Tale 5: Chosen Family - Judges - First Third of the Second Third

What a Spring. Simcha wasn't talking to Ori. Mary was avoiding Bob. Bob didn't want Simcha in his house. Bethany willingly made herself the object of Simcha's spite against his family by coming over theirs, Simcha'd would show his contempt for the laws and customs which were also his by freely announcing he was leaving to visit Bethany's friends, friends he often didn't like and was sure they didn't like him.

But Bethany, as always, knew how to get everybody back together.

Ori knew that this tohu vavohu is what Chabadniks take on by living in the world of apikorsim like Bob Katz. The other Charedim keep to themselves. Die Toyreh provides six hundred thirteen commandments to keep order in life. No Jew has to lead, all they have to do is wrestle with the decisions of how to interpret laws that are already laid out for them with thousands of precedents for how each law can be studied.

Blood is not red until it leaves the body, and Der Rebbe wanted a thriving, bruising, lean Yiddishkeit that fights for every inch of every Jew's Neshawmeh rather than the clotted and wheezing Yiddishkeit of Charedi sects who never ventured out into Olam HaZeh. He wanted Freylikhkeit, he wanted happiness, and he knew that the greatest happiness is in letting ander Yids grow into their Yiddishe kops. It's horrifying for Simcha to go off the derekh now of all times, but der Rebbe knows best, and if Simcha's going off the derekh, it just means his Tateh has to solicit and harrangue him the way he would any ander yingeh Yid.

It's not like Bethany didn't wear long skirts and sleeves when she was over the Freylik's, but it was not something anyone was shy about correcting. If the skirt didn't cover up everything, if she rolled up a sleeve, if she wore a color too flashy, if she starts humming to herself. Tzakhi tells her 'and you should cover your hair up under a sheytl if you come in' after Rinah gently reminds Bethany that she shouldn't be in a room alone with Simcha, which starts a roaring shouting match between the two brothers. There's that 'korveh' word again. All Tzakhi has to do to win the argument is to stand a few inches away from Simcha's eyes in all his particularly unimpressive gangliness, but sans the Simcha hump. Bethany shows up again two nights later with a large hat. One day Kristina convinces Simcha to let her tag along, Tzakhi calls her an oberkapo and tells her she shouldn't even be allowed to stay with the Katzes.

Yes, it's April 1994, five months after the release of Schindler's List and one after it wins the Best Picture Oscar. The Oslo Accords may yet happen. The Rebbe may still yet live forever. A million Shoah survivors around Amerikeh und Yisroel live out the full bloom of their resurrected lives with kinder and eyniklach they can only yearn for their briders und shvesters could live to see. Trees of life grown tall and strong without roots. Gott! Far vos mir und nicht zay?

As far as springtime in the history of our people go, this is a particularly relaxing one. So Bethany and Kristina go over to Vicki's house to find some relief, and out of a mixture of pity and Kristina's entreaties, they invite Simcha, who tries weed for the first time in Vicki's bedroom only to wig out as he follows the circular logic of weed smokers that he's too different from this crowd to even try to fit in with them and is so completely out of his element that a wrong decision could kill him. Vicki assures him all he needs to do is go with the flow, just lie back and relax and accept it all. But there's no way he can possibly do that until he hears:

'SIMCHA YOU VILL RELAX!! ACCEPT ZE EXPERIENCE!!! '

Kristina's shriek relaxes him in a manner Vicki's laid back entreaties never could. He lies back, resting his head on Kristina's right breast as Bethany rests her head on his, Vicki on her's, Kristina on Vicki's. As Simcha's paranoid mind takes in the jam rock, prog rock, art rock, and new wave for the first time, he experiences passive acceptance he's never known possible. With its twenty-minute long songs whose drones served for so many Jews a generation older than Simcha as something akin to worship, a religion substitute that was cheaper than going off to an Ashram, giving them the community and belonging and devotion and self-sacrifice to music too mediocre leave unworshipped.

Until today, Simcha met all things were met with the dread - sometimes a joyous dread but nevertheless, a dread omnipresent - the dread of knowing that the world must always be engaged. The laws weren't going to interpret themselves. The books had to be read, the broches chanted, the righteous praised, the wicked condemned, and if they didn't, the world may end. The world is made from Torah, worship, and deeds of loving kindness which to Simcha never seemed particularly loving or kind. Simcha worshipped as any as any Hasid with a decent neshawmeh does, but where was the loving kindness which he read so much about yet saw so seldom? His mother slaved for her children, yet so many times he'd heard her scream at him and nearly as much the other kinder as though she'd rather have been doing anything but what she was doing. What had he ever seen from his parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and Rabbis and teachers to make him thing that loving kindness was anything more than an imposition? In two months around Bethany, Kristina, and Mary, he had seen and felt more loving kindness than in sixteen years of life among Freyliks. Here are people who are not commanded to be kind, but choose to be.

For the first time in his life, loving kindness seems possible, and it now feels as though the entirety of the Chabadnik community, the entirety of Charedim, the entirety of deh Toyreh, is a system whose sole purpose is to ban all love and kindness and replace it with distractions no more meaningful than a hamster on a wheel. Keep us docile, keep us unloved, keep us unredeemed. Make us believe we're seeing the world as it is when we're shown nothing but the dimmest shadows on the wall. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? And if the world ends, who cares? All that matters is love, and indeed, Simcha was very very high.

(7 seconds of Grateful Dead song followed by Swamley bit)

As we said, Bethany knew how to get them all back together. She knew instantly. From the moment Purim was done, her mind was fit with a plan that simply waited for the proper moment to begin its enactment. Purim is a Carnival of Chaos, but the Hebrew meaning of Seder is order. Purim is about the murder of those antisemites who would murder us, Pesach is about freedom, deliverance, an end to oppression and tyranny. Every Purim, we celebrate the cycle of violence's perpetuation, every Passover, we hold out hope that one day, a deliverer will break the wheel of violence forever. 

Was Bethany aware of all this? Perhaps very dimly, for her thoughts are not our thoughts and neither are her ways our ways. The Lord declares that as the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are His ways higher than our ways, and His thoughts higher than our thoughts. And yet, in the endless wisdom of His lofty distance, He determines that a few of us get a little higher in their ways and thoughts than others, and a little closer to His. And as Simcha blazed his way to the stars and thought to himself that all you need is love, Bethany thought to herself that now is time to enact the plan. 

"Is she insane?"

"Bob, you owe this to us all."

"You can't stand them either!"

"I never said that."

"You said that they couldn't stand you!"

"I never said I couldn't stand them."

"Look at how they're poisoning us!"

"What are they poisoning Bob?"

"In 25 years we never fought until they moved in."

"Are we fighting?"

"You didn't even want to do the Purim gathering."

"It was Mardi Gras too."

"Whatever."

"It was for Bethany."

"Bethany didn't want to do it either!"

"She wanted to do something for the Freyliks."

"No she didn't!"

"What do you mean?"

"The Freyliks made her want to do something for them."

"What does that mean?"

"They convinced her to want to do something for them!"

"So?"

"They put her up to this!"

"What are you talking about?"

"They're manipulating her."

"Bob that's absurd."

"They see the sweetest most good natured 15-year-old in the world and they take advantage of her!"

"If any there's any 15-year-old in the world who knows how not to be tak..."

"You don't know these people!"

"Bob, don't be ridiculous."

"They pull you in their net and once you're in you can never get out."

"So what?"

"So what?!?"

"What's so wrong with these people?"

"It's like they have some magic power over you girls that makes you not see what they're doing!"

"Bob, stop this right now."

"No! I won't stop this!"

What is this madness that gripped the goyisher half of this family? It's as though the presence of conspicuous Judaism blinded them to the mendacity and injustice which the Williams family has spent the entirety of American history fighting against so assiduously from time immemorial.