This chassidus…
That chassidus…
It is all about style these days
White socks or black sock,
Spoddek or shtreiml
Trousers inside the socks or outside the socks,
Peyos under yarlmelke or sideburns curled, uncurled,
Peyos how long? To cheekbone, beyond ears, rolled up behind ears
Long to neck or short ?
In a second you can tell the dynasty from the look…
Ger, Belz, Vishnitz, Breslov, Chabad-‐
It’s all about style, not substance.
Yet what we need is less style
We already had that in orthodoxy!
Chassidus has become mainstreamed
And suffers the fate thereof.
When did revolution die? with the rise from poverty
to middle class bourgeois Judaism?
And with that wealthy chassidim bid on first editions, like the
Noam Elimelech, in the hundreds of thousands,
Artifacts of Rebbes like the pocket watch of Reb Nossen
or the Torah scroll once belonging to the Apta Rov
(people stop in Chicago to touch it) :
will we start searching for other relics?
(Like the head of St. Thomas Aquinas,
removed by the monks at the Cistercian abbey
at Fossanova, chas vechalom!)
No, what is needed now is a Chassidus for the Blotta! The mud!
A chassidus for the lost soul
For the rational mind
For the addiction to mastery
For the unshakeable faith in the left hemisphere
For the spiritually impoverished
For the faithless
For the apikorsus within
For the inner Kritik
For the doubting Thomas
Poking his index finger in the wound to prove his belief
(Now Thomas the Believer?)
A Chassidus for the recovering but chronic relapser
For the addicted drowning in the free fall to “rock bottom”
