lethargic_man | A Masorti Snag* in the court of the Modzitzer Rebbe

On Friday night, I davened at the JLE—though they don't sing much, what they do sing they put passion into (though not, to my disappointment, this week)—and after the service they announced the Modzitzer^† Rebbe was in town, and that he was holding a tish at such-and-such a place at nine o'clock. They mentioned that the Modzitz Chassidim were famous for their singing, and after my previous experience with Modzitzer singing (see here for the tune :o)), I decided to trundle along and experience it in the flesh. Besides, I had never been in the presence of a Chassidic rebbe beforehand, and wanted to see how magnetic an effect his personality had on his followers.

* Short for מִתְנַגֶּד, if it's not obvious.

† Pronounced /Modʒitzer/, as in Polish.

The tish was held in a marquee, and there were about one hundred people there all told. I, of course, stood out like a sore thumb, largely due to my capel, but also due to being in a lounge suit rather than Chassidic attire. To my relief, though, I was not the only one: there was also an Israeli, who had washed up in Golders Green and gone in search of a Shabbosdik Friday night. (I took the opportunately to practise my Hebrew on him, which led to me getting confused and thinking the rebbe was called Admor.) Later on there was also a man whose capel proclaimed him probably United Synagogue^‡, and a lone Satmar chassid, who didn't stand out so much, but whose shiny coat and white knee-high stockings set him apart from the other chassidim.

‡ Note to USAn readers: the US here is an Orthodox institution (and was the institution Solomon Schechter modelled the USCJ upon).

There was a double row of tables down the centre, and a further row along the time, so as to form a T with a thick vertical. The rebbe—once he had arrived, for which everybody stood—sat in the centre of the top table, with, presumably the senior members of his court on either side. The other chassidim sat around the rest of the tables, or stood on benches behind the seats, or on a second, taller, tier of benches behind the first benches; all forming a big horseshoe shape centred on the rebbe, and everyone craning their head at all times to see the rebbe. I'd like to say the rebbe wore a shtreimel twice the size of anyone else's, but there were a few other people there with supersize shtreimlach, so that wasn't quite the case.

Rather to my surprise, there wasn't any vodka (I'd thought this was an essential component of a Chassidishe tish), but there was singing: every five or ten minutes, they sang something. Almost everything they sang was a wordless niggun, so it was easy for me to pick up and join in. After the first couple or so of these, the rebbe made kiddush (rather to my surprise, both because it was so long after Shabbos had come in, but also because I'd thought a tish was held after the Shabbos meal), and carved up a vast plate of salmon into helpings small enough to fit on plastic plates and get distributed around. ("Have some!" urged the Israeli. "It's a בְּרָכָה!")

I stayed there for an hour and a quarter. Some time after ten, the rebbe started giving a דְרָשָׁה in Yiddish, and I decided to call it an evening (before Rabbi Mordred turned up and spoiled the fun^*).

As in:

The list of these epic poems still existing in archaic Yiddish versions is quite formidable. The best known of these are: the Artis Hof (about English King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table) [...]. [All the] Yiddish adapters of epic poems of the day eliminated all references to the Christian religion and to the Church, and even substituted allusions to Jewish beliefs and customs. Thus, at the end of the Artis-Hof, when the knight Widwilt and the fair Lorel, whom he succoured, are happily betrothed, the epic poem concludes [...]:
And thus this book comes to an end,
Would that God did Moshiach send!
Bimhera, in our day, Amen!

—A Treasury of Jewish Poetry, ed. N. and M. Ausubel