. In every esrog store however there will always be a couple of minor starlets in action, earnestly battling over the virtues of ones’ sexy shape against the flawless skin of the other.

Of course none of the star players will ever admit openly they can hardly wait for Yom Kippur to end just so that the championships can begin. Nor will they acknowledge that the real quest for the perfect esrog is not played out on the field of citrus peel but in the hearts and minds of those that buy them. For esroletes the sport is all about black dots vs. brown crusts and in the league table for the highest paid Esrog, like the Olympics, it is all about winning, effort or means do not count.

So let the sports fans wax lyrical about their campaign to find the immaculate exception while I go about my work - to help finance their hobby.

2004-09-23T15:49:00.000+01:00

Begging My Pardon

I nurse a very special bit of my disdain for my whoever came up with the idea of buying an Aliya for someone you want to appease. I can think of no more cynical a way of mending bridges with someone than buying something for them, in public, that they then have to come over to thank you for.

A Jew and a goy were once walking down a dark alley at night when they saw an evil looking character coming towards them. Petrified and convinced they were about to be mugged the Jew turned to his friend and said ‘let me give you that ten quid I owe you.’

Yom Kippur is the traditional time for begging forgiveness from all those you might have offended through the year. In this period we are reminded, by all and sundry, to get the forgiveness of our friends before we ask that of God. I must say though that God, in his infinite mercy and his well documented wish to spread forgiveness far wide, might be happy to hand it out at the drop of a hat. I am no God. My mercies are spread somewhat thinner and I do not feel inclined to be forgiving to the scroungers who wait until my moment of weakness, just before Kol Nidre, to come to ask for it.

It is not that I am not inclined to forgive anybody who might have slighted me. I do however expect those who want my forgiveness to really want it. Leaving it to the very last moment causes me at best to question the asker’s sincerity. I do admit that I too have on occasion felt pangs of remorse over some vestiges of bitterness that have accumulated over the year and have even at times had the inclination to go over to some in an attempt to pave the way to a better understanding for the future. I then have to weigh the advantages of getting my quick fix of sanctimonious glow versus the knowledge that whoever is on the receiving end of my magnanimity is probably feeling a lot like the goy in the alley.

So you guys out there who think you know who I am, learn this; If you do feel like appeasing me don’t come crawling before Kol Nidre because I will not reply. Just so that you don’t think I’m being unreasonable however, I will accept an Aliya on Yom Kippur as the best alternative in the circumstances.

Wishing you all a Gmar Tov and a very happy new year.

2004-09-13T09:28:00.000+01:00

From the mouths of babes

I was brought up as a Chassid, in a home where contact with anyone less than ultra-orthodox was well nigh limited to decorators and storekeepers. Until my barmitzva I believed that anyone who shaved their beard or wore fashionable clothes was destined eventually to spend eternity in hell, unless they could be gotten off in the heavenly court with the Tinuk shenisba excuse (our equivalent of ‘They know not what they do’).

Since I rebelled at a certain age I have changed my own opinion somewhat and my perception of both Chassidim and the more liberal-minded has gone through several metamorphoses. I have discovered that many a deeply religious fervour can lie hidden behind a highly assimilated exterior and, as those many less religious people at work who used to call me Rabbi have learned, there can lurk a disturbing void behind the beard, big hat and dark coat too.

This week the Slichot dragged me out of bed at 5:30 in the morning at the annual start of a calculated and highly effective routine of ever more intense traditions and symbolic ceremonies designed to set the stage for my ultimate showdown in Shul Rosh-Hashana. The accumulated guilt of the entire year gradually comes to the fore to climax as I find myself standing before my maker waiting for the shofar to blow, feeling an abject failure unworthy even to ask Him for the things I need.

I was thus pleased to be humbled this weekend by a woman whom I had hitherto regarded as completely devoid of religious sentiment. We were discussing Rosh Hashana and I could not resist asking what she felt coming to Shul for the first of two annual visits and whether she did not feel like an impostor arriving at the party of a host who had been callously ignored all year. “No,” she said “I don’t feel that way at all. I see Rosh Hashana as a celebration of God’s reign. I don’t feel bad celebrating the Royal Birthday just because I haven’t thought about the queen once all year and I don’t think Americans who avoided the draft feel foolish celebrating the fourth of July. God says I belong and if I belong I can celebrate. If God loves me, as everyone assures me He does, then He will be happy to see me at least once.”

In this coming year, that by all indications will be the one when we finally acknowledge that the western world is at war with Muslim fundamentalism, I believe we Jews will once again find ourselves united before a common enemy. There is a belief among some that we the Chassidim have more in common with the fundamentalists than the assimilated Jew. To certain extent this is true were it not for our passionate belief that every one of God’s creations is worthy of his compassion, and certainly ours no less. I am grateful to her for showing me that side of our religion and reviving in me the chutzpah to beg for Him for a peaceful year.

2004-09-07T10:51:00.000+01:00

Trip Up

Traveling for Yomtov to the Rebbe is another one of those Chassid things I just don’t understand. Did the old tzaddikim never envisage what the effect would be on a girl growing up in a family where the father is never home Yomtov? For those who are not familiar with this concept, let me explain. Genuine Chassidim of former times used to travel over Yomtov to visit their Rebbe in the village he lived. The journeys were often long and rough and much of Chassidic folk tales are of the travelers-tale variety. This probably adds considerably to the mystique of today’s highly popular trips For Yomtov To The Rebbe.

Travel today is less dangerous I suppose. You could still face the ultimate test of your strength, when you arrive last onto a plane, with too much hand-baggage, to find yourself holding the card to the only place left and it’s next to a woman. Naturally as proud bearer of the flag you will explain to the two hapless stewardesses with finality (and your eyes averted of course) that you “cannot possibly sit next to woman. It’s in the religion.” Some have been known to fail this test.

Not every chassidus (Chassidic sect) is equally notorious for being family Yomtov poopers it has to be said. Some chassidi no longer encourage the very long Yomtov trips, invariably undertaken by young heralds on their own. The damsels are left at home to fend for the hearth- and that should be read literally, with the hearth holding a fair few toddlers too. Only one notable exception still has young men coming for three even four weeks to immerse themselves totally in the loving embrace of the group, yet I believe most still encourage their adherents at least to prove it over Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur.

I have never been quite sure what the real reason is for these trips. I am sure a lot of it has as much to do with male bonding as the strengthening of those divine bonds. And have oftentimes wondered whether there is not some flaw in the marital ties of those men who prefer a month with their friends and Rebbe to the marital brood.

I have to steel myself not to cringe when I see some of those Rebbe-widows forlornly standing there outside shul after davening, waiting for a nebbich of a thirteen-year-old boy whose job it is to be the Man in the house for Yomtov. As a thirteen-year-old girl once told me “We never have a Yomtov meal except when we are invited out. My mother does not bother when my father is not there.” I have to keep mum when I am earnestly explained that the school fees have to got rise, again, because so many of the younger parents cannot afford to pay at all. I suppose they back-pack to Israel or the States.

I have no problem with my own son going to his Rebbe. As long as he is young and single and his bills are paid let him have his fun. I regularly insist at home that trips to the Rebbe alone are a bacheloric luxury and that they will have to stop when he is married. And I hope he will listen to his dad even though his never did.

2004-08-29T16:57:00.000+01:00

Quaver vs Quaver

Daniel Barenboim is a fine conductor. The fact that he was the first to conduct Wagner in Israel probably says as much about his passion for his music as it does about his empathy for his fellow Jews. The man has done some admirable things in bringing musicians from all races and creeds to play music together. And indeed it was the man who caught my attention, not the musician. In an extensive interview on BBC TV’s HardTalk or similar program, he was asked about all facets of his life. His answers were measured and intelligent and he came across as a thinker, a liberal man, idealistic, maybe to the point of naiveté. It was only right at the end of the interview that he was asked the inevitable question ‘What do you think about the separation wall?’ that he lost my sympathy.

In the fashion I have come to recognize among the many Jews I know who spend much of their time with goyim (especially the intellectual left-leaning types), he was quick to distance himself from the entire controversy and to condemn it as illegal. He has his right to this opinion and for all I know he might be right. My irritation started when he expounded on his theme as he seemed to bask in the unspoken approval of the interviewer. He went on to explain, in a particularly condescending way, that the wall does not bring security, does not save lives and on the contrary will only bring more grief and more death to the country. Listening to him you could be forgiven for thinking this was the defence-secretary or the army chief-of-staff.

I don’t know in what capacity he answered the last question. I certainly don’t understand in what capacity he was asked it and I resent the implication that by being Jewish and active on the political-left’s propaganda machine, his opinion on the security impact of the wall, matters. What is certain to me is that the people on that side politically, tend to use every opportunity to plug their sound bites for maximum effect and are shameless in their promotion of their ideology.

Borat, or Sasha Cohen, formerly best known for his Ali-G character has shown me the best of genuine Jewish politics-in-art, with his latest shenanigans in a town called Tuscon in the USA. In his own inimitable style he gets on the stage in a little town tavern and starts picking out a song, rather shakily, on his guitar as he sings about the problems of transport in his native Khazakstan. The crowd, about a dozen locals, look bemused and not especially interested, but sportingly claps along a little to “Throw transport down the well”. In the next verse the problem is the Jews -taking all the money and never giving it back- who need to be thrown down the well, and the enthusiasm in the crowd visibly grows. (See clip here)

By the time he repeats the refrain the third time the whole audience seems to be singing along and one woman is even putting her fingers up as horns. A disturbing scene that is telling and revealing yet still entertaining and hysterically funny when you realise who the joke is on in the end.

Sasha Cohen (who incidentally describes himself as an orthodox Jew) knows that he cannot say there is a problem of anti-Semitism even in the United States of America because nobody will believe him. Instead he uses his medium as a TV comedian to prove the point itself. Of course we can argue as to whether his point is a good one, or a valid one but at least it is well made, relevant and in keeping with his profession.

Let Barenboim show me a message with his music as powerful as that and I will respect his music and his opinion more.

2004-08-20T14:53:00.000+01:00

Peyos and Queus (part 2)

Most Chassidim do not look down on Goyim. The reason Goyim get the impression that we do, is because they misinterpret our lack of common courtesy and consideration, as a sign of disrespect. In fact this is our normal behaviour and we dole it out fairly and in equal measure to Jew and Goy alike.

One could argue that informality in religion is the hallmark of Chassidus. The Shtiebel differs from a Shul (Synagogue) in precisely that. Where the Shul is supposed to be strictly a place of worship, the Shtiebel was created to be a kind of clubhouse for hanging out with God. Thus standing around and chatting it is allowed in a Shtiebel but not in a Shul. In addition to prayer the Shtiebel is used for feasting and study, research and learning, chatting and singing and communal gathering, while none of the latter is allowed in a Shul.

The Chassidic culture too is one of informality and within the confines of our bubble it works remarkably well. It is this familiarity and lack of ceremony which allows the rich and the poor, the old and the young to be part of the same social group. The successful lawyer, the physician and the (literally) great unwashed can mingle together and fuse into the single group. All strengths complement all weaknesses and few communities can claim to be as classless as ours. It is important to remember though, that informality is a concession that has to be granted. It is all well and good between consenting adults but hardly appropriate with strangers outside.

Chassidim are not taught to hold the door open for another to pass nor do they beg their excuses before pushing past. They think nothing of interrupting two people talking and are not averse to taking the last piece of schmaltz herring - even after six of them when others have had none. Chassidim among themselves are used to this and indeed expect nothing else. Just as between siblings it is neither unusual nor sinister to hear “Shut up moron.”, but on the street it is both, much of our casual behaviour in Shtiebel is inappropriate outside. Indeed I have heard from many who came to Chassidus later in life that that this is one of the hardest adjustments they have to make.

Unfortunately as we Chassidim become ever more insular and isolated so we are losing touch with the impression we make on those outside. What to us seems like friendly informality often comes across as arrogance and callousness and disrespect. So next time a chassid pushes you out of the way as you read the notice board, or a child allows a door to swing closed in your face, try telling them that what they just did is called rude. He will probably snigger and question your lineage but at least it’s occuring inside and, frankly, who cares?

2004-07-29T19:12:00.000+01:00

Choices, Choices.

I have failed my parents they tell me. Yes, they can tolerate the lifestyle I have chosen but they still feel that by lowering my standards of chassidicity I have essentially let them down. I hope they really mean I have let God down, because if they mean them, that has to be one of the most egotistical things a parent can say.

I am a chassid because I was born one. If I had the choice to undo my first twenty years and be brought up as an MO I certainly would. I find the MO approach to be both more humane and more Godly and I have great respect for some of them. After all, the average Chassid can hardly accept credit for not eating treifa when they feel guilty for buying a slice of Pizza. And that is no exaggeration! In Stamford Hill there are no proper kosher restaurants because most Chassidim are brought up understanding it is vulgar to be seen eating out. The MO, on the other hand, has to regularly make real sacrifices to keep kosher. Our system of denial and disparagement of anything that might lead to a temptation has also managed to almost obliterate any possibility of resisting it. I wonder therefore, whether for God’s sake I should be bringing my kids up that way?

The question is a complicated one. There seems to me to be no doubt, the choices I make will affect my children’s lives irrevocably, and I fear I might be selfishly doing exactly what my parents did. I am utterly convinced that for my children to be able to choose whether to be a Chassid or not they have to be brought up as Chassidim. There is no way effectively that someone brought up any other way will ever fit in really comfortably in a Chassidic community. To become MO, on the other hand, would be relatively easy, were it not for the pressure put on by the community with the threats of banishment and the ever present guilt.

I have been living the lifestyle I chose for twenty years now. I have seen my difficult times behind me and can claim to be settled now. Yet for my children exactly the same story might be about to begin. Having gone to Chassidic high school I now offer them the choice of yeshiva or study. In all honesty these are empty words though, because without a GCSE degree how will they go to study? And then there’s the peer pressure from their friends, all Chassidim and all they have.

The reason I chose to bring them up this way is because I thought my support would be enough to help them overcome all those, if that was what they wanted to do. Yet today I realise I paid a heavy price and maybe it is more humane to deny them some choices…

I am off for my annual holiday. As my wife has no idea I write this blog, although I know she is an avid reader, I can hardly justify needing an Internet connection in the place I will be. So I will sign out now for three weeks and ponder what I just wrote.

2004-07-21T02:34:00.000+01:00

Cleanliness next to Bognor Regis

I used to have a poster on the wall of my office that read, “When all is said and done there’s been far more said than done”. There is that wonderful bit in Pulp Fiction with the Assassin who quotes from the Bible before shooting, because that sounded real cold-blooded, but he never actually thought about what it meant. I always loved the wittiness of the poster but never really thought about what it meant. As I listened to the umpteenth story of someone being told by the landlady of a holiday house that Jews leave the place dirty, I suddenly understood that poster.

The community has been divided, for as long as I can remember, into two camps. The Holiday Schmitzers and the Pitzers. The Schmitzers are slobs, famous for koshering their holiday kitchens as if it were for Pesach. They furiously scrub the whole place down then pour scalding water over everything they can. Then, armed with paper and tape, they proceed to gift wrap the counters and cookers and fridges and all in a frenzy of paper and foil. Anyone looking on from outside could be impressed by the obsessive cleanliness these slobs adhere to. A visit a week later will usually reveal the original paper all still there but now looking slightly more lived in. Meaty stains on one side only and cereal remains on the other stand testament to the strict adherence to some laws, if not those of hygiene, while a heap of black plastic bags is stuffed with enough paper and plastic-ware to clear a hectare of rain forest. The general level of tidiness completes the picture of laidback bliss. They will usually leave the apartment far tidier than it was most of the time they were there just by clearing up most of the trash to take back home with them. So they just don’t get what the landlord is in such a twist about - and he gets labeled an anti-Semite.

The Pitzers on the other hand have heard all these stories and they are paranoid about being bundled in with them. So they become obsessive cleaners and they won’t leave the house after breakfast till all the plates are dried and back in the cupboard and the back steps have been scrubbed. They leave flowers behind in a vase when they leave, having waxed the kitchen floor and bought a special product to polish the taps.

Although both are wrong I much prefer the latter, of course. Unfortunately they are the minority, as we all know. An old Yiddish joke is doing the rounds again now that I have to repeat for those who do not go regularly to shul on our Hill. When God made the Passover miracle and killed all the Egyptian first-born, He instructed the Jews to make a sign in blood on their doorposts so that it should be obvious which is a Jewish house. “Why”, asked some Jewish scholar, “did God need to have a sign made on the door when anybody can recognize a Jewish house just by the state it’s in?” His Rebbe sagely replied, “That happened before the Jews left Egypt, the Torah had not yet been given then”.

It is certainly true that it is harder to keep a place tidy when you have had to bring a mountain of food with you that is unavailable there. Having to bring all your kitchen utensils doesn’t help either and the endless changes of clothing that seem necessary even on holiday compounds all that. I therefore disagree with those who strive for perfection just to deflect any possible and unjustified criticism almost as much as I resent the Schmitzers.

My severe criticism I reserve for the Rabbanim. The few hard-core schmitzers have been doing their dirty job for years. The issue, like the joke, has been around for years, yet no Rabbi has roundly condemned this behaviour and punished a perpetrator. The reason they don’t might have to do with the fact that number of their own could be among the culprits, or it could just be that the whole subject is just not sexy enough to bother about. We the people however do think it is, we have been saying it and hearing it for years and we are still waiting for action. The honest truth is there is nothing they can do. The Rabbi’s are powerless because they have lost our respect. And that is what counts when all is said and done.

2004-07-12T18:35:00.000+01:00

Charge of the right brigade

In Antwerp a 15-year-old yeshiva boy is stabbed by one of a group of Arab boys out patrolling the streets armed with clubs and knives. In London unknown arsonists burn a couple of shuls. In Paris a young mother riding the train with her baby is accosted by a group of youths, mostly Arab, who take her purse. When they see her address is in one the Jewish neighbourhoods they cut off her hair and her clothes and draw swastikas on her belly. For good measure they then overturn the buggy with her baby in it.

As a chassid, anti-Semitic attacks, ranging from verbal abuse to physical attack, albeit usually not really dangerous, are nothing new to me. I have been used to it for as long as I remember. When I was very young it was the teddy boys, then it was the punks and later it was the blacks that scared the shit out of us as we walked the streets. I have grown older and wiser since then and have learned to make the distinction between a few kids out for some fun who find someone weaker than them, and serious, potentially dangerous, hate.

With hindsight it easy to see that the punks and teds were wearing their threatening exteriors as a uniform or a front. I actually work today with a former punk who used to frighten the life out of me when I was a kid. He is a lawyer today and good friend. As he puts it ‘a thirteen year old boy wearing a big black hat, a long coat and a terrified expression is an obvious target for anyone out for a laugh and nursing an impaired self-esteem’. The blacks in Stamford Hill actually get on with the Chassidim probably better than the whites do, maybe because we have both known discrimination and have moved on.

The new threat we are facing today is far more ominous however. This is not mischief by testosterone driven drop-outs. The new threat we face from Muslims on the street is organised and focused. It is driven by a well oiled engine that is teaching hate to their youths on tapes imported from the middle-east and spoken by terrorists and murderers. To a generation of young Muslims, whipped into a frenzy by their Imams and youth club leaders and offered tacit support by the one-sided and sometimes downright provocative and false reports by the media, headed by the BBC and other local news channels, the visible Chassidic Jews on the street have become the target for all their hate.

To make matters worse, the comfortable Jews in Whitehall and in positions of power, hiding behind their goyishe exteriors and knowing no immediate threat to their own precious hides, take every opportunity to further their own particular brand of comfortable Judaism and immediately bring up their trump card; Anti-Semitism and the holocaust.

I, as a chassid, am fed up with that game. I do not need perpetual victimhood to define my Jewishness. The problem I face on the street today has nothing to do with nazis and everything to do with Muslim terrorists and their war against America and Israel. In Antwerp indeed the extreme right are the ones doing more than anyone to protect the Jews, and all the traditionally anti-immigrant movements in Europe are today much more bothered by Muslims than by Jews. It is indeed possible that the bare-headed ‘Jewish’ machers (busybodies) are right and as soon as the Muslim ‘problem’ is solved the focus will turn back to us, but in all honesty I don’t see that day coming any time soon and I prefer to live for the future than for the past.

Whatever the machers have on their agenda I will not feel safer because the BBC shows a few more holocaust documentaries on TV nor does it help me if all the children in Europe learn about the evils of anti-semitism at school. If the Board of deputies and their ilk want to help me they should make all their members and maybe the directors of the BBC too, go out on the streets for a few days wearing kappels and then they will see for themselves what recommendations need to be made. From within their ivory towers they are more help for the terrorists than for us on the real frontline.

2004-07-06T22:12:00.000+01:00

See how they run

Twenty years ago the day I went to the cinema for the first time. I think it was Footloose I saw. And to me it seemed like it was talking directly to me. A story of one boy’s fight with all the elders of the town to bring music to the youth. When I look back at me then I see exactly what the young shaigetz of today must be seeing and I understand exactly where they are coming from. But I have to add that there is a difference. The shaigetz of today has no passion for revolution, no urge to tear down walls. The shaigetz of today is wallowing in self-pity and indulging in self-destruction.

We have in our zeal created a monster called Heimishkeit. An all-encompassing mind control that freezes individuality, stifles creativity and strangles independence. We taught an entire generation that we the Heimishe know everything best and have therefore negated all knowledge from outside. We ourselves therefore know best how children should be educated and if modern psychology suggests different ‘we know who knows best’. We also know that people are incapable of self-control and therefore anything that might tempt them must be banned altogether. That is why universities are treif and learning of any kind other than holy are out.

Although I would not be classed a real shaigetz by most people who know me today I was at one time. Although that has all but been forgotten by most I flatter myself that I came out better for the fight. I know I could never have achieved what I have if I had always been a good little boy and I feel a good Jew inside. True there is a tinge of guilt that lurks around inside, occasionally sending little twinges out to remind me it’s there. But that is a small price to pay for what I do have.

Unfortunately the system that backfired so spectacularly with guys my age, has worked perfectly with the victims of today. They have come off the conveyor belt disillusioned, hopeless, helpless and lost. They will not become the leaders of tomorrow because they have neither the wisdom of the Tzaddikim nor the knowledge and experience of the Shgatzim. So they effectively self-destruct, either literally or by leaving the community altogether.

So this is a call to you youngsters hanging around trying to look cool. Don’t believe those Rebbes who taught you that they know best what Yiddishkeit is all about. If you think you know what is best for you and you feel God’s ok with it, then go ahead and do it and settle the bill with him. But do it inside and let the naysayers be damned. One day there will be a day of reckoning and my bets are firmly on one side.

This is also your answer you of those recent mails.

2004-06-21T23:22:00.000+01:00

Sex Change

I had a post about the salt levels in our food prepared for posting. I feel unable however to ignore what has been playing out in the commenting on the last post and I therefore find myself coming back to the issue of sex education.

There was a story a while back in Bne Beraq when some odious young man forced himself into the confidence of some newlywed Chassidic ladies as a Mashpiya (advisor in religious law and customs) and, using that authority, sexually abused them. I believe he got a long prison sentence. Rumour has it that the reason it did get so far is because there was a daughter of a highly illustrious family among his victims.

Any regular reader of the Charedi press will know that the list of subjects that do not appear there includes anything critical of our way of life and anything concerning sex. This story was therefore mainly followed in the secular press and in the hallowed halls of Hydepark’s Bechadrei Chareidim. What was perhaps most disturbing, if not surprising, was the almost total lack of any action taken to correct the situation that allowed this to occur.

In an age long passed it might have been praiseworthy to manage to bring a couple together until the day of their marriage still ignorant as to the existence of sex. In the Chassidic world stories still do the rounds of individuals who had to be brought a glass of water on the morning of their wedding day after the Rabbi clumsily broke the news as to what the climax of the day’s program consisted of. In fact I still look back fondly on the moment when I had to go through the ordeal of pretending to look shocked when I was gravely informed by my Madrich what I was expected to do. Probably mistaking my carefully rehearsed surprise for revulsion or shock, he patted me on my back and solemnly informed me that I need not be worried I would get used to it. He then proceeded to smugly assure me that he himself not only did it but thoroughly enjoyed it, effectively making any further need for false revulsion totally redundant.

I do not think many youngsters today reach the end of their adolescence in ignorant bliss. The youth of today is sexually more aware than many of their parents are. Yet the education of the playground and furtive sessions on the Internet are no substitute for thorough education and training in how to reject and resist unwelcome advances.

There is an even greater problem that I have come across on more that one occasion and that is of young people becoming confused as to their own sexuality because they might have had same sex experiences in Yeshiva or School and become mistakenly convinced that that makes them gay. All in all there is need for a comprehensive overhaul of what information reaches our youngsters and how. If the Rabbis are not interested in doing maybe there is no option but to set up some websites that will give the information out to those that seek it. In any event something has to be done and the sooner the better.

2004-06-15T23:47:00.000+01:00

Sounds of the Underground

There is a tradition among frummers to be especially frum for others. Tradition has it that Adam, told by his maker not to eat from the tree, in his fervour told Eve that not only were you not allowed to eat from it but touching it was not allowed. The wily serpent pushed Eve causing her to trip and touch it. “See,” he then crowed, “nothing happens, I bet nothing would happen if you ate from it either.”

I would venture a wager that there is not a single brain between two peyos on the Hill that has not heard this story and the lessons that must be drawn from it. That did not stop the Rabbinate from proclaiming a recent frum concert to be forbidden. Did they honestly expect a full hall of posteriorless seats?

Among Chassidim it is common to ironically say about something very good that it must be traif. There is an acknowledged feeling that most things pleasurable, if the Torah itself has not forbidden it, the Rabbis will. By the reverse token I would say that these concerts have got to be kosher.

When I was sixteen my father found my stash of music cassettes hidden in my sock drawer. The forbidden delights included stars like Mordechai Ben David, Jo Amar and suchlike. The hullabaloo that ensued ensured that while those particular cassettes might have been confiscated I have remained a fervent music addict. My way of hitting back was to listen, from them on, only to goyisher music and whatever Capital Radio and LBC had to offer. In keeping with the shgatzim of the time I listened to what I now see were the excruciatingly cloying sounds of Abba and Blondie. We would not be seen dead next to a MBD or Avraham Freed

My taste has developed somewhat over the years and my collection today would be more likely to feature tzaddikim like Eminem, the Grateful Dead and Leonard Cohen, yet I know that I have started to grow out of having to prove myself because I deign to allow the odd religious CD to share the shelf with my ‘real’ music.

I have many times agonized over my inability to give up my music collection even though I would be reluctant to allow my children to listen to many of the CDs I keep locked in the glove compartment of my car. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe, but at least when I tell them I don’t allow them to listen I do not tell them it is because it is forbidden. I tell them that at their age they are too impressionable and that their schools would have them expelled, reasons I hope they understand are valid albeit unfair.

I hope that by the time they are my age the quality and quantity of Jewish music and the quality of religious education will have improved enough that they will be happy to listen to music just because they like it.

2004-06-09T10:16:00.000+01:00

Good Heavens!

One of the things that I think we really ought to adopt from society around us is the culture of questioning facts. Our system of learning discourages genuine questioning, but facts are not svorres (logical contortions in talmud), they can and must be verified before any judgements can be passed on any issue. This applies just as much to a kosher certification as to a person’s reputation in the face of gossip.

Sex, it is said, is unlike justice in that it does not have to be seen to be done. Puns aside, there is profundity in the implication that unless justice is seen to be done one cannot assume that it has. The issue of accountability is not one that comes up very often where the Beth Din (rabbinical courts) is concerned yet it should. In a court system where there is no right of appeal and no forced accountability it is more than likely that abuses will occur.

Shaitelgate is proof enough that the methods of research leave much to be desired. What bothers me more though is the lack of any sense of obligation by the Rabbinate to justify their decisions, even when they affect the lives and livelihoods of countless people who might not even have accepted their jurisdiction. The Rabbinic courts however are still models of rectitude when compared to some of the Rebbishe houses of today.

The tradition of going to a Rebbe for advice is as old as chassidus itself. In times of trouble a chassid would travel to his Rebbe and spill his troubled heart out. The Rebbe, in his infinite wisdom, would let slip some pearls of wisdom and, if necessary, rearrange the forces in heaven and hey presto all problems were solved. I am in no position to judge whether that still works today but I am sure that many still believe it does and I have no reason to deny those believers the comfort they derive from it.

I personally first became a little sceptical about the supernatural powers of the Rebbes when I went to visit mine many years back and he asked me what Masiach thought. To say I was surprised puts it mildly. I mumbled a vague answer that I hoped sounded enigmatic enough to sound profound to Tzaddik who was on speaking terms with The Messiah. The moment I left the room I made a beeline to one of those in the know to ask what he could possibly have meant. I was given various interpretations of this mystical message and admit that I did feel honoured and special for while to be singled out by the Rebbe for my insights into the spiritual planes. It was only a couple of years later, when I discovered that in fact he had confused me with somebody else who was still childless then and was being treated by a man named Dr. Mashiach, that it all clicked.

It is possible that my very devout friends are right and it is not what the Rebbe thinks he means that is important but I what I think he means. I will admit that that story did have a profound effect on me and my behaviour at the time and it is possible that God wanted that. I do believe though that God may be used as a guide but not as an excuse. The laws of slander and libel should, nay must, apply to Rebbes, if not equally to mere mortals then more so. It is all very well to listen to a troubled heart and assure him that all will be well but when the actions or behaviour of others are part of the equation it can be the height of irresponsibility to pass any form of judgment without having heard another side to a story.

2004-06-01T18:13:00.000+01:00

DIY on the Hill

The Torah gives a father the right to marry off his daughter to whomever he wishes. Draconian as that sounds, relevant it is not, because that right is valid up until she becomes 12 years old. After that he can not ‘give her away’ a term that in this case is used literally, without her consent and in fact it is his consent that is neither asked for nor needed. The only limit that Halacha places on the choosing of a spouse is that a man may not marry a woman without seeing her (I suppose that works both ways but I have not seen it written).

I am all for arranged matches for those that want them. They do not seem to work any less well than the western, freestyle matches and many claim that they work better. I have to add that my wife was introduced to me a day before we got engaged. We met for an hour or so at the home of one of my now mother-in-law’s friends. Sitting in two overstuffed armchairs we talked about everything you can possibly talk about to a nervous looking girl of 18 who is biting her nails and blushing every time you recross your legs. Outside the door stood my parents and hers, mine feeling slightly guilty for allowing modernism to creep into our holy family in the form of a meeting lasting longer than 10 minutes. Hers were on best behaviour for fear of ruining their daughter’s chances by disappointing their potential mechutanim (in-laws). The tension could have been cut with butter knife. When, after the hour was up, the parents walked in on us I realised I had not yet heard a single intelligent word from the girl opposite and saw no reason at all to make her my beloved.

My parents were horrified. “You just sat with a girl for an hour and now you say you do not see any reason to marry her? You should marry her unless you see a good reason not to!” “Ok,” I said “If I can sit with a girl for an hour and leave with no wish to marry her, then for that reason I don’t like her.”

The compromise was that we would meet again the next day. I like to say it was my natural charm and winning ways that caused her to open up. She claims she would have said anything just to get the meeting over and herself a gracious exit to the ladies room before that become unnecessary. Be that as it may, I do not regret the accident of fate that got me married to my wife.

God works in mysterious ways. I do not believe there is any justification or logic in denying a couple the right to marry if they wish to and there is no legal or Halachic reason why they should not, even if their meeting did not occur in our time honoured traditional way. There might be a myriad of reasons for creating an environment where there is no likelihood of that happening but if and when it does despite all that, it can be no less His work than any other.

It is true that in our culture there is little respect for that ‘crazy little thing called love’. To be honest there is rarely any mention of it. Yet those who have proudly gotten through life without it are hardly qualified to advise those who are smitten on how unimportant it is. In any event it is certainly counter-productive, for anyone who has made its acquaintance, to hear it described as if it were some vile disease.

It seems to me that those who are most sanctimonious in their condemnation of the chinuch, family, and kehille of those who do decide to tie the love knot are the same ones you can see in every huddle in shul, maliciously salivating over every minute detail of the salacious gossip. It seems almost as if they think that, by ensuring that the blame is laid squarely somewhere, they and theirs will be guaranteed the same will not befall them.

It is also worth remembering that the gentleman Kalba Savua was probably justifiably angry when his beautiful daughter informed him she was in love with a shepherd. Neither of them could have known then he would turn out to become Rabbi Akiva…