Not a purimspiel, honest
Mar. 7th, 2012 11:14 pmThere's a weird Jewish sect called Chabad, who are pretty much the Jewish equivalent of Jehovah's Witnesses. They're very very not mainstream, and they proselytize, up to and including doorstepping people to tell them the good news. One of the things they do is send missionaries to small communities, provide them with both material and educational resources, and gradually turn them over to the Chabad way of doing things, to the detriment of the community's own history and traditions. They've been trying to conquer our shul for years, but the community, while tiny and somewhat lacking in Jewish knowledge, has been strong enough to keep them out.
They left us alone for a bit because the rabbi of the geographically nearest community was in prison for fraudulently pretending to be a psychiatrist. But now he has been paroled they are back to trying to lean on us to do things the Chabad way instead of our way. They managed to get hold of a phone directory from a naive member 10 years ago, so they've been repeatedly calling anyone who hasn't changed their phone number in the past 10 years trying to invite themselves for Purim. And everyone who's been approached in this way has said either "thanks but no thanks" or "over my dead body!", depending just how badly they hate the organization. But they've persisted, ramping up to multiple phonecalls daily over the last week or so.
This evening, about 20 people showed up, many in fancy dress, ready to hear me read the megillah, the Purim story. I allowed enough time for everybody to take photos of the costumes and socialize and so on, and I'd just got the community settled and opened my mouth to recite the blessings before the reading when there was a knock on the door. In spite of repeated and vehement refusals, a bunch of Chabad missionaries had showed up to "help" us read the megillah. We sort of slightly panicked, because it's really quite hard to get rid of people when they're actually on your doorstep, but nobody wanted them. Thankfully our President and another community leader had the gumption to go to the door and say no firmly and unwaveringly. The missionaries told some sob story about how an entirely fictitious person had apparently called them begging them to come and read the megillah for his poor ailing father. They tried guilt-tripping us about the fact that they'd driven all this way in the freezing cold, and they tried bribing us with food (luckily we know their food is so glatt kosher it tastes of nothing but sawdust, so we weren't very tempted). The President and his companion shut the synagogue gates in their faces and told them, for about the fiftieth time, to go away.
So I read the megillah as planned. With silly voices, and summaries in English at the end of each chapter. And I continued to be a woman (in drag for the festival) right there on the bimah touching sacred scrolls and speaking in mixed company, and everybody was happy. And then we ate kosher but not super-duper-mega-ultra glatt kosher hamentaschen, and kept up our own anglo-Orthodox tradition for one more year. But that really was a close shave!
They left us alone for a bit because the rabbi of the geographically nearest community was in prison for fraudulently pretending to be a psychiatrist. But now he has been paroled they are back to trying to lean on us to do things the Chabad way instead of our way. They managed to get hold of a phone directory from a naive member 10 years ago, so they've been repeatedly calling anyone who hasn't changed their phone number in the past 10 years trying to invite themselves for Purim. And everyone who's been approached in this way has said either "thanks but no thanks" or "over my dead body!", depending just how badly they hate the organization. But they've persisted, ramping up to multiple phonecalls daily over the last week or so.
This evening, about 20 people showed up, many in fancy dress, ready to hear me read the megillah, the Purim story. I allowed enough time for everybody to take photos of the costumes and socialize and so on, and I'd just got the community settled and opened my mouth to recite the blessings before the reading when there was a knock on the door. In spite of repeated and vehement refusals, a bunch of Chabad missionaries had showed up to "help" us read the megillah. We sort of slightly panicked, because it's really quite hard to get rid of people when they're actually on your doorstep, but nobody wanted them. Thankfully our President and another community leader had the gumption to go to the door and say no firmly and unwaveringly. The missionaries told some sob story about how an entirely fictitious person had apparently called them begging them to come and read the megillah for his poor ailing father. They tried guilt-tripping us about the fact that they'd driven all this way in the freezing cold, and they tried bribing us with food (luckily we know their food is so glatt kosher it tastes of nothing but sawdust, so we weren't very tempted). The President and his companion shut the synagogue gates in their faces and told them, for about the fiftieth time, to go away.
So I read the megillah as planned. With silly voices, and summaries in English at the end of each chapter. And I continued to be a woman (in drag for the festival) right there on the bimah touching sacred scrolls and speaking in mixed company, and everybody was happy. And then we ate kosher but not super-duper-mega-ultra glatt kosher hamentaschen, and kept up our own anglo-Orthodox tradition for one more year. But that really was a close shave!
