Sometimes I find Brooklyn a bit too much to stomach. I encountered a naive Brooklyn native this chag who had a disturbing way of defining liberal shuls. She defined a certain shul as being liberal due to the liberal dress of folk who attend and not by the height of the mechitzah or the hashkafah of the rav. I found it odd because I have attended yeshivish , modern orthodox and chabad shuls and unless there is an unusually low mechitzah or the hashkafah of the rabbi of the shul is liberal I would say they are all equal. I suppose I am in the minority but I have been to all and I don't find them all that different. Just because the people may dress differently does not immediately define how liberal the davening is . It may define the hashkofah of the congregants, but to me this does not define the actual strictness of the davening. I also think that the hashkafah of chabad and yeshivish are pretty similar if you take away the rebbe /mashiach issue. Maybe its just me though. I did not grow up in NYC and view Judaism a bit differently. Where I grew up anyone shomer shabbos would daven in the same shul together. Here everyone likes to label everything. Labels only mean something if there is an actual standard that everyone goes by, if there is no standard then what does any label mean?
3 comments:
Hope you had a nice Yom Tov. So, why are you still living in Brooklyn then, if you cannot stand people like this?
I usually do not hang out with these types are but I had the misfortune of sitting next to someone with this attitude last night for dinner. There was no way of switching seats without being extremely obvious.
But true, Brooklyn is full of this type of folk which is rather annoying. I can't afford to live in Manhattan without 6 roommates though I would prefer to live there.
The entire discussion makes "liberal" seem like a dirty word.
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