BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
From Basil to me:
A Stranger Among Us. Did you ever see that movie guys? I just watchedit on TV. A female cop goes undercover in a Hasidic community inBrooklyn to solve a murder. It is a crime movie but for me it was reallya spiritual one. It takes place in the heavily Hasidic population ofBrooklyn. The image you have in your mind of Hasidim, it was all there.In the homes, on the streets, in the shops, in cheddahs, in synagogue.Mobs of men with beards and peos, black wide rimmed hats, long black coats,open and flopping in the wind, long tsitzsis fringes visible, walkingquickly to who knows where. Kiddish and kaddish, women in shietels,plainly dressed, cooking, holding babies, little boys with yarmulkes andpeos. My people.... How can I be so different. It's as if we live ondifferent planets. They believe in so much. I believe in nothing.I know they are no better or worse than anyone else andthey hold no mystery for me. Why then do I feel that their veryexistence removes the burden of being Jewish from my shoulders? Why am Iso grateful for that? How can we be so different from each other? Ilove them with all my heart and soul.
From me to Basil:
Great Minds Think Alike:
On JetBlue back from NYC we were seated behind a family of Hasids. Grandmother, mother, two sisters, one with a baby and a grandfather. The grandfather took the window seat and buried himself in a book of Hebrew writing and remained in it until landing. The women and the baby however were in constant chatter and sharing of food across the aisle.
On the spot I wrote this:
2-22-2005,
JetBlue, LAG to FLL.
What is it? Why do these Hasids irk me so? They take so long to get seated, to stow their belongings, to decide who should sit where. The gradfather says nothing-- just takes a window seat and suddenly is apart from everyone and everthing. A book in Hebrew appears in his hand as though by magic and he buries himself in it.
Grandma has a large plastic container of food. I am afraid that it is going to smell. Why am I tempted to say something about the food they bring with them--or to make sure that they see that I am eating a ham sandwich? They open the container--surprise: it doesn't smell--it seems to be a mixture of kasha and mushrooms, maybe nuts. Grandma is putting some into a small cup and is giving some to her daughter.
Grandma leans over the aisle, reaching over to her daughter to pass the food and to talk. She makes herself unaware that she is different. Oblivious to the scene she is making. Leaning into the aisle, speaking loudly, in Hebrew or Yiddish to her daughter. It might as well be Greek to me.
What is it that annoys me?
And yet, there are times when I yearn to be one of them, to understand better who we were when we came one-hundred and twenty years ago. There is only one photo of my great-grandfather and very few of my grandfather, but I look deeply into each one trying to discern who they were. But it is impossible, and yet I peer and peer.
I crave understanding, but I know I will never carve it out of these photos.
If only I could have dinner with them, each of us at the same age--maybe 50, or even now at 65. What a dinner that would be. Great-grandfather Abraham, Grandfather Aaron, Father Bernie and me. I think that Max would like to be a part of the conversation too, Cousin Arnold might like to come.
Who are we really. How much have we changed since we landed here in the 1880s? How much are we the same? How much have we been affected by the thoughts of these ancestors--even though we may never have known them? I look into the mirror on my bathroom wall and I see my father's face. Did he see his father's? I make certain gestures that I know he made. Did those gestures come down from a previous generation too? Or has the slate been erased? Like a palimpsest how much of the writing underlies what is written over it? How much of them underlies what I am?
Seeing these Hasid's, awakens once again, my overwhelming sense of loss.
