Five Hundred Pages
Shulem Deen2011
….
Hey Yitzi, it’s H. I know you sat waiting last night, probably drank your coffee as you scanned the page we were supposed to be studying,
looking at the clock wondering if I’ll show up (hoping perhaps that I won’t — do you do that too?).
I’m aware we were supposed to finish Menstrual Laws — we just had one more page
on the circumstances that require a woman’s underwear to be inspected, and
the short chapter on how to recite the Bathing Benediction while naked —
and then we were to start on Damages, an exciting new world of oxen goring cows,
and asses loaded with flax catching fire from candles and burning down the town.
Instead I was at Nassau Coliseum – you know, the place where
Aron Teitelbaum’s son married Berish Meisel’s daughter with twenty-five-thousand in attendance.
They do rock concerts there too. And I was there to see The Who.
“Who are you?” the crowd around us seemed to ask, staring
at the long sidecurls I stubbornly refused to hide beneath my yarmulke, while all I could think of was, what’s that smell?
Pot, my friend said to me. You smell pot. And as we wondered how we could get some, the lights dimmed.
“Whooooooo are you?” Townshend and Co. hooed in an eerie falsetto. “Who, who, who, who.”
And I wondered that too as I stood amidst a world of strangers in a world so strange, thinking, was I enjoying this?
Spare me, Yitzi, your I told you so’s. I never said I’m sure to have fun. Or that this
would really be more satisfying than memorizing five hundred pages of Talmud.
True, I could barely see the performers, they were so distant, just tiny specks among the blazing stagelights,
and it didn’t seem like Townshend was gonna smash his guitar – he used to do that, you know.
But think of the electrifying energy, Yitzi, when two-thousand Hasidim sing “God, the Master” on Shabbos morning,
now consider eighteen-thousand people chanting “teenage wasteland” and you begin to understand that this is an experience like no other.
But I’ll be back to finish those five-hundred pages with you. If not today tomorrow. Or when I can get this voice to stop asking, “Who, who, who, who?”
….
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Originally published on Hasidic Rebel on October 10, 2007, and reprinted here with permission. Authors have asked us to note that as the essays featured in “Best of the Blogs” document journeys of transformation, the author’s views may have changed since initial publication.
Nominate your own Best of the Blogs posts with an email to unpious.submissions@gmail.com.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine (copy of 2012-02-07). Original page in the Wayback Machine.
8 Responses
WOW!!!!! This is so so good. I love the contrasting feelings-the uneven prose really conveys that muddled confusion .
Loved it then, love it now.
Nebech to you all, you think that freedom means that you can do what you want……………Which marriages do we see last longer? How many cheating spouses are there int he secular world? We are proud of the torah world, and I am proud to be a satmarer chusid laughing at your columns and posts daily, you are disgrace to the off derech people, they would all want to come back, but they are AFRAID…………They think there is no “backsies” or Uturn, we will welcome you back with open arms, dont be shy from your shiksah or goyishe bucherem friends, we will accept you, come back and have a happy life, we see where life of these kids lead to…Drugs, sex and bad things. A Jewish life is so much beautiful, so much happiness, we have the smallest rate of suicide, why do you think is that? Suicide is climbing every day in the secular world? hey, they have freedom…Why are they killing themselves? because they have EMPTY life’s….
we will welcome you back with open arms, dont be shy from your shiksah or goyishe bucherem friends
Classic!
To:Moshe Rabeinu
“”Which marriages do we see last longer?”" How manny options do we have to leave, how manny get abused daily???
“”How many cheating spouses are there int he secular world?”"
How manny yingerlaat tell there wife that they are in shiel and really are somwere else, how manny chasidishe yingerlaat are on fb with fake profiles and chatting with woman, and ready to meet with them???
I’m still inside, but looking for my way out
We are still a nation of only 13 million out of 7 billion people and yet we are always in the headlines of the world since our father Abraham discovered the world has a Creator.
Long lasting marriages and happy marriage are 2 different things. Don’t confuse them.
Yes they can go together nicely but thats not the always the case, even if they share the same bedroom all their lives.
As for you Moshe it seems that you have a lasting marriage but not really a happy one
People who have a sophisticated understanding of music will have no way to connect to this 500 pages piece. It is really sadly a terrible misunderstanding and mockery more of music than of its intended subject which is Torah. For those who really “get” music–spirituality and Torah are quite easy to connect to. When taught properly they touch the same place and go even deeper. Song is a part of avodas Hashem. To those who have ever really “felt” music, recognition of a Creator is very easy.
OF course the power and poetry of The Who’s best music is a pleasure. Of course there is beauty, depth and sometimes a tangible feeling of transcendence in good art and music. This is no chiddush to anyone who has a soul or really just anyone who has ever closed their eyes and thought for a few minutes.
The joke here is only on the writer, who for some reason is blocked, stuffed up and can’t connect the dots. Can’t connect to G-d in music in Torah or anywhere else. Those mundane halachos that he mocks are really universes and universes of connections to the Creator. I know he will just continue to mock just like Pharoah….nothing new….the heart is hardened. Just more and more aspects of an insatiable thirst and desire for mediocrity. Darkness.