Boruch Thaler in a Carnival Costume
The Drunken Purim Shpil
Boruch Thaler died last week from a lung cancer, he was 56 (I thought he was younger).
I had a longtime friend, a classmate. I finally broke off our on-and-off friendship when he decided, in the middle of the war in Ukraine, to return to Russia. He had his reasons. I come from the old school of thinking that destination is more than geography. It’s a moral destiny, a fate. How old-fashioned, indeed!
I stopped talking last year to another long-time friend, also a “Russian”. Let’s call him Z. You see, Z has multiple personalities, sometimes he is a sensitive Moscow intellectual, and sometimes he is a juvenile hooligan from Kiev, where he grew up. In this belligerent role of Kiev шпана hooligan, he engages in painful attacks. I finally had enough. Pain is a large target.
The Fate of the נפילים
With very few exceptions, most of the multiple נפילים (fallen angels) that grew up during the sunset of the Rebbe’s life qualify for this description: never married, never had any solid ways of making a living. In other words, everything that is important is missing. This is the Rebbe's legacy, too.
Girls loved to run their fingers through those curls. The girls loved Boruch.
Boruch had a Persian father, that I think still lives in Iran. His mother is a Crown Heights BT. His online handle, costume, was appropriately “zoroaster yid”.
Boruch would often wear colorful bohemian scarves, it was his signature look.
The Carnival
Boruch and Avremel are the professional “cross dressers”. These angels, sometimes friends and sometimes bitter enemies, had this in common: people often rolled their eyes, anticipating the obsessive Chabad references from the two. For all those who weren’t in '‘the loop’’, it was strange, annoying, crazy. For me, even though I could play along, being stuck was a better description.
Boruch would actually make a good Shaliyach. With his memory of Chabad esoterica and the open, embracing soul, his hush for a nigun. The last time I saw him was on a hot summer night in the middle of Manhattan. He walked with me to the Penn station, where I was catching the midnight train to the cursed Boston. It felt like a family I am so hungry for. Boruch was very kind to people. He would be a good Shaliyach, but he wasn’t a grifter enough to qualify for the job. The fallen angels נפילים wore and wear many costumes. “Don’t you know I am an Iranian terrorist”, Boruch would say about his “biological” father. The return to Crown Heights, undertaken now by many of the נפילים, feels like capitulation. But let’s be clear: perhaps out of necessity and bitter poverty rather than conviction. They still live like ghosts there—the ghosts of the past.
Avremel (the extreme cross dresser), who knows a lot about different costumes, summed up the last Boruch’s outfit as follows: “He is fake, and he knows it.” Spitz Chabad bochur, student at Columbia, flamboyant playboy, new age guru, and now back to Crown Heights. Similar to my classmate and former friend who has gone back to Russia… Can you turn back the clock?
Boruch’s new-age guru costume was particularly disappointing. At worst, it was dishonest, at best it confirmed that Boruch never recovered from the Chabad addiction. I think Boruch hoped to be a second coming of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. But of course, instead of Reb Zalman’s hasidim, overweight middle-aged women wearing the hideous teal color, there would be dreamy girls in hot yoga pants. Even Reb Shlomo didn’t imagine that; oh, wait, he actually did.
Burned Chulent
I don’t think I ever met Boruch when he wasn’t buzzed. Chulent has become a pot lounge, a 21st-century version of an opium den. A harbor for the perpetual “cross dressers”, real trannies, extreme left-wing politics and the rampant outbreak of the TDS epidemic1. Unlike Footsteps, no “constructive” approach to life was even attempted. A truly horrible place for the נפילים angels to fall into. Many attributed the lung cancer to smoking pot. “Boruch’s sickness was a wake-up call for me” - said a fellow “cross dresser” with the grass habit.
I am not blaming everything on the Chulent, but this was the scene. For Chabad, the culturally accepted Russian vodka is the gateway to hard drugs and recreational weed. And of course, no lasting friendship or relationship is possible with a junkie. Let me repeat this… You know that an addict in the end has only one allegiance.
We can’t really add Boruch Thaler to the long Chabad OD list, but perhaps we should. He is on the endless list of the untimely deaths.
See you later, brother! Who would remember and bear witness now?
TDS — Trump Derangement Syndrome.
This recent post is on pace to the most read on mentalblog. Yet, there are no likes, not comments. This is consistent with the mute, unarticulated culture. Sadly, this is also the culture Boruch uncritically tried to promote, sell in the later part of his life.