Not a purimspiel, honest

[liv]

There'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!

Comments

[kass]

Well, kol hakavod to you for chanting megillah with silly voices and English summaries and being a woman in drag. I for one thoroughly approve.

Chag sameach!

[liv]

Thank you! And by the way, seeing your icon reminded me to get started on learning Esther, so that was a bonus. I didn't chant, though, I'm the most unmusical person on the planet, I read the story dramatically; people commented that it was like being transported back to storytime in primary school!

[redbird]

Well done on protecting your boundaries, though it would (as always in such things) have been better if you hadn't needed to and could have just celebrated the holiday.

[liv]

Well, not much credit to me, I think, I just stood there like a lemon on the bimah while the rest of the community sorted it out! But yeah, it was certainly a memorable experience...

[siderea]

Holy crap! I had no idea Chabad were such schmucks.

[hatam_soferet]

They can be much, much worse than this.

[lethargic_man]

I've never had that kind of experience with Chabad. Maybe they're worse for very small communities of that sort. My parents' community, being a small (though not so small) provincial community has been in the situation for the last fifteen odd years of not being able to get a rabbi except for a Lubavitch one, as they are prepared to go and serve anywhere. (When we finally land on Mars, we'll find a Chabad House already there, opposite the McDonalds.) But they tell each rabbi you do what you want at home, in your public role you follow our customs, and so far each of the three they have had has listened and obeyed.

[jack]

That would make sense. I wonder if it's also very variable with whoever happens to be running a local chapter. I assumed they'd be a lot more centralised than that, but it would explain why the chapter run by the guy who just got out of prison for unethical behaviour was disproportionately harassing?

[liv]

I think that's almost certainly a factor, yes. I don't claim to understand how Chabad politics work, but I think it's something like, they have a very centralized and hierarchical international organization, it's not quite the Catholic church but it's heading that way. Except they have a really interesting leadership vacuum at the top because their Rebbe died some years ago without leaving an heir, and some of them think he was actually the Messiah and is somehow still leading them from the afterlife... But at the same time, they give each local outreach group quite a lot of autonomy in small details, because obviously effective strategies for winning converts are going to depend quite a lot on the specific local conditions. Many Chabad groups are at least superficially very nice and fuzzy and open-minded, because it's an effective way to attract people, especially in secular, individualist Western societies. Within each local group, the Rabbi has an absolutely amazing amount of personal authority. So it does seem like, if your group's specific rabbi happens to be a criminal, his followers will unquestioningly harass people at his behest.

[jack]

*hugs*

[liv]

They're not always. I am naturally prejudiced against proselytizers and gender essentialists, so it's hard for me to be absolutely fair to them. Like many missionaries, they do genuinely good work with marginalized people who might otherwise have difficulty accessing any form of support. And sometimes it really is better for a community to be Chabadified than to die out altogether. As far as I'm aware the criminal fraud thing is just this particular guy, I don't know of any reason to think that Chabad people are more prone than anyone else to white collar crime.

[siderea]

My brain is still hiccuping on the whole there are Jews who proselytize thing.

Growing up, I heard a certain amount of sanctimony how we were better than Christians, because we Jews didn't do that sort of thing.

[lethargic_man]

They only proselytise to other Jews. Judaism is not an externally-proselytising religion, because it holds that any non-Jew can gain a place in the World to Come provided they abide by the seven Noachide laws and are a Good Bean™.

However, Jews are beholden to 613 commandments, and Chabad's ethos is to try and increase the level of observance of other Jews.

[liv]

That's a really odd use of beholden to, but apparently it does have that sense, as well as the more common one of owing a debt. But yes, Chabad want Jews (defined in a purely ancestral sense, never mind if they are practising Christians or Muslims or committed atheists or whatever) to keep more of the mitzvot, and also to keep a bunch of their weird eighteenth century Polish customs which they like to claim as halacha even though they really aren't in any normative sense.

[liv]

Chabad are as aware as you or I that proselytizing has been forbidden for at least 1800 years. They get round this by only targeting people who are ancestrally Jewish; for the specific individual who doesn't identify as Jewish but happens to have a Jewish maternal line ancestor, it feels a lot like proselytizing, but from a legal perspective Chabad are in the clear. Actually I think they have a purely racial definition of Judaism altogether; I get the impression they don't accept converts unless they start out with the appropriate Jewish grandmother.

[jack]

*hugs* Yay for fun religion.

PS. You shouldn't dwell on this, but how bad could Chabad get before calling the police is a sensible option? Repeatedly ringing up vulnerable people until they do what they want seems like pretty clear harrassment. Or do they have any central oversight this particular guy is breaking? I know lying low is probably better, but I feel compelled to say something, just in case. *hugs*

[liv]

Thanks for pointing out that option. Involving the police in inter-community stuff like this is very, very much a last resort. I think it's a last resort we'll turn to if we have to, since one of our community leaders is a retired parole officer and maintains good relations with the local police force. I'm not sure that Chabad have done anything actually criminal here. I agree that the number of phonecalls the community have received in the last few weeks may well amount to actual harassment, but it's a bit grey area; they've made lots and lots of phonecalls in total, but to several different people, it's not like they're constantly nuisance-calling one individual. And they did go away without any trouble when we shut the door in their face. Also, being very very insistent about feeding people sawdusty cakes is annoying, but it's not particularly harmful. Honestly I felt much more threatened by the Messianic lot who were plaguing us a while back.

[iddewes]

Good grief. I haven't had much to do with Chabad so didn't realise they were THAT bad. :S

[liv]

Honestly, they quite often aren't. I don't like Chabad, I've had bad experiences with them personally and I'm inclined against that sort of organization anyway. But they do lots of positive stuff; I mean, even in my community, a few years ago there was nobody who was competent to read the megillah, so without Chabad's assistance they in fact wouldn't have been able to celebrate Purim properly. In fact they have had phases of relying on Chabad for the High Holy Days too, which is one aspect of what's kept a very small, struggling community going until now.

[iddewes]

Well, that's good, and I think they have done some good in Russia, for example. Although it's a bit like the sort of good Xtian missionaries have done in the developing world. You can say they've helped out, but they have an agenda.

[redbird]

They have an agenda, and it's important, if difficult, to look at the whole of what they've done. Not just "what are their motivations?" but how it's distributed. For example, is the helping people celebrate things they want to celebrate outweighed by the increase in gender essentialism and restricted roles for women in this case? (I'd say, in general, no, but if the effects are mostly the former, it's not as obvious.)

In the case of some Christian missionaries, that may be weighing people taught to read, or some genuinely useful public health work, against anti-condom propaganda or missionaries encouraging the imprisonment or murder of gay people. (This is the explicit agenda of some American Protestant missionaries who are influential in part of Africa: calling the murders "executions" and having them carried out officially by the government makes it worse, not better.)

[liv]

I actually think of them as basically like vultures. What they do is undoubtedly necessary and useful, but it's not very pretty. Because it's not just people getting to celebrate what they want to, it's communities continuing to exist at all, in any form, sometimes. There are lots of areas of central and eastern Europe where the Jewish community would have been completely eliminated by the Nazis, were it not for Chabad stepping in and providing funds and manpower to rebuild. The trouble is that when you're part of a community that is ailing, and these vultures show up waiting for the moment when the community is weak enough that they can move in and claim it for the movement, well, you'd rather that the community recovered than became vulture-food, so it's not pleasant.

[daharyn]

There's a 24/7 webcam from the big important Chabad house in Brooklyn; it is seriously one of the most unintentionally hilarious things on the internet.

They've been trying to stake a foothold at my graduate school. The first event they sponsored was "for Jews only," according to the advertisements. The student government, which had agreed to chip in a bit of cash for the food, made them change the language--you can't use student monies & then discriminate on the basis of religion. Since then, I've very much wanted to #occupy one of their Shabbos dinners with all the various types of people who go to school here...

I'm glad your community took a stand and set up a situation in which you could all celebrate the holiday as you saw fit.

[liv]

Occupying a Chabad shabbos dinner would be kind of hilarious, yeah. But I am going to tell you something a bit brutal, because if you want to engage in that kind of protest you should probably know: many Chabad people teach that non-Jews don't have souls. This is one of the reasons I dislike them so much; I've heard the attitude described as spiritual racism, and quite honestly it often shades into literal racism. My point is though that you are going to have a hard time making them care what your various types of people think of them, and if you create enough nuisance that they have to care, they are a big, rich organization with enough influence to cause real trouble.

[ajnabieh]

Gee, and I just thought of them as those guys who stand on the street corner asking me if I'm Jewish. (My Jewish friends tend to respond, "Yes, and no I don't want to [do whatever mitzvah you're going to try to impose on me]" while marching away haughtily.) Ugh--what a shame that they showed up and made your holiday a little less pleasant.

[liv]

The thing about the ones on street corners is that I do lay tefillin, which is their big outreach mitzvah for men and boys, and I do also light shabbat candles, which is their big outreach mitzvah for women. I don't point this out to them unless I'm feeling particularly mean, though.

[atreic]

I'm sure this is just me not understanding, but a literal reading of your post - 'trying to invite themselves' and 'we told them to go away' doesn't spell out what I guess was the actual problem - they didn't just want to come to your service, they only wanted to come to your service if you did it differently? *hugs* Sorry you got caught up in this.

[liv]

Sorry, I can see that's unclear if you don't have the context. If they just wanted to join in our service, they'd be totally welcome. But that's not what they want, and indeed they have no need to join us, there are far more of them than us and they have a much higher average level of Jewish education, so if they just wanted to have a purim celebration they could perfectly well do it on their own. So they're trying to do this for our supposed "benefit", not for theirs. What they have done in the past when the community didn't have any of our own people able to run this particular event, was turn up, make all the women sit at the back of the room, read the Purim story very very fast in an incomprehensible Yiddish accent, give out sawdust-tasting cakes and make everybody go through an incomprehensible ritual of giving them to eachother and then giving them back again (but nobody is allowed to give cakes to a member of the opposite sex even if we're talking a male toddler and his own mother, cos that would be "lewd"), and then sit in the synagogue drinking vodka and telling racist jokes for hours on end, making it impossible for the community to close up the building and go home. That is how they believe Purim should be celebrated, you see; they're trying to save our souls by making us do it the "right" way.