Things R Winding Down; I Meet Some Jew

The school year is almost over and I might be eff'd. I have to finish a lot of shit in the next couple weeks, while also somehow finding a job to fund my summer living sitch. I suppose it could be worse, although that’s become a phrase I’ve repeated to myself troublingly often in the last few weeks. Anyway, blah blah blah, drinking, depression, you know the score.

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So I was leaving the dining commons today, having gorged myself on a late lunch of potato soup and chicken parm, when I saw a trio of Orthodox Jews ambling along through the dorm quad ahead. You rarely see such types around these parts—their particular Weltanschauung (I just learned that one) doesn’t exactly mesh with the H-shire vibe, oddly enough. I think the last time I saw black hats on campus was first year, when a couple dudes from the UMass Hillel knocked on my door and gave me a cheap plastic Hannukah menorah. They asked if I’d like to light it with them. I told them it was a violation of the fire code.

I thought I could just slip by these three but, of course, their ringleader, a gregarious and full-bearded gentleman, came right up and started talking, assuming we both knew that he just smelled my Hebrew-ness. He introduced himself as Rabbi Shmuel Kravitsky, the leader of a local group called Chabad Nation, handing me a business card featuring his mug in a sorta spray-paint tag style and the slogan “the time has come.” (The time for bad Adobe Illustrator design work, I suppose.) His group is a cross-five-college alternative to the nominally regular campus religious groups. Our campus Rabbi is a gay Reconstructionist who’s known to bring sushi to holiday events, so the concept of religious alterity takes on a poignant political inversion here; this guy’s seemingly desperate solicitation suddenly didn’t seem so random.

The gist: everyone’s invited, nobody will ask you for money, come hang out and learn, pray, etc. I told him the pertinent personal info: from Connecticut; knew a few Rabbis; Jewish identity currently stagnant. I know next to nothing about the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, but I think it’s weird how these days a kind of forced notion of “hipness” pervades even centuries-old religious traditions, as though late-period MTV commercial groupthink had become a dominant sociological mindset. (It hasn’t, but try telling that to the harried fanatics who run shit like this.) Honestly, even if I disagreed with most of the ideological tenets of a religious-social group, I’d be more inclined to show interest and respect if it was pitched to me with a character of timeless solemnity rather than with weirdly out-of-touch, falsely laid-back youngperson wordplay. The substance of my five-minute, mostly one-sided conversation with this guy was largely obscured by his aggressively en vogue, “popular” communicative style, with repeated references to a promised weekly “Hookah Schmooze” in the gazebo, as he continually referred to me as “dog” like some crazed Semitic Randy Jackson. There’s a distinctive divergence in modern youth-oriented Jewry; there are the Conservative phalanxes consuming flocks of impressionable kids, like locusts, with comfortable, lazy conformity and there are the too-clever post-ironic Gen-Y brats who follow a childhood of undisciplined pop consumption with refined, candy-colored entreatments to the wider cultural dialogue in a self-contradictory bid for exceptionalism-cum-acceptance. (See: the smug, oversexed assholes at Heeb magazine.)

And then you have motherfuckers like Shmuel Kravitsky. Whatever, at least he was an enthusiastic pitchman, even if his faux-eagerness and personable demeanor were fairly transparent. He kept saying how weird it was that I’d never run into him after three years of college, especially in a school as small as mine (“The kind of place where everyone’s slept with his friend’s friend’s ex-girlfriend,” he said, after which I coughed politely) and especially after I told him I wasn’t as frequently high as many of my fellow students. He pointed to a tree blowing delicately in the wind: “There’s a saying in Kabbalah, about every leaf falling where it was meant to be. I think it was meant that we should meet here.” I’ve never studied Kabbalah’s mystical Zohar books and I’d hope they have more to offer than trite bullshit like that, but okay.

Later I checked out the Chabad Nation website, which has a picture of him with his wife and little kid—his wife, Ariel, is an alumna of my college and now runs this thing with her husband. She’s also kind of foxy. (Maybe that whole “rigid, prescribed social custom” deal ain’t so bad.) The website provides a good illustration of the oddly misguided, out-of-touch populist sensibilities guiding these kinds of enterprises. Here’s a hot tip, Jew-boys: don’t assume the biggest guns in your popular-appeal arsenal to be pictures from your most recent “Purim Party Bus” tour, complete with shots of Rabbi Kikeberg in Rastafarian regalia (craaaazy!). Also, don’t post the Smith paper article that describes Kaballah as “the school of thought embraced by everyone from Madonna to Britney Spears.” Not the most celebrated or widely emulated public figures these days, dudes, just saying.