In Which Eric Tells the Story of Two Weekends
In this post, I will expound upon two recent weekends of mine that were full of disparate activities that mark the different sides of humanity. Two sides which both have merits in moderation. This post is not about moderation.
Ever since I first arrived in Omaha, the local Chabad has been calling and text messaging me. Chabad is a Hassidic Orthodox section of the Lobouvicher Hasidic Jewish sect that has operations all over the United States and the world, and tries to reach out to Jews wherever they are. It is the closest thing to a Jewish evangelical operation, but because of the inward looking nature of Judaism, it mostly succeeds at not participating in the most egregious errors of evangelicals of other faiths. My father always said jokingly that he respected the Lobouvicher Hassids because they were the one religion in the world that was closest to Judaism.
Yossi Brackman, the director or the Chabad at the University of Chicago gave the Omaha Chabad my phone number before I came out here, and we had been in contact for a while trying to work out how I would go there to visit them. All of the Jewish people and synagogues in Omaha are in the far west suburbs, while I am stuck in the eastern end, but I had finally found enough friends that I could mooch a couple of car rides back and forth between the east and the west. The Omaha Chabad has a guest house, and I really wanted to spend a full shabbos out there, fully engaging in the Sabbath to the fullest extent of Jewish law. I wanted to become fully immersed in an experience that was not my own, yet not completely foreign. For anyone who has never experienced a true Sabbath, it is a wonderful experience. The Jewish Sabbath is not only a ‘day of rest’. It is not simply a respite from the world of work, it is an entrance into an entire world of contemplation and spirit. But it is very hard for a Jew to enter into this spiritual world alone, he needs others around him, a community, which is why I decided to head to Chabad. The very least, it would be an interesting sociological experience, so, Friday morning I packed my bag with clothes for the weekend, and after work, took the ride out west with the intern Ygal.
I got to the Chabad center earlier than I had planned, so while I waited for Rabbi Katzman to pick me up, I read some of the Chabad material. One of the differences that Hassidic Judaism has with the rest Judaism (one of the many…) is their almost god-like reverence for their ‘Rebbe’, the spiritual leader of the movement. Throughout the 80s and 90s, that Rebbe of Loubouvach was a man named Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a man, who oddly enough, always struck me as bearing both a physical and authoritative resembelence to Pope John Paul II http://www.campus.merkos.org.au/General_web/belief1.jpg
http://billslater.com/Pope_John_Paul_II/john_paul_II.gif
Anyway, the Loubovichers believe that Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson (or simply The Rebbe, as they call him) was sent to herald in the age of Moshiach (the Messiah) and a new dawn of spiritual learning. It’s an odd belief system that is in many ways foreign and anathema to the type of Judaism that I was brought up with (especially considering The Rebbe died more than ten years ago). Anyway, as I waited for Rabbi Katzman to come, I read stories about the miracles that The Rebbe had performed for his community while it was in need.
After a little while Rabbi Katzman arrived. He was a tall and majestic, yet humble looking man, who wore the traditional long black coat and black hat of Hassidic Jews and had a long red beard that was beginning to grey. He smiled at me awkwardly and welcomed me in. While I knew he would look something like this, I was still caught by surprise. Hasids look odd and foreign in their enclosed communities in Brooklyn. In Nebraska they look extraterrestrial.
I went back with the Rabbi to his house, because Omaha is so far west in the Central timezone, the sun sets very late, and we still had a while until shabbos actually began. We got in the Rabbi’s car and he drove the short distance from the Chabad center to his house. As we pulled into the drive way, the rabbi picked up his son’s toy bicycle that was strewn in front of the door and moved it to the side.There, I was greeted by the Rabbi’s large family, his wife, little son, and eight daughters. It was quite a sight to take in, a hassidic family that could be straight out of Brooklyn (and maybe even Vilna or Warsaw), all together, preparing for the Sabbath in Omaha, living in a typical suburban house. I sat down in the living room, and the Rabbi’s wife brought me a bowl of pasta that she insisted I eat. Rabbi Katzman then came in with a book of Hassidic folktales for me to read as the rest of them prepared their bodies and souls for the holy Sabbath.
It turns out I was correct in feeling so out of place with the hassids in Nebraska. As we were walking to services to pray, I asked Rabbi Katzman whether there were other Hasids in Omaha. He shook his head rather sadly and said that his family were the only ones. How strange and lonely it must be to not only choose to be different from the world, but then to choose to live out in that world they had rejected. The Hassids are very much a reactionary sect of Judaism. In the folk stories that Rabbi Katzman gave me, I read about their beginnings. They were founded in the 19th century as a way for Jews to experience a more mystical conection to the Torah. They rejected much of the new scholarship and haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) that was going on in Western Europe and strived to create what they call Yiddishkeit, a Jewish way of life centered around a mystical religious experience, not necessarily pretention. That is why so much of their identity is transmitted through folk tales. The stories that I read documented the vehement ideological war that took place between the followers of Haskalah and those of Hassidism. I knew, that I was a descendent of the haskalah, here in the home of the Hassids.
One of the things that I found most interesting in the tales of the Hassids was their emphasis on material wealth. Many of the stories were stories about the local Rebbe performing some type of minor miracle so that a poor family could have enough money to perform a certain ritual or simply go on living. The religion’s transfixion on the material (albeit, not wealth) was surprising for a sect that was centered around so much mysticism. It was obviously a religion created by peasants to break free of the restrictive religious establishment around them. How ironic that they were now the restrictive religious establishment.
By 9:30, the sun had set, and the Rabbi and I prayed alone together, welcoming in the Sabbath bride. Then, we went into the dining room, where the table was set. The women lit the shabbos candles, and then we began to eat. After the meal, we began to discuss Torah more intensely, and the Rabbi took out a bottle of apricot schnapps. He passed it around the table pouring shots, said “lechaim, lechaim”, and everybody drank.
After dinner, the rabbi walked me back to the guest house, where he explained to me the importance in Jewish law of taking care of your guests even after they leave your house. The next day passed very quickly, and was fully of prayer, study, and discussion. Shabbos really is a beautiful time if you can manage to fully separate yourself from the material world. I stayed one more night on the west end, and then caught a ride back to my house Sunday morning with an engineer named Stephen who had spent most of his life in the Soviet Union and then immigrated 20 years ago to The United States.
The next week was Tisha B’av, the day that that marks most of the bad things that have historically happened to the Jewish people. For some reason, it is one of the few Jewish holidays that I find a real strong spiritual connection to, and it has always be a meaningful time for me. I was too exhausted to go to Chabad that night, but the next morning I woke up early and drove with Stehpen up to Chabad. After a service and torah reading, I drove back with someone else, and went to work.
One of the distinctive marks of Tisha B’av is that it is a fast day. Fasting is one of the more interesting tools in religion’s arsenal. It can be viewed both as a punishment for the body or as a transcendence of it. On Yom Kippor, Jewish people read from the book of Isaiah, a passage in which God asks rhetorically:
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for a man to humble himself?
Is it only for bowing one's head like a reed
and for lying on sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD ?
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
And yet, Jewish people fast, seemingly to humble themselves. And it’s useful in many ways. When you fast, you actually find yourself thinking about food less than you thought you would beforehand. Importantly, you are able to see both how much and how little control you have of over your body. You are able to control your mind and your desires, preventing yourself from doing what you your body wants you to do. And yet, you are still subject to your body. Your extremities get cold. It is hard to keep your hands steady. You are both powerful and humble.
That day was very humid, but finally after work, the weather broke and it began to pour. Thunder and lightning struck out through the sky, and suddenly my room turned from being dark to having a distinctly yellow-green tinge. I looked out to find the world shrouded in sepia. Gazing out my window, I felt compelled to walk outside. So, not even putting my shoes on, I walked downstairs out to my front porch. My roommate Matt was their too, in a similar trance-like daze, without shoes, gazing in awe at the odd occurrences. Neighbors stepped outside from all around, looking up at the sky. Suddenly, the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared. Two rainbows, perfect refractions of light, powerfully projecting themselves from one end of the sky to the other.
The next weekend, I went out to a party. One of my friends from Chicago has a friend in Omaha named Rachel, and she was having a party at her house. The theme was Colt 45, the cheap malt liquor that only someone without enough money to buy skol vodka would drink. Rachel lives in a similar housing setup as mine, in a big house with a number of other roommates. Her house is about a mile away from mine, so I walked over. As I walked, I passed through the UNO med center campus, which was littered with medical advice signs. One of them was to prevent binge drinking. Half of the sign listed the various ways in which one could die from binge drinking, while the other half had a list of how many calories were in various alcoholic beverages. I guess some people are more afraid of putting on a few pounds than dying. I laughed as I passed the sign on the way to a party where I knew there would be more 40s than people. When I got to the party, there still was not enough alcohol, so I decided to go along with Rachel to pick up some more and get to know her more. As we were pulling out of the gas station with bags of booze, a bald man wearing a wife-beater came up to us and asked, “d’ y’all push pills? D’ ya need any pills?” We politely told him that we didn’t need his services and quickly made our way back to the party.
The party goers were divided into two sets, white trash Nebraskans in their early twenties and a more urban punk and bearded crowd. Both groups were there to blow off steam from working depressing retail jobs. Everybody was cordial, but a little awkward, so I decided we break the ice by naming our favorite primary and secondary colors. People looked at me a little strangely. But we went around introducing ourselves and our favorite colors, and people began to get more open. Soon, more people came and we split off into smaller conversational groups. I stayed with a group of the closest thing Omaha has to hipsters (note: Omaha does not have hipsters. It’s actually pretty depressing and actually quite surprising considering there is such a strong indy-folk music scene here. Sure, there are people who wear skinny jeans and have unkempt facial hair, but they are not hipsters. In fact, I have brought up the word hipster in conversation twice with people my age here, and each time, they have given me a blank look of not comprehending.), gabbing away for hours. Eventually, when most of the people were far gone from too much Colt 45, someone realized that the Columbian girl standing next to me in the circle looked somewhat like Penelope Cruz. He pointed this out, and everybody agreed. Then, we proceeded to go around the circle figuring out everybody’s celebrity lookalikes. Finally, they got up to me. Everybody was a little perplexed, when out of the blue, the Penelope Cruz girl said, “I know, you look like an 80s dude!” Everybody agreed whole heartedly, and I was left to wonder what this meant, and how it was in fact a celebrity. In the end I decided to take everybody’s word for it; after all, they were all born in the 80s, while I am only a child of the 90s.
