In Detroit, Jewish Soul

C

hasidic culture, rich in
tales of wonders and
miracles, is painfully poor
when it comes to Detroit.
That is because there are
so few chasidim here.
"Chasidim tend to stick together
and stick to the rebbe. And if there's no
rebbe in the city, they just won't move
there," explains Rabbi Michel Kriger, a
teacher at Yeshivath Beth Yehudah.
Rabbi Kriger found a local rebbe in
Rabbi Yitzhok Zvi (Herman) Deutsch
who, until his death several months ago,
led a small congregation in prayer and
celebration in the basement of his Oak
Park home.
Years back, Rabbi Deutsch, a disci-
ple of the Satmar Rebbe, followed his
rebbe's bidding and moved from New
York to Detroit, according to Rabbi
Kriger.
It was a rare step for a chasid to take.
There is only one chasidic movement
that makes it a policy to send rabbis and
their families away from the cloister of
their rebbe's court: the Lubavitchers, or
Chabad chasidim, who see their calling
as leaving the security of the Orthodox
world in order to bring non-religious
Jews back to Jewish observance.
Chabad houses in such places as

temporaneously to God, often in
disputatious, even near-heretical ways, con-
tinues among the Chasidism of Breslov, or
Bratzlaver, after the hometown of Reb
Nachman, their founding rebbe.
Nigunim, the briskly raucous or haun-
tingly fervent Chasidic melodies conceived
as a ladder of trance leading heavenward,
has crept into the music of the Gershwins
and Goodmans who established the reper-
tory of 20th century American popular
music. The breathtaking vision of a circle
of darkly garbed Chasidic men, arms over
shoulders, feet stamping in unison between
long intervals, dancing to a tune with the
ponderous and sensuous gravity of a
Renaissance pavane, lingers long after the
wedding is over.
The Chasidim claim that this applied
devotion of joy has roots in the Kabbalah,
the mystical tradition whose functional
text is the 13th century Zohar, the "Book
Of Splendor" of Spain's Moses de Leon,
which strives to bring the worlds of the
revealed and the concealed into fruitful
collision.
Chasidim steep themselves in the broad
concepts and specific vocabulary of Kab-
balah; the universe of sefirot (spheres of be-

West Bloomfield, Farmington Hills and
Ann Arbor were estabalished, not so
much to serve Chabad chasidim as to
function as service centers for Jews who
need a place to pray or who are in-
terested in studying chasidic Orthodoxy.
The Lubavitch community in Detroit
is actually rather small — about 60
families almost all of whom live in Oak
Park, according to Rabbi Yitzhak
Kagan, president of the local Lubavitch
Foundation.
For Rabbi Kagan, a native of Great
Britain who has lived in Detroit for 22
years, it is "activist" Orthodox Jews like
the Lubavitchers who will keep the lines
of communication open with the larger
non-Orthodox community.
And, he says, it is Chasidism that
can best answer the fears of many Or-
thodox parents that their children may
succumb to the lures of secular
pleasures.
Chasidim believe the joy derived
from mundane acts like singing and
dancing is holy and in the service of God.
Chasidism, founded in Eastern Europe
in the 18th Century, consciously seeks
to nourish the Jewish soul, often
neglected in the rational pursuit of
Talmud study.
— David Holzel

ing), holy sparks hidden inside earthly
husks (klippot), the flow of shefa (heaven-
ly grace) and the like, but explicated in a
more popularly accessible form that they
prefer to call "Chasidus."
"Chasidus goes one step further than
Kabbalah," explains one Lubavitcher
Chasid, for whom the Tanya by Chabad
founder Schneur Zalman (the "Alter
Rebbe") is the primer of Chasidus.
"Chasidus translates philosophy into
everyday life."
But translations in matters of doctrinal
faith inevitably differ — at times violent-
ly. One long-standing and particularly bit-
ter Chasidic dispute revolves around the
question of Israel and Zionism.
Contemporary Jews tend to forget that
in the pre-Hitler world most Orthodox
Jews, among both Chasidic and non-
Chasidic factions, stoutly opposed Zionism
as a pseudo-Messianic, dangerously
secularized pipe dream. The Final Solution
and the energetic Zionist opinion-molding
swayed the popular consensus, but there
remains today a sturdy core of diehards,
both in Israel and America, who continue
to oppose the State of Israel with varying
degrees of aggressiveness. On a religious

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level, their opposition is based on the belief
that Israel as a nation can only be formed
by the Messiah, and that a non-religious
state, as exists today, is a sacrilege. On a
practical level, they display their views by
stoning cars passing through Mea Shearim
on Shabbat, refusing to carry Israeli
passports or currency, or to speak Hebrew
(preferring Yiddish), burning the Israeli
flag at public rallies, placing ads in the
New York Times condemning Zionism, and
rioting against what they regard as the
cultural and sexual permissiveness of
overall Israeli society.
Most of these dissidents cluster inside
the Satmar sect, by common agreement
the most conservative wing of a highly
conservative movement, and the affiliated
group known as Neturei Karta ("Guardians
of the City").
By contrast, the extremely visible Luba-
vitcher organization has shifted from a
once equally vociferous anti-Zionism to an

,

Beneath this
ferociously ascetic
submission to God's
will lies the sometimes
tremulous, sometimes
savage soul of the
ecstatic.

implicitly yet militant pro-Zionism in
recent years, prompting the present rebbe
to oppose any compromise on the West
Bank occupation with a zeal rivaling that
of the most right-wing elements in the
Israeli establishment.
Lubavitchers are strongly criticized by
some other Chasidim, chiefly Satmar, for
allegedly glorifying their rebbe in Mes-
sianic terms, and for piercing the historic
wall of Chasidic insularity in the diligent
pursuit of their bawl tshuva, or "return to
the faith" campaign.
Satmar groups have hung the Lubavit-
cher Rebbe in effigy and their youths have
at times attacked Lubavitchers on the
streets of Brooklyn — an incongruously
physical expression of hostility within such
a presumed anti-physical culture. After one
older Lubavitcher was attacked and his
beard cut off in Williamsburg, an angered
Lubavitcher Rebbe declared a boycott of
Satmar goods, backed up by the stern force
of religious sanction. The Satmar derided
the boycott as having, at best, a dubious-
ly symbolic effect.

In future weeks, the conclusion: Lubavitch
leads the way in proselytizing, and the
struggle for political influence.

THE D.ETRUIT .1P_WRI-LNI_PlAM *es

