Jew Like Me

I'm going to try something a little different for these blogs. I'm going to work my way through an unusual new book I'm reading, "Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith" . This is the second collection to come forth from KillingtheBuddah.com. On the back cover comes this recommendation:

"In a world river by absolute convictions, these ambivalent confessions, sceptical testimonies and personal revelations speak to the subtler and stranger dilemmas of faith and doubt, of religion lost and found and lost again."

Jew Like Me

Peter Manseau offers the first dispatch. After graduation, Manseau worked for an organization that collected Yiddish books. This French-Irish-American who had learned some Hebrew while studying religion at college began to be mistaken for a Jew. In his Yiddish class he'd been called Pesach so that was his new name.

During a Lubavitcher wedding he watched then joined "concentric circles of black-clad hasidim, dancing madly, a most pit of piety." They began to call for the "Rebbe", the late leader who they believe is the messiah and who they also believe will return to them.

I've seen this kind of sacred frenzy a couple of times - in the streets of Jerusalem just outside the old city and in front of the Wailing Wall/Jerusalem West Wall on Pentecost weekend. Young men and little boys dancing, drumming, caught up in the intoxicating ecstasy of the blessed.

Pesach collapsed into a chair. Out of the crowd emerged two hasidim. One was about four feet tall. The other had Down Syndrome. Pesach asked the four foot man, "He's a rabbi?"

"Of course. And you know what else? I think he's more than a rabbi. His voice dropped to a drunken whisper. "I think he's the Rabbe. I think (he's) chained up inside him and we've got to get him out...Wouldn't that be just like Hashem? Hiding in silence, seeing what we'll do"

I like that. It sounds like the transcendent God, whose secret identity incarnation cannot help but surprise us.

Peter



You can also send your comments to assistant.webmaster@emmanuelunited.ca and I will make sure they are posted.