So, I’m torn.

I was watching TV with my roommate tonight (Think we’ve found a new show to obsess over… House is pretty awesome) and the 10 o’clock news comes on with a story about how a town has banned the internet for school age kids and for their parents on pain of expulsion from school. Here the Youth Rights activist in me was all set to be outraged. When the story actually came on, it was Lakewood New Jersey, and a Chassidic community in which this ban was instituted by the local rabbis. The punishment for violation of this ruling (on honor code, at this point) is expulsion from yeshiva.

My first thought was “Oh, well, they’re Chassidim, they’re lost anyway. No use being outraged.” Not the best example of Ahavat Yisrael, I know. But when a community so isolates itself from the rest of the world, becomes so zealous and fanatical, it’s hard not to shudder a bit at the fact that these are the people that much of the world thinks of when they hear the word “Jewish.”

On the other hand, they afford the opportunity for the rest of us to teach, because while they are the most visible, we (that is, the Jews whom the Gentiles know and befriend, who are a part of their world and allow them into theirs) are the more approachable. The Chassidim who walk among, but seemingly aloof from, the rest of us are the ones who raise the questions which my friends then come to ask me about “why do they do this?” and “why do they dress like that?” and “where does this custom come from?” and “how are you different from them? How are you the same?”

Then reality comes rushing back in… they are Jews and thus affect the Jewish world, and by multiplying and isolating and multiplying in an endless cycle, they gain and retain the power of ignorance in numbers. That is scary to me, as a Jew.

Where is the place for Ahavat Yisrael, and where is the place for pragmatism? And what of the children?