The Power of Good

 I didn’t think I’d ever write these words but something in the New York Times last week showed the power of sheer goodness to overcome small-minded prejudice and cynicism. Then again I didn’t think I’d ever see a picture of a chassidishe couple the husband resplendent in shtreimel and beketshe a shy smile radiating from their pure faces in the pages of the Times. But that’s precisely what readers of that paper were treated to last week in a story about a letter that Nachman Glauber a”h wrote to his parents before his chasunah.

The photos appearing alongside media coverage of frum and certainly chassidish people often convey even more than the article does. Typically it’s a group shot depicting an undifferentiated mass of black often showing just backs turned toward the camera or joyless faces. The message is clear: these are not individuals with hearts and minds and life stories of their own.

Readers may recall the recent discussion in this space about the Forward columnist whose “own sense of the term ‘ultra-Orthodox’ in American Jewish discourse is that on the whole it has been used neutrally with no overtone of either denigration or praise.” But what I didn’t mention was the irony that the picture accompanying that ringing assertion of neutrality was a shot from above of two dozen or so black “ultra-Orthodox” hats presumably with live even perhaps thinking and feeling human beings under them.

Yet the tragedy in Williamsburg brought to the pages of the Times the story of how a pure neshamah about to be wed had written a heartfelt letter to his beloved parents thanking them for all they’d done for him for the values he’d now use to undergird his new home asking their forgiveness for the pain he might have caused them beseeching them to pray for him and praying that they in turn would see much nachas from him and his “special bride.” It ended