Shining City Upon the Hill

BTs and OTDs

It’s a beautiful, sunny morning. If you haven’t listened to the last podcast, please do. The energy is tremendous.

A podcast is not an argumentative medium. A host who injects into conversation does damage to the flow. Plus, I am slow.

But I have to take issue with one statement. Somehow, it was said that importing secular Jews into Crown Heights created the “infection”. Generally majority rules. So this true for the Shluchim inside the secular word, but not true for BTs inside the frum world (simplistic Satmar take). You can’t advocate outreach work and presume it should be handled like COVID, with rubber gloves and masks? Moreover, there is not even an “infection”.

This is a uniquely American view that secular Jews come from drugs and mostly immoral. Maybe a post revolution of the 60-s, popular take? Let me just say off the bat (using American expression) that this view is not true for Russian Jews. Not even true in America.

As we discussed on the blog in Russia, high-class strata of the Jewish population assimilated (Schneersons and many similar), lower-class “peasants” stayed “backwards” frum. One needs only to walk into the FREE on President St. to find a vivid illustration of this. When the Rebbezin Musya called Hasidim “shpana” (Russian for hooligans) it wasn’t too far from the truth.

American BTs. I have never observed devious behavior. The worst I have seen on one occasion is smoking pot in a sukah. Which, incidentally, was met with deep dismay by other BT’s. Laugh all you want, but this is my experience.

Lubavitch doesn’t lack worldly interests, starting with RAMASH himself, of course. But even the kids of the BTs themselves who go OTD aren’t doing it because their parents brought them up with “foreign influences” (the opposite might be true). Certainly, the many OTD kids in gezha families weren’t influenced by the BTs.

When the entire grade of the Lubavitcher Yeshiva went OTD, it wasn’t because of BTs but a combination of psychological factors, the cultural shock of Rebbe’s death, etc. When I observed approximately this group later, it was dreadful. The prevalence of drugs in this group, I have never seen in the secular world. FFBs almost all.

The opposite, the BTs brought a certain earnestness and intellectual curiosity to Chabad to use the word from the podcast. In return, they were met with discrimination and racism, to use the modern lingo. Ironically, this racism was coming from the lower-class simpletons.

Skver separation is not a good example, one day it will collapse like the dam holding too much water, all at once. And their political grift is famous.

The only solution is Israel. The Rebbe should have done this. No use going to f’ing Kansas or Kathmandu¹. You need to create an example of a “shining city upon the hill” to draw others. Only by example of a functioning and prosperous economy, not shnor and grift. America is a proof of that. The other experiments don’t work, we had 2,000-3,000 years to try it.

Elon Musk understands this. You need to give people a high goal, i.e., travel to Mars. His company SpaceX (Elon is obsessed with the letter X) is the most desirable place to work in America, followed by Tesla.

Grift and Shnore is not a high goal. Human beings, Jews, deserve better. Only by example, you can genuinely attract other human beings. Chabad wants to erase Jewish history (that they don’t even study), and then they would like to make nostalgia their business model. It doesn’t work. I mean, it works materially only for some gansta shluhim but no benefit for Jewish people or the “continuity”.

BTs hoped for a revival, instead they came upon the deadly and corrupt swamp ruled by old grifters. Kind of like the USA, c. 2023.

1. The Rebbe tried this. This is what Moshiyach is all about. But Failing with Moshiyach, he left generation(s) led by grifters that he deliberately left in power. He left a movement where allegiance to the throne trumps talent, with predictable results. And now there is no throne but plenty of grifters.