Word: hasid
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Harris eventually found a Lubavitcher couple willing to open their home to extended observation. Over four years, Harris visited them in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, N.Y., where 15,000 Lubavitchers live. The pseudonymous central figure of Harris' book is Housewife "Sheina Konigsberg," not a born-and-bred Hasid but a baalat teshuvah (female "returnee"). Financially comfortable and reared in a Jewish family that was only moderately observant, Sheina joined a supportive community of Lubavitchers in the Midwest after a divorce from her first husband. To the dismay of her children, Sheina subsequently entered an arranged marriage and moved...
...FAKE-HASID TRICK...
Elie Wiesel quotes a Hasidic rabbi's prayer, "I have but one request; may I never use my reason against truth." Wiesel's grandfather believed "An objective Hasid is not a Hasid." The value of miracles hinges upon these distinctions. The subjective and objective flow into one another until the + distinction between the two is meaningless, just as the distinction between God and human vanishes. Reason has its mechanical uses in an ordinary world but is counterproductive in the higher realms that miracles inhabit. So says the believer's mystic line...
Work and Mozart. On the voyage out, Bellow finds himself surrounded by Hasidim, Jews in outmoded black attire, long earlocks and beards. One of them asks Bellow what his wife does for a living. She is a mathematician, the author explains. The Hasid has no idea what the occupation is. "Do you recognize the name of Einstein?" "Never. Who is he?" In me, reflects Bellow, "he sees what deformities the modern age can produce in the seed of Abraham. In him I see a piece of history, an antiquity...
...their words add up to something extraordinary. Stark figures on an uncertain terrain, they are voices amid thunder, and the voices stick in the mind. Wiesel, who calls himself a Hasid, has done honor to his past with a superb piece of narrative artistry and -more important-with a stunning affirmation of life. Mayo Mohs