Comments | kaygigi: L'Shana Tovah

kaygigi

L'Shana Tovah

Sep 30, 2008 21:43

So I spent last night at Zach's place, after Erev Rosh Hashanah services. Zach lives in the liminal but gentrifying space between Crown Heights proper and Prospect Heights proper, so seeing Hasidic men on my way to the subway was both surprising and unsurprising - it's Rosh Hashanah, they ought to be in services, and aren't they a little too much ( Read more... )

Comments 10

strauss October 1 2008, 14:05:24 UTC

The Hasidic guys came up to me, too, on Eastern Parkway as I was headed to work! I hadn't heard the Shofar, so we said the Brichu (sp?) together and then the guy blew it. It was the older guy. He seemed surprised/happy that I knew the prayer.
I was just really happy that I got to hear the Shofar even though I couldn't take the day off and go to shul.

kaygigi October 1 2008, 14:55:09 UTC

Ya know... there are times I appreciate the evengelical zeal of the Lubavitchers. They want so badly everyone with even a drop of Jewish blood to become fully halachic and observant that at some point, they don't care about some of the other things. One of the really awesome people I met in Israel was a Cuban-black-Jewish-drag-queen who had studied with a Lubavitch rebbe to officially "convert" before making aliyah. The rebbe had refused to touch him (on the basis that he was part woman and the rebbe was shomer negilah), but was more than willing to help him study and become "fully" Jewish.
Of course, this is not to say that there aren't things about the Lubavitchers that annoy me, or even downright frighten me, but of the Hasidim/Heredi sects, they are def. the most palatable.

geminid October 1 2008, 17:30:41 UTC

What a lovely story, but I'm confused, did they think you were a man?

kaygigi October 1 2008, 17:58:29 UTC

I'm guessing so. I was wearing a button down and slacks and a baseball cap, and the button down was rather loose and pin-striped, and pin-stripes tend to hide curves. The Hasids tend to avoid talking to women, even women they think are Jewish, though maybe not for High Holy Days.
The other possible explanation is that English is rarely their first language (most speak Yiddish, Hebrew or Russian as a native language), so the kid mucking around gender pronouns may just indicate his poor English language skills.

I also mentally foil it to the couple of times I've run into the Mitzvah Mobile in mid-town on my way to the Grad Center. Their whole purpose is to get men (and only men) to come and do the daily prayers; sometimes they've stopped me, only to realize I'm not a man, and then they get embarassed and quickly move on. That didn't happen, so it made me happy - they didn't really care about my gender, so much as if I was Jewish and therefore if I had heard the shofar. :)

amyannosu October 1 2008, 18:54:46 UTC

Well now that the holiday services/dinners I am obligated to attend have passed, when am I going to see you???

kaygigi October 1 2008, 19:09:37 UTC

Jordan said you guys were leaving today! Are you still around??

amyannosu October 1 2008, 19:14:22 UTC

What? We are not leaving today, lol. We're probably leaving Saturday. We're around! Want to do something after dinner tonight? Grant might be up for it too.

Tomorrow we're going into the city... I'm seeing a concert. Friday is my birthday!

chayasbarehands October 3 2008, 02:22:43 UTC

I am routinely mistaken for a boy. It wouldn't bother me so much is I was mistaken all the time for a MAN, but hopefully people think I at least hit puberty. People get terribly flustered by it, too. At Touro, people kept trying to bar me from entering the building on "woman's night" because, apparently, they thought I would disrupt the purity of the place. The thing is, no one would be very direct with me. I just got a bunch of angry looks and hints and I felt like ripping off my shirt and yelling, "Would a boy have these?" Then I realized that some do, and that I really didn't want to work at the place for other reasons as well. Sorry, you post just reminded me of something that really aggrivates me.

kaygigi October 5 2008, 00:47:38 UTC

Oh I'm sorry! The post was meant to spread love. I'm sure they were like, giving each other high-fives, like, "just score one more shofar sounding for Reb Teitelbaum!" or something, when in fact I was on my way to CBST.

Touro sounds like it was awful. I didn't realize they had "women's nights" and that sort of crap. ARGH!! That would piss me off as well....

chayasbarehands October 5 2008, 03:29:10 UTC

It didn't terribly bother me, just remind me of recent. It was strange at Touro because I have always been able to move in and out of circles of men, mostly gay, without a single bit of sexual or romantic "tension". It's not that I don't see sleazy guys who say inappropriate things, but among people I know, I forget that women and men often HAVE tension between them, that they aren't always just best buddies, or neutral or pssed off at each other.