From: murray.bbs@cybernet.cse.fau.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish
Subject: L'Chaim
Date: 13 Aug 92 21:23:41 GMT
Organization: Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

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L'CHAIM                      ISSUE #  227 PART                   3 OF 8
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                               SLICE  OF LIFE
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    CAFE CHABAD Enjoying themselves at Cafe Chabad by Anne Gottlieb 
 
 It was a funny  place to cry. But I  wasn't really sad, so I  guess it
was all right--in the same way it's all right to cry on a child's first
day of school, or at a wedding, or when a baby's born.     In any case,
I sat there  at the table surrounded by friends,  my dinner plate piled
high with falafel and chumus and pita and salad. I sat there with tears
in  my eyes, listening to  the murmur of  conversation--the hundreds of
voices mingling at the dozens of  tables stretching from one end of the
room to the other in a grand semi-circle. I could hear people laughing.
I could see them nodding, smiling, talking to one another.  And I could
see that they--that we were having a wonderful time. And so, I cried.  
 Quietly, of course,  and briefly. Before the music  began. But that in
itself  will often  make me  weep. Not  any  music though.  Just Jewish
music--the  kind which makes me  see lined European  faces or dark-eyed
Sefardic  children.  There's a  certain  plaintive  sound  to words  in
Yiddish and a kind of strength to Hebrew that I feel, although I cannot
understand the words. And feeling sometimes makes me cry.     And then,
there was the dancing. The  circles of men and the separate  circles of
women with  our feet keeping time  to the music and  our cheeks turning
red from  the effort and  our hands in  the dizzy ecstasy  of movement.
Round and round we  went to melodies we knew instinctively,  to rhythms
born in  shtetels and in  desert sands. And  a lump  rose in my  throat
again.      Because I understood. Suddenly. There, in the middle of New
City,  New York  at an  unpretentious event  called  Cafe Chabad  I saw
something which I had  not seen in all the time  I've spent learning to
become observant.  There, in the center  of an ill-lit room  with a few
close friends  and a horde of  strangers, I realized a  truth which I'd
not understood in the years of study, in the  cycle of holidays, in the
morning prayers I've tried to comprehend.     We are a people. We are a
diverse   and  sometimes   arrogant,   and  sometimes   obstinate,  and
occasionally weak  or strong, or pious  or lost, or sad  or joyous lot.
But we are  a people. And there  at Cafe Chabad we showed  ourselves in
our  diversity--black hats,  and  knitted kippas,  and satin  yarmulkes
donned  for the occasion. Women  with bare heads,  women with shaitels.
People from  Monsey and  Spring  Valley and  New  City and  Pomona  and
Suffern. People  who daven  every day.  People who  daven once a  year.
People  willing  to   teach  and  people   willing  to  learn.   People
understanding how much there is to know. People not yet knowing this.  
 And then  I saw the simplicity of it. Here,  suddenly, was a place and
an occasion  at which no one  group, no one ideology  or institution or
individual  seemed to  be looking  up  or down  upon  the other.  Here,
suddenly, we were eating and talking and laughing and dancing as though
we were part of  a whole. Because we belong to  something and we belong
together. Because we need one another. Because we are Jews. And because
I am a Jew, I cried.  Reprinted from The Chabad Magazine, New City,  NY
The Chabad-Lubavitch Center of Rockland