Comments by "marialiyubman" (@marialiyubman) on "Inside Private Hasidic Sabbath Dinner As A Non-Jew 🇺🇸" video.
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I have a childhood memory of being invited to do Shabbas with a chassidic family in Israel. It was what taught me about chassidic kindness and also taught me that it’s not for me.
They were so hospitable, but there was a case where the mother of the family forgot to turn off the stove and they had to send every family member to find a “shabbas goy” so that he could touch the fire and turn off the stove.
Shabbas boy is necessarily a non-Jew, because it’s against the law to make even a secular Jew break shabbat, so it has to be a non-Jew who can help in case a stove is on or if there’s an emergency that calls for breaking shabbat.
Basically, if you can’t find a non-Jew to help you and the stove becomes a life-and-death situation - then you’re allowed to turn it off yourself, because life and death is the only case in which you can break Shabbat.
Up to here, it would sort of make sense, but seeing how hard they searched for an Arab (or “goy”) for this menial task made me see them in such a weird light.
Also, they’re not allowed to do work, but the women had to serve the food, make the food off a plate that’s always on for 24 hours and wash the dishes. So the male rabbis actually came up with washing sponges that didn’t “scrub”.
There’s an entire culture in the chassidic community where leaders and rabbis came up with these idiotic “cheats”, and it wasn’t a huge part of why I left the chassidic community into atheism, but it’s a small part of it. Just seeing how helpless the “regulars” are and how some of the rabbis act like smart-asses.
The main reason I left chassidic Judaism is because, if only they put the same amount of energy and ingenuity into being good and kind, but they don’t.
I went through several religious schools.
They assumed we didn’t keep kosher at home, so instead of looking us in the eye and saying: “do you keep kosher?
Here’s a piece of paper with rules just in case you don’t do something the chassidic community does to keep more kosher”, they told me: if you don’t bring the food in an aluminum no one will touch it, and even after we did (my best friend and I), even then - they looked at us “the non religious” (despite the fact we did keep kosher back then), like we’re sinners just because we’re not like them.
And it happened many times, otherwise, I’d assume it’s just the one time..
The women were vicious! Talking badly about each other is highly forbidden in the chassidic community (and Judaism in general), but they just did it anyway, including be violent, and then just said a prayer to repent.
I’ve never felt more alone than when I was in the 4 religious schools for girls.
That’s what made me atheist until I finally said:”they will not take my faith from me” and returned to being just the secular Jew I was before. Where you do the best you can and what you believe matters more.
So I am on my phone on Shabbat, but I try not to talk badly about people unless extremely necessary (like now, when I tell my story), and I talk to God.
Many extremist chassidic Jews really do give all Jews a bad name.
They hate Israel, they call non-religious Jews “goyim”, and the term goy just means “a people”, so a non Jew is goy=(other)people, and Jews are “goy gadol” - a great people.
But the radical chassidim don’t get the fact that God tests us more, which is why we were “chosen”, and they do practice the supremacy that some white-supremacists claim exists in the community.
And their rabbis, they’re just as bad as they are, so since the community is very closed-off, these problems never get addressed or fixed and the bad rabbis don’t get confronted or corrected - like in politics.
And I will never join a community where a fallible man, such as a rabbi, cannot be confronted or corrected and his word almost replaces the word of God.
That’s why I left.
Same with problems like pedophelia and child-abuse. The chassidic community is so afraid of not going through their rabbis that many times it just never gets resolved, and many of the rabbis are the problem because they were abused themselves. And it gets even worse when Israel has the law of return for every Jew, so if a chassidic Jew is finally caught in crimes, they can just run to Israel and they’re accepted - no questions asked, and the chassidic community rarely does a background check and they don’t really use internet, so they don’t really have a predator database.. it gets really bad and they keep sweeping it under the rug.
That’s one more reason why I don’t consider this an original form of Judaism.
What I did find out eventually is that the Israeli chassidic communities are much more radical than in America and the rest of the world. I don’t know why that is, but at home you learn the person’s true personality.
When I got lost in NYC, the only one who stopped to give me directions was a chassidic male Jew. I was shocked because in Israel they don’t talk to women and they don’t even look us in the eye. And they’re extremely frightful and rude to secular Jews in Israel. Whereas in the rest of the world - that doesn’t exist. They talk normally to everyone because that’s the accepted norm.
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