Holy Days

The Bible has always been the star that charted the Jewish mystics’ course through ritual, withdrawal from sensory vanities and distractions toward intimacy with God, and whatever their differences, all of them shared the belief that the more they repressed their egos, the more they would be like mirrors reflecting the bright image of God.

Whatever resemblance Jewish mysticism had to other religions, however, it differed from most of them in the way it stressed commentary and interpretation

Last week a group of us were speaking about Hasidic life at one of the universities, and a student said to us, ‘You know, it’s really ridiculous, the way your women cover their elbows and their knees, and the way you make married women wear wigs. I’m not turned on by elbows and knees, and I’m not going to ravish anybody’s wife just because her hair is beautiful.’ And most of the people there either laughed or smiled. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s too bad if beautiful hair and legs and arms don’t arouse you. They do me.’ Uh, and that’s true. It takes a lot to turn people on today, because there’s so much public nudity and promiscuity. People have become coarsened

The Besht did not exclude scholars from his circle, he merely made room in it for the nonscholar.

“In Vilna you are taught how to master the Torah; in Meziritch you are taught how to let the Torah master you.”

I was sure that she was well aware of the fact that most of the modern world disapproves of the separate women’s gallery; indeed, she gave me a sharp look before she answered. “Of course I wish that it were roomier. I don’t like it. But it just doesn’t matter that much to me. Despite what everybody believes, the synagogue is not the center of Jewish life. The home is, and I don’t think you’ll find many women in this community hiding in the shadows in their homes. I never think, ‘Ah, now I am going to the synagogue, where I will focus all my religious feeling.’ There’s a place for religious feeling in everything I do. The rituals I perform and the prayers I say as I go about my daily life keep me from becoming blasé about it. They force me to think about the sanctity of the ordinary facts of my existence.”

"The same thing applies to the separation of the sexes at 770. The reason people look at us in dismay is that they are applying Christian standards where they are not applicable. We are not striving for togetherness in shul. My relationship to God is private. It’s not where I sit that counts but the spirit of my prayer. I don’t worship once a week and then go home and that’s it for religion for the week.”

“I’m a hundred percent sure that some people do things a hundred percent wrong in a Hasidic community,” Moshe said when I asked him if he knew about the alleged wrongdoings mentioned in the Bellamy report. “Just like they do everywhere else. This is not a neighborhood of angels, just a place where most people are trying to live a spiritual life.”

Moshe said that neither he nor anyone he knew believed in demons or angels with a tangible shape, but that he did believe in good and bad spirits, in a more abstract sense. “Think of it this way,” he said. “You know you get a different feeling standing on Forty-second Street and standing in Crown Heights. It’s obvious that certain places are filled with an atmosphere of good, and others are not. It says in the Talmud that every time you do a mitzvah you create an angel; that doesn’t mean that every time you fulfill one of God’s commandments a little winged creature pops up, but that you are adding to the world’s store of goodness. Maybe in previous times people actually saw these spirits in a physical shape. Certainly the more spiritual a person is, the more palpably he feels the presence of good and evil.”