The better one knows someone, the less aware one is of his group identity
For someone like me who enjoys meeting new people, having my photo in Mishpacha each week is a blessing, as I’m often approached out of the blue by complete strangers.
On a recent trip to New York, I was waiting for the Monsey bus at a chassidishe beis medrash on 18th Avenue in Boro Park, when someone approached me excitedly. “You’re Yonoson Rosenblum! I’ve been reading you for decades.”
He proceeded to prove his point by referring to a column published ten years ago about a pamphlet on the state of our communal emunah written by Rabbi David Sapirman of Toronto. The article, he told me, has had a major impact on his thinking. Rabbi Sapirman wrote that many yeshivaleit today are on a conveyor belt with respect to issues of emunah. As long as everything is going well, and they don’t have to confront any challenges to their faith, they experience no emunah issues. But, in reality, they “neither believe nor disbelieve.”
The chassidish yungerman, Yitzchak, described a movie he had made, for a yeshivah fundraiser, in which he substituted the metaphor of a train for the conveyor belt. (Soon after our meeting, he sent me several of his short films, including one on tefillin.)
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