Delinquents of a Hasidic underground

Hasidic

Photo: kk+

In which Robert Hirschfield says no to drugs and observes a conversation in Jerusalem.

I ENTER Chaims living room thinking this cant be. The old Hasid in his long black coat has invited over a friend for Torah study and a toke. Chaim extends his roach to me. I refuse. Seems too much like a bribe. If I take it, I will feel obligated to study with him.

Maybe I should. To get high and delve into Jewish holy books in Jerusalem may be the antidote to my childhood memories of being entombed in a dusty yeshiva classroom while spring rubbed its green head against the window.

I see Chaim, once a San Francisco lawyer for Rolling Stone Magazine, as a branch cut off from his worldly tree and self-smuggled into the arbor of God.

I am caught in the crossfire of a learned debate about this Talmudic rabbi and that Talmudic rabbi.

My own life, by comparison, seems so straightjacketed. I wanted to be a writer when I was sixteen, and I still want to be one. Maybe if Id aired out my mind in Chaims snow globe of drugs (I was part of the amphetamine crowd.), I too would be able to leap back across time into an ancestral black coat and find that it fits.

Chaim makes a place for me on the couch between him and his friend, a younger, black-coated version of himself. I am caught in the crossfire of a learned debate about this Talmudic rabbi and that Talmudic rabbi.

I admire the ease with which the two men juggle tradition and behavioral heresy. It feels good to be among the delinquents of a Hasidic underground. Robert, Chaim says to his friend, writes about Palestinian nonviolence.

I didnt know there was such a thing, the young man says. I say nothing. I want to write a psalm dedicated to a Hasid who abandons God for the weed but who cant abandon the clich tumored in his gut.


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