Holy Days

The World Of The Hasidic Family

Lis Harris

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439144237
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ebraica

A beloved contemporary classic, Holy Days is a personal account of New York's Hasidic community, its beliefs, its mysteries, and its encounter with secularism in the present age. Combining a historical understanding of the Hasidic movement with a journalist's discerning eye, Harris captures in rich detail the day-to-day life of this traditional and often misunderstood community. Harris chronicles the personal transformation she experienced as she grew closer to the largely hidden men and women of the Hasidic world.

CHAPTER ONE

The Neighborhood and the Family

IN the small hours of a cold fall morning, when most of Brooklyn was asleep, some five thousand bearded, dark-hatted men, wearing nearly identical dark suits and coats, danced around a decrepit synagogue, arms clasped. The synagogue, a converted pre-war apartment house, stood on the corner of Kingston Avenue and Eastern Parkway, a major thoroughfare, and the curious slowed their cars down as they drove past this strange spectacle. Some drivers lowered their windows and caught a few snatches of the songs the men were singing. Few of them could make out any of the words, because they were Hebrew, though some of the songs were just wordless melodies.

The men were Lubavitcher Hasidim, and they were celebrating the Jewish holiday called the Rejoicing of the Torah (Simchat Torah), a day when the final portion of the year’s reading of the Torah is completed, the scrolls of the Torah are carried around the synagogue seven times and the Hasidic community expresses its appreciation for being intimately connected with the Torah with spirited singing, dancing, and merrymaking that frequently last all night. A smaller but still substantial number of Hasidic women hovered along the edge of the sidewalks, smiling but not dancing. I had come to witness this annual event in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn with two friends, a man and a woman. Apart from the motorists, we were the only spectators present. The man, a gentile, was enjoying himself. The graceful, scholarly-looking old men, bright-eyed little boys with long sidelocks, plump, disheveled householders, and pale, bespectacled students were as exotic to him as any Fiji Islanders, and he spoke admiringly of the virility of the dancing and the religious fervor of the dancers. The woman, a secular Jew, was not enjoying herself. She thought that the joy she saw was inspired by vodka, not religion, and she saw the separateness of the men and women as symbolic of the group’s backwardness. My own feelings about them oscillated between neutral and familial. A secular Jew, like the woman, I had nevertheless felt for years that the Hasidim were a mystery I wanted to fathom.

In a box of old photographs that my family kept, I had once, long ago, found a picture of a fierce-looking, bearded old man, wearing the sort of fur hat and long black coat that Hasidic men wear. When I asked my mother (a Manhattan-bred lawyer) who he was, she peered at the photograph briefly and disapprovingly and shrugged, “Nobody in our family.” Indeed, the man stood out like a sore thumb among the waistcoated shopkeepers, artisans, small businessmen, and tightly corseted women that populated the box. But she may have been wrong. Our progenitors came from Austria, Romania, and Russia, and in the nineteenth century, three quarters of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe was Hasidic. It was more than likely, therefore, that that man or somebody like him was not only “in” our family but a central figure in the families of the majority of American Jews—most of whom can trace their lineage back to Eastern Europe. Believing that the Hasidim represented some antique version of myself, I have always felt vaguely bound to them and curious to know who they actually were—a curiosity that neither my education, my social milieu, nor my reading of Hasidic stories did much to satisfy. The outing with my friends in Crown Heights was one of many tentative forays I made to the gates of the Hasidic world over a number of years until one day several years ago I decided to see if I could breach them and find out what was on the other side. I hoped to find a Hasidic family that would allow me a privileged look behind its door.

Hasidism is a revivalist-pietistic movement that began in Poland in the first half of the eighteenth century. Its innovativeness lay in the way it redefined traditional Jewish values by placing prayer, mysticism, dancing, singing, storytelling, and sanctification of daily life on an equal footing with Talmudic scholarship. (Talmud is the name given to the oral law of the Jews and the commentaries on it written by Palestinian and Babylonian scholars from the third to the fifth centuries A.D.) It has always been a leader-centered movement and its leaders, men noted as much for their charisma as for their piety and scholarliness, have traditionally passed their leadership on from generation to generation in dynastic fashion. The various Hasidic groups, called courts, that developed over the years were named after places in Europe that were the seats of these dynasties or sometimes the birthplace of their founders. The Belzers came from Belz, the Bobovers from Bobov (both Galician towns) and so on. There is even a homegrown American group of fairly recent vintage, called the Bostoners, whose leader holds court in the Boston suburb of Brookline.

It has been estimated that there are some two hundred and fifty thousand Hasidim in the world today, about one fifth the number that existed at the turn of the century. Some two hundred thousand live in the United States, and about half of the American Hasidim live in Brooklyn. The Lubavitchers, whose name comes from the Belorussian city that was the seat of their dynasty for many years, are believed to be the largest sect worldwide (no official census exists) and are one of forty that survived the Holocaust and the Russian pogroms—although many of these survived only skeletally. Before World War II there were about fifty Hasidic courts. The Satmarers, another group, who live in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, claim the largest New York following, forty-five thousand. Originally from Hungary, they survived the war in greater numbers because the war did not come to their country until 1944. Most of the other groups (among them, the Gerers, the Bobovers and the Belzers) live in the Boro Park section of Brooklyn and number about thirty-five thousand. A smaller number live in Westchester, Rockland County, and New Jersey. The groups are more alike than unalike, but differences and even deep enmities have developed among some of them.

Despite the large Hasidic presence in and around the city, finding a family who would allow me into their lives proved to be no simple task. Most Hasidim are suspicious of outsiders, distrustful of the printed word, and tired of being depicted as cute but anachronistic—like the pygmies, or, worse, cultists. After months of pleasant but fruitless exchanges with members of some of the smaller groups, an acquaintance with ties to the Hasidic world suggested that I try the Lubavitchers. The Lubavitchers, who are familiar to most New Yorkers because of the aggressive sidewalk proselytizing campaign they conduct at the side of large white campers, have traditionally been more open to outsiders than other Hasidim. A Lubavitcher spokesman gave me the names of two families to try. Neither was interested in being interviewed, but word of my quest rapidly spread along the Lubavitcher grapevine, and before long someone gave me the telephone number of Moshe and Sheina Konigsberg (the name as well as certain identity-revealing details about their lives have been made up), a couple who lived in Crown Heights. Several women I talked with before I called the Konigsbergs said that their husbands would find it impossible to speak with a strange woman; others sounded as if they suspected I might be an operative of the K.G.B. Mrs. Konigsberg, whose firmly accented r’s and flat a’s betrayed origins more westerly than Brooklyn, New York, said that she and her husband rarely liked the articles they read about Hasidim outside the Jewish press, but it might be useful to other Jews if they could in some way clarify the picture people had of Hasidic life. The Konigsbergs agreed (after a brief family conference) to talk with me as much as I liked and invited me to pay them a visit that week.

Crown Heights, where most of the city’s fifteen thousand Lubavitcher Hasidim live, is a tidy, quiet oasis surrounded by streets that have succumbed to decay and abandonment. For the ultra-Orthodox, mostly Eastern European, Jews who live there, the kosher butcher shops and restaurants, the religious schools and bookstores, the ritual bathhouses and scrupulously observed religious life are taken as much for granted as they would have been in any nineteenth-century shtetl. But to outsiders, even (or, perhaps, especially) to Jews who live in the ordinary world, it is a world shrouded in mystery. According to the city, the borders of the neighborhood are Atlantic Avenue to the north, Clarkson Avenue to the south, Ralph, East New York, and Utica Avenues to the east, and Ocean and Flat-bush Avenues to the west. But the Lubavitchers’ Crown Heights actually encompasses a far smaller area whose borders are loosely defined by their synagogue, schools, kosher shops, and the last Hasidic family on a block. The majority of the neighborhood’s residents are, in fact, black, but perhaps because of the old-fashionedness of their clothes, or their high visibility when they gather in front of their synagogue, it is the Hasidim who dominate the landscape. In the postwar years, the neighborhood was predominantly Jewish, but with the arrival of large numbers of blacks and Puerto Ricans in the late fifties and sixties, most of the Jewish population departed. Those who wanted to live in an exclusively Jewish neighborhood moved to Boro Park, the more upwardly mobile moved to the suburbs. The Lubavitchers stayed.

On my first daytime visit to the neighborhood, I felt as if I had wandered into a dream. Pale, bearded, black-hatted, dark-suited men, looking remarkably alike, hurried along the sidewalks with downcast eyes, pointedly avoiding eye contact with civilians. Those who chanced to look up stared stonily into space, like figures in a Magritte painting. Every woman under forty-five appeared to be pregnant. Nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who looked like my baby-sitters pushed their own carriages and strollers, and high-spirited children hopped like rabbits everywhere. That day the community was celebrating Purim (the festival that commemorates the biblical story of Queen Esther’s deliverance of the Jews from a murderous plot of Persia’s Grand Vizier, Haman, to destroy them) and many of the children wore masks and colorful costumes. Giggling, mustachioed Hamans and gaudily crowned Esthers chased one another up and down the streets, their small bodies and masked faces adding a slightly madcap element to the dreamlike aura of the scene.

The Konigsbergs live on President Street, a beautiful, tree-lined avenue abutted by large, old-fashioned, architecturally diverse two-story houses that would not look out of place in a New England town. In the nineteen forties President Street housed so many of Brooklyn’s doctors that one section of it became known as Doctors’ Row. Now its residents are chiefly well-heeled Lubavitcher Hasidim or blacks, but the street has changed little in the last forty years. The Konigsbergs live in a three-story redbrick house with Italianate masonry trim that was built in the solid, generous style of the early nineteen hundreds. The house boasted a small plot of land, planted with rhododendrons and privet, that looked neat but unloved.

The shade behind the Konigsbergs’ front window was down. Walking along, I had noticed that many of the houses in the neighborhood had their blinds closed, their curtains drawn, their shutters latched.

Sheina Konigsberg greeted me warmly and there was a long moment of mutual sizing up. Whatever stereotype I might have had in my mind about Hasidic women, Sheina did not fit it. She is an attractive, fashionably dressed, generously proportioned woman in her late forties who looks as if she could once have been a high school cheerleader. As I contemplated her short, remarkably burnished-looking red curls and general air of wholesomeness, two limpid, trusting-looking blue eyes gazed at me from behind oversized tortoiseshell glasses with interest. Like many of Sheina’s neighbors, I too was pregnant at the time, and I had the distinct impression that the pregnancy not only conferred a welcome air of harmlessness upon me but earned me some unspoken laissez-passer.

“Hello. Come in. You’re a little early. Moshe’s not due back from prison for a while,” she said, enjoying the shock effect of her words before adding with a smile, “He goes to Allenwood Federal Prison Camp on some holidays to lead the Jewish prisoners in services. If he didn’t, they might not have any.”

The house Sheina led me into was bright, cheerful, immaculately clean, and suburban looking. The parlor floor had been turned into a spacious open room with hexagonal tiles on the floor, an orange-and-blue square geometric print on the walls, and colorful paintings everywhere. A quilted velvet couch, two chairs, and a coffee table had been placed at the side of the room near a fireplace, and there was a piano, bookshelves filled with books bearing mostly Hebrew titles, and a potted palm. Somehow, the furnishings, though obviously chosen with care, seemed like afterthoughts. The room had a public air about it, as if it were more a meeting hall than a living room, more a place where people might throng or pass through than somewhere to migrate to with a book and an apple. At the end of the floor was a bright yellow modern kitchen—a room so orderly looking that I would not have been surprised to find the cans on the shelves in alphabetical order. Near the kitchen, at the far end of the room, stood a heavy sideboard, a twelve-foot dining table, and a dozen or so leather-backed chairs, all of which were dominated by an unignorable full-length portrait of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitchers’ revered spiritual leader, universally referred to as “the Rebbe.” Rebbe is a variation on the word rabbi, which in Hebrew means “‘my master’ or ‘my teacher’” but has come to mean teacher or master. It is also the title given to leaders of Hasidic courts. Rabbi Schneerson is the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe. The first, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, taught that the rebbe’s central task was to “teach Hasidism according to the spirit of the times and the needs of the people,” a dictum that has been scrupulously adhered to by all his successors.

Sheina led me over to the dining room table. In the center of the table was a huge pile of straw baskets, tangerines, pineapples, cookies, hard candies, rum cordials, pints of J & B Scotch, packets of nuts, chocolate pastilles, and peanut-butter cups.

“Listen, we’ll talk when we can, but you know it’s Purim. I have to rush to make more shalach manos baskets.”

“What are they?”

“Leah [the woman who gave me Sheina’s name] said you were Jewish. Didn’t your family celebrate Purim?” she asked, in a sympathetic tone that suggested that she already knew the answer to her question.

I explained that my family was not religious and that their attitude toward their Jewishness was more or less that of fans whose home team was the Jews. I did not add that my mother, no longer alive, had regarded Hasidim as fanatics and not a little repellent, nor that my octogenarian father, a pleasure-loving Yankeefied son of Russian Jews, whose family emigrated from St. Petersburg to Connecticut in the eighteen-seventies, had looked at me in wonder when I had told him I’d had a lifelong curiosity about Hasidic life and said, “But that’s all old hat.”

During the long period that I was to spend getting to know the Konigsbergs and their community, I never encountered a single Jew who didn’t have a strong opinion about the Hasidim. Gentile friends who knew about my visits to the Hasidic world asked polite questions. The Jews I knew were usually in one of two camps: those who did not like them and were eager to share stories about alleged Hasidic hypocrisy—how they’d heard that they cheated in their business dealings, and so on—and those who shared a kind of wistful, idealized view of Hasidic life. The language of the detractors might have been drawn from the lexicon of classic anti-Semitism: “They’re really dirty. Have you seen how they keep their homes?” “No one is pushier.” “I hate their standoffishness.” “Why do they think that they’re better than everybody else?” “They’re certainly unhealthy—you can tell that just by looking at them.” Both camps were united in their (mistaken, as I was to learn) conviction that most Hasidic practices were somehow fundamentally different from those of ordinary Orthodox Jews.

Shalach manos, Sheina explained, as she filled a basket with fruit and candy, meant “sending out of portions,” or gifts of food and drink. It was customary for religious Jews to distribute the baskets, usually transported by the younger members of the family, to friends on Purim. While methodically arranging the fruit and sweets in the basket, Sheina went on to say that everyone in the community had gone to 770 Eastern Parkway—the place where I had seen the men dancing—the main Lubavitcher synagogue (as well as the movement’s official headquarters) the night before for a reading of the scroll of Esther, in which the story of Esther and Haman is related. That morning she had gone to a neighbor’s house to hear the story read again. The word Purim, she said, was Hebrew and meant lots. Haman drew lots to choose the date on which he intended to kill all the Jews in the kingdom.

“Have you known about all this since you were a child?” I asked.

“Some of it, but I never really understood the deeper significance. I wasn’t raised here, you know. I grew up in Michigan—in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit. My dad is a businessman—he owns a large paint manufacturing company—and I grew up like any well-to-do American girl really. I went to movies and parties, I dated, and I sort of drifted along like everyone else. My family called themselves Orthodox but many commandments were not strictly observed. I learned Hebrew when I was a girl and we kept a kosher home and went to synagogue every Saturday but I know that neither of my two brothers nor my sister and I ever profoundly connected with any of it. Purim was never celebrated in a big way there, for instance, although it says specifically in Esther that the holiday is supposed to be a day of feasting and merrymaking. Here the day is like a carnival; we have a special Purim feast and everything is completely unlike the rest of the year. It’s the only day of the year besides Simchat Torah when it is considered appropriate to drink all day and the whole community celebrates in one way or another. It’s all commemorative, of course, a celebration of an occasion when for once Jews were spared from the destructive whims of their ruler. The rituals keep people aware that the danger is always there. I never fully understood any of the reasons for Jewish rituals until I became a Lubavitcher.

“It was different for Moshe. He grew up among Hasidim and his family has always been Lubavitch; even so he’s always studying—on his own and with his children. We were both married before, and both of us had five children [the average number in Hasidic families]. Moshe lost his wife in 1969 and I got divorced in 1974. It was the saddest time in my life, but this is the happiest because baruch Hashem [praise God] I’ve come to understand that, like all Jews, I’m here for a purpose.”

“And that is?”

“To see the beauty and holiness in everyday things. To try to elevate ordinary life. The key is in the Torah [the Pentateuch] and the way to get there has been shown us in a practical way by the mitzvot. [The mitzvot are the six hundred and thirteen positive and negative commandments or precepts described in the Torah and referred to by Jewish sages in the first and second centuries A.D. In the fourth century A.D., a Palestinian rabbi divided them into positive and negative commandments but few attempts were made to enumerate them with any precision until the twelfth century, when Maimonides, in his typically lucid way, established that there were two hundred and forty-eight positive commandments and three hundred and sixty-five negative ones and wrote a treatise in which he described the scriptural origin of each of them. The list embraces virtually every facet of a religious Jew’s day, indeed of his life, from resting on the Sabbath (positive commandment one hundred and fifty-four) to fasting on Yom Kippur (positive commandment number one hundred and sixty-four) to not increasing wealth from anything connected with idolatry (negative commandment number twenty-five). Nothing is considered more central to the lives of religious Jews than the fulfillment of the commandments. Whatever impedes their fulfillment is considered to be in the realm of darkness; whatever contributes to carrying them out in the realm of light.] When the Jews accepted God’s challenge to follow his ways, he gave us the mitzvot so that we’d know how to do it.”

Sheina was interrupted by the boisterous entrance of her husband and his two sons, Shmuel and Mendel, who had accompanied him t...